"Delan previously recorded Getty's cycle The White Election, which consists of thirty-one Dickinson settings. The set featured here, Four Dickinson Songs, consists of songs that were not included in The White Election but are among his best. 

“Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers” has reverent, cinematic grandeur and superb coloristic contrast. “A Bird Came Down the Walk” makes inventive use of fragmented solo harpsichord in its first two stanzas and a romantically soaring vocal line for the rest. “There's a certain Slant of Light,” the album's title track, features clangorous, dissonant chimes representing the “oppress[ive] heft of cathedral tunes.” The famous “Because I could not stop for Death,” which opens with a driving duplet figure on the xylophone, is swirling and ghoulish, with a touch of macabre humor. (There's another setting of the same poem in the Copland set, but Getty's is better.)"

He creates a cathedral-like sound for “There's a Certain Slant of Light” and ends with the same poem as Copland's “The Chariot,” using the original title, “Because I could not stop for Death.” Including both versions shows how two composers can create compelling settings for the same words.

Recorded in Pentatone's trademark excellent, crystalline sound, this is one of the most intelligent releases to have come my way in some time. Four composers celebrate the greatness of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, each adding his own “slant of light” on Dickinson's inimitable words. The performances are more than impeccable: technically flawless, but also much more... 

We enter a very different world for Getty's Four Dickinson Songs (2008). These set four poems considered for the 31-poem cycle The White Election (1981) but which only find a flowering here. The orchestration of these songs is specifically for this recording. The impetus for this short cycle so many years after The White Election was a suggestion by Barbara Bonney. They are highly atmospheric, and the orchestration is masterly; the use of bells in “A Certain Slant of Light” is particularly effective.

“There's a certain slant of light” is a poem of Emily Dickinson, set to music by Gordon Getty, and it gives this disc its title.... Fanfare readers may already know that I am a fan of the music of Gordon Getty. His extremely conservative style (though not without an occasional injection of Modernism) is used at the service of a genuine melodic gift. This particular cycle of four of Dickinson's poems was composed in 2008, some 27 years after his larger Dickinson cycle The White Election. It is interesting to compare Getty's setting of "I could not stop for Death" with Copland's. Copland seems to focus on the wandering mind of the subject riding in the chariot, where as Getty amplifies the relentless tread of the horses taking that journey to eternity.

Four Dickinson Songs (2008) by Gordon Getty (born 1933) is in some ways an extension of Getty's The White Election of 1981, which contains 31 Dickinson poems. The four here were orchestrated specifically for this recording, and three of the four are about death, including the famous Because I Could Not Stop for Death – which [Aaron] Copland also set, with slightly different words and in a version 50% longer than Getty's. Getty engages directly with the poems here and does not hesitate to bring out their darker elements: if Copland's settings are presentations of the poems, Getty's are interpretations of them.

It felt like a new experience to hear Gordon Getty's Four Dickinson Songs up close and personal, though their performance by [Lisa] Delan a year ago...had seemed unaffected and accessible, even in awesome Davies Hall. The granitic aspect of Getty's composition, at times Mahlerian in its panoramic scope, was perhaps more striking in the smaller SFCM venue, and the contrasting delicate veins and occasional pastoral touches were more aurally accessible, with pianist Robert Schwartz forthcoming with colorful support. The most familiar of the evening's many pieces of verse — Dickinson's “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” — proved the composer capable of setting and changing a scene convincingly, and providing the singer with a comfortable but affecting vehicle for her lyric. 

Getty's influence on the evening's program suggested a keen interest in different settings of the human voice, apparent also in the variety of form in his own composition. He's consistent, though, in seeking out poetry as inspiration, and soprano Lisa Delan effectively showcased his Four Dickinson Songs, with light and lively intonation and an ingenuous theatricality conveying both the era and the affect of the 19th-century New England poet. The composer's musical lines, in which Delan was prettily paired by Symphony pianist Robin Sutherland, were similarly unaffected and accessible, supporting the verse and the refined but earnest emotion.

Getty openly champions and allegedly channels 19th-century tonal approaches to classical music, and there were bows to Johann Strauss in his orchestral Three Movements from Ancestor Suite. But there were also surprising and delightful hints of 20th-century Russian modernism therein, particularly in the Polka: Polonaise section. These appealing pieces of program music appear in different form in Getty's Usher House, recently released by PentaTone Classics and due for a production by the San Francisco Opera.

The new piece's power contrasted with the private delicacy of the composer's soloist-and-piano outings, and suggested Getty's mastery of broader strokes, with massed singers and instrumentalists.

On his way back to his seat from Intermission, Getty confided to a reviewer his excitement about the upcoming premiere of his A Prayer for My Daughter, which began the evening's second half. The new piece enjoyed a splendid reading by the full Symphony and Chorus. Although Prayer made use of devices favored in the Dickinson settings, including alternating arpeggiation and unison, the new piece's power contrasted with the private delicacy of the composer's soloist-and-piano outings, and suggested Getty's mastery of broader strokes, with massed singers and instrumentalists.

Both groups of musicians displayed the composer's appeal as a colorist, highlighting sections of the chorus and orchestra (with horns and woodwinds particularly noteworthy to this reviewer) to illustrate poet Yeats' references to sea and stormy sky. Prayer affected an impressive dynamic range, from a gutsy beginning on to a place of parental resolution, if not absolute certitude.

Often the repertoire and locale of summer festivals seem, on first glance, a disconcerting mix, as the music we are used to hearing in a formal concert hall setting doesn't smoothly combine with bucolic surroundings. This anomaly kept coming to mind while attending the July 16 concert at Napa Valley's Festival Del Sole, produced at Castello di Amorosa....

Before 450 people, in the Castle's sun-spotted courtyard, two big repertoire mainstays, featuring two international stars, were preceded by a premiere, Gordon Getty's Four Dickinson Songs.

The radiant soprano was Lisa Delan, singing with clear diction and chaste phrasing. All four songs had bantamweight endings, with “There's a Certain Slant of Light” and the famous “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” especially telling. Most of these works lie comfortably in the middle range, and Delan's narrow vibrato and palpable emotion seemed just right for each. Pianist Kristin Pankonin was an attentive and often forceful accompanist. 

I reviewed Lisa Delan's first issue in this “series” back in 2009, And If the Song be Worth a Smile. I said then “I am not sure I have heard a finer American song album since Songs of America made its debut on Nonesuch about 20 years ago.” Well, guess what? I can say it again, with a lot of confidence. Not that it is better than the last one—that is too difficult a call to make—but it is certainly the equal.

We have four more songs from the intensely talented and lyrical genius Jake Heggie, this time a little dark and creepy (with the addition of cello), but still affecting and marvelously intrepid in his ability to match words and text. This time the text is by poet Galway Kinnell, and I would not be lying if I said Kinnell's work is actually improved by Heggie, and there is not a lot of poetry you can say that about. William Bolcom returns as well, again with five more of his Cabaret Songs, and Arnold Weinstein's poetry has never enjoyed such a sensitive treatment, his back room lyrics explored to the hilt by Bolcom's masterly music.

Four other composers are called back for encores. Gordon Getty is on his best and most infectious behavior with his Dickinson settings, perfectly nuanced to the unusual and often quirky pauses of Emily Dickinson in a way that perhaps only Aaron Copland could have managed. Woolf's unusual and evocative love poems by Rumi had to be a challenge as the words themselves are so highly perfumed to begin with. The brilliance of these settings is in the sparseness of the harmonies (also adding a cello), allowing Rumi to shine through in all his glory.

John Corigliano, whose own cabaret songs stood out in the last issue, takes a completely different road on this disc with some Irish folksong settings for voice and flute alone. This was in a response to his vigorous Pied Piper Fantasy way back in 1982 for James Galway. This time he wanted to test a more intimate environment and the results are hauntingly beautiful. Finally, David Garner graces us with his Klezmer-like Vilna Poems, sung in Yiddish with the addition this time of clarinet and cello, to poems by the great Avrom Sutzkever, who lived in the Vilna ghetto for two years before escaping to the forests with his wife. Particularly noteworthy is the exceptional and wailing clarinet of David Krakauer.

Lisa Delan is still the master of this sort of recital, even more affecting and in control than the last album. I for one will be thrilled if there is yet another and I can't think of any reason why there won't be. Pentatone again proves that intimate chamber music can be well-served by judicious use of the surround-sound microphones. Outstanding!