Stéphane Lemelin, Kim Yaroshevskaya - Poulenc: L'histoire de Babar / Debussy: La boîte à joujoux (1998)

A word of warning: all the text on this disc from Quebec -- work texts, liner notes, tracklist -- is in French, unlike the majority of the Atma label's thoroughly bilingual releases. Its usefulness for Anglophones who don't speak any French is minimal. The familiarity of the story of Babar the Elephant, however, opens up some possibilities for the disc in the English-speaking market, and indeed they're novel ones. What would happen if French teachers used it in their classes? Has anyone studied whether reinforcing linguistic images with music improves foreign language acquisition? A kid who knew the story of Babar by heart might easily pick up a lot of French words from this version, which consists simply of the original text plus piano interludes originally improvised by Francis Poulenc when a small girl removed his music from the piano and replaced it with a copy of Babar. The version of Debussy's children's ballet La boîte à joujoux (The Box of Toys) heard here is unique; it is accompanied by piano, with spoken text describing the action of the ballet. Perhaps this would be an items for the advanced level of our hypothetical experimental French class -- there isn't the element of familiarity that there is with Babar, but the music, together with the four section titles (The Toy Store, The Battlefield, Sheep Pen for Sale, and Twenty Years Later -- Epilogue), gives strong clues as to what's going on. The texts are read by Russo-Québécoise actress Kim Yaroshevskaya; she seems a little laid-back for most kids in these high-pressure times, but her diction is admirable. If your children are learning French and know the Babar story, try this disc out and see how they like it.