Lynn René Bayley, Usher House
I wanted to review this CD because I am enough of a Gordon Getty fan that I like to hear everything he has written…Unlike Plump Jack, Getty’s music here can stand on its own as a listening experience without the need to see the action. It is tonal but not “obviously” melodic; as the late Moondog (Louis Hardin) might have said, “I am considered avant-garde in rhythm but old-fashioned in harmony,” but Getty uses neighboring tonalities in a very creative manner, whereas Moondog did not. Moreover, the music morphs and develops in interesting ways…There is a certain strophic character about the sung lines in the first scene, and the orchestration is exceedingly clever, supporting the voices or commenting on the drama in turn. When Roderick suggests having a ball, for instance, the rhythm changes to 3/4 time and a quirky waltz melody arises; when he talks of the landscape around the house as being desolate, the orchestra reflects this in both its melodic and timbral treatment. This sort of thing continues throughout the opera, the sign of an assured composer who understands his art and knows exactly how to morph and change the music, not only in such a way that it supports or echoes the drama but also to keep the listener onthe edge of the seat. This is first-class music…While Getty’s rewriting of this fictional story for dramatic purposes is imaginative and creative, my personal feeling is that an already somewhat incredulous tale has been taken to the level of Gothic fiction, of undead ancestors and “forces of evil” that border on vampire and ghoul stories. Yet the opera is highly entertaining, and I was entranced by Getty’s spectacular ability to create such a wonderful atmosphere and sustain it for 67 minutes. This is a real tour de force, certainly the best and most sustained musical creation of his I have heard, and as such I recommend your listening to it.
Raymond S. Tuttle, Usher House
He is a real composer. His style is proudly tonal, although there are, as he says, “hints of atonality, such as any composer would likely use to suggest a degree of disorientation”…I think Usher House is his most expressive work yet…My understanding is that Usher House will receive its premiere later this year by the Welsh National Opera. I suspect that it will work rather well.
Hans Visser, Orchestral Works
Gordon Getty is mainly known for his vocal works but that he writes very well for orchestra proves the CD Orchestral Works. Neville Marriner leads the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in contemporary music that touches the listener surprisingly well. It begins with the overture to his opera Plump Jack. American Getty, in his sixties, does not feel embarrassed to say that for two/thirds he stands in the nineteenth century. That other part is responsible for the fact that his music sounds everything but old-fashioned. Stravinsky, Copland and Prokofiev have inspired him here and there without affecting his originality. For example the Ancestor Suite smells very American although it is a series of old European dances: waltz, Scottish dance, polka, gavotte and sarabande. It is very colourful composed ballet-music, inspired by the story The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe. A beauty is Tiefer und Tiefer for strings. What a splendid intense sounding simplicity. The Homework Suite opens seductively with an oboe part, followed in the other small movements with beautiful, dancing-like roles for the other soloists. With The Fiddler of Ballykeel he refers catchingly to a neighbourhood near Belfast where his ancestors came from. Raising the Colors is a beautiful fanfare-like encore for brass, virtuoso finished with wood and strings. Not only in super audio this music is a surprise.
David J. Baker, Usher House
The very first notes of Usher House reveal what must have drawn composer Gordon Getty to Poe’s tale. The original Fall of the House of Usher, published in 1839, overplays its gothic horrors, but it also bathes in atmosphere. It’s the story’s haunted setting, its hints of decay and secrets, that the music evokes from the start with economy, immediacy, and apparent spontaneity.
Wavy woodwind fragments, chromatically flavored, flit about like unwelcome memories as Edgar Allan Poe himself — turned into a character in Getty’s libretto — arrives at an isolated, dilapidated manor house to visit Roderick Usher, an old school friend. Traded off to other instruments, the moody elements of the accessible, mostly diatonic score are never long absent, even though Getty varies the claustrophobic moods with warmer, more conventional devices such as a tuneful ball scene and a love song. (Some of the triple-meter tunes manage to combine both modes, romantic and gothic.)
Lynn René Bayley, Orchestral Works
Gordon Getty, who describes himself as “two-thirds a 19th-century composer,” is nevertheless a creative and original one and, as this CD proves, the other one-third makes its presence felt often enough to provide interest and flexibility…. The performances by Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields display this orchestra’s metamorphosis from its chamber roots in the 1960s to its more robust sound today. PentaTone’s sound, undeniably resonant as a result of SACD mastering, is nevertheless clear and transparent at all times.