Compact Disks

This is the first time, I believe, that I have sat and listened to these renderings.  They are delightful.  The music moves wonderfully in coordination with the text of La Fontaine.  The silent moment, for example, in "Shepherd and Sea" comes at the time when the former flock owner has lost everything at sea and must return now to be a hired shepherd.  The contrast in voices in "Cobbler and Financier" is also engaging.  Likewise, the choice of phrases to be repeated supports well what is going on in the text.  Besides the title pieces, there are five other offerings on this 50-minute disc.  Winner of the award "Grand Prix du Disque."

This offering of six fables of La Fontaine has as its chief feature that it uses different singers for each fable.  The fable accompaniment seems limited to piano.  There seems to be some difficulties with the transcription of the French and its translation into English.  I enjoyed FC, GA, and MM.

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 predictable and "pretty."  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!

This disc surprised me.  Rap turns out to be a great way to understand La Fontaine!  The rap artist presents each fable quite briskly.  Jump on the bus, because it is leaving fast and moving fast!  Each fable is given first in its mixed form, with music and text, and then only the musical part is played – perhaps so that one can oneself rap?  I could not identify what is titled "Le Grenouille Et Le Boeuf."  It seems not to be La Fontaine's "Le Grenouille qui veut se faire aussi grosse que le Boeuf." 

This disc is a very pleasant surprise.  The texts of La Fontaine are presented verbatim, if not always at the same level of intensity or audibility.  But each text is encased in a true chanson, with its own rhythm and persuasion.  These chansons move!  I enjoyed the first four immensely, not least the conjunction of the third and fourth: "The Rat and the Elephant" and "The Frog Who Wanted to Be as Big as An Ox."  They are very much about the same pretentiousness.  The voices here work together wonderfully!  An accompanying little booklet with clever illustrations offers a key refrain from each song.

This is a lovely CD, perhaps the one I would most recommend for articulate presentation of the original French fables.  I listened to the first four of the twenty fables – FC, GA, TH, and WL – and enjoyed them thoroughly.  WL is read, for example, with a strong sense of pace that fits the fable.  There is an appropriately understated musical background and a few sound effects.  The final "Theme of the Contes" is a rather haunting instrumental piece. 

Here is another highly creative development of La Fontaine's fables.  I listened to and enjoyed the first three: "La Montagne Qui Accouche"; OR; and "The Coach and the Fly."  The last of these was, for me, the most clearly articulated.  Because the marriage of jazz and fable is somewhat breathtaking as an endeavor, I think the producer had to make some choices.  In that third fable, "The Coach and the Fly," I believe the choice was for articulate rendering of the words of the fable.  I believe that that effort succeeded.  In a fable like "La Montagne Qui Accouche," I believe his choice was more for the mood set by the jazz.  I believe that that effort also succeeded.  At the end of OR, there is a clever repetition of "Morts."  That word sums up wonderfully the end of the arrogant oak. 

Lively and articulate narrations of seventeen fables, separated by brief musical interludes.  This and a 1993 CD, also from Millaire and Stanké, may be the only CDs in our collection narrated by a Canadian, though I am sure I cannot tell the different in accent.  The disc is accompanied by a 48-page booklet offering the French texts of the fables with one colored and several black-and-white drawings of Anne Coté.  Our collection also includes a 1993 audio cassette of Albert Millaire reading, again for Alexandre Alexandre Stanké.  I could not establish any clear relationship between this CD and that cassette and could also not compare this CD and booklet with the CD and publication from 1993.

This is the former of two CD's that are apparently identical in content with the two-CD set from the same firm in 2012, which one can find elsewhere on this page.  This first disc has 22 fables, listed on the back of the packaging.  As I mention there, these CD's may be the best representation of a great reading of these, some of the best known fables of La Fontaine.  The packaging here displays many of the same notices of prizes these recordings have won!  The booklet offers the very same critique texts by Jean-Pierre Collinet as the booklet nine years later, now newly formatted, as is the packaging of the discs.  As there, one finds in the booklet plentiful Doré illustrations.

This is the latter of two CD's that are apparently identical in content with the two-CD set from the same firm in 2012, which one can find elsewhere on this page.  This second disc has 17 fables, listed on the back of the packaging.  As I mention there, these CD's may be the best representation of a great reading of these, some of the best known fables of La Fontaine.  The outer cellophane packaging here displayed many of the same notices of prizes these recordings have won!  The booklet offers the very same critique texts by Jean-Pierre Collinet as the booklet nine years later, now newly formatted, as is the packaging of the discs.  As there, one finds in the booklet plentiful Doré illustrations.  Did the first disc do so well that  they made a second disc a year later?  The first disc curiously shows no "Volume 1" to correspond to the "Volume 2" here.

"1 Livre + 1 CD Audio." This high-class CD comes inside the front-cover of a large-format book of the same name published by Gallimard Jeunesse in 2008. The book offers at its back a musical passage from each of the fifteen fables. The fables are rendered in highly complex music involving a number of instruments and several voices. This book and CD bring together a significant collection of songs, texts, facts, and art objects! The CD has imprinted on i

Several things are remarkable about this disc.  First is the price for which I was able to obtain it.  It could not be lower!  Next is that a goodly portion of the disc seems to repeat, from Puzzle Productions, readings of four fables by Jean-Pierre Darras from a disc we have, produced in 1999.  The third remarkable thing is that the other five presentations are as different as could be from Darras' readings.  They are a kind of "children's radio theater" presentation of the fables, complete with giggles, sirens, the sound of pouring lemonade, and church bells.  These are dramatizations of La Fontaine, sometimes – only sometimes, as far as I can perceive – using La Fontaine's words.  I suspect the voices of, for example, the town and country mice are sped up human voices.  TMCM seems to include several broken glasses or dishes and also a phone call to the town mouse.  I find the grouping of these presentations with Darras' readings jarring.  For the price, I guess I cannot complain.  We do not have the second volume, and I will not be seeking it zealously.

This is a disappointing CD.  Although it offers a variety of reciters, each of whom uses a variety of voices supported by orchestral music and sound effects, there are two serious drawbacks.  First, the sound quality is not the highest.  Secondly, while the jewel case advertises 24 fables, there are 17 tracks, and the last fable and a half are cut off at the end.  A good example of the various voices provided by one reciter is WL.  Similarly a peculiar voice for the fox in FC includes in his final putdown a good deal of laughing.  Louis de Funès recites the first ten fables.  There is an accompanying12-page booklet with photos of de Funès and Fernandel, but only some of the fable texts are provided.

This is a fine book with an excellent compact disc. Twenty fables appear, with at least one fine, detailed, full-page colored illustration per fable. The best among these illustrations may be for "The Coach and the Fly" (5), as the mosquito stands sweating after the coach can start downhill; for "The Small Fish and the Angler" (11); for GA (21); for "The Wolves and the Sheep" (32), where wolf and sheep bump fists to clinch their deal; and for OF (34). The illustrations are lively. There is a T of C on the back cover. The actors on the disc come from Le Théâtre Français. The tracks feature only voices, but they are excellent and nicely varied voices. The French keep on presenting their La Fontaine with distinction!

This disc largely repeats the 2010 disc of La Fontaine fables "Lue par Gérard Philipe et ses compères." That disc accompanied a book with illustrations by Bruno Vacaro, published by Le Chant Du Monde.  Our listing of it is on this same webpage.  The back cover of the present jewel case recognizes this earlier publication.  Three selections from that earlier disc are here dropped out – UP, LS, and "The Bat and the Two Weasels" – and two are added at the end: MM and "The Lapdog and the Ass."

The two CD's here offer 22 and 16 fables, respectively.  These CD's may be the best representation of a great reading of these best known fables.  Notice by the cover how many prizes these recordings have won!  The booklet offers insightful critique but not texts of the fables presented.  There are also plentiful Doré illustrations.

Here is something new.  Clérambault in the eighteenth century created children's music out of fables, set to vaudeville tunes and simple arias.  The texts by an unknown author are simpler than La Fontaine's.  They match well the catchy tunes to which they are put.  The result is delightful, not least when OF ends with a vocal sound like a balloon bursting.  The disc has twenty such fables and then six instrumental-only tracks for family karaoke.  With the disc is a 20-page leaflet including English translations of the prose descriptions and eight strong illustrations of fables by Thomas Carrere. 

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.

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!

This CD contains Aesop in four languages.  The key to the English edition may be that the publisher is listed as "Cassell, Petter, Galpin, & Co."  The company took that specific name in 1878.  Note also the comment after the introduction by JBR(undell) that about 130 fables not in the first and second editions have been added by another editor.  A guess says that this is the edition in our collection for which I have guessed a date of 1890.  The break before the added 132 fables comes at the top of 219 here, as in that edition. 1869 and 1874 may have been the dates of the first and second editions, both published, as I believe, without clear indication of a date of publication.  The German editionlisted as published in 1479, seems to be an authentic Steinhoewel, part of the Rosenwald collection given to the Library of Congress.  The Latin, likewise from Rosenwald and LC, is the Sebastian Brant edition of 1501, printed by Jacob of Pfortzheim .  The illustrations are hand-colored.  There seems to be another book bound together with Brant's "Esopus."  The Spanish version is from Jacob Cronberger in 1521.  This disc is a richer resource than I had thought!  To get a menu, click on "CD-Start."

I asked for these images as I was preparing a paper for the Renard Society in summer of 2009.  I actually found that scans I got from our facsimile served my illustrated lecture's purpose even better.  The preparation of this paper made for a lively summer in Mannheim in 2009. 

Detailed photographs of pages in two formats.  The pdf is similarly 227 pages long.  Good work!  I have not been able to identify this apparent later printing of Steinhoewel's work.

The illustrations are wonderfully distinct in these photographs.  Note that the photographs are of pages, not of the illustration portions of pages.  Some photographs of prose pages are better duplicates of less distinct images.  That these are photographs of the Creighton copy is clear, for example, from the tears on 132.

I found this CD with some old materials in May of 2023 -- 21 years later!  A note read "does not play on either computer."  I decided to give it one more try.  It turns out that this CD contains one long txt file.  A quick look online showed that one could open it with Microsoft Word, and voila!  There is George Fyler Townsend's translation. 

This disc represents perhaps a spate of helpful texts digitally reproduced soon after the technology fostered that work.  I suspect that they have been eclipsed by more recent developments.  This text is described as "about 1880."  I would have hoped for more specific information.  Tip: open this disc and get to "Data" and then click on the pdf "Aesop's Fables."  121 pages.  As I catalogue this CD fifteen years later, I cannot explain how I paid British Pounds for a CD produced in Virginia!

It is pleasant to hear the translator read his own work, work we have in several copies, including an advance copy provided to me so that I could offer a review.  The complete fables edition was by Arcade Publishing in 2008.  The CD jewel case includes a simple leaflet offering a T of C of the fables read and their place in La Fontaine's twelve books.  It refers to illustrations; I wonder if something has been lost from the simple foldout.  Craig Hill is not an excited reader.  Rather, as he is a careful translator, he is a careful reader.  I find his title telling, especially since, of the first fables that I read, FK is particularly well done – and particularly telling for us in the United States these days!  The rhymes often fortify the sense well.  I can find no references to this disc online, but reviews mention the illustrations in the published edition, and the references to illustration here may well be pointing there.