Back to School: Classical Music Edition

For decades, classical music has been perceived as a genre reserved for an elite, older audience. Strict concert etiquette and expensive ticket prices have upheld this assumption and often alienated younger audiences. With the advent of digital streaming in the twenty-first century, this outlook has shifted—but the idea that classical music isn’t open to children still lingers. 

At its core, classical music is a powerful form of expression and storytelling. Composers have used their works to convey a vast spectrum of complex emotions: grief, joy, confusion, and all the nuanced shades of feeling in between. Many have also written pieces intended for young learners and listeners, opening a window of introduction into the classical world. This window often takes the form of an instrumental guide or engaging narrative inspired by the natural environment. Ahead of the new school year, dive into three iconic orchestral works that introduce young listeners to the orchestra, with a back-to-school soundtrack ranging from Britten and Saint-Saëns to Prokofiev.

Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf

What better way to introduce children to orchestral instruments than through a symphonic fairytale? Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf tells the story of a young boy called Peter, who encounters a dangerous wolf in a meadow and meets an array of animals along the way. A narrator provides a running commentary on the events, while the instruments give voice to different characters.

Setting out on his adventurous path, the skip in Peter’s step is conveyed through a leaping, vibrant melody, played by a string quartet. The bird flutters in the top register of the flute and the duck quacks to the reedy tones of the oboe. When Peter encounters a cat, it paces along to the sound of a staccato clarinet. The lower register of the bassoon conveys the anger of Peter’s grandfather, while the French horns take on the role of the menacing wolf and the blast of the hunters’ shotguns is animated by the kettle drums.

A beautifully concise 30-minute musical tale, Peter and the Wolf has been recorded over 400 times in twelve different languages. Written as a commission for a pedagogical piece for a newly established children’s theater, the composition is a fantastic way of introducing children to different musical timbres and inspiring them to pick up an instrument. It’s no wonder that this work still has mass appeal, almost a century after it was written.

Watch the Britten-Pears Orchestra take on this masterpiece of musical storytelling, conducted and narrated by the unparalleled Marin Alsop. In the final section titled “The Triumphant Procession to the Zoo,” listen out for the key motifs as they’re seamlessly passed around the orchestra. You can even hear the duck quacking inside the wolf’s stomach, after the wolf swallowed her alive…

Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals

Following a turbulent concert tour in Germany, Saint-Saëns sat down to write The Carnival of the Animals in 1886. Upon the piece’s completion, he banned all public performance for fear that it would taint his reputation as a “serious” composer. Published one year after his death, The Carnival has ironically become his most popular work—but for good reason. A comedic musical suite, The Carnival is scored for a small chamber ensemble, featuring two pianos, strings, flute, piccolo, clarinet, xylophone, and glass harmonica.

The composer’s “grand zoological fantasy” takes shape through fourteen movements with each one portraying a different animal. First up is the majestic entrance of the lions, complete with piano tremolos, glissando, and chordal fanfare. We take an extensive musical journey through the animal kingdom, encountering wild donkeys in a gallop conveyed by piano scales, an elephant that waltzes playfully to a duet with piano and double bass, an aviary filled with soaring flutes that mimic the chirps of birds. 

Amongst these creatures, we get a humorous sighting of “The Pianists” in the eleventh movement, instructed to “imitate the hesitant style and awkwardness of a beginner” while playing piano exercises. Saint-Saëns also makes clever references to other musical works in The Carnival: “The Tortoises” features a string quartet and double bass performing Offenbach’s Can-Can (from the operetta Orpheus in the Underworld) at a snail’s pace to comic effect. The composer even borrows from his own Danse macabre to convey the afterlife in “Fossils.” Well-known French nursery rhymes make an appearance in this movement too: “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Au clair de la lune,” and an excerpt from Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville—familiar melodies that the audience can pick out. 

A review by Le Figaro at the time accurately summarized the work: “Themes, whimsical ideas, instrumentation complete with buffoonery, grace and science …” Enjoy the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra’s unique rendition of Saint-Saëns’s work, locally stylized with a cow in place of the lion and a goat for the kangaroo, alongside the stunning animated paintings of the artist Sandra Albukrek. Gautier Capuçon gracefully captures the evocative legato melody of “The Swan”: an essential piece of the cello repertoire and the only part that the composer published during his lifetime.

Benjamin Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra

Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra originated as a score for an educational documentary film called Instruments of the Orchestra, directed by Muir Mathieson and featuring the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Malcolm Sargent. Symphony orchestras soon adopted the music for concerts with spoken narration. Subtitled Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell, Britten’s work is based on the theme from the Rondeau of Purcell’s incidental music for Behn’s play Abdelazer. The composer uses the theme as a vehicle for showcasing the power and versatility of each orchestral section.

We start with its grand introduction by the full orchestra, and then the theme is passed around different instrumental families: woodwind, brass, strings, and percussion with a striking cadenza. Variations on the theme are then developed, with individual spotlights on each instrument, from highest to lowest pitch in every section. The instruments join forces for a fugue and enter in the order of the variations, before returning full circle to a majestic statement of the theme. 

Unlike the character-driven narration of Peter and the Wolf, the optional commentary for Britten’s piece is technical and focuses on how the instruments work, as well as what they’re made of. The European Youth Orchestra perform the grand brass-led finale of A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra in a dramatic style that recalls the stateliness of Purcell’s theme—listen out for the triumphant brass that rise above the rest of the orchestral fugue.

Through contrasting treatment of themes and narration, these three compositions successfully convey the unique timbre and character of each orchestral instrument. Although the works were dedicated to younger audiences, their stories are timeless and can be enjoyed by people of all ages. After all, it’s never too late to (re)discover classical music.