Tao's recording of Getty's piano pieces offers a hearing of seven works spanning the breadth of the composer-philanthropist's career. The miniatures on this recording are playful and simplistic. They do not threaten or disturb. 

Some listeners might find this refreshing, but Getty's stubbornly tonal language might be a detriment to the sense he tries to capture. He says of his compositions, "Whatever it was that the great Victorian composers and poets were trying to achieve, that's what I'm trying to achieve." It is hard to tell whether that is apparent here. When I think of Victorian poetry, I associate it with elegiac melancholy and the "long, withdrawing roar" in the sound- scape of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, or the anguish and dejection that borders religious crisis in Gerard Manley Hopkins's later poetry. If this is the case, Getty's pleasant tonal language is not very well suited to Victorian poetry. This is true for his other literary influences: I hear nothing of Edgar Allan Poe in the Ancestor Suite. In fact, if not for some Internet research, I would never have guessed that the pieces derived from a ballet on "THe Fall of the House of Usher".. A more varied harmonic vocabulary might have helped him convey Poe better, if that was his intention....

When compared to Dorken's Janacek or Koroliov's Prokofieff, these pieces cannot help but sound like an attractive surface, pretty but never going beneath that. Nevertheless, this is light, brief, and pleasing.