Gordon Getty might be the wealthiest classical composer in history this side of Felix Mendelssohn or Frederick the Great. The resulting celebrity guarantees him an audience, but respect has been harder to come by.

Nevertheless, Getty has persevered in his late-blooming career as a composer, writing three relatively short operas, several choral works and song cycles, and some orchestral, piano, and chamber pieces, many of which can be heard in SACD splendor on PentaTone label. The recordings reveal a capable composer and a fairly reticent one – no grandiose shouting at the balcony for its own sake. Heir to an oil fortune, Getty has said that he is “two-thirds a 19th-century composer,” but what I hear is an unmistakable 20th-century man who has sidestepped the main trends of the era and prefers to write in a self-effacing, tonal, non-ear-threatening style. His closest musical soulmate, intended or not, is probably Benjamin Britten.

Getty’s most recent one-act operas, Usher House and The Canterville Ghost, were meant to be paired together – and indeed they do offset each other well, with Usher being immersed in the murky morbid world of Edgar Allan Poe and Canterville a setting of a rollicking ghost story by Oscare Wilde. So on June 22, LA Opera Off Grand, the company’s ever-adventurous offsite offshoot, put both of them on the Broad Stage under the label "Scare Pair"...

Liberally based upon Poe’s enigmatic Gothic short story "The Fall of the House of Usher", Usher House is a followup piece to Getty’s ballet Ancestor Suite, which was also inspired by the same Poe story. With the exception of the central ballet sequence, the opera’s musical language is very different from that of the suite; the opera is spare-textured, inward-looking, and almost all recitative, with plenty of room for the voices to be heard. Getty injects Poe in the flesh into the opera as the narrator and longtime friend of Roderick Usher...

Yet nothing in Usher’s score is terribly inspired, and there is little dramatic tension in the buildup to the conclusion....

In The Canterville Ghost, a wealthy American family circa 1890 buys an English manor whose resident ghost, Sir Simon de Canterville, tries and fails to put the willies in them. The work was unexpectedly delightful; Opera Leipzig's recording doesn’t convey as much fun as this production did. Here, too, Getty put in something of his own: an opening scene set in 1960 in which the eighty-something couple Cecil Cheshire...and Virginia Otis...tell the great-grandchildren about what happened 70 years before, making the rest of the opera a flashback. The scoring is lighter in mood and thoroughly tonal, but not in a white-bread way, with flashes of humor that got the audience chuckling....

Bursts of amplified sound effects helped to relieve any tedium during the frequent breaks between Canterville’s 20 mostly short scenes. Canterville’s final scene, with the lovers Cecil and Virginia singing and the celesta playing the only memorable Getty tunes to be heard all night, was saved from sentimentality by Virginia’s refusal to admit that she had helped the ghost achieve his long-sought eternal rest.

The composer, now 84, was on hand to take a bow with the rest of the cast, playfully acting like one of his ghosts. Of course, neither he nor his two operas scared anyone.