Conductor brought talent together for 'Rappahannock'

NORFOLK

Rob Fisher is the matchmaker of "Rappahannock County."

Nearly four years ago, he and Rob Cross, director of the Virginia Arts Festival, got together following a Virginia Symphony concert Fisher had conducted.

Broadway star Kelli O'Hara was with them, too. She had just performed.

Cross asked Fisher for names of composers he might approach to create new works for the festival, since that's a major way the festival can build on its national reputation.

Fisher was the right one to ask. He is a Norfolk native who is internationally known as an artistic director, conductor and pianist and is a leading figure in musical theater. His many credits include founding music director and conductor of the Tony Award-winning Encores! series at New York City Center and music supervisor for the recent Broadway production of "Hair."

Both Fisher and O'Hara suggested Ricky Ian Gordon, a New York composer with a diverse and weighty resume in opera and musical theater. Gordon said yes, and in turn invited Mark Campbell, a lyricist whose work the composer had admired for years.

Gordon has been wide-ranging in his subjects, writing operas based on the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and on John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath."

Fisher said Gordon "has his own voice" and is "not trying to follow anybody else's rules but his own."

He was one of the first composers to blur the boundaries between opera and music theater, and that's a growing trend.

"Ricky was early in that, and so his voice is particularly strong. He's always really strong melodically and writes really well for the voice.

"And it's a very American voice. It's an assimilation. The best American things are assimilated from lots of sources."

In Gordon's voice he hears jazz and musical theater in the tradition of George Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bern-stein.

"It doesn't sound like a version of any of those things. It's his own thing."

Gordon's music doesn't require a trained ear to enjoy, he said. "The emotionality of it gets to people without intellectual filters. It's a gift."

Fisher signed on for the project early. Which meant that when the new Broadway production of "Anything Goes" came along, he turned down being conductor. He settled for music supervisor.

"This was in place first," he said. "I feel like I worked it out so I got to do both things."

Thursday was opening night on West 43rd Street.

"I'm planning to go up," Fisher said last week. "Everybody involved is wanting me to go and not miss my opening up there.

"But it is unusual," he said, laughing a little crazily, "to have a Broadway show opening Thursday and an opera on Tuesday."

Teresa Annas, (757) 446-2485, teresa.annas@pilotonline.com