BACKSTAGE WITH…
Author and presenter Zeb Soanes
What can the audience at Gaspard’s Christmas in Edinburgh on 23 December expect to hear and see?
You will hear me narrating the story of Gaspard’s Christmas and see the book’s artist James Mayhew illustrating it live on stage, as the Royal Scottish National Orchestra perform a specially commissioned score by Jonathan Dove. Like Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, the story is completely interwoven in the music and the various characters are represented by particular themes and instruments: Gaspard the fox is a bassoon; Peter the cat is a clarinet; Flinty the dog is a horn; and Flinty’s owner, Honey, is a harp.
Without giving too much away, can you give us an idea of what the story of Gaspard’s Christmas is about?
It all centres on Gaspard and the other animals discovering a homeless man, which Peter the cat is convinced is Father Christmas who has fallen out of his sleigh. The animals manage to get him to safety and Peter is convinced that, in the process, they have saved Christmas.
This is not the first Gaspard musical adventure, is it?
No. When James and I got together to discuss working on the first Gaspard book, Gaspard the Fox, we acknowledged that we had both worked with orchestras as an illustrator and narrator respectively and said that it would be marvellous if one of our Gaspard stories could be adapted musically. It was then the Three Choirs Festival who set the ball rolling by making the approach to Jonathan Dove when I told them that I would like to work with him – the resulting Gaspard’s Foxtrot was intended for the 2020 Three Choirs Festival but Covid got in the way. When it did get its live premiere the following year, performed by the Philharmonia, James did his illustrations via a Zoom link from his home in Suffolk. So Gaspard’s Christmas will be the first time we have worked together in this way live on stage.
And tell us a little about the real-life inspiration for the Gaspard series of books and concerts…
It was in 2017 that I first encountered a fox near my home in London, and I just found myself relating to him. It was only when ‘he’ started to get fat and teats began to appear that I realised that Gaspard was in fact a vixen. However, by then the first book was already on its way to the printers, so it was too late to do anything about it!