Gordon Getty Orchestral Works

The San Francisco-based Gordon Getty is most widely known to music lovers through his vocal works, perhaps not surprising for a composer who in his student years studied not only composition and piano but also voice. Most of his compositions have involved the voice, and his three previous recordings on PentaTone Classics have all featured vocal works: his widely performed song cycle The White Election, to poems by Emily Dickinson; his cantata Joan and the Bells, on the Joan of Arc story; and Young America, a collection of his choral compositions. (The White Election, in fact, has been issued in two separate commercial recordings.) But to most music-lovers, the work of Getty’s that most readily springs to mind is Plump Jack, a two-act opera that was premiered in a concert production by the San Francisco Symphony in 1987 (that orchestra had presented an excerpt from the work-in-progress four years earlier) and since then has been performed in whole or part by such organizations as the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, Festival of the Two Worlds (Spoleto, Italy), Aspen Music Festival, London Philharmonia with London Voices, Puerto Rico Symphony, New Mexico Symphony, and Orquesta Sinfónica Sinaloa de las Artes (Mazatlán, Mexico).