Most composers would give their eye teeth to be
wealthy enough to get their music performed without the hassle of continually
seeking commissions or funding. Even for composers who are multi-millionaires
like Gordon Getty life may not be a bed of roses. Then again, to do
Getty credit, while he has poured substantial sums of money into music,
he has not used his benefactions to promote his own music at the expense
of others. The number of recordings of his music is small, but we have
enough on disc to be able to judge that his music - written in a conservative
but not reactionary style - is fully worthy of the accolade of performance.
His song cycle
The White Election alerted us some years ago to
an individual voice; and more recent CDs of his orchestral music - performed
by a no less distinguished body than the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields
under Sir Neville Marriner -
review
- and choral works - conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas and Alexander
Vedernikov - have given us the opportunity to discover some really enjoyable
music. The latter disc in particular has shown us that Getty has a real
feeling for words, and can set them in an approachable but involved
style.
All this made the prospect of a recording of his opera
Plump Jack
really enticing but, at any rate, on the basis of this performance,
one can only register a sense of profound disappointment. What has gone
wrong?
In the first place, the idea of an opera on the subject of Shakespeare’s
fat knight Sir John Falstaff is hardly new. Settings based on
The
merry wives of Windsor by composers such as Salieri, Balfe, Nicolai,
Vaughan Williams and Verdi are all established in the mainstream or
fringe repertory. The Falstaff scenes from
Henry IV have been
less often mined, although Holst’s
At the Boar’s Head
retains a small toehold in the catalogue.
Getty has similarly used Shakespeare’s history plays as the basis
for his libretto. Although he does not set the ‘honour’
monologue which Boito extracted for Verdi, some of his texts do parallel
those set by Holst. Much of Getty’s libretto focuses ironically
enough not on Falstaff himself, but on the development of the character
of Prince Hal from the street-wise ruffian into the noble King Henry
V. This aspect extends to including settings of passages from Shakespeare’s
Henry V in which Falstaff does not appear at all. The real problem
with this is that the passages he has selected are not generally ones
which lend themselves to musical treatment although he does include
such speeches as “O for a muse of Fire” from
Henry V,
putting the words into the mouth of Pistol.
The manner in which Getty treats his selected texts only serves to compound
the problems he has set himself. In his booklet notes Getty is quite
frank about his methods: “I place most of the musical content
in the orchestra, like Wagner in
The Ring, and fit a recitative-like
prosody to this melodic background.” Now this is not quite an
accurate description of Wagner’s method; for what Wagner generally
writes is not recitative-like but a form of arioso, where the voice
shares in the melodic material rather than merely providing a counterpoint
to it. Getty goes on to draw some rather unwelcome conclusions from
his thesis: “This bias towards recitative, leaving most of the
melody to the accompaniment, makes it easy to write
ossias to
suit voices of different ranges. I need only pick other notes in the
harmonies that keep the rough shape of the line.” This approach
produces real dangers. Time and again in this performance one is brought
up short by a vocal line that simply does not approximate the patterns
of real speech - which is after all the point of recitative - and at
the same time lacks any melodic distinction which might transform the
recitative into arioso. In fact, the sense of feeling for a text which
Getty has demonstrated in his choral music is really lacking here.
Another thing that is disturbing is Getty’s sense of dramatic
timing. The booklet gives us the full English text, including the stage
directions; but there simply would not be enough time in a stage performance
for some of the action to take place in the time allowed. At the end
of the First Act the directions read: “Falstaff puts on his cuirass,
hoists his sword belt over his shoulder, puts on his helmet, and strides
to the door. At his most imperious, he throws wide the door and stares
down the Captains. He then turns to the Hostess, with a deep and courtly
bow.” All this would make for a fine curtain, but Getty allows
almost no time at all for any of it; instead there are just a few bars
of orchestral postlude and a very abrupt conclusion. At other points
there are changes of scene where one would welcome a degree of expansion
in the orchestral music, but we just don’t get it. At the same
time there are unwanted pauses at other points in the text which don’t
appear to be dramatically motivated. There are also points where the
recitative delivery is so rapid that the singers in this performance
have to swallow their words. Holst received a lot of adverse comment
about his dramatic pacing in
At the Boar’s Head, but by
comparison with much of
Plump Jack his opera was a model of rectitude.
Getty has been working at
Plump Jack over a period of years,
and we are informed that the scenes were not all composed at the same
time, nor indeed in the order that they are given here. This may account
for the uneasy feeling that there is a lack of dramatic development
in the characters as the plot progresses. The overture, which was added
at a fairly late stage in proceedings, has already been included in
Marriner’s disc of Getty’s orchestral music, and is given
at least as good a performance here; but it has an unfortunate tendency
to stop and start, as if it had been patched together over a period
of time rather than conceived as a whole unit. The earlier disc of choral
music also contained the
Jerusalem scene of the death of King
Henry V, and that scene was given complete in that recording, while
here some five minutes of the music has been removed.
That is because what we are given here is a ‘concert version’
of the score rather than a full recording; perhaps indeed the dramatic
timing is affected because of that. We certainly lose two whole scenes
which would serve to round out the plot; and a number of the other scenes
are truncated, not always to good effect. For example, we are given
the raid at Gadshill, but not Falstaff’s boasting narration of
it which follows to such comic effect. Getty has set it - it is included
in the synopsis of the action - but the whole passage here is simply
omitted. We are only given four scenes (out of twelve) which are not
subject to abridgement of this kind, and these include the two final
scenes of Act Two describing Henry’s preparations for war with
France and Falstaff’s death. The description of Falstaff’s
death is not as moving as it ought to be; the narration of the Hostess
is accompanied by a series of orchestral gestures which fail to cohere
into a musical and dramatic whole. Immediately following this passage
there is a real jolt as Bardolph and the soldiers enter with their jolly
preparations for embarkation, where the quotation of sections of the
Agincourt Song - one of the best tunes in all of mediaeval music
- serve only to underline the relative plainness of the music that surrounds
them. The sense of contrast, which could have been smoothed and made
more palatable by an orchestral transition, cannot here be blamed on
abridgement.
Nor do the performances here help to bring the musical drama to life
before our eyes and ears. The best-known singer in the cast is Susanne
Mentzer, who sings the Hostess and does the best she can with such passages
as the description of Falstaff’s death. The remainder of the singing
is serviceable rather than gripping. Lester Lynch has a fine baritone
voice, but there is no sense of rotundity in his singing such as one
expects from a Falstaff. Christopher Robertson, who oddly doubles the
roles of King Henry IV and Pistol, sounds rather too woolly in tone.
Nikolai Schukoff, Austrian rather than Russian despite his name, commands
the English language idiomatically, and makes the best he can of passages
such as “I know thee not, old man” but he has to work to
inject drama into the music, rather than bringing out what should be
there already. Melody Moore is rather wasted in the small roles of the
Boy and Clarence. The decision to make the first of the travellers ambushed
by Falstaff into a mezzo-soprano seems perverse. Would a - presumably
wealthy, because worth robbing - woman be travelling alone with but
a single male companion in the lawless England of Henry IV’s reign?
Robert Breault and Chester Patton give us some nice character sketches
as Shallow and Davy in the Gloucestershire scenes, but both their scenes
are subjected to cuts and what we have lost might have helped to round
out their portrayals.
The orchestra and the chorus - singing in excellent English - are fine
and responsive under the baton of Ulf Schirmer, to such an extent that
one wishes they had rather more to do. It is nice to see the Bavarian
Radio Choir and the Munich Radio Orchestra, who have over the years
given us so many recordings of rare and valuable operas, back in harness
again. They sound as good as ever. One just wishes that
Plump Jack
itself had been less disappointing. Getty regards it as his best score,
but I personally much prefer works such as
Victorian scenes -
included on the disc of choral music in a superb performance conducted
by Vedernikov - which shows a much greater sense of ability in Getty’s
setting of words.
I very much wanted to like
Plump Jack, but in the event the main
feeling I came away with was one of frustration. Perhaps another round
of revision might help.
This disc seems to have been a long time coming for review -
Fanfare
published a review as long ago as last September - but its international
release is welcome.
It comes in a gatefold booklet, with full notes in English and translations
of the synopsis into French and German - other translated material is
available on Pentatone’s website. The booklet contains also some
rather charming period illustrations of episodes in the plot; one just
wishes that it could have not been glued into the gatefold so that it
could be extracted for greater ease of use.
Those, like myself, who admire Getty’s music, will want to hear
Plump Jack, but despite the discovery of some intermittently
beautiful passages they should be prepared for disappointment too. Those
who do not know Getty should investigate the discs of orchestral and
choral music first.
Paul Corfield Godfrey 
[75.34]
