Gordon Getty Works To Be Performed At Festival Napa Valley

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.

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