Mr. Getty’s finances undoubtedly facilitate his music’s journey from creation to publication and performance, but it should not be assumed that the richness of a composer somehow cheapens his music.

As the composer himself acknowledges in his brief remarks printed in PentaTone’s liner notes for this recording, Mr. Getty set the essence rather than the letter of Edgar Allan Poe’s 'The Fall of the House of Usher'....

Conjuring a sense of the darkness and unalleviated mystery in Poe’s story is critical to the success of a musical setting of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ and Mr. Getty’s music, though not arrestingly original or melodically memorable, evokes both an apt element of peril and a disturbing but effective suggestion of the inevitability of the destruction of the Usher line. The story’s unnamed narrator is made Poe himself by Mr. Getty, and the strangely unnerving physician encountered by Poe’s narrator when he first arrives at the Usher mansion is given an increased profile. Musically, Mr. Getty’s idiom is predominantly tonal but accessibly modern: there are passages that are reminiscent of the Bartók of Bluebeard’s Castle, and the sparseness of the sound and the depictions of emotional and social isolation and their effects upon men’s psyches recall the mature vocal works of Britten. If this is not the sort of music that is likely to forever remain in a listener’s memory, it is mostly successful in capturing and retaining the listener’s attention.