The title Krazy Kat: A Jazz Pantomime promises so much, especially if, like me, you adore cats and love jazz, and even harbour the suspicion that felines manage, like great jazz musicians do, to find improvisational freedom within routine and discipline. Chicago-born John Alden Carpenter wrote his ballet in 1921, a whole three years before Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue set in motion a domino effect of jazz-meets-classical concertos and orchestral showpieces. The piece is certainly of historical interest, and Carpenter’s understanding of ‘jazz’ is clearly informed by Paul Whiteman (with whom he worked) rather than exhibiting any explicit connection with leading black bandleaders such as Fletcher Henderson or James P Johnson.

This music is well behaved and predictable – not like jazz (or indeed cats) at all – and anyone hoping that Krazy Kat might animate the senses with the cartoon anarchy of proto-Tom & Jerry chase sequences, as musical styles collide and fall off cliff-edges, will be disappointed. The Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 1992 performance under Calvin Simmons on New World Records (albeit in Simmons’s own orchestration) demonstrates what can be done with appropriately thespy rubato and the Broadway snarl of an idiomatically fit-for-purpose brass section. But the BBC Concert Orchestra and Keith Lockhart are simply not in that class. The harmonic latticework of Carpenter’s seventh movement, ‘Tempo di Foxtrot’ – hints of Ivesian incongruous tonalities – is glossed over here, while the jazzy fight of the concluding Presto lacks heavyweight punches.

Patterns for piano and orchestra, Carpenter’s attempt to pull off Bergian atonal off-tonality, is as dry and utilitarian as its title; the Concertino is more flaccid concert jazz and Carmel Concerto is Carpenter ‘doing’ Copland or Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite. Not much here, frankly, for anyone who isn’t already a Carpenter devotee – pieces and performances only a qualified success.