Before screens filled every quiet moment, a voice, a record player, and an orchestra could create an entire world.
In this edition of Listen with Gilbert, we open The Listening Room, a new Chesterton Radio series rediscovering the records, voices, music, and stories that taught generations how to listen.
We begin with Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf—the ingenious 1936 “symphonic tale” in which a flute becomes a bird, an oboe a duck, a clarinet a cat, French horns a wolf, and the strings a young boy named Peter.
We’ll listen again to the great tradition of narrated recordings, with particular attention to Peter Ustinov’s performance with Herbert von Karajan and the Philharmonia Orchestra and Boris Karloff’s recording with Mario Rossi and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. Different voices reveal just how much of Peter and the Wolf is not simply classical music, but radio drama played by an orchestra.
There’s a personal reason for beginning here. During the WSND-FM years at Notre Dame, Fr. Robert Griffin, C.S.C., played narrated musical works alongside stories on his Children’s Hour. I remember his playing the Ustinov Peter and the Wolf, and Karloff as well, and later the Carol Channing recording.
That memory leads to a larger question at the heart of The Listening Room: What did the age of radio and records understand about listening, storytelling, and imagination that we may have lost?
The Listening Room will return to recordings such as Carnival of the Animals, Tubby the Tuba, classic spoken-word albums, narrated literature, and other treasures from an era when listening itself was part of the adventure.
LISTEN TO THE CLASSIC RECORDINGS
Peter Ustinov / Herbert von Karajan / Philharmonia Orchestra
Boris Karloff / Mario Rossi / Vienna State Opera Orchestra
