Of Food And Love: Carnival Of The Animals

Where do I begin?  Should I repeat our love to you all for classical music?  Maybe not.  Well, maybe I should.  If you’ve never exposed your children to classical music, I couldn’t recommend it more highly.  A great place to start would be Peter and the Wolf.  The story of a young boy and his adventure hunting for a wolf.  Only, the parts are all played by instruments.  This piece of music is played so often in our home that Cylas knows which parts the instruments are playing for the story.  We will sit down and I will tell the story as the bassoon smoothly sings out the part of the Grandfather and little Peter is played by the orchestra.
Well, the local University was hosting a performance of Camille Saint-Saens’Carnival of the Animals, very similar to Peter and the Wolf, and I just knew we had to go.

But leave it to me to get all confused and show up a half hour after the show started.  I can tell you that Cylas was very, very disappointed in me and chastised me the whole way back.

Cylas was so enthralled with the music and when the part of the swan was being played, much to his chagrin,  it was a violin instead of the cello.  Not that he has anything against the violin, because he informed me that he wants to learn to play it, but when we looked up The Swan’s song on Youtube, it was being played by a young boy on a cello and he loved it.

Roma liked the show too, so much that she chose the quietest part of the performance, like in between pieces, to shriek out, “Papa!”  *sigh*  A few giggles around us, and I’m glad it was dark because I shoved her low and clamped her mouth shut, so embarrassed.

What made this performance enjoyable, even for the people who didn’t care much for classical music, was the whitty rhymes the MC inserted in between each section.  He described the pianos, who obviously aren’t animals but they are LIKE animals because “like snakes, they use scales to get around” and they’re “like peacocks, they look great but they sound terrible and they’re like hermit crabs they play better alone.”  Everyone chuckled.
We were there for maybe 15 minutes before the performance came to a close.  They polished it off with The Flight Of The Bumblee, not a part of the score for the Carnival but very appropriate.
The performance was only an hour long and we missed nearly all of it.  Uhg!!!  I score a zero for mother of the year on this one.