Getty is a more intuitive composer than many of his colleagues who come at music from a more abstract, perhaps more academic background. Mozart, who is considered a very great composer, but not quite in my pantheon,” he says. But I still have to do my own thing and not theirs.”Īmong Getty’s favorite composers are Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Wagner and Mahler. I know who my favorite composers of all time are and they must have influenced me. “It is predominantly tonal,” Getty says of his music. (One can sample several of his works at .) The overture to the opera paints the bluff libertine deftly with some artful flavor of Elizabethan music. Charm is not a quality one often applies to contemporary works yet Getty’s Ancestor Suite is piquant and delightful, its light dances shaded with nostalgia and a gentle melancholy. The music of Plump Jack and most of Getty’s works is honest, unpretentious and approachable, much like the composer himself. “It is a charming piece that introduces the elements of Shakespearean characters very well to an audience and is a very versatile piece of music.” Plus it fits the bill for Danzmayr’s goal of including a work by an American composer on every IPO program. “I then decided to use the overture as a starting piece for a singer-focused concert. (The opera and most Getty works are available on the Pentatone label.) “The tunes sounded very good and the whole cast seemed to be excited about the project,” said the Illinois Philharmonic’s young music director. I’m the same composer I always was but now I tend to have music going more of the time-much more accompagnato nowadays.”ĭanzmayr discovered Getty’s music when he caught a German television documentary by Peter Rosen about the recording of Plump Jack by Ulf Schirmer and the Munich Radio Orchestra. In opera I trusted recitative more than I do now. “And even my composing is somewhat different now. “So much of it represents my early work and I’m a better orchestrator now. “You might say I never finished it,” the composer says wryly. At over two hours, it is also his longest work (an abridged concert version runs about 90 minutes). It wasn’t until the 1980s when Getty published his first work, The White Election, a song cycle on Emily Dickinson poems.Ĭompleted in 1987, Plump Jack was Getty’s first opera, drawn freely from Shakespeare’s lusty Falstaff character. While following a business career and running the Getty Foundation, time for composition was scarce and progress slow at first. 302 in 2014 with $2.1 billion), he has long been superseded among the annual list of the wealthiest Americans by the likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and a plethora of Silicon Valley’s dot.com mega-billionaires.įollowing military service and while working in the family business, Getty enrolled at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in the early 1960s where he studied music theory with Sol Joseph. While Gordon Getty still makes the Forbes Top 400 (No. 1 and songs by Schubert and Strauss, performed by Kathrin Danzmayr and David Govertsen. The program will also include Sibelius’s Symphony No. Local audiences will have a rare opportunity to hear Gordon Getty’s music Friday night when David Danzmayr leads the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra in the overture to Getty’s first opera, Plump Jack. “All in all, on the whole it’s been a help.” “It may be baleful attention, which is a bad thing,” he added with a laugh. “I think that it attracts attention, which is a good thing,” said Getty, 79, from his home in San Francisco. Paul Getty, is it a help or a hindrance in being accepted as a composer? Yet when your name is Getty and you are the son of famous industrialist J. The retired businessman and philanthropist has devoted much of the last 35 years of his life to his music, building up a fairly ample oeuvre of works. Suppose that you also possess one of the most famous names in America, one long associated with business success, family wealth and philanthropy but perhaps less so with individual artistic achievement. Suppose that you are a dedicated composer who has attended a conservatory, studied music and spent decades of your life carefully working and honing your craft. Music of Gordon Getty will be performed Friday night by the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra.
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