# Music with narration



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I've recently been enjoying Christopher Palmer's arrangements of Walton's film music to _Henry V_ and _Hamlet_. They have prominent parts for a narrator, who tells some of the story in Shakespeare's words. So what other works can people think of which includes a narrator? Apart from some of the more obvious examples, like Prokofiev's _Peter and the Wolf_, Britten's _A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra_, Saint-Saens' _Carnival of the Animals_ or Schoenberg's _Survivor from Warsaw_...

I'm interested in more dramatic/theatrical works, like the Walton...


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

Elgar wrote some music during the first world war with narration. A piece called _Carillon_ comes to mind, and another called _Une voix dans le desert_. This last has a particularly haunting soprano part in the middle, between two sections of narration. I have a version exquisitely sung by Teresa Cahill - let me find it....

Here we are:


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## Lang (Sep 30, 2008)

Three which immediately come to mind are Schoenberg's Kol Nidre, William Walton's Facade and Honegger's Le Roi David


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Thanks for the opportunity for me to once again champion *Tobias Picker's *_The Encantadas (for narrator and orchestra)_ featuring Sir John Gielgud as narrator and using Herman Melville quotes describing the Galapagos islands.. This is a wonderful piece that sounds sometimes romantic, sometimes modern.

There is an all too brief excerpt here:
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=43:86995


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## shsherm (Jan 24, 2008)

The most frequently performed work for narrator and orchestra in the US is " A Lincoln Portrait" by Aaron Copland.


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## Elgarian (Jul 30, 2008)

Vaughan Williams did some of this sort of stuff too. There's some narration in _Sinfonia Antartica_, though that's not really integral to the music. However, his _Oxford Elegy_ fits the bill very well.


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