Richard S. Ginell, Plump Jack
Gordon Getty's "Plump Jack" came to Los Angeles Wednesday night more or less as an afterthought to the Los Angeles Music Center Opera's second season. Perhaps this was the token nod toward presenting so-called contemporary music. Perhaps there were other, more base considerations in mind, given who the composer is. Perhaps none of the above.
At any rate, it was a rather different presentation of "Plump Jack" than the one that was unleashed upon the suspecting world last June in San Francisco. In some ways, the "concert opera" itself sounded stronger than it did at the premiere. In other ways, though, the total presentation was weaker.
First, the good news. Getty has said the version of his piece heard at the Music Center Pavilion was "improved" in small ways over the San Francisco version, like re-arranging furniture a few inches here, a few inches there. If anything - and it may be illusion on the listener's part - the piece did sound richer in its orchestration, though still spare in its Britten-like decoration of the vocal lines and pointed in its knockabout wit. Again, Getty knows how to keep his audience's attention, and it makes one look forward to hearing a purely orchestral piece by him someday.
What Getty needs is more confidence in his obvious talent and a longer attention span. One could hear some marvelous ideas that were aborted seconds after they materialized without any development - particularly in Part II, which musically is the strongest segment. Also, "Plump Jack" remains dramatically static; it does very little to advance the piecemeal Shakespearean story line. Yet one must admit, it has staying power upon repeated hearings, and that's the best news of all.
But the total presentation made it a much more exhausting evening than it could have been. Parts I and IV of "Jack" were prefaced by 26 minutes and 17 minutes, respectively, of interminable spoken dialogue patched together from ''Henry IV" and "Henry V." However deftly acted by Tony Church and Paul Whitworth, and bizarre in its staging - Falstaff came out in a modern-dress leather jacket and crash helmet - these scenes turned out to be a drag on the whole evening. Getty had originally planned to have spoken interludes for ''Jack" (not these particular ones, it was learned), but the idea ought to be scrapped.
Andrew Massey led the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra with point and humor when he and the orchestra weren't just sitting around on stage watching the actors. John del Carlo, if anything, sounded even more resonant and authoritative in his portrayal of Falstaff than at the premiere, and Jonathan Mack was his reliably intelligent self as Prince Hal and King Henry V.
James Chute, Plump Jack
Composer and multimillionaire Gordon Getty raised a number of moral issues in his concert opera "Plump Jack," but the most weighty question posed by the production of his work Wednesday at the Los Angeles Music Center's Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was, how could anything as bad as "Plump Jack" be produced by such a reputable company as the Los Angeles Music Center Opera? ....
"Plump Jack" is ghastly from every musical perspective: The opera's melodies are fragmented. They lack character and seemingly have little to do with the nuances of the text. Its mildly dissonant harmonies are as bland as the melodies. Its rhythm is ill-defined. Its form is amorphous and incoherent.
But most damning, there is little evidence of a strong personality behind the music. Getty wanders from one idea to another, as if he is presenting various musical elements for the sake of argument rather than out of strong musical or emotional conviction.
The works' weaknesses were put into relief by performances of the original texts on which the opera was based by actors Tony Church (as Falstaff) and Paul Whitworth (as everyone else) that proceeded the opera. Despite some eccentricities in the dramatic performance (Falstaff in a sequined tuxedo), Shakespeare's lines rang true.
In Getty's music, despite the superb singing of bass John Del Carlo and tenor Jonathan Mack, the meaning of the text is obscured rather than clarified. In the opera's climatic moment, when Falstaff is rejected by King Henry, Getty has so much going on (choirs singing and chanting, trumpet calls, and who knows what) that the drama of the moment is lost in a muddle of sound.
Composers, or would-be composers, would be well-advised not to set a poetic or literary text unless the music improves, or at least illuminate the text. Getty made Shakespeare seem nonsensical.
Robert Masullo, Plump Jack
The world premiere of Gordon Getty's first opera, Plump Jack, took place Friday at the Palace of Fine Arts in a handsome production by Marin Opera...
Getty, whose other musical efforts have won him sufficient praise to distinguish him from your average billionaire dilettante, uses the orchestra unlike Verdi. Where Verdi's orchestra accompanies, Getty's orchestra punctuates.
Listening to the Getty work is not unlike a dramatic reading of Peter and the Wolf. The narrator describes an action in silence, stops reading, and the orchestra mimics the sounds described. For the most part the singers in Plump Jack sing with little or no orchestral accompaniment. When they end a phrase, however, the orchestra comes in to echo and/or amplify what they sang. Frequently, that comes from the percussion section.
Getty's music, nevertheless, is bright, cheerful, melodic. The plot flows less smoothly. I failed to find a point to it.
Joshua Kosman, The White Election (1988)
Nobody likes to be patronizing, especially not to the richest man in the known universe or whatever Mr. Getty is. But the only response I can muster to this sweetly wrong-headed song cycle is to mentally pat the composer on the head and say, "Yes, yes, very nice." The texts are by Emily Dickinson, and the songs are arranged in four matching groups of eight that trace a roughly chronological and biographical course through "Emily's" life. Erickson sings bravely, with a lovely tone and firm technical control.
Getty's aesthetic principle in this cycle is to close his eyes very tight , and pretend very very hard that it's 1870 again. Melodically, the writing is often quite imaginative; Getty provides a number of pretty tunes in which to dress up Dickinson's poetry. But there's no rhythmic or harmonic life to the music at all, and the whole cycle is so proudly, determinedly anachronistic that it's hard to take seriously. Some of the songs would merit an A in a model-composition class, some a C; none of them have much business out in the real world.
Paul Hertelendy, Plump Jack
Ambitious but anemic...The carving of a whole new "Falstaff" drama from various Shakespeare plays was a provocative exercise on Getty's part. Instead of exploring Falstaff's preposterous attempts at amorous escapades a la Verdi and Nicolai (which were taken out of "The Merry Wives of Windsor"), Getty brings forth a central theme of reform and noblesse oblige (mostly out of the "Henry IV" plays) that demolishes that pompous, paunchy pretender Sir Jack Falstaff...
Where the two other composers turned to broad comedy, Getty takes up the serious issues of moral fiber, meeting a leadership challenge and the need to throw off accumulated effects of being irresponsible.
Undeniably, the music is thin; Getty is a self-taught orchestrator... Whatever his shortcomings, Getty did achieve a model intelligibility, partly because he used a lot of lower singing voices.
His historical fanaticism brought some memorable touches, such as resurrecting the actual Latin chant sung at King Henry V's coronation.
That scene is the drama's best, a fitting finale. Confronted with Falstaff, the crowned king renounces his past hellion life with the words, "I know thee not, old man." The icy blow and sudden estrangement is exquisitely caught in a brief musical moment of dissonant strings.
The cut post-finale scene, heard at the symphony in 1987, had the static monologue of Hostess Quickly reminiscing in a Falstaff postmortem.