BMOP Debuts Complete Carpenter Ballets

courtesy of AMT Public Relations

This coming Tuesday, the Boston Modern Opera Project (BMOP) will release its latest album. It consists of three compositions by John Alden Carpenter collected under the title Complete Ballets. As most readers will expect, Amazon.com has created a Web page for placing pre-orders.

As might be guessed, each of the ballets presented is a one-act affair. The “order of appearance” on the album is not chronological:

1. “Krazy Kat: A Jazz Pantomime,” 1921 (score revised in 1940)
2. “The Birthday of the Infanta: A Ballet Pantomime,” 1919 (score revised in 1940)
3. “Skyscrapers: A Ballet of Modern American Life,” 1926

My guess is that the album was conceived to frame the darker narrative of Oscar Wilde’s fairy tale with the more upbeat selections.

Indeed, the contrast between this ballet and “Krazy Kat,” both created by Adolph Bolm, best known for his contributions to Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, is one of night and day. Sadly, I have not been able to uncover much information about the choreography for “Krazy Kat,” so I have no idea how many bricks are thrown. (I have no idea how many readers will get the reference in that last sentence!) For that matter, I have no idea how much time either Bolm or Carpenter spent reading the Krazy Kat comic strips. (The booklet provides a single frame that tells you everything you need to know about Krazy Kat.). Since I count myself a maven of that content, I have to say that Carpenter’s music does not do the protagonist justice; and I cannot imagine Bolm coming up with choreography that did much better. On the other hand, “The Birthday of the Infanta,” based on a fairy tale written by Oscar Wilde, involves more narrative than either music or choreography can handle. My guess is that Diaghilev did not allow either of these ballets to remain in repertoire very long; and I suspect that his successor, Leonide Massine, felt the same way.

“Skyscrapers” is another matter. The Dance Encyclopedia cites Carpenter as one of the choreographer (possibly providing the framework for the narrative). Most of the choreography is probably due to Robert Edmond Jones, who was assisted by Sammy Lee. It was then given new choreography by Heinrich Kröller in 1929. Personally, I have my doubts as to whether this ballet reflected “American Life” in the Roaring Twenties; and I wonder whether or not Kröller’s version is a reflection on the 1929 stock market crash.

Carpenter died in 1951 at the age of 75. I believe there was some effort to keep his music alive and kicking at the Eastman School of Music. Howard Hanson, who was Director from 1924 to 1964, certainly believed that many American composers deserved a fair shake where repertoire was concerned. Certainly, the recordings he made with the Eastman-Rochester Orchestra included Carpenter selections. (His recording of “Adventures in a Perambulator” is in my collection.) Nevertheless, however sincere the intentions BMOP may have been, I fear that all three selections come across as “music of the future whose time has passed!”