My Dad was unusual; he came from the Middle East (basically) when he was an adult, but he LOVED classical music passionately. So I grew up listening to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Vivaldi, Handel, Wagner, and others. We went to symphonies, ballet, and operas in NYC pretty often - the kind of childhood that would be unimaginably out of reach for a middle-class family today, even if anyone was interested in that sort of thing any more.
Dad couldn't keep rock & roll out of our lives forever, but he made sure we had a good grounding in the classics. One of the ways he did that was with three LPs by the TaleSpinners for Children: The Story of Bach, The Story of Mozart, and The Story of Beethoven.
These were wonderful dramatizations for children of the lives of the great composers, including lots of excerpts from their music. The voice actors were British, and their work was outstanding; the stories moved me profoundly.
For a while most of the TaleSpinners albums were available as downloadable MP3s online, but sadly that site seems to be gone. Luckily the Internet Archive still has copies of the site, and you can download the albums from there. I couldn't recommend them more strongly for children, but they're great for adults, too!
And it's not just the three albums I mentioned above that are on the site. There are also many others, most of them children's stories such as Robin Hood, Aladdin, Pinocchio (with Maggie Smith), Don Quixote (with Donald Pleasance)...there are 69 albums altogether.
I don't know how long they'll stay up, so personally I downloaded them all. They were never released on CD, as far as I know.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130813045512/http://www.artsreformation.com/talespinners/
#Vinyl #Classical #Music #Children