Often the repertoire and locale of summer festivals seem, on first glance, a disconcerting mix, as the music we are used to hearing in a formal concert hall setting doesn’t smoothly combine with bucolic surroundings. This anomaly kept coming to mind while attending the July 16 concert at Napa Valley’s Festival Del Sole, produced at Castello di Amorosa....

Before 450 people, in the Castle’s sun-spotted courtyard, two big repertoire mainstays, featuring two international stars, were preceded by a premiere, Gordon Getty’s Four Dickinson Songs.

The radiant soprano was Lisa Delan, singing with clear diction and chaste phrasing. All four songs had bantamweight endings, with “There’s a Certain Slant of Light” and the famous “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” especially telling. Most of these works lie comfortably in the middle range, and Delan’s narrow vibrato and palpable emotion seemed just right for each. Pianist Kristin Pankonin was an attentive and often forceful accompanist. 

Deep-seated musical urge in the great and famous is a known phenomenon; witness King David and Frederick the Great, Einstein and Harry Truman. But in the case of Gordon P. Getty there seems to be a difference: His ambitions are serious.

He may not succeed in making people forget the connotations of his name, his fortune and the family oil business. But by the evidence of Plump Jack, Scene I, which was given a resoundingly successful first performance by the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Symphony Hall Wednesday night, he may indeed succeed in getting people to take him seriously as a composer.

It's a brilliantly theatrical piece. Only 13 minutes long, it is the first step in an inspired idea: to set to music four or five of Falstaff's scenes in Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry V. This first scene is the one in Henry IV, Part I (Act II, Scene 4) in which the fat knight challenges his protege, Prince Hal, to justify his roistering in a mock audience with his father, the king. First Falstaff plays the king, seeking a good word for himself; then Hal takes the role away from him and denounces him as an old fat man a white-bearded Satan. The raillery turns suddenly serious at the end with a hint of Hal's future rejection of Sir John:

Falstaff protests: Banish plump Jack, and banish all the world. The prince says: I do, I will.

The work is scored for bass or bass-baritone (Falstaff), tenor (Hal) and orchestra. The writing for voices is satisfyingly expressive of the lines. As as for the orchestra, Getty uses it in resourceful, imaginative and effectively theatrical ways to surround, illuminate, underline, jostle, inflate, mock and, in general, have fun with what is being sung. The sound& ranges from the tinkle of a solo harpsichord and a muttering of tympani to a veritable screech from all the the brass to cover Falstaff's use of the word whoremaster. The idiom is tonal. There are a few orchestral phrases so loud they cover the words, but that's easily corrected. What counts is that the piece works extremely well as musical theater.

Its success Wednesday certainly owed something to a superb performance. John Del Carlo, the towering bass-baritone of the San Francisco Opera, cut a fine figure as Falstaff, and Paul Sperry, who made such a strong impression at last fall's New American Music Festival at California State University, Sacramento, made clear Hal's intelligence and wit. The singing was magnificent and was reinforced by just the right amount of physical acting. Edo de Waart conducted like a man enjoying his work. Plump Jack could hardly have had a more promising beginning.

I have not been terribly impressed by the music I've heard by Gordon Getty. Though I have no problem with his brazen musical conservatism, I find his work too complacent in inhabiting the styles of the past, with the result that a strong individual personality fails to emerge. Poor Peter, set to three texts by the composer himself, and written for Delan, is a modem romantic evocation of the world of "Merrie aide England." These songs are more effective than much of Getty's music that I've heard, although I could have done without the foot-stomping in the second song. 

There was so much media interest in the San Francisco Symphony's premiere of a composition by the wealthiest man in America, people may have forgotten that his piece was embedded, actually inserted, in an attractive program of well known works.

Musically, Gordon Getty's scene for tenor, baritone and orchestra, ``Plump Jack,'' Scene 1, was not a main event, but a pleasant, lightweight entertainment. Getty made a virtue of simplicity and directness in his setting of the Shakespeare text taken from ``Henry IV.'' The parts for Prince Hal and Falstaff were eminently vocal; tenor Paul Sperry and bass John del Carlo projected them well, in singing and acting; the orchestra did little more than provide elementary support and pictorial and reinforcing comments.

The audience was able to get everything, effortlessly, and afterward, clearly showed its enjoyment and, possibly for some, relief that it had come off. ``They said it couldn't be done . . .''

In this scene, the first of a set Getty plans to write, Falstaff and Hal take turns impersonating Hal's father Henry IV. Falstaff characterizes himself as a saint, Hal (as his father) denounces Plump Jack as villain. Falstaff defends himself and protests, Getty's sympathetic treatment making this the climactic moment. The scene ends with Hal's quietly renouncing his fat, old drinking and carousing companion.

The orchestra part was a thing of snatches and effects, including a couple of harpsichord passages in period dress, a brass raspberry, and a lot that just underlined and variously illustrated what the words are up to. The orchestral parts sounded all right, but there's no getting around it, if you or I had written this, it wouldn't have gone beyond the living room.

All the same, the piece was mildly diverting and curiosity was satisfied. We saw once again that riches are no impediment to writing music, and learned that the Symphony doesn't discriminate for reasons of wealth either.

Sperry, his tenor a little darker than remembered, gave a flexible, attractive performance. Del Carlo portrayed and sang Falstaff neatly, with tasteful restraint and in good character. Edo de Waart conducted, doing all that was important.