Price: $18.37

A children’s introduction to Beethoven, this is the story of a young boy called Christoph who lives in 1820s Vienna. After his father’s death, his mother takes in a lodger who Christoph thinks is a madman - eccentric, unkempt in the extreme and constantly making a racket in his room. He writes to his uncle to complain, and the story continues in the form of letters between the two of them. The boy’s initial hostility towards the lodger (none other than Ludwig Van Beethoven) softens and eventually, as the premiere of the 9th symphony approaches, they kinda become friends.

Beethoven’s music underscores the text throughout - symphonies 5-9, the Moonlight and Pathetique sonatas and lots more. The music isn’t separate from the story, it’s more like the soundtrack - I guess the theory is that your child (and you) will come to know and love the tunes by osmosis. It’s hard to tell how well the theory has worked on Isabelle - I did try to see how she’d get on listening to the 5th symphony on its own one day and was amazed at how quiet she was being until I realised she had fallen asleep.

She really loves this CD though, whatever about the theory. On our first listen in the car during our summer holidays she dozed off halfway through and we thought it was obviously too old for her and were trying to decide what older kid to pass it on to (it didn’t help either that Niamh took against the boy narrator, Christoph, because he was “a whinger”). When she woke up she surprised us by demanding to continue listening, and then demanding the album regularly (along with Peter and the Wolf) all through the holiday (and since).

The story really draws you in after a while (even Niamh got to like Christoph eventually) - it’s fiction, of course, but you feel like you’re getting a real insight into the composer’s life and times - and naturally the music is fantastic. So while I can’t guarantee that your children will be able to tell the 7th symphony from the 6th after listening to this, if they’re anything like mine they’ll enjoy listening to it (Isabelle grandly declared that this is the third best CD ever, after Rompe and Mamma Mia) and you might too.

Price: $13.61

The central children’s theatre in Moscow commissioned Sergei Prokofiev to write this to cultivate “musical tastes in children from the first years of school”, and it’s gone on to become pretty much the children’s classical music classic. Composed for narrator and orchestra, it’s the story of a young boy outsmarting everyone and catching a wolf. Each character has its own tune played on a particular instrument - flute for the bird, strings for Peter, horns for the wolf, etc.  - and the tunes re-appear throughout the piece as the story progresses. I think listening to this as a kid is where I got the idea that on oboe sounds like a duck (which, now that I think of it, it doesn’t really all that much).

This particular recording is narrated by Dame Edna Everage and she does a wonderfully dramatic job of it - her “LOOK OUT!” when Peter spots the cat stalking his friend the bird nearly made Isabelle leap out of her car seat.  The orchestra is great too - they play with relish, and the strings in particular are very rich-sounding, even on our very dodgy car stereo  (we have to copy CDs to tape because there’s no CD player in the car).

The music itself might not be what you’d expect from a 20th century composer - it’s very melodic, and I was amazed to find I could still sing along with most of it despite not having heard it since my own childhood. Peter’s and the cat’s tunes are the real stand-outs, both of which I’m sure everyone in my office knows now from me whistling them going up and down the stairs. The pieces are short enough for young attention spans and the story keeps Isabelle engaged, so it’s ideal for the car - we brought it on holiday with us a while ago, and between this and the Classical Kids CD “Beethoven Lives Upstairs” Isabelle was kept absorbed for hours.

Also on the CD is “Babar the Elephant” by Francis Poulenc, another story with musical interludes. The story - about a little elephant who, when his mother is shot by a hunter, goes to live in a town where he wears clothes and drives a car, eventually driving it home to the forest where he, out of the blue, becomes king - is utterly bizarre, like one of the crazy stream-of-consciousness stories Isabelle makes up herself. The music is, mostly, less accessible than Peter - the harmonies more astringent and the melodies less hummable. That’s not to say that I don’t like it - it reminds me of Stravinsky’s ballets a bit, which I love, but it’s inclined to make Isabelle fall asleep.

Then right at the end is Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra”, which is a more explicitly educational introduction to the different orchestral instruments, but we seldom make it this far before Isabelle demands to go back and listen to the Peter story again.

Price: $12.25

Isabelle has always been fairly interested in classical music - she calls it “ballet music” and, seeing as she’s planning to be a ballerina when she grows up (as well as a princess and a power ranger), she often requests it so she can practice her ballet dancing. Or, rather, practice a kind of dancing she’s dreamed up herself that she calls “ballet”, since she’s never been to a ballet lesson (yet) and has never actually seen the real thing. It looks fairly convincing to me, I must say, but I’ve never been to a lesson or seen a ballet myself, so I guess my opinion doesn’t count for much.

Anyway, her aunt Dervilia, who’s studying music in university, bought her this book-and-CD when the two of them were about to go on a long car journey, and it took her interest to a whole new level. Bedtime stories went out the window for a while, instead she preferred to sit and listen to a few tunes from this while looking at the book (and asking me incessant questions, like “why was Tchaikovsky sad?” and “why did Beethoven have twenty children?”), and she’ll happily sit and listen to the whole hour-plus if you give her a chance. Her favourites change regularly - John Adams was an early one, then she fixated on Handel’s “Fireworks” for a while, and lately it’s been Grieg’s “Hall of the Mountain King”. She kindly concedes to put Stravinsky on for me because she knows I especially like him. Even now, a good few months later, we probably listen to a chunk from the book together at least once a week, and it works really well as a wind-down if she’s got herself over-excited or just needs to sit down for a while.

There’s some really clever things about this package. The book is basically a picture book - colourful, animal-based action-packed illustrations with little snippets of information on each composer or instrument - and it’s perfect for engaging a little mind that might otherwise drift while listening to instrumental music. The music is in 3-minute chunks, which makes the whole thing easily digestable for kids (and their parents), and most of it is great - Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (you know, the kinda scary organ music that goes “DEDEDE dededededuuuuuuude”), one of Brahm’s Hungarian Dances, a lovely little Mozart piano sonata, etc., etc. Most people will find one or two familiar tunes here, even if you don’t listen to classical music - and if you don’t, this is a great introduction for an adult too.