Tao's recording of Getty's piano pieces offers a hearing of seven works spanning the breadth of the composer-philanthropist's career. The miniatures on this recording are playful and simplistic. They do not threaten or disturb. 

Some listeners might find this refreshing, but Getty's stubbornly tonal language might be a detriment to the sense he tries to capture. He says of his compositions, "Whatever it was that the great Victorian composers and poets were trying to achieve, that's what I'm trying to achieve." It is hard to tell whether that is apparent here. When I think of Victorian poetry, I associate it with elegiac melancholy and the "long, withdrawing roar" in the sound- scape of Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, or the anguish and dejection that borders religious crisis in Gerard Manley Hopkins's later poetry. If this is the case, Getty's pleasant tonal language is not very well suited to Victorian poetry. This is true for his other literary influences: I hear nothing of Edgar Allan Poe in the Ancestor Suite. In fact, if not for some Internet research, I would never have guessed that the pieces derived from a ballet on "THe Fall of the House of Usher".. A more varied harmonic vocabulary might have helped him convey Poe better, if that was his intention....

When compared to Dorken's Janacek or Koroliov's Prokofieff, these pieces cannot help but sound like an attractive surface, pretty but never going beneath that. Nevertheless, this is light, brief, and pleasing.

Getty's style derives from nineteenth-century antecedents, rather than from anything more recent: Mussorgsky, for some reason, seemed the dominant influence here, both in the harmony and in the orchestration (which frequently recalled Pictures at an Exhibition in Rimsky-Korsakov's large-scale treatment of his late colleague's piano original). The extensive text is set in a kind of parlando manner that once again could be related to Mussorgsky's practice. The result is neither especially memorable nor original, but it does mark an advance over Plump Jack, Getty's earlier Falstaff opera, even if the word-setting remains effortful when not clumsy and the general level of technical skills fairly limited. 

As I've mentioned in these pages on other occasions, I am generally a fan of the music of Gordon Getty, my unhappy review of his opera Plump Jack conditioned by the fact that it was an abridged performance and conveyed little or nothing of the theatrical atmosphere that the composer put into it. Tonal he is, but uninteresting he is not.

On this occasion, we are presented with a program of solo piano music written over a period of 50 years: The Homework Suite was composed in 1962, the Andantino and Scherzo Pensieroso written in 2012. As the composer put it in the liner notes, his composition teacher, Sol Joseph, once asked him if he "expected to move on to atonalism. I told him I kind of doubted it." The Homework Suite, as it turns out, is an utterly charming set of very short pieces (four of them either a half-minute or a minute in length, only one-the "Berceuse"-running on for a lengthy two minutes), yet wit and charm imbue these works, as they do nearly all of Getty's music. The Ancestor Suite is apparently Getty's homage to his European roots, consisting of waltzes, a schottische, polka-polonaise, gavotte, march, one enigmatic little piece entitled "Madeline" and another called "Ewig Du." In listening to these works, I couldn't help reflecting on the similar style of Karim Al-Zand which I had listened to the day before (see my review elsewhere in this issue). A similarly light approach to composing, but what a difference in quality! Every single piece in Getty's suite sparkles with not only wit but invention; there are, indeed, touches of polytonality or atonality here and there; and the music holds your attention. (And yes, I think that even a child, at least one over the age of six, will be attentive to Getty's pieces.) In a certain way, this suite is almost like Debussy's Children's Corner: The music is light in character but not in quality. It has sparkle, rhythmic drive, and also numerous little surprises within each vignette...particularly the "March-Sarabande-Presto," which starts out with a conventional (and tonal) march, but then veers towards a strangely modal and atmospheric "sarabande" before winding up with a quirky, bitonal Presto. Also the last two pieces, "Ewig Du" and "Finale," begin with the exact same little melody, but what stays relaxed and charming in the former quickly develops into a swirling mélange of sound, becomes quiet and mysterious, and then suddenly ends.

The Three Traditional Pieces begin with the Irish-tinged "Fiddler of Ballykeel," yet once again Getty's vivid imagination takes him onto side paths in his musical excursion. "Tiefer und Tiefer" (Deeper and deeper) is a slow waltz, while "Ehemals" (Formerly) is a lively piece that Getty once again breaks up into smaller musical fragments and puts together again in his own unique and charming way. First Adventure and Raise the Colors are brief, simple works, much like the component parts of the Homework Suite, but the Andantino is quite fine, with a quirky and unexpected atonal bridge, while the Scherzo Pensieroso wends its quirky way along a path of finely chosen single notes in the upper range of the keyboard, meeting the left hand in the middle before the latter rolls its way into a faster tempo, in which the left joins it for a bit of minor-key fun. Getty's music often has that effect on me: It raises my good-humor level.

Pianist Conrad Tao, with whom I was unfamiliar, plays these works with a great deal of charm and warmth, and in Gordon Getty's world charm is half the musical content... On musical grounds, this disc is a winner.

[Translated from Russian] The artistic merit of the images on the screen was underwhelming in comparison to the beautiful music of Gordon Getty, Gustav Holst, and Claude Debussy, and to the excellence of the orchestra and choir.