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RECORDINGS
Choral and Song
GETTY: THE WHITE ELECTION
 Delan; Steinegger, piano. English texts. PentaTone Classics 5186 054
The White Election, Gordon Getty's cycle of thirty-two Emily Dickinson poems for soprano and piano, has been performed widely, and this is its second recording. Getty (b. 1933) clearly venerates Dickinson, and treats the texts lovingly. With only a few exceptions, the songs are simple — even simplistic, as if the composer were channeling music that Dickinson herself, an amateur pianist and singer, could have come up with for her own poems. As Getty puts it in the notes, "I have set them, in large part, just as Emily might have if her music had found a balance between tradition and iconoclasm something like that in her poems."
Personally, I could have used more iconoclasm. The harmonies are triadic and pretty — sometimes Victorian, sometimes Elizabethan. There's very little in the way of illustration in the accompaniments, which are often strictly chordal or sometimes just a single bare line. Getty doesn't use the music to penetrate deeply into the texts; he uses it more to declaim them, giving the poetry primacy over the music. This is a certainly a time-tested approach to musicalizing poems, but I found myself wishing throughout that Getty would bring more of his own artistry to the table. Now and then a track jumps out as particularly melodious or inspired, but in general, it's all a little too reverent, and too homogenous. I'd been hoping for more; I admired Getty's cantata about the execution of Joan of Arc, Joan and the Bells (reviewed in the October 2003 online edition of OPERA NEWS), which displayed much more individuality and musical interest than these songs.
THE soprano Lisa Delan, a Getty favorite, performs the cycle with attractive facility and understanding. There's not a lot of musical differentiation at work, but the composer has not provided much opportunity for it. Fritz Steinegger plays the modestly conceived piano parts with great sensitivity. Though disappointing to this listener, it's entirely possible that in setting these poems, Getty accomplished exactly what he set out to do.
JOSHUA ROSENBLUM
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