David Gordon

Tenor David Gordon will sing the role of Pedrillo in Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail with Concert Opera Philadelphia in February and March 2010.  David has recently sung the roles of Lysander (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) with dell’arte Opera Ensemble; Herodes (Salome) with One World Symphony; Alfredo (La traviata) with the BMCC Orchestra, with whom he has also sung Don Jose (Carmen) and Tamino (Die Zauberflöte); Lennie (Of Mice and Men) at the Kimmel Center with Center City Opera of Philadelphia; Mendelssohn’s Elijah with the Putnam County Chorale; Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Westchester Collegium; and Elijah at the Rye Presbyterian Church, where he has also performed Mozart’s Messa di requiem and Britten’s St. Nicolas Mass, all under the baton of J. David Jackson, of the Metropolitan Opera.

David made his New York City Opera debut in 2005, where he performed the role of Don Luigino in Rossini’s Il viaggio a reims and covered the Imperatore in Turandot and the Duke of Dunstable in Patience, by Gilbert & Sullivan.

David has also performed with the Ensemble du Monde (Tanzmeister/Scaramuccio, Ariadne auf Naxos), Kalamazoo Symphony Orchestra (Borsa, Rigoletto), the Opera Company of Brooklyn (Don Jose and Rodolfo), Boheme Opera of Trenton (Pong and Elder Hayes), Bronx Opera, Camerata New York (Mozart’s Messa di requiem), Cornell Chamber Orchestra and Kalistos Orchestra of Boston (Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings), the Mozart Society of Harvard College (Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen).

David performed in 2007 as Ruwet in Man: Biology of a Fall, by Evan Hause.  David also performed Mr. Hause’s opera Nightingale.  David has performed new opera with American Opera Projects (Marina by Drattel, Ann Bogart director, J. David Jackson conducting), the Center for Contemporary Opera (Alice in Wonderland, Westergaard), and Fort Worth Opera (Walter in a reading of Pasatieri’s Frau Margot), among others.
 

David is a long-time member and regular performer with Opera on Tap, an organization that brings opera to casual and alternative venues and audiences.  He has also performed with Octavia Cup Dance Theatre (Enredaderas), Cirque Boom (Hoffmann in The Hoffmann Circus, an aerial adaptation of The Tales of Hoffmann), LITE Company / ChekhovNOW! (adaptations of stories by Anton Chekhov), and Beckett Below (Play, Catastrophe by Samuel Beckett).  A native of Kalamazoo, MI, David is featured in Boiling Water Productions' soon-to-be released Kalamazoo, River: Us, an original musical-historical film about the pollution of the Kalamazoo River. 

David is developing, with dramaturg Dr. Peter Campbell, a multimedia theatre trilogy focused on the three children of Agamemnon, of the House of Atreus. Each piece mixes known theatrical texts, both classical and modern, with other forms and materials, creating hybrid mash-ups that include movement, music, opera, video, and other media.  The fist part, iph.then, utilizes portions of Iphigénie en Tauride of Gluck; yellow electras included music from Elektra of Strauss,; and orestes/west will draw from the Oresteia of Taneyev.  David is a development partner of red handle, the company he formed with Mr. Campbell, and he performs as Orestes in the trilogy; iph.then was developed as part of the Incubator Series at Richard Foreman’s Ontological Hysteric theatre; yellow electras was in residence at the Ontological in the summer of 2008.  red handle is also developing a piece based on paintings by Hogarth and Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress.

David is a member of the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music Precollege Division, where he has been teaching voice and acting since 2003.  He has been studying voice with Mark Oswald, of the Metropolitan Opera and Manhattan School of Music, since 2003.  He earned his Master of Music in Voice Performance from Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Marlena Malas and Ted Puffer, and performed Alfredo in La traviata, Don Jose in Carmen and the Male Chorus in The Rape of Lucretia.  David earned his Bachelor of Music in Voice Performance from the University of Michigan, where he studied with legendary Metropolitan Opera tenor George Shirley and sang for many years in the Men’s Glee Club, under the direction of Dr. Jerry Blackstone.  He performed Monostatos in The Magic Flute, his first operatic role, as well as Elder Gleaton in Susannah with the opera theatre at the U of M, under the baton of Maestro Kenneth Kiesler.
 
David has been a participant in several summer training and apprenticeship programs, including the Seagle Music Colony (Bacchus in Ariadne auf Naxos), the Lake George Opera Festival (Elder Hayes in Susannah and Rodolfo in Act III of La Boheme), the Central City Opera House (the Governor in Candide), Elysium Opera Bernried (world premiere of Dante in Lustgarten’s Dante im Exil) and the Brevard Festival.  After his summer in Saratoga with Lake George, David was invited to sing Rodolfo in a full concert of La Boheme with the Glen’s Falls Symphony Orchestra.