Jeff Dunn, Usher House
I wonder if anyone who attended the San Francisco Opera on Tuesday was reminded of two priceless sentences from Tim Robbins’ novel Another Roadside Attraction: “The day was rumpled and dreary. It looked like Edgar Allan Poe’s pajamas.” Two one-act versions of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” were creeping the stage with their rumpled and dreary elements, yet there was nevertheless much in them to admire. Furthermore, comparisons between the two prove instructive.
Most admirable in local composer and philanthropist Gordon Getty’s Usher House was the video production design by the Viennese David Haneke. Huge, mobile, video panels of his invention (the “Triptichon” system) displayed high-resolution images of movements through Usher House interiors and exteriors. These were populated by a raven (natch!), living portraits whose subjects got up and walked out of their frames, and a bevy of ghostly ancestors right out of the opening number in The Addams Family musical (except they were better dressed).
Also of note was Getty’s own libretto, which added some potentially dramatic elements to the original story. In brief, it’s about an unnamed, old friend visiting an agoraphobic Mr. Usher, who is going mad in his decaying mansion while pursuing abstruse researches. Meanwhile, (1) Usher’s cataleptic twin sister is buried alive and (2) escapes her tomb, magically causing (3) the estate to collapse into its surrounding lake. Rather than capitalize on the impressive stagecraft that could have accompanied prolonged musical settings of these three events, the composers of both operas concentrated their skills on Usher’s psychological morass, leading up to denouements that were all too brief.
Getty, with some success, turned the two Ushers into noble heroes allied with the friend—characterized by the composer as Poe himself—against dark forces of the ancestors and the building stones (H.P. Lovecraft fans: think Cthulhu). The family physician, barely mentioned by Poe, has morphed into “Dr. Primus,” a sinister agent of the ancients (well portrayed by bass Anthony Reed).
Getty says he wrote his libretto “20-30 years ago as a short play or opera,” and its ambivalent purpose shows in its interesting, but text-laden monologues. I wish I could say the music, like Wagner’s in Wotan’s long speeches, makes the listening worthwhile. Unfortunately, the transparently scored parlando hangs like tinsel on the text. Only a poem sung by the character Poe contains memorable melodic material.
Jeff Kaliss, Four Dickinson Songs, Ancestor Suite, A Prayer for My Daughter
Getty’s influence on the evening’s program suggested a keen interest in different settings of the human voice, apparent also in the variety of form in his own composition. He’s consistent, though, in seeking out poetry as inspiration, and soprano Lisa Delan effectively showcased his Four Dickinson Songs, with light and lively intonation and an ingenuous theatricality conveying both the era and the affect of the 19th-century New England poet. The composer’s musical lines, in which Delan was prettily paired by Symphony pianist Robin Sutherland, were similarly unaffected and accessible, supporting the verse and the refined but earnest emotion.
Getty openly champions and allegedly channels 19th-century tonal approaches to classical music, and there were bows to Johann Strauss in his orchestral Three Movements from Ancestor Suite. But there were also surprising and delightful hints of 20th-century Russian modernism therein, particularly in the Polka: Polonaise section. These appealing pieces of program music appear in different form in Getty’s Usher House, recently released by PentaTone Classics and due for a production by the San Francisco Opera.
The new piece’s power contrasted with the private delicacy of the composer’s soloist-and-piano outings, and suggested Getty’s mastery of broader strokes, with massed singers and instrumentalists.
On his way back to his seat from Intermission, Getty confided to a reviewer his excitement about the upcoming premiere of his A Prayer for My Daughter, which began the evening’s second half. The new piece enjoyed a splendid reading by the full Symphony and Chorus. Although Prayer made use of devices favored in the Dickinson settings, including alternating arpeggiation and unison, the new piece’s power contrasted with the private delicacy of the composer’s soloist-and-piano outings, and suggested Getty’s mastery of broader strokes, with massed singers and instrumentalists.
Both groups of musicians displayed the composer’s appeal as a colorist, highlighting sections of the chorus and orchestra (with horns and woodwinds particularly noteworthy to this reviewer) to illustrate poet Yeats’ references to sea and stormy sky. Prayer affected an impressive dynamic range, from a gutsy beginning on to a place of parental resolution, if not absolute certitude.
Jason Victor Serinus, Plump Jack
It has been a long time coming, but Gordon Getty’s most widely discussed composition, the opera Plump Jack, has finally made it to disc — the 75-minute concert version, that is, which omits two of the opera’s scenes. And while it’s not clear that we as yet have the opera in final form — since the first performance of the “Boar’s Head Inn” scene (Act 1, Scene 5) at San Francisco Symphony in 1985, 11 additional scenes and an 11 minute and 18 second long overture have been added and orchestrated, and the entire opera has been recently revised — what we do have is an engaging musical enterprise that invites critical commentary.
With a libretto that Getty himself adapted, in large part, from Shakespeare’s Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 and Henry V, Plump Jack follows the rotund Falstaff, the elder King Henry IV, Henry’s son Hal (eventually Henry V), and their not-so-merrie comrades, cohorts, and acquaintances through a series of ambushes, schemes, and deaths. Although I am far from a Shakespeare scholar, both SFCV editor and musicologist Michael Zwiebach and UC Berkeley Shakespeare scholar Hugh Macrae Richmond’s video collection of Shakespeare stagings confirm that the Falstaff of these plays, who predates the Falstaff of The Merry Wives of Windsor, is a dissolute knight whose wit, in Zwiebach’s words, “is razor sharp and not clownish.” The earlier Falstaff’s actions, he writes, “show a man with a significant dark side,” one capable of cheating men, both honorable and far less so. In short, Getty’s title, Plump Jack, may suggest a barrel of belly laughs, but neither libretto nor music invites such.
Getty pulls no punches when discussing his compositional aesthetic. In the remarkably candid liner notes to the superbly recorded Pentatone hybrid SACD release, he acknowledges that his music is derivative: "I find it much easier to rank my favorite composers, past and present, than to figure out which ones have influenced my music. … I am something like an unwed mother who cannot name the father. What I hear more of [in Plump Jack] is movie music.… Movies, after all, are spoken operas where the score tells us what to expect and how things feel."
This quasi-cinematic opera’s extended overture, wonderfully performed by the Münchner Rundfunkorchester under the baton of Ulf Schirmer, immediately signals what’s in store. The music may be tonal in the traditional sense, yet its dark drama, arresting percussive exclamations, and intriguing dynamic contrasts immediately draw us — certainly me — in. Most of the ensuing dialogue far more resembles speech than melody, with Getty’s notably rich and compelling orchestration conveying the underlying emotions.
Many of the oft double-cast singers, including the well-known soprano Melody Moore (singing Boy/Clarence), mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer (Hostess Nell Quickly), bass-baritone Christopher Robertson (Henry IV/Pistol), tenor Nikolai Schukoff (Hal/Henry V), and baritone Nathaniel Webster (Bardolph/Chief Justice), sound reasonably like you’d expect their characters to sound. The big puzzlement is baritone Lester Lynch as Falstaff. He has a fine voice, with lots of strength, but the crucial flaws, irony, and nervy humor that are essential to drawing a compelling characterization of Falstaff are absent. Getty’s orchestration says one thing, yet Lynch’s vocal quality and inflections do nothing to send it across the imagined footlights.
Nonetheless, Getty’s writing retains its eloquence. Even as I acknowledge that I want the opera to succeed — Getty is, after all, one of the Bay Area’s and the world’s great music and education philanthropists, whose generosity enables a host of organizations (including SFCV) to perform with excellence — I can honestly affirm that much of it does. The immensely colorful overture may be too long to present online, but the two scenes excerpted herein (albeit in sonically compromised 320 kbps MP3 form) should certainly give you a good sense of how much there is in Plump Jack to enjoy and savor.
Jeff Dunn, Homework Suite
The opening night concert at Oakland's Paramount Theatre for the OEBS officially celebrated Democracy, in tune with the recent national election. As Music Director Michael Morgan's "Message from the Maestro" put it:
We should celebrate the fact that we live in a country where nearly everyone is eligible to vote and therefore has a role in running the Republic. There has been a great and historical struggle to bring us to this point and for those who choose to participate, it is a moment that brings us together....
The concert began with American Fanfare (1985) by the African-American educator Adolphus Cunningham Hailstork... Next came the lightly scored Homework Suite (1961-62) by Bay Area composer and philanthropist Gordon Getty, written while he was a conservatory student. Its five very short unassuming movements run eight minutes in total. The most memorable is the first, "Seascape," which suggests a calm but wistful day on a lonely shore by means of a beautiful but unexploited melody for oboe.
Janos Gereben, Ancestor Suite
The evening opened with a surprise.... This was Oath of the Ushers, to a score by Gordon Getty, a complex, strange 30-minute work. It is a movement from Getty's Ancestor Suite, the story based on Poe's 1839 The Fall of the House of Usher, about the mysterious destruction of the Ushers' immortality....
Getty has long concentrated on Ancestor Suite, having The Oath of Ushers movement premiered by the Bolshoi dancers and RNO in 2009, in Moscow, Perm, Voronezh, and Krasnoyarsk. Friday night was the U.S. premiere.
Besides the dancers' performance, the good thing about this dramatic discombobulation is the music, perhaps Getty's best. It begins as gentle circus music, transforming into something reminiscent of Prokofiev ballets, and ending in hesitating, stretched-out phrases. It could work well as abstract music, without reference to Ushers, et.al.