By BERNARD HOLLAND [NY Times, 12 February 2007]

ST. PAUL. Feb. 11 — “The Grapes of Wrath” is an epic in a peculiarly American way. Famously in John Steinbeck’s novel of migrant workers in the Depression, and now in an opera by Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael Korie, its knights and ladies are poor people of little natural distinction, ennobled by the desperation of their lives. Their shining ambition is to survive, although a lot of them don’t.