It cannot be easy being a venture capitalist and philanthropist – once listed by Forbes as America’s richest man – and expect to be taken seriously as a composer. Equally, it can’t be easy for artists or record companies, however serious, to resist any offers of working on such a man’s music. So it is also difficult to overlook these issues when approaching this new CD of Gordon Getty’s opera Plump Jack, which unbiased ears will probably hear as no worse – and no better – than many contemporary operas. Plump Jack scrapes into the ‘contemporary’ category, however, only on account of being written (in stages) over recent decades. Getty is a ‘neo-con’ composer, whose style here ranges from harmless film music in the unduly long overture, to sub-Wagnerian recitative for most of the vocal scenes.

Basing his opera on Shakespeare, Getty is of course pitting himself against Verdi. Getty’s opera is stuffed with period-evoking quotations, and even this shortened ‘concert version’, squeezed on to a single disc, feels long and unmemorable.