Painless, faceless, unabashedly eclectic, pleasantly decorative, sporadically engaging music.... Getty, 53, has assimilated a century of operatic cliches with crafty zeal. He knows his way around Verdian parlando and straussian ooze. He savours the impact of a pretty melodic fragment here and a pompous bit of declamation there. He obviously loves his literary source. He haso has the good sense to avoid anything deja-entendu involving the fat knight and the merry wives of Windsor. However, his biggest talent...involves his uncanny ability to be pretentious and naive at the same time. The pretension is reflected in the unrealistic grandeur of his rhetoric and the self-confidence of his ambition. The naivety emerges in the simplistic, antiquated devices he chooses to recycle, content to embroider the text with safe sound feffects. There is no room in this tight little structure for the dramatic amplification or thematic development implied by the old-fashioned idiom. Nor are Getty's one-shot expressive strokes bold enough to command much interest as isolated statements. The static little scenes...certainly don't work as new music. For all their economy and accessibility, they don't work particularly well as old music either.