Animals, Cats, Peter, and the Wolf

Alexander Armstrong has been recording an album with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, in which he narrates several pieces of classical music.

Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf tells a children's story while the orchestra illustrates it. A young boy, Peter, and his friends, the farmyard animals, capture a big grey wolf that comes out of the forest.

Carnival of the Animals, by Saint-Saëns, is a humorous musical suite of 14 movements, each representing a different animal or animals. In 1949, Ogden Nash wrote a set of humorous verses to accompany each movement.

20th Century British composer Alan Rawsthorne wrote orchestral pieces to accompany poems from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, the same poems that inspired Andrew Lloyd Webber's Cats. This composition has only been recorded once before, in the 1950s.

The album comes out in the autumn, and Xander will be taking part in a live performance of the pieces in Liverpool.