A MUSICIAN has carried a piano up a mountain in Thailand to play classical tunes to blind and handicapped elephants.

Paul Barton, a former music teacher at Ayton Friends School, in Great Ayton, North Yorkshire, said performing The Elephant from Saint-Saens’ Carnival Of The Animals to the giant creatures in the Kanchanaburi mountains had been a 50th birthday present to himself.

Mr Barton also taught eurhythmy - the interpretation of the rhythm of musical compositions - at the Camphill Village Trust in Botton, on the North York Moors, before moving to Thailand.

He travelled for four hours from his home in Bangkok with an upright piano in a taxi to reach the mountains, in the area made famous by the Bridge Over The River Kwai movie.

Mr Barton said four Mahout locals helped him carry the piano up a mountain to a plateau where the elephants from a nearby sanctuary were having breakfast.

He said: “Elephants have often had a hard working life in Asia, so the idea of a human carrying something that was quite a burden for him along to a mountain for an elephant while he was having his breakfast seemed a little less eccentric that it might at first appear.

“I have a really bad back, but I wanted to make the effort so I could feel like I had undergone a personal challenge.”

The Royal Academy of Arts graduate said he got the idea to play for blind elephants after reading Charles Darwin asked his wife to play for earthworms in a jar on top of her piano for scientific research.

He said: “I have noticed other animals do react to music when you play the piano - dogs will either come under your piano if you are playing well, or run away if you are playing badly, and elephants are very intelligent animals.

“I was very suprised when a blind elephant called Clara stopped eating. He took a big mouthful of barna grass and as soon as I played the Slow Movement 2 from the Beethoven Pathetique Sonata he stopped munching.

Throughout the piece he kept the barna grass in his mouth without eating it.”

Mr Barton hopes to raise enough money to install an electric fence at the Elephants World sanctuary.