If you’re looking for a musical stocking-filler for the under-12s in your life, relax: you’ve found it. Here, bright-eyed and tail wagging, is Saint-Saëns’s musical menagerie – evoked with warmth and real finesse by Britain’s best-known musical family and interspersed with new poems by the War Horse man, Michael Morpurgo, who shares the narration with Olivia Colman and Mariatu, the youngest of the Kanneh-Mason siblings.

The friendly lions and airborne kangaroos of Emma Chichester Clark’s cover art set the mood. Morpurgo knows his audience too well to patronise them; his animals are wry, self-assertive, remarkably educated (the donkeys compare themselves to Achilles) and his hint of a burr, paired with Colman’s measured, kindly tones, dispels any possibility of archness. Musically: well, grown-ups who are primarily interested in the score will need to look elsewhere. The 45 short tracks here form an interwoven narrative, with Morpurgo actually interrupting the music in ‘Fossils’.

But if you’re on board for the ride, the Kanneh-Masons (plus some distinguished friends) play Saint-Saëns’s jeu d’esprit with a sensitivity that might verge on the wistful if it wasn’t balanced by such evident fantasy and joy. Isata, on piano, is the most striking presence: sweeping into the big climaxes with terrific verve and finding Impressionist undertones amid the clucks and roars. The clarinet of Mark Simpson (no less) adds haunting colours to the ‘Cuckoo’, and Toby Hughes’s bass gives a velvety glow to ‘Tortoises’. Sheku plays ‘The Swan’ with eloquent poise.

And then there’s the bonus: Morpurgo’s short ecological fable Grandpa Christmas, illustrated with lollipops by Bartók, Rimsky-Korsakov and (exquisitely) Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Apparently the Kanneh-Masons used to listen to Dame Edna Everage’s Peter and the Wolf (Naxos) before school. This is rather less outrageous, but it’s surely destined to create just as many happy memories.