A long time ago, when the world seemed a different place and I was very young, my parents used to occasionally give me a small chocolate mouse. It was intended as a special treat so it didn’t happen very often. Each mouse had two pink eyes, a brown chocolate body and a long brown tail. I cannot recall whether or not the tail was edible but I didn’t eat the tails anyway. The problem was that because I was very fond of animals, I couldn’t easily bring myself to eat them, even chocolate ones. I always had a nagging feeling that it would cause emotional distress. Fortunately, in later life I overcame these childlike concerns and if anyone offers me a chocolate mouse these days, I can eat it without hesitation, except of course the tail. Unfortunately, people rarely do.
So it was with some delight that wandering in the supermarket last week, I found a box not of chocolate mice, but of animal-shaped biscuits (“made with Madagascan vanilla extract”). They are called Two by Two and come from the small and picturesque town of Ashbourne in the British county of Derbyshire. You may recall the children’s song The Animals Came in Two by Two, based on the melody of the American folk song When Johnny Comes Marching Home. The origin of course is the biblical legend concerning Noah, his Ark and all the animals trooping into the ark in pairs – “two by two”. Oh yes, you can also buy a colourful tin in the shape of an ark, containing biscuits in the form of monkeys, lions, kangaroos and elephants. Some of the packs even have a nursery rhyme or fable printed on the side. It is reassuring to know that in our troubled world, you can still buy animal-shaped biscuits and it just goes to show that things can’t be all that bad.
I suspect that the Russian composer Serge Prokofiev might have enjoyed the animal biscuits because he wrote an animal-inspired work quite different in style from his huge output of symphonies, concertos and chamber music.
Serge Prokofiev (1891-1953): Peter and the Wolf. Vancouver Symphony Orchestra cond. Bramwell Tovey (Duration: 29:30; Video: 1080p HD)
Prokofiev was a Russian Soviet composer and is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century on account of his ground-breaking sonatas, symphonies and concertos. This is one of Prokofiev’s most popular works, especially among school children. It was written in 1936 as a commission from the Central Children’s Theatre in Moscow and Prokofiev managed to knock out the words and music in just four days. You probably know the story. It concerns a bird, a duck, a cat, some hunters, a grumpy and over-cautious grandfather and of course, Peter and the dreaded wolf. It’s written for narrator and orchestra and each character is represented by different instruments. There are countless recordings of the work, dating back to the 1940s. Almost every actor you can think of has recorded it including Peter Ustinov, Basil Rathbone, Sir Ralph Richardson, Boris Karloff, Sean Connery, and Patrick Stewart of Star Trek fame).
Unusually, in this performance, the conductor and the narrator are the same person. Bramwell Tovey is a British composer and conductor who at the time was music director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. He does a pretty decent job as narrator and the musicians in the orchestra seem to enjoy themselves. It’s all good clean fun for young kids, even though one of the orchestral players bears an unsettling resemblance to the actor Anthony Hopkins, who played the role of the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs.
Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921): Carnival of the Animals. Danijel Gašparović, Nikola Kos (pno), Komorni Ansambl Muzičke Akademije U Zagrebu (Duration: 27:12; Video: 720p HD)
This is a work for small ensemble with fourteen short movements, each of which depicts an animal or a group of animals. It must have given Saint-Saëns a great deal of amusement composing the music and he admitted that he wrote the piece just for the fun of it and intended it as a private entertainment for friends. The second movement, Hens and Roosters is a parody on a piece by Rameau; and Pianists (who Saint-Saëns presumably considers as animals) are heard painfully lumbering up and down scales. In Tortoises, the strings play an extremely slow and laboured version of the can-can from Offenbach’s operetta Orpheus in the Underworld. The thirteenth movement, The Swan is the famous cello solo of the same name, known to generations of cello students. This lively performance by talented young musicians from Zagreb has excellent sound and video quality and it’s also available in HD making full screen viewing not only possible but pleasurable. I noticed that the musicians all seem to be playing from photocopies, so perhaps times are tough in Zagreb. They probably don’t have animal biscuits there either, let alone chocolate mice.
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