Richard Morrison
It’s time to spring clean children’s music and try exciting new options
My children and grandchildren have been a delightful, if expensive, part of my life for over 35 years. For an even longer period, I have run a choir with children in it. But can I make a confession? I still cannot predict whether a certain piece of music will appeal to children or not.
That wouldn’t matter a jot, except that I suspect this particular failure of empathy is shared by many composers – even some of those who have written music designed to appeal to children. In this issue, Saint-saëns’s Carnival of the Animals is explored in some detail by Jessica Duchen (starting on the next page). That’s a work which, in my experience, does appeal. Children love the zoological images it evokes with such deft eccentricity. Yet the irony is that it was written to amuse adults – in fact, Saint-saëns’s sophisticated friends in smart Paris salons.
When composers have deliberately set out to charm both children and adults, the results have been hit-and-miss. Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf is a hit; kids love the dark, Roald-dahlesque twists in its plot. Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel also grips kids; it has great tunes and a horror-story that turns out well. It’s sad that you usually need to spend hundreds of pounds to take your family to watch it in an opera house. The same is true of Ravel’s whimsical nursery-tale, L’enfant et les sortilèges, though one amazing product of last year’s lockdown was a streamed production (jointly mounted by Vopera and the London Philharmonic) that transplanted the stroppy child of Colette’s story into a 2020 scenario that must have struck a chord with bored house-confined children everywhere.
On the other hand (and I can sense a storm of Twitter rage approaching), I find most of Britten’s famed works for children increasingly fail to enchant young minds. I’m talking now about their atmosphere, not the quality of Britten’s craftsmanship. Where they are not patronising (Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Let’s Make an Opera), or plain weird (the ‘pickled boys’ episode in St Nicolas), they are dated and twee (Friday Afternoons, The Golden Vanity) or make vocal demands (Missa Brevis, A Ceremony of Carols) that put them beyond the reach of the vast majority of child performers.
Oddly, I think the British composers following in Britten’s footsteps have made a much better job of grabbing the attention of children. The doyen is surely Jonathan Dove. He has written fantastic community operas involving hundreds of kids. I still have a vivid memory of On Spital Fields, his 2005 musical kaleidoscope of East London’s many communities. But he has also composed operas for adult professionals that hugely appeal to youngsters. I’m thinking of
The Adventures of Pinocchio and The Enchanted Pig, two divertissements that deserve revivals every Christmas as upmarket alternatives to panto.
Just as gripping, for the 150 teenagers in the cast and those in the audience, was Garsington Opera’s terrific staging of Roxanna Panufnik’s The Silver
Birch, exploring the stress and trauma of modern warfare (yes, kids can deal with it). And I wish someone would revive David Bruce’s The Firework Maker’s Daughter, based on a cracking Philip Pullman story, which combines elements of The Magic Flute and The Wizard of Oz. I took a seven year-old who loved the wild, Irish-jig stomps, while I was tickled by the allusions to Purcell, Stravinsky and Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. Perfect for pretentious grown-ups and wide-eyed tiddlers alike!
Of course, anyone who has played in a youth orchestra – and there are millions of us – will attest that teenagers are just as likely to be enthralled by music that wasn’t written for kids as by music that was. There’s a lot to be said for the ‘throw them in at the deep end’ approach: expose children to the greatest music of all ages, preferably by performing it, and watch as their musical appetites take off in directions you would never have imagined.
The main thing is not to impose your own tastes, or hopes and dreams, on your offspring. I once interviewed Mstislav Rostropovich, the great Russian cellist, hours after my first son had been born. Slava had been told, and greeted me with a bear-hug. ‘Now your son cellist will be,’ he proclaimed. Nearly 20 years later I interviewed him again. ‘You were wrong about my son,’ I said. ‘He’s become the bass guitarist in a punk-rock band.’
Slava looked deflated for a moment, but then beamed at me. ‘It’s ok,’ he said. ‘Still bass clef!’
Expose children to the greatest music of all ages, and their musical appetites will take o