Carter and Copland in dancing shoes

Composers Datebook

Synopsis

In 1935, 26-year-old American composer Elliott Carter returned to the States after composition studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger. Carter found work as the music director of Ballet Caravan, an ambitious and enterprising touring ensemble whose mission was to present specially-commissioned new dance works on quintessentially American themes. Virgil Thomson, for example, wrote the ballet Filling Station, and Carter, decades before the animated Disney movie, wrote a ballet version of the story of Pocahontas and John Smith.

While on tour, these new scores were presented in two-piano versions, but on today‘s date in 1939, the orchestral version of Carter’s Pocahontas Ballet was presented by the Ballet Caravan at its home base at the Martin Beck Theater in New York.

The New York Times reviewer didn't much care for the staging or Carter’s music: “The costumes are in the manner of the old-fashioned cigar box Indian,” he wrote, “and after the first amusing glimpse their psuedo-naiveté begins to grow irksome. Mr. Carter’s music is so thick it is hard to see the stage through it.”

The Times reviewer did like another new ballet also receiving its orchestral debut that same night. This was Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid. “A perfectly delightful piece of work," enthused the same critic, concluding, “Aaron Copland has furnished an admirable score, warm and human, and with not a wasted note about it anywhere.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Elliott Carter (1908-2012): Pocahontas Ballet; American Composers Orchestra; Paul Dunkel, conductor; CRI 610

Aaron Copland (1900-1990): Billy the Kid Ballet; St. Louis Symphony; Leonard Slatkin, conductor; EMI 73653