Joshua Kosman, Plump Jack
This production by the Marin Opera, directed by William Lewis and conducted by Hugo Rinaldi, marked the opera's first fully staged performance...
"Plump Jack" is in one act, and runs just under an hour and a half. It has a libretto cobbled together by Getty from the two "Henry IV" plays and a snippet of "Henry V" (unflattering comparisons with Verdi's "Falstaff" are forestalled a little by Getty's decision to avoid "The Merry Wives of Windsor," the main source for that opera).
The composer's notes tell of his plan to differentiate between the worlds of the court and the tavern by setting the tavern scenes to music and leaving the court scenes spoken. With much of the evening thus devoted to straight recitation of Shakespearean lines, the score itself doesn't end up having much impact on the proceedings.
Not that the music has anything particularly important to offer. Getty writes in a listlessly conservative idiom, stringing together snatches of melody that cling timidly to the text without attaining a life of their own. The orchestral writing - as far as one could tell from the threadbare playing Friday - is competent but unimaginative. There was little in the score that lingered in the memory five minutes after the curtain came down.
Getty's opera is a work of no particular merit and - appearances to the contrary - no particular ambition. Shakespeare's plays are great enough to withstand any use that can be made of them, whether by great artists or by workaday craftsmen; I think an operatic treatment of Eugene O'Neill by Getty would have been more worrisome. "Plump Jack" may not inspire enthusiasm, but it's too modest and negligible to inspire much outrage either.
Paul Hertelendy, Three Waltzes
...Engaging, consonant salon music that did not show Getty at his most creative, by any stretch. He is comfortable at orchestration, but painfully repetitive in this placebo background music.
Marilyn Tucker, Annabel Lee
Gordon Getty's "Annabel Lee,'' for orchestra and low voices, set to the poem by Edgar Allen Poe, gave a nicely registered Gothic imprint to the program.
Robert Commanday, Three Waltzes
Jekowsky opened with the premiere of three waltzes by the prominent San Francisco patron Gordon Getty. They are pleasant and brief, as their material and aspiration dictate. Unpretentious in the manner of incidental music for a play, they faithfully reflect their origins as pieces homemade for the piano, essentially melody with waltz bass, transcribed for orchestra.
The first waltz, "Madeline," named after a ghost in Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," interpolates sections with light spectral effects. The second, "Tiefer und Tiefer" ("Deeper and Deeper"), rather stays on its nice, even surface, whereas "Ehemals" ("Formerly") did not so much lilt as hop a bit.
Paul Hertelendy, Annabel Lee
Ever since philanthropist Gordon Getty wrote "Plump Jack," his quasi-opera on Falstaff, in the 1980s, Getty-bashing has been a sport among music critics. But I see nothing remotely bashable about his new choral piece, "Annabel Lee," sung by 65 men. The work combines orchestra and choir in a skillful setting of Poe's poem on the death of a beloved. Some will gainsay Getty's tonal, retrospective harmonies, which are just a tone's throw from the more Eastern moments in Menotti and Britten. But the hand-in-glove integration of the elements was exquisite. Many of the effects were supremely sensitive, as when harp and gentle percussion lead into the chorus that voices those ear-catching intervals known as augmented seconds.