How to entertain your children and foster an interest in classical music? Composers have created many works for young people, from stories with musical accompaniment to didactic works that teach them about the instruments of the orchestra. Others have dedicated scores to children or composed pieces for them to play. Programme music – music that paints a picture – appeals to the child in all of us, so gather your littles ones around and settle down for a musical tale or two.
1Camille Saint-Saëns: The Carnival of the Animals
Camille Saint-Saëns wrote his humorous suite in February 1886, a time when he should have been working on his Third Symphony, but, admittedly, this work was more “amusant” as he confessed to his Parisian publishers. Can we blame him?! Although the work saw a couple of private performances during the composer’s lifetime, Saint-Saëns specified that Le Carnaval should only be published posthumously so it wouldn’t detract from his “serious” composer image. Take your kids on a safari and hear roaring lions, hopping kangaroos, a swan (the famous cello solo!) gliding over the water, Cock-a-Doodle-Doos and a gloriously ponderous tortoise depicted by a satirically slow rendition of Offenbach’s Can-can.
2Sergei Prokofiev: Peter and the Wolf
Peter and the Wolf is probably the best known classical music tale for children. Commissioned to write a “symphony for children” to introduce them to the instruments of the orchestra, Prokofiev responded with a story in which the different characters are represented by particular instruments: the flute is the bird, the oboe is the quarrelsome duck, the clarinet the slinky cat. Peter himself is represented by the strings, his grumbling grandfather by the bassoon, while a trio of horns take on the savage wolf. Are you sitting comfortably? Then let Itzhak Perlman begin:
3Alan Ridout: Ferdinand the Bull
Written in 1936, Munro Leaf’s The Story of Ferdinand tells of a gentle bull who doesn’t wish to take part in fierce bullfights but prefers to sit and smell the flowers. Alan Ridout’s setting, composed in 1971, is for narrator and solo violinist, whose fierce double-stopping stamps out familiar Spanish rhythms. This is a particularly lovely version, filmed recently by Ruth Rogers, of the London Mozart Players, and her son, Alexander.
4Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov: Flight of the Bumblebee
Bzzzzzz! With spring comes the buzzing sound of busy bumblebees. Whether you’re out and about, on your terrace or you forgot to close your window in the late afternoon sun – bzzzzzzzzz – everywhere! In your drink, on your cake, chaotically flying around your head.... bzzzzzz. The Flight of the Bumblebee is a buzzing earworm, but it’s probably less well known that Rimsky-Korsakov composed it as an episode in his opera The Tale of Tssssssssar Saltan.
5Claude Debussy: Children's Corner
Debussy dedicated his piano suite to his daughter, Claude-Emma (known in the family as Chou-Chou), the score bearing the words “with her father’s tender apologies for what follows”. Each of the movement titles is given in English, presumably acknowledging the family’s English governess. It’s a suite full of gentle humour, from the laborious piano practice of Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum (a parody of Clementi studies) to the elephant Jimbo’s Lullaby and the popular Golliwog’s Cakewalk which pokes fun at Wagner in its middle section. It’s no child’s play for the pianist, but Alain Planès plays it beautifully here.