The concept of opening orchestral music to younger audiences is great, but often overly complex execution reduced the accessibility

The Wolf, the Duck and the Mouse is a sweet, slightly quirky children’s story about a mouse and a duck that live in a wolf’s stomach. The story by Mac Barnett and the wonderful illustrator Jon Klassen is brought to stage by the Aurora orchestra and composer Martin Suckling.

Giving children the opportunity to learn about orchestral music is so important and the format of using known storybooks gives the opportunity to highlight the joy of music. It is clear that the Aurora orchestra, whose mission is to open up orchestral music to everyone, and Laura Stubbs, the narrator of this performance, have undertaken their Kodaly or Orff training to cleverly use sounds and interactivity to capture children’s imagination, however, I am unsure if this was ever truly tested with children. 

The performance started with the attention grabbing “sounds of the forest.” Firstly, they asked the audience to stand and silently act out leaves falling to the ground, perceptively leveraging the silence to create anticipation and suspense. Next, the audience was split into sections and asked to replicate the sounds of different instruments by clapping or tapping their knees. The issue with this exercise was the timings were quite complex and because Stubbs was acting the activity out rather than explaining it, it wasn’t initially clear that  different sections of the audience were doing different actions. Although there was a lead for each section on stage, it wasn’t an obvious rhythm which meant the satisfying cohesion of these types of clap along exercises was not achieved across the audience. 

A number of similar interactive audience elements were introduced at different stages of the performance, which is important for a younger audience. However, each one had the similar issue that it was a bit too challenging for the target age group. The dance moves were rhythmically challenging and when asked to sing different parts of a chord, the chosen chord was quite discordant. Whilst this was in keeping with the tone of the music, it meant that, again, the audience participation didn’t easily make sense for ages 4-8, thus feeling more frustrating than fun. 

Suckling’s composition cleverly captured the different characters in the story. The mouse being portrayed by a piccolo, the duck by an oboe and the wolf by a trombone. Each instrumentalist dressed in line with their character to help the imagination on these points. The conversational sections between the piccolo and the oboe personified the story well. The talent in the orchestra of being able to act along to the narration whilst playing instruments was fantastic. At a later point in the story a bassoon was used for the hunter, and the performer stalking around the stage pretending his instrument was a gun and then going on to play his accompanying melody was very enjoyable. 

Whilst the composition emulated the quirky storyline well, I felt that more could have been done to draw in the audience to the fact this was a musical accompaniment of a story. The show dived straight into the story telling without acknowledging the excitement of the ensemble to entertain the audience. By not taking time to acknowledge the orchestra at the beginning, other than a cursory introduction of the conductor, the music felt like an afterthought instead of a focal point. At the end of the performance Stubbs introduced each member of the orchestra and if time had been taken to do this at the start, it would have shifted the tone, and helped to draw the audience in to the piece of music. 

The additional element to this performance was the projection of Klass’s illustrations on a screen above the stage. It felt odd that there were only about three of these images across the performance at sporadic points, rather than having them throughout. The illustrations are so interesting that it felt the audience were short changed by not having them throughout the performance. Again, because of the younger nature of the audience, visual prompts alongside the other elements are so important, and it felt like these were really missing.

Overall, it was clear that all of the performers were talented and wanted to engage the younger audience. However, the complex nature of the participation, the challenging music that lacked explanation, and the missing visuals meant it didn’t quite achieve what it set out to do. Simplifying and slowing down the performance would do a lot to truly show children how brilliant orchestral music can be.