Not Now, Bernard is an all-time classic story by David McKee, set to music by Bernard Hughes with melodic charm and a subversive sense of fun. Alexander Armstrong recounts it along with companion piece Isabel's Noisy Tummy as well as Hughes's The Knight Who Took All Day, which challenges chivalric convention with its subversive story of female empowerment.
The Orchestra of the Swan raise a riot of sound in Malcolm Arnold's Toy Symphony, complete with quail cuckoo, guard's whistle and gloriously irritating toy trumpets. The album's mood darkens in John Ireland's haunting melodrama Annabel Lee, a spine-tingling setting of Edgar Allan Poe's final poem presented here in Bernard Hughes' specially arranged chamber version, before Armstrong breezes through Judith Weirs brilliant Thread!, an early work inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry's cartoonish images.
Not Now Bernard and Other Stories is released on 7th February. It is available from Amazon and all usual sources.
