The Boston Modern Orchestra Project has been making a signal contribution to American music, with this new disc no exception. Not even Elliott Carter’s devotees would make wild claims for his two ballets, though they are crucial to that period when he arrived at an idiom capable of sustaining 65 years of creativity – each being approachable and appealing in its own right.

Both ballets were instigated by Lincoln Kirstein, who later admitted he knew Carter more as classics scholar than composer. The orchestral premiere of Pocahontas in 1939 was not the success its 30-year-old composer might have expected, yet under Gil Rose’s astute direction its scoring betrays little of that textural thickness for which it was criticised: the amalgam of influences from such as Hindemith and Prokofiev as apposite to the conflict between Native Americans and English settlers as to the tender if fateful union between the eponymous princess and John Rolfe. Two episodes cut for the 1941 suite are now heard for the first time in eight decades, further underlining the immediacy and eloquence of Carter’s original conception.

The complete score of The Minotaur may not have remained under wraps, though its failure in 1947 was equally acute – Balanchine abandoning the project to work in Paris, his seeming dislike for its music likely playing a part. Carter swaps the disjunct expressive contrasts of his earlier ballet for a seamless interplay between literal depiction and atmospheric evocation of its fabled scenario that is never less than effective. Its relative impersonality coming between his audacious Piano Sonata and groundbreaking Cello Sonata is less a failing than a pragmatic compromise that itself proved too subtle either for first-time listeners or critics to appreciate.

Rose conveys the incisiveness and pathos of this score more tangibly than Gerard Schwarz in his finely played if emotionally aloof account. Maybe it was a matter of timing, Pocahontas appearing at the same time as Copland’s Billy the Kid and The Minotaur just before Stravinsky’s Orpheus, but hearing them afresh enables due reassessment of what David Schiff memorably describes as those ‘links between the late-hatched caterpillar and the long-lived butterfly’.