Carl Davis’s magical carpet ride towards Aladdin

What must it feel like to write music that inspires breathtaking movement? For composer Carl Davis, perhaps best known for his television and film music, creating ballet music is the most exciting thing that he does. ‘’I love it,’ he says. ‘The music is what makes the dancers move.’

Davis’s latest ballet project is Aladdin, whose current tour kicked off at the Birmingham Hippodrome on February 15 and concludes at the London Coliseum on March 24. Davis originally composed the music in 2000 for a production by Scottish Ballet in collaboration with American choreographer Robert Cohan. 

But it is David Bintley, the Huddersfield-born artistic director of Birmingham Royal Ballet, who is responsible for this latest incarnation. When Davis and Bintley worked together on Cyrano for Birmingham in 2007, Davis took the opportunity to pass on a copy of the recording of Aladdin that he’d made the year before with the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra. 

‘I’d never thought about a ballet on Aladdin – it didn’t grab me at all,’ admits Bintley. ‘But one day I was driving up to Salford on tour – the trip is 90 minutes and I knew the ballet was 90 minutes so I thought I’d stick it on. I loved it immediately. Like so many of Carl’s pieces, it’s full of great melody and he’s got a great knack of capturing period and atmosphere.’

The score is typical Davis – sweepingly filmic, with dashes of colour and humour along the way. It’s not overtly ‘exotic’ for a story that, in its original version, suggests three musical ‘locations’ – Persia, China and Morocco. But the necessary elements are there, with music built on a bass drone heard in Middle-Eastern music, use of the pentatonic scale and North African drumming. 

‘It’s all there in the score, but not persistently,’ says Davis. ‘There’s some drumming in the orchestra, which is perhaps more aggressive than if I was portraying a Western subject, and I’ve tried to bring in some traditional Chinese elements like the Lion Dance and the Dragon Dance. But, with the pentatonic scale for example, that will only take you so far. When it comes to storytelling, I’m doing my own thing.’

Agrees Bintley: ‘The music has all sorts of influences and colours but you wouldn’t want exoticism all the way through.’ Not that he didn’t insist on some revisions, however. As Davis explains, ‘David works very much in a ballet vocabulary, compared to Robert Cohan who’s Martha Graham-trained and was imagining floor work and non-ballet movement.’ The tweaked version, which included changes mainly to the second act, was performed in Tokyo by the National Ballet of Japan in 2008 and again in 2010.

When Davis first saw Bintley’s production, he was terribly excited. ‘It was a wonderful experience to see what David did with my music. Working with a choreographer always takes me by surprise because I imagine my music will inspire certain things, but the choreographer nearly always has different ideas.’

The current version, which includes further changes, mainly in the orchestration of the finale, has received mixed reviews so far, with one critic, Judith Mackrell in The Guardian, even going so far as to say that Davis’s score was an ‘obstacle’ to the choreography by way of its ‘lacking sufficient rhythmic variety to inspire serious dance invention’.

Davis is, understandably, a little hurt by these sorts of comments, but is generally resigned to them: ‘I think the reviews for me in ballet in general are mixed,’ he says. ‘But with Aladdin I do feel that I respect David’s work a lot, and I think he’s done some beautiful things with this production.’

Bintley is more outspoken: ‘Utter nonsense,’ he says. ‘I haven’t read my own reviews since 1982 and that’s exactly why. I was overwhelmed by the score and there’s more choreography in Aladdin than in anything I’ve done before.’

For more information on Aladdin, and to buy tickets, visit brb.org.uk

Musical extracts

Aladdin – The Power of the Lamp

‘My Lamp Theme has a background built on the bass drone heard in Middle-Eastern music’