Judging from their playing, which pours forth in one melodic stream after another, Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields must have relished their assignment. Their recent multi-channel SACD sampler of orchestral music by Gordon Getty (b. 1933), released by Pentatone, is a joyful experience, filled with one easy on the ear, richly scored piece after another....

Getty’s melodic, tonally conservative potpourri begins with the 12-minute Overture to Plump Jack, a two-act opera that the San Francisco Symphony premiered in a concert production in 1987. Since played by major orchestras in Los Angeles, London, Spoleto (Italy), Aspen, Puerto Rico, New Mexico, and Mazatlan (Mexico), the opera depicts the Falstaff of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V.

Getty writes, "The Overture is a synopsis of the story, quoting scenes of Falstaffian high jinks and of courtly grief by turn, along with a few idyllic episodes, interrupted by occasional distant fanfares warning of the banishment." It certainly has its share of rollicking moments, as well as an orchestral plushness that brings to mind the tone poems of Richard Strauss.

Jumping ahead two decades, the 12-movement Ancestor Suite was premiered in Moscow by the Russian National Orchestra in September 2009. The ballet score is loosely based on Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. You’ll be hard put to hear Poe’s sinister menace and horror. This is far more the music of fairy tales, of characters waltzing and waltzing until they can waltz no more. To single out two of the movements, the lovely loneliness of Madeleine, and the wistfulness of Ewig Du, are especially pleasing.

The remaining shorter works are dominated by the five-movement Homework Suite. Initially composed for solo piano in 1964, when Getty was studying music theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, it includes a short Berceuse (at 2:14, the longest movement in the suite) that is especially sweet.

As the disc ends with Raise the Colors, a lively C-major march for winds and percussion, the overriding impression of sometimes rollicking loveliness remains. Getty’s is the kind of genial music that, were you to hear it on the radio, you’d be tempted call the station to ask what you heard and where you can buy it.