Designed as a complete recital, minimal in technique but not minimalist, it makes an effect through total absorption in the subject. There is a cleanliness about the limited materials and triadic harmony which is particularly fitting, but this is certainly not true of the weak reliance on recitative, which sometimes even blurs the sense of the text. Contem- poraries of Copland also responded with a type of limited means.  

Gordon Getty’s settings of three of his own poems, ranging from the delicate tracery of Where is My Lady, (“In footfall and starfall again and again, / beauty and grace she is, beauty and grace / Hang in the air like chimes when she goes by”) to the rousing, stamping high spirits of Tune the Fiddle and the poignant sense of pristine beauty lost in, bring forth an impressive range of interpretive responses from Delan, in collaboration with the sensitive accompaniment of pianist Kristin Pankonin. “Upon a day, along a way, / I met a child. / She said, “˜Come find me if you can: / you lost me when the world began.’ / I asked her meaning but she ran / into the wild.”

The afternoon's most thoroughly satisfying offering came courtesy of the Bay Area's Gordon Getty, whose 20-minute cantata "Joan and the Bells" preceded intermission. In this skillfully wrought triptych, Getty uses a few swift dramatic strokes to conjure up Joan of Arc's trial, internal anguish and execution. 

Getty's harmonic palette is constrained by his neo-Romantic idiom, but the melodic ingenuity of the writing is irresistible -- especially in Joan's long and heartfelt central monologue, which continuously circles back on itself in whorls of doubt and reassurance. And in the work's powerful ending, as chorus and orchestra leap ever higher, Getty makes you hear the flurry of angels' voices and even the ascension of Joan's soul. 

Delan, who has sung this music since its 1998 premiere, was a sensitive, probing soloist, handling the wide vocal leaps gently and precisely and lending an air of other-worldly grace to the performance. Chernov, singing in heavily accented English, was a formidable presence as Cauchon, the Bishop of Beauvais, and the singing of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, led by Vance George, was robust and well blended.

Gems don't make jewelry. The most blinding fact about Gordon Getty is his share of the Getty fortune. In many ways, it has obscured his work. Getty came to study composition in his late twenties, somewhat after most composers get started. Despite his training, he has never struck me as a professional composer in the sense that someone like Morton Gould was -- rather a gifted amateur, most comfortable with small forms. Perhaps the fact that he's never had to earn a living at it has hindered him, although money certainly never hindered Elliot Carter. On the other hand, his music certainly stands apart from various academic trends. Primarily a vocal composer, Getty turns out mainly small pieces. The White Election is one of his more extensive works and probably one of his most performed.

I'm probably not the person from whom to expect a sympathetic review, since I dislike most of Emily Dickinson's poetry. The monotony of the hymn meters drives me nuts, and I often feel as if she's merely pushing around Big Words, a kind of fill-in-the-blanks. No poet myself, I can nevertheless fall into her idiom very easily:

If angels dance around the sky

In Immortality,

To lie stock-still in bed would be

Anathema to me.

I have no idea what it means, since it might mean so many things, and furthermore I wrote it just now, in under two minutes. Can anybody tell me by internal evidence why it wouldn't be included in an Emily Dickinson anthology? Consequently, for me a composer must find both a way to subvert her rhythms as well as a musical line interesting in itself, since the poems by and large don't interest me in themselves. In both respects, Ernst Bacon's Dickinson's settings seem right to me, as does Aaron Copland's magnificent cycle 12 Poems by Emily Dickinson, a monument of American art song.

Getty gets through with mixed results. He began with the conceit that Dickinson wrote the poems to be sung to melodies she composed. It's not a far-fetched notion. We do know she was musical and liked to improvise at the piano. Getty accordingly comes up with an idiom that links to 19th-century parlor music with some surprises thrown in, a musical equivalent of Dickinson's verse. It reminds me greatly of Virgil Thomson's faux-naïveté. Accompaniments are generally simple, sometimes downright sparse. Following Thomson is no easy task, and Getty does pretty well without falling into mere imitation. I consider every individual song sensitively, often beautifully, set. The problem is, with thirty-two of them, Getty doesn't escape the charge of repetitiveness. Too many songs fall into the Dickinson trademark rhythm. Getty overuses certain melodic tropes, blameless in themselves ("mi-sol-do-mi" started to grate on me after a while). Certainly, Getty wants a complete recording, but I question whether he's written a real cycle. I don't find a meta-narrative that takes in the whole, as I do in Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin or Winterreise. One could switch songs from one of the four major sections to another, and not affect the overall impression of the cycle at all. One listens to the entire piece with difficulty, although in short bursts it's fine. Thank goodness for programmable CD players.

I complain not at all about the performers. Soprano Lisa Delan sings beautifully, with careful attention to the musical phrasing and to the meaning of the poems. Few sing English words better than she. Getty has given the pianist little to do, but Fritz Steinegger gets more meaning into a single note than I'll bet even the composer knew was there.

S.G.S. (April 2010)