[Getty's] treatment of the story is dull and dramatically plodding, making Poe himself (sung by Jason Bridges) the narrator but using far too many words and setting them in an unvaried declamatory style with over-emphatic orchestral punctuation like a pastiche Mussorgsky or Prokofiev. There's little sense of characterisation, even in the portrayal of Roderick Usher (Benjamin Bevan) and the sinister Doctor Primus (Kevin Short), and no sense at all of what this gothic tale of an ancient family in terminal decline is really about....

Gordon Getty is a self-confessed 19th Century romantic composer who's alive, well, and still writing music 150 years after his defining sensibilities were considered de rigueur....

In this program, the composer's anachronistic melodies and lush orchestral textures are placed at the service of Stephen Vincent Benet and Getty himself, whose words combine to form the texts for Young America, a set of six songs. They are performed by the San Francisco delegation, as is the setting of Poe's Annabel Lee. From the Swedish choir and Russian orchestra, we get the composer's settings of Tennyson and Housman in seven vivid Victorian Scenes plus three Welsh folk songs: 'Welcome Robin', 'Kind Old Man', and the beautiful 'All Through the Night'. The opera scene also comes from the Russian conductor and orchestra, with names that sound Slavic and Scandinavian singing the male roles. (In rather clenched fashion, too, I might add.)

I enjoyed the choral songs very much. Emotions rise quickly to the surface in interludes like 'Daughter of Asheville' from the Young America set--a gentle, nostalgic waltz hinting at the country's loss of innocence, then and now. There's more than a little melancholy in the Welsh group (Housman's 'With Rue My Heart is Laden' is gorgeous--the most affecting thing here, for my money). 'All Through the Night' with its sweet, arpeggiated symphonic accompaniment offers more comfort than we probably deserve in our agitated, violence-ridden world.

With such a mood established chorally, the 11-minute operatic scene seems out of place, musically and emotionally. The most evocative moments are heard immediately as the offstage choir chants 'Kyrie eleison' and other sacred texts. Frankly, I'd need to hear more to comment intelligently on Getty in opera mode. The Ericson Chamber Choir and San Francisco Chorus are first-class outfits, as are the bands and conductors backing them up. Sumptuous SACD sound flatters Getty's intentions even more. All in all, this offering is so not run-of-the-mill that I think you'd enjoy checking it out.

Getty may have been worried about writing too long an opera, but I would have welcomed more. He has a real knack for setting words well and sensibly, but he deprives us of almost all of the most famous lines from the plays--no "Uneasy lies the head", no St Crispin's day speech. To reinforce the realism of his story, he quotes some Renaissance music and Latin plainchant. His spare orchestration can be quite vivid (as in the final scene). He compares much of what he writes to movie music, citing such characters as Sylvester, Tweety, Yosemite Sam, and Mr Magoo, which is perhaps carrying self-denigration too far. Plump Jack is far more sophisticated than anything from Looney Tunes and would probably be effective on stage for an audience already familiar with Shakespeare's plays.

One of the most familiar lines from Henry V is given to Pistol: "O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention." How bright a heaven Getty ascends should probably be decided by each individual listener. I loved Nell's heartfelt eulogy for the dead Falstaff, "Nay, sure, he's not in hell, he's in Arthur's bosom", and the byplay among Fal staff, Bardolph, Shallow, and Pistol earlier on; the speeches of the two kings are rather stiff and less striking.

We've reviewed quite a lot of Getty's music in ARG (check the index), and our critics have generally been positive. Here's another interesting recording to add to the list.

[Usher House] is a one-acter in five scenes lasting just over an hour, the scoring relatively spare and the soundscape tonal with, in Getty's words, "hints of atonality." In this scenario, Roderick Usher, who lives with his off-balanced sister, Madeline, has invited an old school friend (Poe himself) to his house to help expunge some ancestral ghosts and revive the Usher family line. Its not entirely clear what's at issue here since Getty has introduced some new elements, including references to a medical archive, an ancient curse and a malevolent character named Doctor Primus. "We ourselves may be at risk if we cannot puzzle it out," Usher sings. Indeed.

This is one of those pieces that may fare better in the seeing than the mere listening. Getty's style is conversational, a kind of unending recitative with only one aria-like piece, a song written for Madeline by Poe and Usher in their schooldays. The singers are good and try hard, including two Canadians, baritone Etienne Dupuis (Usher) and bass Phillip Enns (Primus). Tenor Christian Eisner is Poe, and soprano Lisa Delan handles Madeline's nonverbal lines. Their efforts, however, can't mask the lack of a real dramatic arc in the score. The piece just seems to drift to its nominally catastrophic conclusion.