It's a lovely performance, and highly recommended.Īnyone who grew up, as I did, on Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar books will find this CD entrancing. But the passage in which Babar cries for his dead mother is really touching, and the closing nocturne is absolutely exquisite. He has great fun with Poulenc's excited depiction of Babar digging in the sand with a shell, and with the slightly delirious waltz to which he scoffs cake with his cousins Arthur and Celeste. Callaghan, meanwhile, plays it extremely well, and is nicely alert to its grace, humour and emotional shifts without over-exaggerating the comedy or veering towards sentimentality. She narrates it with admirable simplicity, without resorting to archness or affectation, but where she really scores high is the sense of wonder she brings to the tale she tells, which in itself is deeply affecting. Miriam Margolyes is the latest in the remarkable line-up of actors and occasional singers to tackle it on disc, and her new recording with Simon Callaghan is both genuinely delightful and probes the work's ambiguities in a beautifully understated way. It was premiered on French radio the following year. The musical ideas born that day were to simmer away at the back of Poulenc’s mind until he completed the work in 1945. Noting that she became bored with the music he was playing, Poulenc put Brunhoff’s Babar on the piano and began to improvise, to the great delight of the young girl. In a heart-warmingly similar situation ten years later, Poulenc was spending time with the granddaughter of one of his cousins. The children have acknowledged that the story originated with Cécile de Brunhoff, who, feeling that her contribution was too small to be credited, requested that her name be removed from the publications.

The resulting book initiated a series that was to be the crowning achievement of Jean de Brunhoff’s short professional life, and that of his son Laurent, who added further volumes following his father’s death in 1937. So moved were the young boys by the curious tale of the young elephant’s adventures, that they asked their father to create illustrations.

The journey began in 1930 when Laurent and Mathieu, sons of French author and illustrator Jean de Brunhoff were told an enchanting bedtime story by their mother, Cécile. A delightful set of circumstances combined to produce the beloved masterpiece, Babar.

Original babar the elephant