April 13, 2001

College of Music and LPO stage Gordon Getty's Joan and the Bells

The College of Music will present "Saint and Scribe," a concert featuring Gordon Getty's Joan and the Bells and Samuel Barber's Prayers of Kierkegaard on Sunday, May 6, 2001, at 7:30 p.m. in Roussel Hall. Meg Hulley, assistant professor of music and coordinator of choral activities at Loyola, will direct the Loyola University Chorus and Chorale, members of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Loyola Symphony Orchestra.

Joan and the Bells is Getty's oratorio that dramatizes the sentencing and death of Joan of Arc. Joan and the Bells first premiered with the Russian National Orchestra in 1998. Joan met with tremendous response from audiences and critics alike. The San Francisco Bay area was thrilled with the American premiere of this exciting new work in February 1999. Joan was performed in the Basque region of Spain in September 1999.

Joan and the Bells features soprano Lisa Delan and baritone Philip Frohnmayer, music professor, as soloists with the combined choruses and orchestras.

Honored as an Outstanding American Composer at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., in 1986, Getty continues to win high praise for performances of his music in major concert halls across the United States and overseas.

His works have also been heard at major festivals around the world, including Tanglewood, Aspen, Newport, Miami, the Schubert Festival in Washington, the Casals Festival in Puerto Rico, and the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, where his opera Plump Jack was performed in concert version to critical acclaim in 1989.

Getty was honored by Loyola in 1988 - 89 with the prestigious Distinguished Guest Artist Award.

Samuel Barber's Prayers of Kierkegaard was commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation and is dedicated to the memory of Serge and Natalie Koussevitzky. Though the commission was given in 1942, Samuel Barber did not begin composition until 1953, and the work was completed in January of 1954. He chose four prayers by Søren Kierkegaard (1813 - 1855), the influential Danish theologian and philosopher regarded as the founder of Existential philosophy. The prayers are taken from Kierkegaard's journals and two of his books, The Unchangeableness of God and Christian Discourses. They are most concerned with God's love and redemption, but they also reflect the basic credo of Kierkegaard's writings, individual responsibility in choosing among the various alternatives life offers. Barber's setting is a single-movement cantata, cast in the Romantic musical language spiced with modern dissonance of which he was a master.

Call the Loyola Ticket Office at 865-3492. Tickets are $15 general admission, and $5 students and Loyola community.

Gordon Getty, composer

Born in Los Angeles in 1933, Gordon Getty has lived in San Francisco since 1945. He graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1956 with a B.S. degree in English literature, having meanwhile studied piano with the late Robert Vetleson and voice with Easton Kent. Following six months of active duty in the army and four years in family businesses, he studied music theory at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Today, Getty is a frequent visiting composer at colleges and universities across the country and holds honorary doctorates from the University of Maryland, Pepperdine University, the University of California San Francisco, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and the Mannes College of Music.

His works includes Plump Jack which has a number of performances as a work in progress and in semi-staged concert versions, by such distinguished orchestras as the San Francisco Symphony, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the BBC Philharmonic in London, among others.

Getty's Emily Dickinson song cycle, The White Election, was released by Delos on CD in a performance by the late Kaaren Erickson to extraordinary international acclaim. The recording followed highly praised concert performances by Erickson and others presented by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Morgan Library and Alice Tully Hall in New York, the Etherredge Center in Aiken, S.C., Herbst Theater in San Francisco, Harvard, Yale, the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Barbara, the University of Texas at Austin, Indiana Opera Theater, and the Kennedy Center in Washington.

Victorian Scenes, the composer's choral settings of poems by Tennyson and Housman, and a setting for men's voices of Poe's Annabel Lee, had their first performance by the Los Angeles Master Chorale and Sinfonia in the Chandler Pavilion at the Los Angeles Music Center.

Three Waltzes for Piano and Orchestra ­ Tiefer und Tiefer, Madeline, and Ehemals were performed by André Prévin and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. In 1991, orchestral arrangements of the Three Waltzes were performed both at Tanglewood under the baton of Zuohang Chen, and by the California Symphony conducted by Barry Jekowsky.

Getty's chamber works include Ewig Du, The Fiddler of Ballykeel, and Ehemels (scored for both string quartet and string chamber orchestra). Five short piano pieces published by Belwin in 1954 are now available as Homework Suite. Three Diatonic Waltzes, Tiefer und Tiefer, Madeline, Ehemels, Waltz of the Ancestors, Gothic Waltz, Zwei Ländler, First Adventure and The Fiddler of Ballykeel round out his compositions for piano. The composer has also penned new settings of the traditional Welsh folk songs Welcome Robin, Kind Old Man, and All Through the Night.

Rork Music now publishes all works by Gordon Getty, Theodore Presser Company, distributor.