Music: Alice in Audioland

Children’s recordings used to find some of their finest inspirations up in tree houses and down in rabbit holes. Nowadays, they enviously twirl around the television screen. Nobody makes a bigger noise on Kidiscs than Yogi Bear or Huckleberry Hound. Accordingly, holiday record-shop browsers this year will meet the likes of Professor Ludwig von Drake (Disneyland), Quick Draw McGraw (Golden), Popeye the Sailor Man (Peter Pan) and Felix the Cat (Play Hour)—all of them shouting, giggling and bleating out jokes and songs with hectic abandon. But the children’s market still offers more than a few moments of genuine magic on microgroove. Among the best:

Between Birthdays (Peter Ustinov; Columbia). A delightful recording of Tchaikovsky’s 16-piece children’s suite for piano, arranged for orchestra by Andre Kostelanetz and provided with a whimsical series of Ustinov-narrated introductory poems by Ogden Nash:

Hurdy-gurdy organ grinder

Lost his wife and couldn’t find her,

Found her in a gingerbread house

Waltzing with a waltzing mouse.

He locked them in his hurdy-gurdy

Which gave the plot of Aïda, Verdi.

Tom Glozer: Children’s Concert (Wonderland). With the aid of some infectiously gay patter and a sunny, open voice, Singer Glazer plays on a squealing suburban audience as expertly as he strums on the guitar. Thirteen selections, including Hush, Little Baby, Jimmie Crack Corn, Skip to My Lou.

Treasure Island (Sir Donald Wolfit; Wonderland). Stevenson’s adventure classic takes its tone from Long John Silver, who in illustration and dramatization too often emerges as merely quaint. Sir Donald makes him properly crafty, rapacious and murderous (“Wait, is what I say, but when the time comes—kill”).

Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories and Other Tales (Boris Karloff; Caedmon). Actor Karloff, in a voice as rich as a ripe persimmon, unwinds with “infinite resource and sagacity” the mad Kiplingesque logic featuring the rhinoceros with a three-button skin and the Parsee from whose hat the rays of the sun were reflected “in more than Oriental splendor.”

West Indian Folk Songs for Children (Lord Invader; Folkways). Merrily We Roll Along, Ring a Ring a Rosie and other favorites of the hopscotch set tilted to the unaccustomed rhythms of a Kingston street band. The performances are uniformly expert, the moods just exotically enough flavored to strike new echoes off a child’s mind.

Children’s Songs (Ed McCurdy; Tradition). Singer McCurdy pays his listeners the highest compliment that a grownup can pay a child: he enters their world on even terms. In a manner as comfortable as a man lounging over the back fence, he chats about Billy Boy, The Old Woman and the Pig, Froggy Went A’Courting.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit (Vivien Leigh; Wonderland). Actress Leigh, with prams, St. James’s Park and starched generations of nannies in her voice, makes her Peter sound a little like a nephew down on the holidays from school. Cozy without being cute.

Babes in Toyland (Disneyland). Victor Herbert’s 1903 relic in a skillfully cut performance that goes off like a string of Roman candles. A handsome introduction to the man who made the Broadway musical work.

Danny Kaye Tells Six Stories from Faraway Places (Golden). One of the world’s most inveterate collectors of tales offers some fine new ones from Scotland, Ethiopia, Sweden, Russia, Viet Nam. Narrator Kaye is as good as he ever was at making his gaudily disjointed visions flower in the listener’s mind.

Carl Sandburg’s Poems for Children (Caedmon). Poet Sandburg, in his keening, wonder-struck voice, reads a selection of the short poems that have fueled his public recitations for years. The quieter ones—Buffalo Dusk, Young Sea, Early Moon—are fused with a sense of mystery that any receptive child can feel.

East of Flumdiddle (Playhouse). Those masters of mythification, Jim Copp and Ed Brown, are off on another of their nonsensical crusades (“Oh, never have we ever been on such a trip as this/ We’re headed for Flumdiddle, but/ We don’t know where it is”), this time accompanied by titled tin pans, AWOL toy soldiers, and that masterly comic creation The Hen With the Low IQ.