Okay, maybe that was a little too snarky. But I think Gordon Getty’s song cycle White Election would be a sharper and more effective piece if it were half the length. There didn’t seem to me to be enough going on in either the words or the music to justify a song cycle that’s long enough to include an intermission. I have to admit that I’m not much of a lover of Dickinson’s poetry, though. After a while it sounds to me like they all begin, “How sweet to never live your life!”

Lisa Delan sang very beautifully but with so-so diction and without finding a way to make the 32 songs into some kind of progression; they came across as a long string of pleasant but mostly rather similar songs. Mikhail Pletnev was at the piano, and it was fun to see him in action relatively close up.