Recorded in Pentatone’s trademark excellent, crystalline sound, this is one of the most intelligent releases to have come my way in some time. Four composers celebrate the greatness of the poetry of Emily Dickinson, each adding his own “slant of light” on Dickinson’s inimitable words. The performances are more than impeccable: technically flawless, but also much more... 

We enter a very different world for Getty’s Four Dickinson Songs (2008). These set four poems considered for the 31-poem cycle The White Election (1981) but which only find a flowering here. The orchestration of these songs is specifically for this recording. The impetus for this short cycle so many years after The White Election was a suggestion by Barbara Bonney. They are highly atmospheric, and the orchestration is masterly; the use of bells in “A Certain Slant of Light” is particularly effective.

Four Dickinson Songs (2008) by Gordon Getty (born 1933) is in some ways an extension of Getty’s The White Election of 1981, which contains 31 Dickinson poems. The four here were orchestrated specifically for this recording, and three of the four are about death, including the famous Because I Could Not Stop for Death – which [Aaron] Copland also set, with slightly different words and in a version 50% longer than Getty’s. Getty engages directly with the poems here and does not hesitate to bring out their darker elements: if Copland’s settings are presentations of the poems, Getty’s are interpretations of them.

“There’s a certain slant of light” is a poem of Emily Dickinson, set to music by Gordon Getty, and it gives this disc its title.... Fanfare readers may already know that I am a fan of the music of Gordon Getty. His extremely conservative style (though not without an occasional injection of Modernism) is used at the service of a genuine melodic gift. This particular cycle of four of Dickinson’s poems was composed in 2008, some 27 years after his larger Dickinson cycle The White Election. It is interesting to compare Getty’s setting of "I could not stop for Death" with Copland’s. Copland seems to focus on the wandering mind of the subject riding in the chariot, where as Getty amplifies the relentless tread of the horses taking that journey to eternity.

As is his wont, Getty put listeners right into the action with an irresistible pulse at the outset of his cantata Joan and the Bells, written in 1997. The libretto, in English by the composer, is telegraphically compelling and poetic... In a promotional video for the concert, Getty (who co-founded SFCV and remains a major donor) had declared, not for the first time, that “I’m basically a 19th-century composer,” and indeed the influences of Wagner and Strauss were evident in the first scene (“Judgment”) and elsewhere, in chromatic movement and sweeping washes of color. The orchestra setting successfully supported soprano Lisa Delan (as Joan) and baritone Lester Lynch (as the prosecuting, British-backed bishop, Cauchon), both of whom have recorded Getty’s work on the Pentatone Classics label. The chorus was effectively deployed in the roles of the townspeople of Rouen, and angelic host.

Delan’s tender theatricality was particularly compelling in the “Joan in Her Chamber” scene, as was her sweet, buoyant, almost girlish soprano, as she addressed the saints she was accused of defaming. The singer’s clear diction was vital here, as was Harada’s and his ensemble’s confident command of volume, with woodwinds and harp sounding plaintive responses. She credibly conveyed the tomboyish, forthright conviction of Joan’s pride in her soldiering and her fulfillment of her divine mission.

In “The Square of Rouen,” Getty provides the chorus with a roiling commentary on Joan’s dilemma, rather evocative of Benjamin Britten’s deployment of a massed community of voices in Peter Grimes. In a turn of good storytelling, Cauchon, for a moment, is compelled to look back on his own youth. Lester Lynch shone as an able singing actor in the dynamic range of both his voice and his demeanor, in this dramatic scene. Getty built forcefully toward the conclusion, with ascending horns and insistent percussion culminating in the transcendent tolling of the titular bells.