Consider Saturday's concert at Santa Clara University, an expensive undertaking called "A Celebration of Shakespeare's Falstaff." In order to produce three sections of Getty's concert opera, "Plump Jack," the university had to hire a lot of people:

(check) 57 musicians from the San Francisco and San Jose Symphonies.

(check) Two professional singers, including the rising bass- baritone John Del Carlo to perform the title role.

(check) Tony Church, a Royal Shakespeare Company veteran actor.

(check) Paul Whitworth, an actor, and Michael Edwards, a director, both of the University of California at Santa Cruz theater faculty.

This doesn't begin to count the 50 members of the Santa Clara University Concert Choir, five actors from the university's theater department and conductor Lynn Shurtleff, a Santa Clara faculty member, who all came free....

Getty, 54, has musical gifts, but they are small and finite. As in his song cycle of Emily Dickinson poems, "The White Election," he understands the art of musical declamation: the wedding of words and music to bring text into sharp relief. His problem, I think, is an excessive fidelity to the text.

In the terse and exquisite Dickinson poems, it was right for him not to cut or repeat a single word. But in the whole scenes he has extracted from Shakespeare's "Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2," cuts are badly needed. Getty hasn't sliced so much as a line, and the cantata feels saturated, burdened, weighty with words. Compare Verdi's Shakespearean operas -- "Macbeth," "Otello" and especially "Falstaff" -- to the original plays and you'll see that his librettists cut more than two- thirds of the text. The music more than fills in the gaps.

The orchestral accompaniment is strangely and problematically scored for a chamber orchestra of strings but with lots of extra brass and woodwinds, a large percussion battery, a harpsichord, two harps and a celesta.

There are delightful moments such as the orchestra's raspberry when Falstaff lies about his age or the jangly chords that speak while a singer mouths the word "whoremaster." A muted trumpet choir heralds the coronation procession of King Henry V, and there are subtle echo effects for the speaking chorus as the parade approaches and disappears. The choir also has a lovely Gregorian hymn during the coronation scene. Getty has written a gleaming night-music of chimes, insect noises and horsemen passing in the distance to set off the nocturnal conversation of Falstaff and Justice Shallow.

But such style as he has is mostly derivative. Bartok, Stravinsky, Debussy and Benjamin Britten are among those most readily discernible. And except for a magnificent striding theme that takes hold momentarily in the Justice Shallow scene, there's little to reward the listener for wading through the libretto to keep up with the singers.