Maestro Classics offers wonderful stories combined with lovely symphony orchestra music, for audio enjoyment for adults and children alike. Some of the stories they offer are “Swan Lake”, “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel”, and “Juanita: The Spanish Lobster”.
Maestro Classics sent our family “The Tortoise and The Hare” ($16.98). Our family loves audio books, so this was listened to immediately. The story is told with compelling voice and lovely word choice. The music is original to the story, woven in naturally and is fitting and beautiful.
In addition to the 20 minute story, the CD has a few other sections. It has a segment about the history of the story. It explains the background, a little about the author and some items of note about the genre. There is a section that gives explanation of the music. Why the music type was composed for a specific character, a bit about the instruments and why some of them were used and the feeling they convey. It also talks about how music can create mood and how that is used to enhance the story.
After the story background and music have been explained the whole story is played again and the children are encouraged to notice the things about the music and story that they learned.
There is also a karaoke section at the end where the children can sing along with one of the songs in the story. The CD also comes with a booklet with information about tortoises and hares, musical instruments and timing, crossword puzzles and more for added fun.
What we thought:
This CD is extremely well done. The quality of the voice, music and recording is superb. The language, word choices and story line is enjoyable and the music adds to the experience. The information about the story and music is interesting and I’m sure adds to the children’s awareness of music and style.
The sing along has a lot of French words and phrases and it is sung quite quickly. So even with listening to it several times, and having the words in front of us, none of the children or adults in our home were able to sing with the music. Now perhaps that is the point, to make it challenging, but it aside from providing a lot of laughs, our children skip the karaoke portion of the CD and no one has been able to actually sing it.
The story “The Tortoise and The Hare” is a story that our younger children would select (4 and younger). However, the story and music background tends to be geared to children a little older. These sections are quite short and so don’t tend to completely lose the younger ones, but it’s a portion of the CD that they don’t enjoy as much.
Maestro Classics offers one CD for $16.98 or 3 CDs for $45 and they offer some very appealing titles.
I received this product free for the purpose of reviewing it. All opinions expressed are my own and I was not otherwise reimbursed for this review.
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Hi, I'm Kimberly. 
Well, it’s good to know we weren’t the only family that couldn’t sing the song!
Annie Kate
[Reply]
Kimberly @ Raising Olives Reply:
December 18th, 2009 at 8:36 am
No you’re not alone. I couldn’t figure out why they did that or if we were just too dumb to figure it out.
[Reply]
Hi Michelle!
This is a belated thanks for the wonderful review of our Tortoise and the Hare CD. I just wanted to let you know that since you reviewed our CD we’ve made a Facebook page so that our fans can participate in monthly giveaways (we have a big one coming up for the full 8 CD set!) and get coupons. We’d love to invite you and your readers to join our page or check out our new free homeschool music curriculum guides and thanks again for the lovely review!
Ruth
Maestro Classics
[Reply]
Oops Kimberly, I didn’t meant to push “submit” yet.
If you think singing along to the french song is tricky, try singing along to “Juanita La Longosta Espanola”! (actually this may be easier if your kids are studying spanish
Ruth
Maestro Classics
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