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Elmo and the Orchestra

With all the recent consciousness-raising campaigns about the importance of music education, it's about time somebody spread the gospel at the preschool level. Enter the Sesame Street gang with Elmo and the Orchestra, Sony Wonder's companion title to its movement-of-the-moment targeted video Elmo's Musical Adventure: The Story of Peter and the Wolf. Here, Elmo fans giggle along as the furry red guy and Big Bird gab their way through a wide-ranging selection of classic compositions. The venue is Bird's nest, where the Birdapest Orchestra, confidently led by conductor Leonard Birdseed, tackles snippets of Mozart's Symphony No. 40, Paganini's 24 Caprices, Chopin's Minute Waltz, Haydn's Surprise Symphony, Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, and 14 famous others. During the pair's daffy, Sesame-style running dialogue, Elmo gets a grip on the four sections of an orchestra; delights in discovering that music, even the kind without words, sometimes tells a story (especially when the story is about animals, as in Rimsky-Korsakov's Flight of the Bumblebee); and, with great enthusiasm, sits in for Mr. Birdseed as conductor for a few performances. Silliness aside, the 2- to 5-year-old set stands to learn a confidence-building tidbit or two about the often stuffy-seeming classical genre from this CD. Caregivers bent on working the music into their kids' cultural repertoire can count on a less guarded approach to complicated (if masterful) compositions when they scoop up this record. And then there's the fun factor--as with most Sesame releases, it's through the roof, so the storyline's treetop setting couldn't be more suitable. --Tammy La Gorce