Discover poetry in motion with Beauty Come Dancing, composer Gordon Getty’s new album of choral works. Love and dance permeate this collection of new music, paying homage to the romantic and elegant traditions abounding in the latter half of the 19th century.
Here, Getty finds inspiration in the poetry of John Keats, Lord Byron, John Masefield, Sara Teasdale, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Ernest Christopher Dowson. These settings sit alongside choral treatments of three of Getty’s original poems, plus his arrangement of traditional favorite “Shenandoah.” Rising-star conductor James Gaffigan leads the Netherlands Radio Choir and Radio Philharmonic Orchestra.
– PENTATONE
COMPOSER'S NOTES
I wrote the verse for “The Old Man in the Night” about thirty years ago, when I was not an old man, and for “The Old Man in the Morning,” along with “Beauty Come Dancing,” in 2014 when I was. All my choral settings recorded here date from 2009-2015, though earlier versions of “The Old Man in the Night” and Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci” have been performed.
All the poets represented are old favorites of mine. Keats heads my pantheon, with Masefield a close second. I would choose the same two, in the same order, for comic poetry. Keats’ “There Was a Naughty Boy” is a delicious example. In Masefield’s “Ballet Russe,” a ballerina dances to a Chopin piano accompaniment. My setting aims for tunes he might have written but didn’t. Although this text and my “Beauty Come Dancing” scan in iambic pentameter, I set both to waltzes to highlight the dance theme. That can be tricky.
E.A. Robinson, like Masefield, paid no court to modernism. “For a Dead Lady” and “Eros Turannos” build like Bach fugues. Few can match him for cadence and the longer breath. The fateful anapests of “The Destruction of Sennacherib”put Byron among those few. Sara Teasdales’s “Those Who Love the Most” shows the equal power of a lighter touch.
“Shenandoah” has haunted me since I first heard it sung by Fred Waring’s Pennsylvanians seventy-five years ago. My arrangement pays tribute to what I remember of his. In my setting of “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” a clarinet sings what a bird would have sung in that birdless and desolate place.
That poem offers a composer a natural climax building to the line “Thee hath in thrall” in the elfin grot. My own “The Old Man in the Night,” more than twice as long, is reflective throughout and really has none. I managed two anyhow, in the parts beginning “It was here I sought the night” and “O Beautiful my Love.” When we recorded it near Amsterdam last fall, along with the other choruses, I realized that I had botched the orchestration of that first climax. I rewrote it. Luckily, James and the chorus and orchestra were available for a patch session two months later, with me listening in from California. Another narrow escape!
The Making of Beauty Come Dancing - Video filmed while recording the album.
PRODUCTION TEAM
Executive producers Lisa Delan, Job Maarse, Bruce Munson
Recording producer Job Maarse
Recording engineers Jean-Marie Geijsen & Karel Bruggeman
This album was recorded in MCO 5, Hilversum, June & October 2017.