Animal Crackers
Camille Saint-Saens in 1903
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 made of
candy, a brown chocolate body and a long brown tail. I cannot recall whether or
not the tail was edible. The problem was that because I was very fond of
animals, I couldn’t easily bring myself to eat them, especially the heads. I
always had a nagging feeling that it would cause them 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. They are called, appropriately
Two by Two and come from Ashbourne in Derbyshire. You can even 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. In case you’re interested, you can buy a
small pack for Bt. 155 at Villa.
I suspect that the French
composer Camille Saint-Saëns would have enjoyed animal-shaped biscuits and
possibly even chocolate mice, because in 1886 he wrote an animal-inspired work
quite different in style from his huge output of symphonies, concertos, operas
and chamber music.
Saint-Saëns
(1835-1921, France): Carnival of the Animals.
Danijel Gašparoviæ, Nikola
Kos (pno), Komorni Ansambl Muzièke 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 obviously 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.
Serge Prokofiev
(1891-1953, Russia): Peter and the Wolf.
Vancouver Symphony
Orchestra cond. Bramwell Tovey (Duration: 29:30; Video: 1080p HD)
This is one of Prokofiev’s
best-known 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, Patrick Stewart (of Star
Trek fame), Basil Rathbone, Sir Ralph Richardson, Boris Karloff, and Sean
Connery to name but six. Even Dame Edna Everage has had a go at it.
Unusually, in this video,
the conductor and the narrator are the same person. Bramwell Tovey is a British
composer and conductor who has been music director of the Vancouver Symphony
Orchestra since September 2000. 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.
Heavens, I am quiet
exhausted after all that excitement. I’ll go and make a coffee and have an
animal biscuit. And yes, I did succumb to temptation and bought a pack.