What a pleasure to attend a concert that includes three pieces (one a world premiere) written by contemporary composers, and come away beguiled, spirits soaring. No screeching of strings. No wailing of wind instruments. No washboard percussions. Just beautiful music that uplifts the soul.

Praise for this belongs to Gordon Getty for two of three items on the program, to William Hawley for the third, and to Robert Bass, music director of the Collegiate Chorale, for having the good taste to present them.

It all happened Sunday afternoon at St. Bartholomew's Church on Manhattan's Park Avenue. The concert was the first of five to be presented by the church, that magnificent landmark whose architectural integrity has been so much in the news lately.

Gordon Getty's contribution included "All Along the Valley," part of six a cappella choruses that had their New York premiere in April. His is a delightful, ethereal setting for Tennyson's poem of the same name, sung by sopranos and altos. It's an unpretentious piece, yet deeply felt and sung beautifully by the choir.

Who doesn't know Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee? " It was part of the curriculum in the nation's schools until the era of relevancy caused the abandonment of Poe, Hawthorne, and Emerson by so many of our high school English teachers. It was a favorite of soldiers on both sides of the Civil War, as well as a staple of parlor musicales until the advent of radio. Getty ventured his own setting last April in Carnegie Hall. In July, he expanded the instrumental interludes and divided the voices in certain spots. The revised version, given for the first time Sunday, is haunting and thoroughly modern without violating the poem's romantic integrity. I don't know of a better acoustical setting than St. Bart's for this absorbing piece. 

There's nothing that says a fabulously wealthy man can't be a good composer, and Gordon Getty fits both categories. Getty, whose surname explains the circumstances of his wealth, is a music lover who has produced respectable works in genres as different as the art song and the opera; his song cycle based on poems of Emily Dickinson, ``The White Election,'' has been performed in Seattle as an added attraction to past Wagner Festivals by Kaaren Erickson, the soprano who sings the cycle on this new Delos recording

Like Dickinson's poems, these songs are spare and uncrowded, with almost grudging use of Armen Guzelimian's piano (often restricted to a single line, or to a sustained chord, rather than the dense and powerful music a piano could make). The focus is on the words, and the singer is allowed a recitative-like freedom in spinning out those words. Getty is adept at mirroring the mood of the poem in the music, which is largely consonant; the sung melodies are often angular, with big intervalic leaps.

Getty's own program notes are revealing of his compositional motives as well as Dickinson's life, whose unconsummated passions were represented by the white frocks she wore and the bridal/death imagery of many of her poems. The 31 poems set here include two settings of ``I Sing to Use the Waiting,'' which begin and conclude the cycle.

Gordon Getty, composer.

That is the way the fourth son of the late oil tycoon J. Paul Getty wants to be known, first and foremost. Amazingly enough, he may get his wish.

For those who don't keep track of the concert world, the emergence of Gordon Peter Getty as a composer who is being taken seriously is one of the more improbable developments of the 1980s. It reached a new peak last June 26 in San Francisco, when Getty's concert opera "Plump Jack" - based on portions of Shakespeare's plays featuring Sir John Falstaff - received its world premiere at the hands of the San Francisco Symphony.

Many critics entered Davies Symphony Hall that night burning with skepticism and left convinced that "Plump Jack" was indeed, a pretty good piece. It may not be a dramatic thriller, but Getty knows how to keep the listener's attention, peppering the vocal lines with spare, humorous, often colorful orchestral comments and backdrops.

Last night in Davies Symphony Hall the Russian National Orchestra (RNO) returned to perform the first of two concerts in the Great Performers Series organized by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). Their conductor was Founder and Artistic Director Mikhail Pletnev....

The intermission was followed by the appearance of soprano Lisa Delan singing the world premiere of Gordon Getty's "Gretchen to Faust." It is not often that a visiting ensemble brings a world premiere to its program, but this provided an opportunity for RNO to introduce the music in the composer's presence without the composer having to travel.

The work was inspired by Faust's encounter with the imprisoned Gretchen in the final scene of the first part of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust. Rather than translate the German, Getty reconceived an English text by turning Gretchen into a ghost, giving Faust instructions on the burial of not only her own body but those of the other members of her family. While the text sheet presented the words as a blank-verse poem, Delan's delivery reflected Getty's talent for expressing prose that emerged so vividly in his "Usher House" opera. (That prose was also a great relief from Goethe's persistent doggerel.) The piece was short (about five minutes in duration); and the musical language was modest. However, the dramatic impact made for a fascinating reflection on the traditional Faust legend.