Rock star Sting turns out to be an exceptionally lucid storyteller, making his rendition of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf quite enthralling. His knack for getting into character as well as his talent for creating voices lends an appropriately cartoonish atmosphere to the proceedings. Claudio Abbado’s playfully dramatic conducting and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe’s animated playing results in a Peter that’s fun for kids as well as adults.
On the other hand, it’s difficult to imagine any child enjoying this edition of Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, weighed down as it is by Ogden Nash’s insufferably droll poetry (attached long after the composer’s death). The high-flown text is quite wordy, and you haven’t heard this many bad puns since the classic Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. It’s too bad the spoken parts aren’t tracked separately, because Karl Böhm leads a remarkably characterful performance with the Kontarsky duo and the Vienna Philharmonic. But in order to hear it, you’ve got to sit through Hermione Gingold’s oh-so-cutesy recitation.
The narration in Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra was written specifically for the work, and while Lorin Maazel is no Leonard Bernstein when it comes to musical lecturing, he does make the material interesting. He also does a first-class job at conducting the actual music, obtaining a sterling performance by the French National Orchestra. However, this piece plays even better without the narration, and there are many fine recordings of it in that form.
DG’s overall sound is very good, with the 1990 Prokofiev recording being the most vivid and present. In sum, this is a mixed bag, but musically curious youngsters (and/or their parents) should find this disc (the outer portions, at least) a mildly challenging diversion.
