Though skillfully assembled and, in its Southern California premiere performance, tastefully presented, Gordon Getty's Plump Jack, a work the composer calls "a concert opera," resembles nothing so much as a vanilla cookie: innocuous and undistinctive.

But its first local performance, given by forces of Los Angeles Music Center Opera in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center on Wednesday night, proved fascinating nonetheless....

This is no Falstaff; neither is it an opera. It is, rather, a mosaic, not yet focused, without a central point.

Composer Getty, a longtime arts patron and amateur singer, has been writing music for many years. His song-cycles have been published and performed. He is clearly not without talent nor without sensitivity and sophistication.

His settings of these Falstaffian texts often emerge graceful, musical, canny and comprehensible. Though the six singers in this concert performance showed particular skills at delivering the words, the composer had already made their work grateful.

But no totality grows out of these disjunct and apparently non-continuous scenes. No vision emerges. The musical line remains unarched. Characterizations are not developed, dramatic climaxes unachieved.

Getty's pastel, eclectic modern style--he himself acknowledges his debt to models by Richard Strauss and Verdi--deals competently in recitative. There are no distinctive tunes (other than purposefully borrowed ones, as in the quotations at the top of Scene 3) and no arias; neither lightning nor inspiration ever strikes.