Festival Napa Valley Announces Performances of Works by Composer Gordon Getty

Three 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 performances are as follows:

July 11, time and place to be announced - Kathy, a trio based on themes from Gordon Getty's new opera, Goodbye Mr. Chips, will be performed as part of the Festival Live! chamber music series. Kathy is a short, three-movement piece written in a classical style for piano, violin and cello, named for a character in the opera who plays the cello. The second movement was taken directly from Goodbye Mr. Chips; the first and third were written to accompany it. The trio was given its premiere on March 12, 2019 by members of the Chamber Orchestra of Havana at the Fábrica de Arte Cubano in Havana, Cuba.

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."

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.

Photo Credit: Emily Polar

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