{"id":369,"date":"2009-01-25T00:13:54","date_gmt":"2009-01-25T04:13:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/25\/review-of-the-shoe-bird-a-musical-fable-by-samuel-jones\/"},"modified":"2009-01-25T00:40:17","modified_gmt":"2009-01-25T04:40:17","slug":"review-of-the-shoe-bird-a-musical-fable-by-samuel-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/?p=369","title":{"rendered":"Review of The Shoe Bird, a Musical Fable by Samuel Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"shoe_bird.jpg\"<\/em><\/p>\n

The Shoe Bird<\/em><\/p>\n

A Musical Fable by Samuel Jones<\/p>\n

Based on the story by Eudora Welty<\/p>\n

Performed by Jim Dale<\/p>\n

Seattle Symphony, Gerard Schwarz, conductor<\/p>\n

Northwest Boychoir and Girls of Vocalpoint! Seattle, Joseph Crnko, conductor<\/p>\n

Brilliance Audio, 2008.\u00a0 1 compact disc.\u00a0 1 hour.<\/p>\n

Starred review.<\/p>\n

A children’s story set to narration and orchestration?\u00a0 What a charming idea!\u00a0 This CD makes for lovely listening.\u00a0 Jim Dale’s incredible performance, with such astonishingly different voices for different birds, makes for a delightful listening experience.<\/p>\n

I’m afraid this is no Peter and the Wolf.\u00a0 <\/em>The story, about a parrot who repeats the line, “Shoes are for the birds!” and gets all the birds of the world to believe it, seems much more lightweight than Peter’s story.\u00a0 The music, while nice, didn’t seem as memorable to me.\u00a0 But then, I only listened to it once, rather than the thousand times I must have heard Peter and the Wolf.<\/em><\/p>\n

However, it does provide plenty of opportunity for the orchestra to give different themes to different birds (as well as Jim Dale’s different voices).\u00a0 There’s even a cat who threatens the birds, all weighted down with their new shoes.<\/p>\n

And isn’t it nice to think that here’s a symphony orchestra experience to which you could send children, and they would hear something new!\u00a0 As for me, it made a delightful and diverting change from listening to more serious books on CD as I drove to work.\u00a0 Instead, I got lovely music, a silly story, and Jim Dale’s vocal gymnastics.\u00a0 I hope that composers and orchestras and vocal actors and writers will do more of this sort of thing!\u00a0 (Hmmm.\u00a0 It takes a large cast to pull it off.\u00a0 No wonder Peter and the Wolf <\/em>doesn’t have more wannabes.)<\/p>\n

Buy from Amazon.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Shoe Bird A Musical Fable by Samuel Jones Based on the story by Eudora Welty Performed by Jim Dale Seattle Symphony, Gerard Schwarz, conductor Northwest Boychoir and Girls of Vocalpoint! Seattle, Joseph Crnko, conductor Brilliance Audio, 2008.\u00a0 1 compact disc.\u00a0 1 hour. Starred review. A children’s story set to narration and orchestration?\u00a0 What a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,39,10,9,42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animal-characters","category-audiobooks","category-childrens-fiction-review","category-fantasy","category-starred-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}