Creighton University

This CD was a revelation to me, through its 22 tracks, of the rich heritage of presentation of La Fontaine's fables as songs.  I enjoyed them!  Collaborators here are piano and four voices.  Lecocq's WL is an excellent example of contrasting wolf and lamb voices.  He also has a wonderfully dramatic finish to FC.  I found Offenbach's "Shepherd and Sea" eminently understandable.  The same goes for his GA.  Gounod has several voices, not necessarily in unison, working at once.  Caplet and de Manziarly are more "modern," that is, less pretty and perhaps predictable.  I enjoyed particularly Caplet's WL with its great closing line and de Manziarly's OF.  I found Van Parys more easily comprehensible in his FC, including the inserted "coi, coi, coi."  Trenet's GA, among the shortest offerings, seemed to me more playful than others.  An auditory treat!

33 tracks, listed on the back of the CD jewel-case label.  Marcelonis died of AIDS in Philadelphia in 1995.  This musical was "was a continual work in progress from High School until he was forty.  His artist friends came together and performed the play to standing room only audiences, sold out for its run" (Wikipedia).  The Wikipedia account of his life is touching.  It is not easy to match song and fable just by reading titles and listening to tracks.  Some of the more obvious connections are in "The Belly As an Animal"; "Earn Your Keep"; "We Want a King"; "The Heiffer and the Ox"; and "Death."

Crude animation for three stories: "The Prophet"; "The Fox and the Woodcutter"; and "The Mouse and the Frog."  The stories, each about 10 minutes long, expand their fables.  For the first, I lose contact with the fable.  The second and third are clear versions of traditional fables, though extended in Disneyesque fashion to include more exciting episodes.  The second fable goes for two-thirds before arriving at the fable.  How does the third make sense of the frog's ugly action?  Three monkeys appear between stories; I believe I have seen them exercise that function before.  This approach to cartoon presentation seems to love panning countryside in repetitive fashion.

Eight fables are performed quite exquisitely here, if the two that I enjoyed are any indication.  LM is well performed, with good voices and sound effects.  The lion seeks a nap in several places and finally finds the right one.  The chatty female mouse gets off a great appeal, concluding with the appeal to become a friend.  A week later she hears his roar and saves him.  FG is also well told.  Clearly articulated morals. 

As in the promotional CD done by the Sunday Telegraph, the Vivaldi background contributes, as do sound effects, and voice transformations from Lesser.  Naxos had used this same recording on an audio cassette in our collection from 2000 and for the Telegraph promotion.  Again there are 66 tracks.  The stories are kept brief, and they are both well fashioned and well narrated.  Of course there is a British accent.  Lesser creates contrasting voices well for the lamb and the crane in the first stories, which I enjoyed.  This may be the best simple CD recording of Aesop to recommend to listeners. 

The Vivaldi background contributes, as do sound effects, and voice transformations from Lesser.  Naxos used this same recording on an audio cassette in our collection from 2000, and they will release it again on a CD for sale.  66 tracks.  The stories are kept brief, and they are both well fashioned and well narrated.  Of course there is a British accent.  Lesser creates contrasting voices well for the lamb and the crane in the first stories, which I enjoyed.  This may be the best simple CD recording of Aesop to recommend to listeners. 

Guitar background.  Lively sung introductions to Aesop and to his life, followed by five stories 6 to 12 minutes in length.  CP, BW, AD, "The Monkey & the Donkey," and DS.  At the end there is a reprise of "Aesop, Alive and Well."  I listened to "Poor Crow" and "The Shepherd Boy."  Ferlatte continues to tell of Aesop's life between fables.  Narration moves easily into song.  The renditions are engaging.  For example, the dying laugh of the shepherd boy at others' expense is very well done.

Good readings without further accompaniment.  The cover illustration of TH is taken from Arthur Rackham.

Wow!  A full orchestra leads us, with a full chorus, into a narrator's energetic telling of the hungry wolf's approach to the waterhole.  "I'm a Lone Wolf" is a great lonely monologue-song!  A flirtatious donkey knows nothing of the wolf's eating intentions, even when he says she could use a little make-up, like ketchup!  When she understands, she sings "Why Me?" to a cha-cha rhythm.  This is perhaps the most professional musical presentation of Aesop I have run into.  He answers with "Nothing Personal."  He is just a wolf!  She mentions the nasty thorn in her hoof….  Aesop comes through!  She is just being herself!  The shepherd boy is just lonely.  He makes his cries in order to see another human face.  The recording has the chorus singing the same "To the Rescue" song more and more slowly with each of his several calls for help.  It is a delight to listen through this performance!

This is lovely contemporary orchestral and vocal music.  Beautifully, professionally executed.  Of course it is all in Armenian!  Three of these six fables are Aesopic in one way or another, although my sense from the texts offered here in English in the accompanying booklet is that they are more morality tales than fables.  "The Eagle and the Arrow" is straight from Aesop.  "The Ailing Lion and the Fox" is also straight from Aesop, though in this "Eastern" version it is a donkey's ears and heart that are in question.  In Western Europe, at issue was a deer's heart that the fox eats and then tells the lion that the deer had none.  In a switch from a different fable, the lion was told that he needed these things to cure his disease.  The young camels and donkeys ask their mothers why they have to work for food but the pigs do not.  The mothers answer that patience brings understanding.  The understanding comes on slaughter day for the pigs!  Aesop survives in a lot of ways in a lot of places!

"Charming Educational Stories for Ages 4 and Up!"  I agree.  Seven-year-old Asher meets Aesop and Aesop's father, and they start to tell him fables.  They wisely tell him early that there is no right answer to a story.  There are musical interludes leading into this encounter and filling in as Asher asks other people what they think a fable means and returns with his best "answer."  The last track in fact has a lyre playing for the donkey who cannot play it himself.  Track 20 brings Danielle, who recites a La Fontaine's DW section by section in French, and Aesop translates.  This version pleases me more than the one Aesop presented as his first fable.  I expected a more radical "modernization" of Aesop here.  I would say that his storytelling is here taken seriously for what it is.

Here are lively musical tracks, both vocal and purely instrumental, to accompany each of the booklet's eight fables.   For example, the song for "The Farmer and the Stork" stresses that bad company will hurt a person.  FG gets the repeated refrain "Hey, what do you say?  He didn't want it anyway."  This music is certainly upbeat!  The purely instrumental version of each would allow the students to sing to musical accompaniment.  The musical titles, listed on the CD, help communicate these lessons well.  "Nobody Believes a Liar" and "One Step at a Time" are good examples.  At first I listened to this disc without reference to its booklet and without seeing these titles, and I sometimes had to wonder which fable might be involved.

I taught Jonathan in a course probably called "Greek Literature" at Holy Cross College in the 1970's.   In a course in which students had to make some artwork in response to the literature we were reading, Jonathan made a wild oversized line-drawing of Jason making an indecent gesture to Medea with her children lying dead in the Sun-God's cart.  The crazy, many-viewpointed drawing featured a cameo of Fr. Carlson!  I displayed it proudly to years of subsequent students as I enlisted their artworks.  In this disc we hear six stories with excellent sound effects, music, and various voices: "Barkface and Rootnose"; "Big Fish Small Pond": "Fox & Crow"; "Rabbit & Turtle"; "Squeak & Roar"; and "Tailor's Tale".  The third, fourth, and fifth, are traditional Aesopic fables well told.  The first story is about competing seeds who, as trees, learn to work together.  Big fish learns that the big river has lots of threats in it and returns happy to the little pond.  In LM, the mouse spearheads a movement to help the lion, and then maybe "he will not be so mean."  The mouse helps when the lion has got a thorn in his paw.  In a second phase, the lion is caught in a hunter's net.  "Tailor's Tale" is a tale told for the fun of telling a tale.  Good work, Jonathan!  Your old teacher more than approves!

Here is a delightful rendition of six stories, the second of them with three different endings.  Alas, I do not find a tale that I would call a fable among them.  They are: "Ferdinand the Bull"; "The Rascally Rogue of the Beanstalk"; Rogue Endings A, B, C; "Rumpelstilskin"; "Adventure at Granny's"; "Prince Rooster"; "Three Little Pigs."  The stories are well told, with excellent musical complements.

Ten love songs.  The second is "Modern Fables." It is a challenge for me to put together.

A female British voice tells the stories, listed in their groups on the back cover of the clamshell.  The format of the clamshell front cover suggested that Jain had actually published a five-book series in 2010.  A bit of snooping online and I found and ordered the set, along with an enclosed CD.  Now let us see if this is the CD that comes.

Muthesius' portrayal of these fables and Märchen is delightful, with helpful musical background by Ismail Boulaghmal and wonderfully varied voices.  I wish we were told who did the verse translations of La Fontaine.  Kyber is new to me.  His stories are longer, more developed, and perhaps more modulated than most fables.  I listened to three and found them all delightful: "Der K.d.R."; "Der grosse Augenblick" and "Die Haselmaushochzeit." 

The special value of this set lies in the gifted British narrators and expansive development of the storylines.  The actors employ various voices within each fable and have sound effects and occasional musical background to help them.  I listened to the first two fables on each disc.  In this version of TH, the hare runs back to tell the tortoise that the race has started!  He then announces that he will take a nap, apparently near the starting line.  "Slow and steady is sometimes better than fast and flashy."  In OF, one of the mother frog's 247 children tells her of the ox.  She is overweight and hates exercise.  She does not make it all the way to see the ox, but whizzes around like a balloon and lands at the ox's feet.  Her mistake relied on her perception that "No creature in the pond is bigger than me."  The wolf in WC spends most of his time thinking of food.  He would love to try eating the moon and stars if he could.  A fishbone gets stuck.  This version of the story thus cleverly uses the river to introduce the heron as the wolf's savior.  "I didn't bite your head off: that is your reward!"  The "hee-haw" of the donkey in DLS gives him away to the fox.  This donkey had long wanted to be something else.  The other animals had laughed at him before and now they do again.  In something of a surprise, the other animals tell the donkey "We like you just as you are."

Twelve-year-old Henry, freshly chastised by his father as he brings home an old chest, finds the chest opening and beckoning to him.  The chest offers books with a quest.  Of course Henry opens one of the mysterious books and meets Aesop in a time warp.  Aesop challenges him to figure out the life lessons from five stories, and then he can escape.  Soon Henry has six legs and learns that he is a grasshopper and has to transition from easy summer to hungry winter.  Henry is dying and finds no life lesson to learn.  He fails his first test, and Aesop has to explain it to him.  I left Henry as a hare in the second story running like crazy.

This is a refreshing approach to the six fables offered.  I listened to and enjoyed the first three.  What a wide variety of emotions presented by the instruments and the human voices!  There are surprising, lively explorations of the stories here.  The demanding frog finally finds himself swallowed by chance by the ass to whom the frog has promised a reward.  TH is presented in terms of its aftermath conversation between the two contestants.  The fox in FC offers to teach the crow how to sing.  It helps to have the printed text to check as one listens to this fine CD!

Tom and I had corresponded as he was on his way to creating this E-Book and spoken CD.  He decided – wisely, I would say -- to use images from Milo Winter and Arthur Rackham.  My sense is that Tom's versions enter into the stories' details with a loving eye, and that Colin Hay renders the stories with a loving ear and voice.  Aesop keeps inspiring people to add their part!  This very nice work is a labor of love!