Carpenter Concerto

Lean, greying John Alden Carpenter, who has flirted gracefully with jazzy and other folk idioms (The Birthday of The Infanta, Krazy Kat, Skyscrapers, Adventures in a Perambulator), dislikes being called a "businessman-composer." Though he helped carry on the family ship chandler business, Composer Carpenter has been an earnest musician and a musical institution in Chicago for some 25 years. Last week he gave his native city the first big work he had composed since 1933, a Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. His good friend, Zlatko Balokovic, Yugoslav violinist, played the Concerto. A friendly audience applauded. Respectful Chicago critics agreed that Composer Carpenter had learned something, but could not quite say what it was. Some attempts: "None-too-deeply-ecstatic emotionalism of a facile fantasy . . . rhythmic vitality . . . mercurial elusiveness. ... It sings . . . in a world of its own, where a man may . . . stand aloof and comment, with some piquant glee, upon his own absurdity."

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