Charles Geyer: Goodbye, Mr. Chips – Gordon Getty’s New Opera on Film Takes its New York Bow
Getty's score is characteristically rich, layered and long-arced, with especially exquisite string voicings, vivid base lines, and a number of lovely and affecting motivic recurrences. There are several remarkably moving arias and set-pieces for Chips – one celebrating his newfound capacity for both pain and joy; one cataloguing the grim sacrifice made by all too many of his former students in the Great War; one ruminating on what it might have been like had Chips’ and Kathie’s son survived her death.
And Getty reserves his most lush and passionate music for the opera’s final, full-throated blossoming. Reinforced by galactic cinematic imagery, Kathie returns in an orchestral apotheosis, helping Chips see the quiet yet consummate symmetry of the life he has lived, and the undeserved grace he has been granted in having been father to “thousands of children – all boys.”
The opera, perhaps more so than Hilton’s original novel, concludes on a note of transcendence, suggestive of how even the littlest of lives can achieve a kind of fractal correspondence to the great, immanent soul of a benign and integrated cosmos.
Victor Gluck: Goodbye, Mr. Chips
The lush, lovely music is old-fashioned enough that it could have been written pre-1940 but does not suggest British music of its time period.
Alexandra Coghlan: A solo debut of startling quality announcing a major new talent
"Moore has stayed close to home for her debut, performing songs by everyone from Barber and Copland to Jake Heggie, Carlisle Floyd and Gordon Getty, that show off her intelligence and careful handling of text ... There’s soul-bearing directness in Floyd’s Five Songs of Motherhood and Kathy’s aria "Chips, darling" from Getty’s "Goodbye Mr Chips" ...
Meche Kroop: A New Art Form?
It was easy to perceive “Goodbye, Mr. Chips” as a film with award-winning music composed by Gordon Getty, music which amplified the drama. … The instrumental writing left nothing to be desired. It neatly supported the onstage drama in a most effective way, which led us to think of this as an award-winning soundtrack to a film.
Jeff Kaliss: Melody Moore Enchants With An American Song Album
“Not surprisingly for the Pentatone label, Gordon Getty is represented on the song list. The composer, a major donor to SFCV, was in fact present for part of the recording, at the acoustically praised Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts, and it proved an opportunity for listeners to get an excerpt from his yet-to-debut opera, Goodbye, Mr. Chips. It’s “Kathy’s Aria,” otherwise titled by its opening line, “Chips, darling, it’s started.” With the text adapted by Getty from the novella by English writer James Hilton, both music and singer credibly inhabit the luminous, good-hearted persona of the titular schoolteacher’s beloved wife.
"There’s yet another attractive variety showcase in Getty’s setting of Three Welsh Songs. Moore virtually warbles in resonance with the avian spirit of “Welcome Robin,” then turns ticklish in the doggerel of “Kind Old Man,” enhancing the humor and flexing her vocal range by, at one point, singing an octave below the written melody. Moore’s lyric soprano is enchantingly experienced on the familiar “All Through the Night,” to which Getty brings a fresh arrangement and some of his own words, and on which Moore works a different interpretation in each of the three verses.
"In the closing pair of Getty settings, Moore draws on early personal exposure to church music for an understated but elegant reading of the spiritual “Deep River,” and then renders his questing, loving, and rather surprising send-up of “Danny Boy.” The listener is left with a rare takeaway of a personal encounter with a genuine and credible performer.”