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Carnival of the Animals

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Detail of the cover illustration for Carnival of the Animals featuring Justine Clarke, Jay Laga’aia, and Georgie Parker.
ABC Kids celebrities Justine Clarke, Jay Laga’aia, and Georgie Parker on parade with the Carnival of the Animals.

This recording of Camille Saint-Saëns's children's classic Carnival of the Animals features poems with an Australian twist by the playwright Nick Enright. They are read by ABC Kids celebrities Justine Clarke, Jay Laga’aia, and Georgie Parker.

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About Carnival of the Animals

Camille Saint-Saëns didn’t want anyone to hear his Carnival of the Animals, except for a few of his good friends – at least, not while he was still alive. He was a composer who took his reputation very seriously, and he knew that the Carnival would make people laugh – as indeed it does, thanks to all the musical jokes he worked into it! Saint-Saëns was on holidays at the time, taking time out from writing his massive (and very serious) Organ Symphony. Relaxing in a small village in Austria, he created these musical snapshots for the sheer fun of it.

He originally wrote his ‘Grand Zoological Fantasy’ for a small group of instruments, just two violins and one each of viola, cello, double bass, flute, piccolo and clarinet, plus a few surprises: a xylophone, two pianos, and a glass harmonica – a bizarre instrument that produces its sound in much the same way as a damp finger rubbing the edge of a wine glass. Nowadays it’s usually performed by a full orchestra, adding even more colour to Saint-Saëns’ brilliant characterisations.

Sometimes it’s the sounds of the instruments themselves which paint the picture: the double bass doubling as an elephant, quicksilver ripples from the pianos in ‘Aquarium’, or the clattering of fossil bones from the xylophone. Sometimes it’s the shape of the music: hopping kangaroos, elegantly gliding swans, trilling birds. And sometimes Saint-Saëns slips in musical jokes to underline the point: the tortoise, for example, trundles along to the strains of Offenbach’s famous can-can in super slow motion. 

When Saint-Saëns died, in 1935, his Carnival was at last set free to delight the wider world. The idea of putting words to the music came in 1949, when the American poet Ogden Nash wrote a set of humorous verse to introduce each movement; the music still stands as a piece of ‘pure’ music but it has become a real tradition to perform the Carnival with poetry accompaniment. Forty years after Nash, Australian playwright Nick Enright was inspired to create a new set of poems, with a distinctly contemporary and Australian flavour. (The birds in his aviary, for example, are boobooks, lorikeets and cockatoos; his swans are black swans; and Saint-Saëns’ original ‘speedy animal’, the central Asian onager or wild donkey, is transformed into our local sprint champion, the emu.) These poems, commissioned by the ABC, have now become classics in their own right, with Enright’s almost physical feel for the taste and feel of words and sounds perfectly matching Saint-Saëns’ subtle skill with a musical paint-brush.

From the CD booklet of Carnival of the Animals: A Parade of Kids' Classics

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