Records International, Beauty Come Dancing
As we’ve seen before (05K089, 05T071 etc.) Getty has a special relationship with the human voice - he contemplated becoming a professional singer at one point early in his musical career - and nowhere is this shown to better advantage than in these fine choral settings of poets with whom he feels a particular affinity, with their sumptuous orchestral accompaniments.
Paul Corfield Godfrey, Beauty Come Dancing
In his booklet note for this release, Gordon Getty observes that he has avoided musical settings of the words of living poets apart from himself, “because I prefer to avoid disagreement.” But in the choral works in this collection he has certainly not shied away from competition with other composers who have tackled some of the same very well-known poems:
Barry Bassis, Beauty Comes Dancing
Gordon Getty's Ode to Love and Dance
Gordon Getty (b. 1933) is a distinguished composer of songs and operas inspired by poetry. “Beauty Comes Dancing” is a new release on the Pentatone label of Getty’s choral works performed by The Netherlands Radio Choir led by chorus master Klaas Stok, and The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by James Gaffigan. This is the third album of his choral works.
Jeff Kaliss, Beauty Come Dancing
Gordon Getty Aims for Tunes Chopin Might Have Written
Beauty Come Dancing, on the Pentatone label, is an attractive collection that confirms Gordon Getty’s twin loves of composing for voice and making poetry into music. Even those familiar with Getty’s operatic settings of Shakespeare (Plump Jack) and Poe (Usher House) may be unaware that the composer studied English at the University of San Francisco before earning a bachelor’s degree and setting the verses of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Emily Dickinson in song. The poets assembled here range historically from Lord Byron to John Masefield to Getty himself, and the music in many aspects is as varied as the verse, unified by the composer’s self-declared affinity for 19th-century tropes of elegance and romance, and his flair for the dramatic.
Joshua Rosenblum, A Certain Slant of Light, Opera News
"Delan previously recorded Getty’s cycle The White Election, which consists of thirty-one Dickinson settings. The set featured here, Four Dickinson Songs, consists of songs that were not included in The White Election but are among his best.
“Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers” has reverent, cinematic grandeur and superb coloristic contrast. “A Bird Came Down the Walk” makes inventive use of fragmented solo harpsichord in its first two stanzas and a romantically soaring vocal line for the rest. “There’s a certain Slant of Light,” the album’s title track, features clangorous, dissonant chimes representing the “oppress[ive] heft of cathedral tunes.” The famous “Because I could not stop for Death,” which opens with a driving duplet figure on the xylophone, is swirling and ghoulish, with a touch of macabre humor. (There’s another setting of the same poem in the Copland set, but Getty’s is better.)"