Narrators, like humour, are notoriously difficult to integrate into musical works. For every successful endeavour – Schoenberg rather had the knack, as in Gurrelieder, A Survivor from Warsaw and the Ode to Napoleon – the failures are legion. Works such as Britten’s Young Person’s Guide and Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf don’t really count as the narration is not really integrated into the scores and can be omitted.

Jon Deak (b1943), former double-bassist with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, is a composer who has clearly embraced the genre, as this unusual and enterprising release from Naxos reveals. The four works featured here date from 1982 – BB Wolf – to 1991, when The Snow Queen Finale and The Legend of Spuyten Duyvil were composed. The formats are very different, BB Wolf (An Apologia) scored for Deak to declaim while playing the bass unaccompanied, Bye-Bye! (1987) a more complex ‘tribute to the immigrants of America’ for flute and piano, where both players double as speakers, and the two orchestral works where conductor Marin Alsop also narrates.

Each piece works quite well – Deak is an efficient and accomplished composer – though it strikes me that in each case the impact of the music is greater for being seen and heard live. There is an immediacy to the writing that does not fully translate on disc, especially in his apologia for the perhaps not-so-villainous wolf, BB Wolf, where seeing Deak perform this live would be more compelling. To varying degrees the same applies to the other pieces, which employ instrumental and vocal effects that are better seen as well as heard. The expressive targets are not always comedic: The Legend of Spuyten Duyvil is a tragic tale and The Snow Queen Finale is emotively ambiguous. The performances are all well executed and well recorded.