Respighi : Marie Victoire. Kizart, Jurowski.

Piano International (Nov, 2013)
The American billionaire Gordon Getty (born 1934) funds West Coast arts ventures and recordings of his own compositions, including these piano pieces created over the past half-century. A graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory, where he studied with Sol Joseph (1912-2002), Getty has stuck to a musical language akin to middling Northern European ballet scores circa 1840. Determinedly retro and pale, his works are the aural equivalent of Prince Charles’s watercolour landscapes.

Defiantly unserious and inconsequential, possibly in reaction to his grimly purposeful, miserly oil magnate father J Paul Getty, the younger Getty has created music that can dither in slower works, while up-tempo efforts tend to be merry jigs. Like …