Gordon Getty, 82, one of the sanest composers on the planet, launched an engaging one-act opera of spooks, cadavers, and madmen at San Francisco Opera on December 8 that showed him to be a better librettist than composer. His mind-trip, Usher House (2014), walked the tantalizing lines between reality, fantasy, life, and death distilled from the nebulous outlines of Edgar Allan Poe's short story, "The Fall of the House of Usher"....

In Usher Getty's vocal lines are mostly recitatives that repetitively hop up and down a perfect fifth or fourth, reflecting some of the mental fragility of Roderick, the last of the Usher clan. His music, with subdued orchestral effects, is thoroughly consonant, carrying on an American tradition from Floyd, Barber, and Menotti. Given a cast of just three singers plus a dancer and off-stage voice, an eventual chamber-opera version with small orchestra might make sense....

Good ghost stories in opera are few and far between. Getty's Usher House, his third opera, is a viable and intimate addition to the genre, but it would probably be much more effective if paired with a lighter work or comedy. 

In Gordon Getty’s Little Match Girl, which he adapted from H. B. Paull’s English translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale, the composer uses a full chorus and orchestra to narrate the heartbreaking yet transcendent story, with earnest, declamatory vocal settings and striking instrumental illustrations. He seems particularly inspired by nature; one of the most arresting passages is “They had only the roof to cover them, through which the wind blew.” “Then she saw a star fall, leaving behind it a bright streak of fire” provides another scintillating musical depiction. He’s also particularly inventive as the little girl strikes a succession of matches: the orchestra springs to life with each flame, as images of home, hearth and food explode into view. The girl’s old grandmother, “clear and shining,” appears amid pealing brass instruments. When they fly together to a place above the Earth “where there was neither cold nor hunger nor pain,” it’s soothing, then marvelously celebratory on “they were with God.” Getty’s musical language is predominantly conservative, but he dramatizes all of this powerfully and directly, without cliché. The Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks isn’t always intelligible, but they sing with good pitch and rhythmic precision. 

Getty also derives considerable musical inspiration from nature in A Prayer for My Daughter (one of several other works on this disc), which begins with a vigorous instrumental storm, shortly followed by the full chorus intoning the vivid opening lines of W. B. Yeats’s poem of the same name. Getty’s setting is full of abrupt contrasts, bright orchestral colors and a skillful sense of the visceral drama inherent in the poem’s powerful, eloquently expressed parental feelings. 

Poor Peter is an appealing cycle of three songs for tenor, chorus and orchestra, set in the mythical Middle Ages. The haunting, minstrel-like “Where is My Lady?” is taken from Getty’s opera Usher House, inspired by Poe. “Tune the Fiddle” is a rousing, fiery two-step, and “Ballad of Poor Peter” is melodic and melancholic, with an original text by Getty inspired by Yeats. All three are evocative of a bygone era but laced with contemporary touches. Nikolai Schukoff’s earnest, opulent tenor is well-suited to these expressive, vocally sympathetic songs.

The disc concludes with Getty’s engrossing, well-wrought cantata Joan and the Bells, which relates the Joan of Arc story by way of Shaw (Saint Joan) and Jean Anouilh (The Lark). (There’s an earlier recording from 2003, also on the Pentatone label, with different personnel.) Melody Moore’s ringing, charismatic soprano brings Joan compellingly to life, and baritone Lester Lynch’s voice resonates with menace. The chorus does some particularly rousing work here, and the Münchner Rundfunkorchester blazes under Ulf Schirmer. Asher Fisch skillfully conducts the other three works. 

When I opened this SACD I wasn’t sure what to expect. The composer, Gordon Getty, was not known to me, and the works were also unfamiliar.

I’m happy to report this is a wonderful disc, with chorus and orchestra performing Getty’s compositions and text from works by Hans Christian Andersen, William Butler Yeats, and a Cantata with words by Getty....

This SACD starts with “A prayer for my daughter” for chorus and orchestra, based on the poem by William Butler Yeats which is, according to Getty, “…one of the most admired works by one of the most admired poets of the age”. It is followed by “Poor Peter” for tenor, chorus and orchestra, with lyrics by Getty himself inspired by Poe and again Yeats.

Then follows “The little match girl”; the heart-breaking fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, put to music more or less word for word in a challenging setting for the orchestra and particularly the chorus.

The disc concludes with “Joan and the bells”, Getty’s own narrative of the trial of Joan of Arc, about which he said, “It was the genius of Shaw that inverted this safe literary tradition and brought out the spunky teenager in Joan. Jean Anouilh went farther, in The Lark, and gave her the simplicity of preadolescence.

This is one of the most dramatic and involving recordings I have heard in a long time. The orchestra, chorus and soloists are precise and appropriately dramatic. The recording is amazing in it’s emotional wallop and dynamic range. The soloists are placed across the front spread between the front speakers, while the surrounds get a sense of the hall. It’s demonstration quality and reminds me of the old thrilling Columbia recordings with Bernstein, but here the impact is greater with a high resolution product from start to finish. If you have doubts about multichannel and the extended frequency response of SACD discs, this recording will put it all those reservations to rest.

This recording by the Münchner Rundfunkorchester and the Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks was conducted by Asher Fisch and Ulf Schirmer respectively. It features magnificent soloists such as tenor Nikolai Schukoff (“Poor Peter”), soprano Melody Moore (“Joan and the Bells”) and baritone Lester Lynch (“Joan and the Bells”).

The only drawback to this disc is the absolutely horrible cover art. Hide it away and enjoy the music. I’ll search out more of Getty’s music after hearing these compositions. He’s an intriguing composer with a highly interesting background. Pentagon has created one of the finest recordings I’ve heard this year. Recommended!

Author of some of the most musical language in all of American literature, Edgar Allan Poe got his night at the opera Tuesday when a double bill of works based on his short story The Fall of the House of Usher was presented at San Francisco Opera.  Yet while the evening had its musical and theatrically haunting moments, this pairing of Gordon Getty’s Usher House and Debussy’s La Chute de la Maison Usher struggled to make a compelling operatic case.

Brooding orchestral palettes, monologue-clogged librettos and a surfeit of projections were the dominant impressions of the evening.  However tempting Poe’s tale of a deeply haunted house and a dying sister might have been, the atmospherically rich but dramatically static Usher story proved to be a daunting challenge....

Getty, a noted philanthropist and San Francisco Opera donor, filled his portion of the evening with a ponderous book and largely unengaging score. Weighed down by bookish verbiage, the conversation between “Eddie” Poe (an eager but handcuffed tenor Jason Bridges) and [Brian] Mulligan’s Roderick plowed on through pages of wooly academic dialogue. The language seemed to stifle the occasional wrinkles of musical charm – a strophic folk song, a lightly burlesqued ballroom waltz.

The opera’s ideas, both literary and musical, steadily wore thin.  Getty threaded a few motifs through the score, but they never took hold or developed. Bass Anthony Reed looked and sounded imposing as Doctor Primus.  And Duggan was both rag-doll limp and febrile as the dancing Madeline.

Without a strong musical or dramatic spine, however, this Usher devolved into incomprehensibility at times. Madeline’s onstage death was indifferently staged and scored. Even as the projected house crumbled and that storm set in, the music, all too fittingly, withered away to an anticlimax.