Gordon Getty might be the wealthiest classical composer in history this side of Felix Mendelssohn or Frederick the Great. The resulting celebrity guarantees him an audience, but respect has been harder to come by.

Nevertheless, Getty has persevered in his late-blooming career as a composer, writing three relatively short operas, several choral works and song cycles, and some orchestral, piano, and chamber pieces, many of which can be heard in SACD splendor on PentaTone label. The recordings reveal a capable composer and a fairly reticent one – no grandiose shouting at the balcony for its own sake. Heir to an oil fortune, Getty has said that he is “two-thirds a 19th-century composer,” but what I hear is an unmistakable 20th-century man who has sidestepped the main trends of the era and prefers to write in a self-effacing, tonal, non-ear-threatening style. His closest musical soulmate, intended or not, is probably Benjamin Britten.

Read more: Richard S. Ginell, Scare Pair

Having reached the ripe age of 84, composer-philanthropist Gordon Getty can look back upon a fairly sizable body of work, mostly for the voice, that he has written over the last three decades.

His music gets a mixed bag of reviews which — good, bad and indifferent — are unflinchingly documented on his website. Yet the PentaTone label diligently records much of his output, and his music does get live performances — if more in his home base, the Bay Area, than in Southern California. To round out its 2017-18 season, Los Angeles Opera Off-Grand took a chance on two recent Getty works, a pair of hourlong one-act operas.

Composed of “Usher House” and “The Canterville Ghost” — which are based upon tales by Edgar Allan Poe and Oscar Wilde, respectively — the double-header was marketed as the “Scare Pair,” though neither piece would scare a fly... The two operas do make a logical twin-bill — the spooky, enigmatic “Usher” followed by the comic relief of “Canterville” — much like LA Opera’s pairing of Bartók’s “Bluebeard’s Castle” and Puccini’s “Gianni Schicchi” back in the Kent Nagano era (2002). Of the two, though, only “Canterville” strikes me as something that might catch on, and the lively cast and staging had a lot to do with that.

In “Usher House,” Getty inserted Poe himself into the opera as the narrator who visits his old “friend” Roderick Usher, the inhabitant of the doomed house. Much of the opera is an overly talky back-and-forth between Poe and Roderick, with a gracefully written instrumental ballet sequence in its center featuring Roderick’s writhing, contorting, terminally ill twin sister Madeline and some onscreen ghostly ancestors.

Getty’s score is spare, inward-looking, unapologetically tonal, channeling Benjamin Britten in mood and texture if not actual style, and consisting of mostly unmemorable recitative with little connection between the orchestra and the singing line. Poe’s murky tale doesn’t seem to inspire the best in composers — Debussy couldn’t finish his own version and Philip Glass’ take on “Usher” consists of mainly routine minor-key underscoring — so Getty is not alone in being unable to come up with a compelling piece of music theater.

Ultimately, Dave Dunning’s scenery designs and David Murakami’s elaborate projections scored the main points in “Usher’s” favor. Through direct projections on Gothic-shaped (of course) arches onstage and others from a giant 20 foot-by-24-foot video monitor in the back of the stage, they provided stunning simulations of the dark, gloomy Usher library and observatory, as well as a ballroom in which hologram-like images of ghosts danced.

“The Canterville Ghost” came off as the more engaging piece, with 20 mostly brief scenes tracing Wilde’s storyline about a rich American family circa 1890 that buys an English mansion with its own resident ghost. There is satire about how Americans rely upon consumer products and litigation to solve their problems, and the ghost (Sir Simon de Canterville) can’t scare the bejeebers out of any of these Yankees, least of all a pair of twin boys who torment the poor fella.

The scoring is lighter in weight than in “Usher,” still mostly recitative, but now with flashes of humor like the interpolations of “Yankee Doodle” and “Rule Britannia.” And in the final scene, for the first time all night, Getty hits upon a couple of attractive melodic ideas for the audience to take home from the theater. The video screen displayed a riot of bright, vibrant color in the cemetery, as well as in the scenes of croquet in the park — and a library of amplified sound effects during scene changes mostly added to the hilarity....

Altogether, LA Opera Off-Grand’s cast made a much better case for Getty’s ghost comedy than the PentaTone recording.

While Usher House and The Canterville Ghost may have been Oscar Wilde retro they turned out to be nearly as charming as their counterparts were the first time around. Both operas had a genuinely American feel to them – the cowboy lilt of a waltz or a simple populist tune – they also shared a common theme: of being haunted by inheritance. Of course they they come to different conclusions. Usher House ends anticlimactically in dust and a last echo of Rheingold; the Ghost in a Norman Rockwell hymn of peace.

In each, Getty's ability to write for singers trumps almost all his shortcomings. It's clear that the singers can't wait for their next big set piece, or their next bit of business, because they know that the audience will love them (if they sing beautifully) even if the vehicle is not yet Mozart. It made for a delicious, slightly overlong afternoon in which everybody on the stage, was magnetic, and the audience responded not only with applause at the end but a surprising volley of cheers.

The better of the two operas was the Usher House, which had its world premiere in 2014 at Welsh National Opera. Its title is a gracious gesture to distinguish it from the Poe story from which it is adapted; it needn't have worried. Getty has his own way with the very curious tale that is alternately intriguing, downright sexy, and just plain dolorous, all in a sort of comic bookish way....

The Canterville Ghost had its moments. It was originally given by Oper Leipzig in 2015 in an incongruous double bill with Leoncavallo's Pagliacci, but some of the narrative was really too long and a series of scene changes as the end neared were longer than the scenes....

This weekend, Santa Monica’s Broad Stage held two performances of L.A. Opera's double bill of works by composer Gordon Getty. The two pieces were based on Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (first performed by Welsh National Opera in 2014) and on Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost (first performed by Leipzig Opera in 2015). The show, which featured Getty’s adapted librettos, was called Scare Pair, and it successfully achieved a unique fusion of classic spooky stories and opera....

The show began with the Poe adaptation titled Usher House. The libretto made several departures from Poe’s classic tale. Principally, these included having Poe as a character in the story (in the place of the unnamed narrator from the original); the addition of a mad scientist/doctor, Dr. Primus; and a romantic history between Poe and Madeline Usher (Jamielyn Duggan).

The performance, which was in English, featured projected subtitles over the stage; these helped one’s understanding of the libretto quite a bit due to the complexity of the archaic verbiage throughout Usher House... In Usher House, the principal number was in the form of an old poem that symbolized the bond between Poe and Madeline. The score was alternately whimsically lighthearted and suitably threatening. Such dynamism conveyed the natures of both light opera and stories of gloom and doom.

The inherent challenge of Usher House is that Poe’s tale does not have a lot of action. Thus, several sequences were added to the story, including a ball of spectral attendees (the Ushers of generations past) and a visit to the house’s astronomy room, wherein Dr. Primus explains the connection between the cosmos, life and death, and the arcane scientific knowledge held by the Usher family. These sequences were successful at conjuring a strong mood, and the sparing use of the Madeline character (who elicited the passion of the Poe character) was successful at generating the sense of mystery. While Usher House succeeded in its ambiance, the dialogue was excessively expository, and this revealed the limits to attempting to adapt Poe’s words to opera. Furthermore, although the score was very good in the hands of conductor Sara Jobin, the opera might have benefited from more individual songs to punctuate the piece as a whole.

The second opera, The Canterville Ghost, was a great complement to Usher House. While Usher House was successful at maintaining an unsettling tone throughout, The Canterville Ghost took the theme of haunting to the light side. Wilde’s tale features an ages-old ghost named Sir Simon, who meets his match in an obnoxious American family, which seems immune to his attempts at scaring them or causing them harm....

The Canterville Ghost made for an enjoyable short opera (the entire running time of Scare Pair was about 2 hours and 20 minutes). Like Usher House, this piece was punctuated with a single love song... Adaptations of literary works into theatrical productions are always a challenge. In this case, the challenge of adapting Poe to opera yielded an appropriately atmospheric show with some chilling and enthralling moments, but it never quite broke free of its literary roots. Perhaps this was done intentionally so as to show reverence for Poe’s writing. In any case, Wilde’s comedy provided a more relaxed piece that did not challenge the linguistic capacity of its audience. Collectively, L.A. Opera’s Off Grand presentation of Scare Pair...was an entertaining hybrid of spooky stories and opera, providing fans of scary stories with an eloquent theatrical experience and fans of opera with a particularly colorful program.