Paul Corfield Godfrey, Beauty Come Dancing

In his booklet note for this release, Gordon Getty observes that he has avoided musical settings of the words of living poets apart from himself, “because I prefer to avoid disagreement.” But in the choral works in this collection he has certainly not shied away from competition with other composers who have tackled some of the same very well-known poems:

Jeff Kaliss, Beauty Come Dancing

Gordon Getty Aims for Tunes Chopin Might Have Written

Beauty Come Dancing, on the Pentatone label, is an attractive collection that confirms Gordon Getty’s twin loves of composing for voice and making poetry into music. Even those familiar with Getty’s operatic settings of Shakespeare (Plump Jack) and Poe (Usher House) may be unaware that the composer studied English at the University of San Francisco before earning a bachelor’s degree and setting the verses of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Emily Dickinson in song. The poets assembled here range historically from Lord Byron to John Masefield to Getty himself, and the music in many aspects is as varied as the verse, unified by the composer’s self-declared affinity for 19th-century tropes of elegance and romance, and his flair for the dramatic.