Elliott Carter’s Ballet Scores

At the beginning of this month, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) released its latest album. The recording is devoted to some of the earliest works of Elliott Carter, two orchestral compositions made for one-act ballets, “Pocahontas” and “The Minotaur.” Both of these scores were commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein, who had been one of Carter’s fellow students at Harvard University. Kirstein would go on to become one of the first impresarios to cultivate “home-grown” ballet in the United States.

Kirstein and George Balanchine started the School of American Ballet in 1934. This would become the “training ground” for the professional company now known as the New York City Ballet (NYCB). Kirstein also founded a “training company” called Ballet Caravan, which presented the premiere of “Pocahontas” in 1939. Local readers may wish to note that the choreography was created by Lew Christensen, who would direct the San Francisco Ballet between 1952 and 1984. The production was a failure, and The New York Times particularly went after Carter, describing his music as “so thick it is hard to see the stage through it.”

A photograph of John Taras’ choreography for “The Minotaur” (from the booklet accompanying the recording being discussed)

“The Minotaur” was commissioned by Kirstein for NYCB. Carter assumed that Balanchine would create the choreography, but Balanchine went to Paris in 1947. The task of making the new ballet was turned over to his young assistant John Taras. While the resulting choreography was not particularly memorable, the music became known due to a suite that Carter published in 1956. This found its way to the “flip side” of a Mercury album of the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra conducted by Howard Hanson, which featured Colin McPhee’s Indonesian-inspired suite Tabuh-Tabuhan.

My guess is that I am far from the only purchaser of this album that was totally blown away by Tabuh-Tabuhan and had no idea what to make of the Carter suite. I might even venture that Hanson himself was in the same boat with the rest of us. As a result, this new BMOP album, conducted by Gil Rose, may be the first opportunity any of us have had to give the “Minotaur” a fair shake.

For one thing, it helps to have a track listing that provides a better account of the relation between the music and the ballet’s scenario. For another, Rose’s conducting reflects a clearer understanding of the building blocks of Carter’s thematic material and the ability to sort out a rich vocabulary of embellishment from the themes being embellished. (The score may still have the “thickness” that annoyed the Times critic, but Rose seems to have gotten beyond any problems of opacity!) Finally, I would speculate that this score offers an early account of Carter’s interest in rhythmic patterns and the techniques of unfolding those patterns through both sequencing and superposition.

From that point of view, this new album is not so much an account of “Carter before he became Carter” as it is an indicator, particularly through the score for “The Minotaur,” of how Carter would begin to establish his own voice in the Fifties.