On October 21, Center for Contemporary Opera served up a spooky double bill by Gordon Getty at the Kaye Playhouse, pairing his ghoulish, disconcerting Usher House, based on Edgar Allan Poe’s "Fall of the House of Usher", with his adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s lightheartedly supernatural The Canterville Ghost. Getty, also the librettist, made the savvy choice of turning Poe’s unnamed narrator into the author himself, “Eddie” to his old friend Roderick Usher. The opera was most compelling when it followed the outlines of the original: the reminiscences of the two men, the strange, symbiotic relationship between Roderick and his deteriorating twin Madeline, and her climactic emergence from the grave to claw Roderick and the house down with her. The addition of an obscure plan by a Dr. Primus Usher, who may be the reincarnation (or even the ghost) of a prior Usher, was more confusing than illuminating.

Getty’s recitative-heavy score hews to natural speech patterns and is chock full of dissonances and singular effects. There could have been room for more lyricism, however; strophic settings for Primus’s plan and Roderick’s explanation of the family curse might have clarified the former and focused the latter....

[In The Canterville Ghost], Getty’s consonant, upbeat music suited the proceedings, and the piece ended with a lovely, lilting duet for Virginia and her suitor, Cecil. The opera is composed as a series of short vignettes, and many of them simply stopped, rather than ending with any definition. Without transitional music to connect the scenes, the piece felt choppy....