Gordon Getty Works to be Performed at Festival Napa Valley, July, 17 and 20, 2019 (Includes Moon Landing Commemoration)

WORKS BY COMPOSER GORDON GETTY TO BE PERFORMED AT
FESTIVAL NAPA VALLEY IN JULY 2019

Works by American composer Gordon Getty will be performed in July 2019 at Festival Napa Valley, an annual 10-day event in California’s Napa region attracting more than 12,000 guests.

The upcoming performances are as follows:

July 17, 6:30 p.m., Castello di Amorosa courtyard - Getty's The Fiddler of Ballykeel, for string orchestra and violin, will be performed by British violinist Charlie Siem with the Blackburn Music Academy Orchestra conducted by Joel Revzen. This is the first of Getty’s Four Traditional Pieces. About this work, Gordon Getty writes: "Fiddler is a strictly diatonic piece throughout. Since the tunes seemed Irish when they occurred to me, I harmonized them mostly in fourths and fifths. Then I needed a title. My own patronymic ancestors appear to have come from a suburb of Belfast called Ballymoney. Since The Fiddler of Ballymoney by Getty might raise unintended nuances, I moved my ancestors a few miles away to Ballykeel.”

July 20, 5:30 p.m., Lincoln Theater - Getty’s choral work The Old Man in the Night will be performed as part of "Song to the Moon," a concert commemorating, to the day, the 50th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The Festival Orchestra NAPA will be conducted by Joel Revzen. (The program will also include Gustav Holst’s The Planets, Antonin Dvorak’s aria Song to the Moon with Canadian soprano Andriana Chuchman, and the opening of Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra from the movie 2001 Space Odyssey.)

About The Old Man in the Night, Mr. Getty writes, "My two favorite poets since college have been Keats and Masefield. Flip to any page in the prolific outputs of Keats’ few years or Masefield’s many, and every line is rich. My poem, The Old Man in the Night is modeled on Masefield, after the Hemingway quote that begins it. Old Man shows my usual habit of setting iambic pentameter as if it were prose, putting prosody first, and leaving most musical interest to the accompaniment.”

The Old Man in the Night was recently released on the PENTATONE recording of Gordon Getty's choral works, Beauty Come Dancing (PTC 5186 621).

Festival ticket information can be found at https://festivalnapavalley.org/events-calendar-summer/?categoryid=F4C67ABD-C383-7BEB-8C86980C870D79CB or by contacting boxoffice@festivalnapavalley.org, 1-888-337-6272.

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

Gordon Getty The music of American composer Gordon Getty has been performed in such prestigious venues as New York’s Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center, London’s Royal Festival Hall, Vienna’s Brahmssaal, Moscow’s Tchaikovsky Hall and Bolshoi Theatre, and Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts (“The Egg”), as well as at the Aspen, Spoleto and Bad Kissingen Festivals, and Festival Napa Valley.

Plump Jack, Getty’s first opera drawing on the adventures of Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff, was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony and has been revived by the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, London Philharmonia, and Munich Radio Orchestra among other ensembles. Usher House, based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe, received its premiere in Cardiff with the Welsh National Opera. The Canterville Ghost, based on the Oscar Wilde story, premiered with Germany’s Leipzig Opera. These last two were later united in a double bill dubbed “Scare Pair” and presented in New York with the Center for Contemporary Opera and in Los Angeles by LA Opera.

Joan and the Bells, a cantata portraying the trial and execution of Joan of Arc, has been widely performed, notably at Windsor Castle with Mikhail Pletnev conducting. Getty’s ballet Ancestor Suite was given its premiere staging by the Bolshoi Ballet with the Russian National Orchestra at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, and has been reprised in Beijing, Shanghai, and several American cities.

Getty has enjoyed a long relationship with the PENTATONE label. In addition to his three operas and Joan, PENTATONE has released an album devoted to six of his orchestral pieces, with Sir Neville Marriner conducting the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields; three albums of his choral works, Young America, The Little Match Girl and his latest, Beauty Come Dancing; an album of his solo piano works with Conrad Tao; and The White Election, a much-performed song cycle on poems by Emily Dickinson. He revisited the poetry of Emily Dickinson in his Four Dickinson Songs, recorded by Lisa Delan and Kristin Pankonin on their recital album The Hours Begin to Sing. A newly orchestrated version of the cycle is featured on Lisa Delan’s album A Certain Slant of Light with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille.

Getty’s latest project is an opera based on the novella Goodbye Mr. Chips. It will be workshopped at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and given its world premiere at Festival Napa Valley in 2020. Mr. Getty’s life as a composer is the subject of the documentary film There Will Be Music by director Peter Rosen, which has been broadcast on PBS in the U.S. and in Europe on ARTE, and has also appeared in film festivals and programs across the country. Gordon Getty’s music is published by Rork Music. (www.gordongetty.com)

Festival Napa Valley

Blending the beauty and bounty of Napa Valley with the very finest performing arts, Festival Napa Valley offers programs that enrich the economic and cultural vitality of the region and make the arts accessible to all. The Festival presents world class performances staged in iconic Napa Valley venues and inspiring educational programs offered at Napa County public schools year-round. It is presented by Napa Valley Festival Association, a nonprofit organization governed by a board of prominent vintners and local leaders. More than 200 artists, wineries, resorts, theaters, restaurants, chefs and vintners participate each year.  

Festival Napa Valley's Blackburn Music Academy Orchestra is a tuition-free summer music program for instrumentalists from 18-36 years of age. Participants take part in chamber music and orchestral concerts together with faculty members, as well as workshops, sectionals, coaching sessions and other professional development activities.

Festival Orchestra NAPA: Centered around a core of musicians from New York’s Metropolitan Opera Orchestra led by concertmaster Laura Hamilton and conductor Joel Revzen, Festival Orchestra NAPA includes hand-picked musicians from the Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Toronto Symphony, Vancouver Symphony, Dallas Symphony, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, among others.

The First Republic Bank Stage at Castello di Amorosa: The Castello di Amorosa (which translates to the “castle of love” in Italian) rises above the hills in the Napa Valley. An authentically-styled, thirteenth century Tuscan castle winery replete with five towers and over 30 acres of estate vineyards, it was built over a 14-year period by Dario Sattui, a fourth generation winemaker and owner of V. Sattui Winery in St. Helena, California. 

Joel Revzen is an award-winning conductor who leads symphony and opera performances throughout North America and Europe and who recently made his Metropolitan Opera conducting debut, leading performances of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. He has served as the Artistic Director and Principal Conductor for Classical Tahoe since its founding in 2012.

Charlie Siem, one of today’s foremost young violinists, has appeared with many of the world’s finest orchestras and chamber ensembles. Currently signed to Sony Classical, Siem has a varied discography and has made a large number of recordings. He has revived the age-old violinist tradition of composing virtuosic variations of popular themes in collaboration with artists including Bryan Adams, Jamie Cullum and The Who.

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