A Carpenter’s Well-Crafted Stage Return

How fitting that Richard Carpenter should reemerge on Valentine’s Day. Armed with a 100-piece orchestra, the seldom-seen pianist and singer delivered a ballad-heavy show Friday that overflowed with sweet sentimentality and melancholy emotion.

Besides the apt timing of the event, Carpenter had several other factors working in his favor. Number one, his nearly two-hour performance took place within Cal State Long Beach’s intimate Carpenter Performance Arts Center, a resplendent 1,000-seat facility that the musician helped finance. That gave the Downey resident and Long Beach graduate a true home-field advantage in a pair of shows over the weekend in preparation for a tour of Japan he’ll do next month.

Second, Carpenter was working from the rich catalog of melodic songs that he helped bring to light with his sister, Karen, in the ‘70s soft-rock duo the Carpenters. They scored an astonishing 20 Top 40 hits between 1970 and 1981.

During their heyday, the Carpenters offered an easy-listening counterpoint to the increasingly loud and blustery sounds of rock ‘n’ roll. The group came to a end when Karen died in 1983 of a cardiac arrest caused by anorexia nervosa.

Clad in black and looking remarkably youthful, the 50-year-old Richard delivered a host of Carpenters favorites on a stately grand piano while the sound of his orchestra swelled around him.

Even without Karen’s movingly pure and mournful vocal accompaniment, such teary numbers as “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “Yesterday Once More” and “(They Long To Be) Close To You” came across as irresistibly catchy. Carpenter’s new orchestral arrangements--possibly for an album of orchestral versions of Carpenters’ songs he’s reportedly working on--gave many of these chestnuts an appealingly majestic quality that was cinematic, yet far from overblown.

He also diverged from the material he’s so inextricably identified with, crooning songs by Cole Porter and Rodgers & Hammerstein in his baritone while seated informally at the lip of the stage. In another segment, he let his fingers fly over the ivories while interpreting compositions by Debussy and Paganini.

But Carpenter is neither much of a singer nor a particularly stellar concert pianist. So the bulk of the show was devoted to looking back on his life and paying tribute to his erstwhile group.

He proved an engaging raconteur as he reminisced about his parents and his days leading up to the superstar success of the Carpenters, though he stopped short of commenting on the personal problems that contributed to his sister’s death. Often as he spoke, old photographs or film clips flashed on two video screens.

Carpenter may have overdone the nostalgia when he played and sang along with low-fidelity music videos featuring Karen delivering a number of Carpenters songs. Still, it was hard to doubt the loving intentions behind this gesture.

One pleasant surprise was the inclusion of “One Love,” a lovely piano-based piece that appeared on the 1971 “Carpenters” album never released as a single.

It was “One Love,” for which he was accompanied by 15 members of the CSULB choir, that best illustrated Carpenter’s contributions to the pair’s classy sound. Written by himself and lyricist John Bettis, the song--as on record--was tastefully arranged and performed. While many balladeers have a tendency toward frilly overstatement, the best Carpenters’ records contained a simplicity and purity that was refreshing.

As a mainly behind-the-scenes producer, songwriter and musical arranger, Richard Carpenter doesn’t get many opportunities to step into the limelight. With his orchestral presentation of Carpenters’ music, his fans finally were able thank him en masse for his contributions. When he left the stage at evening’s end, he received a heartfelt standing ovation.