A fable in music commissioned by Aurora Orchestra with the support of the Vaughan Williams Foundation
Instrumentation: orchestra and narrator
Duration: c.25’
First Performance: Aurora Orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Collon, directed by Poppy Burton-Morgan, at Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London, as part of Imagine Children’s Festival, on 4 March 2023
The Wolf, the Duck and the Mouse
Whenever I travel to London to meet my publisher, I always pop around the corner to the London Review Bookshop to pick up a little present for my daughters. On one such occasion in the summer of 2019 I happened upon Barnett and Klassen’s The Wolf, the Duck and the Mouse, and knowing my children to be firm admirers of Klassen’s ‘Hat’ trilogy I had no hesitation in making the purchase before hopping on the train back North, no need even to open the cover.
So it wasn’t until the following day, having read the book half-a-dozen times with my younger daughter, that I realised this story was a sequel (of sorts) to Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. How else would a talking duck come to be resident in a wolf’s belly if not by way of the earlier musical (mis-)adventure?
Consequently, I became fixated on the idea of creating musical versions of Klassen and Barnett’s wolf and friends, following the model of Prokofiev. As with Peter and the Wolf, the characters in this story are associated with different instruments of the orchestra. The duck (aloof, slightly aristocratic) is represented by the cor anglais; the skittish mouse by the piccolo. The sorrowful wolf is paired with the trombone, and late on a pipe-smoking hunter puffs through the bassoon.
These animal-instrumentalists provide the melodies for a fable-in-music in which no one is eaten or captured or taken to the zoo, but in which songs of despair give way to fabulous mealtimes, crises lead to joyful dances, and predatory instinct is subverted in favour of inter-species collaboration. In this way the secret behind one of the natural world’s great mysteries is revealed. . .