(++++) HOP, SKIP AND JUMP

Watch Me Hop! By Rebecca Young. Illustrations by Von Glitschka. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $12.99.

Wrapped-Up FoxTrot: A Treasury with the Final Daily Strips. By Bill Amend. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

Mike Stellar: Nerves of Steel. By K.A. Holt. Random House. $15.99.

     Lenticular animation, a new version of a technology as old as the 19^th century’s seminal zoopraxiscope and kinetoscope – precursors of modern movies – is making a comeback of sorts in kids’ books. The new version of the technology makes still pictures seem to move, often in remarkably lifelike ways and always in fascinating ones. The best version of the technology is a patented form developed by Rufus Butler Seder for museums and other public places. It has been used in several books published by Workman. But others have created versions of this still-but-animated design as well, such as the one in Watch Me Hop! This is a simple book in which animals all hop – or don’t hop, but do something else shown through the same apparent-motion technology. It’s a clever idea. At one point, Rebecca Young writes, “It’s hard to see me, then up I POP. I’m a GRASSHOPPER…watch me HOP!” But then, “I have a snout, and a tail like a SQUIGGLE. I don’t hop – I like to WRIGGLE!” And the picture shows a pig, which does indeed wriggle instead of hopping. Von Glitschka’s pictures here are in color – those in Seder’s books are black-and-white – and their movement is less extensive and can be harder to see than in Seder’s books (you have to hold the pages at the right angle). But this becomes part of the fun: first the animals don’t seem to move, and then suddenly they do, and the result is likely to be squeals of delight from the young children for whom the book is intended. There are eight animals in all here, from the small (frog) to the huge (elephant), each of them attractively displayed and moving interestingly – the kangaroo is particularly good.

     You can skip the oversize FoxTrot “Treasury” volume, Wrapped-Up FoxTrot, if you already have Houston, You Have a Problem and And When She Opened the Closet, All the Clothes Were Polyester! Those two smaller-size collections of Bill Amend’s strip are reprinted here, with no changes except for color Sunday comics in Wrapped-Up FoxTrot. But if you don’t have the smaller collections and have any fondness at all for Amend’s wonderful and now-truncated strip, the new volume is a must-have. Heck, you could probably talk yourself into buying it for the silly cover alone: it looks like a package wrapped in bright purple wrapping paper emblazoned with the heads of FoxTrot characters and “torn” on the back enough to reveal the publisher’s name, the UPC code, and so on. That’s clever, and so is, or was, FoxTrot, which is now a Sunday-only strip and the merest shadow of its former self. Wrapped-Up FoxTrot includes the final daily strips, in which Amend subtly thanked his readers and the newspapers that carried his work for so long. Before that, it contains many, many examples of the reasons the daily strip is missed: a week in which the characters talk about their cartoonist getting sick, resulting in stick drawings, a sideways panel and an imitation of Pearls Before Swine; a week in which Jason makes his own King Kong film, with his brother, Peter, as the giant ape – but in a Donkey Kong costume; a week of crossword-puzzle hints, such as “computer havoc-wreaker” being not “virus” but, since this is the Fox household, “daddy”; a week of Jason’s Halloween costumes, including a full-body Snickers bar and a black hole to attract all the candy; and much more. The character comedy of FoxTrot comes through far more clearly in the daily strips than in the remaining Sunday-only ones. It is wonderful to have one final collection of those dailies – and sad that it is the last one.

     FoxTrot always remained fully grounded on Earth, but Mike Stellar: Nerves of Steel jumps all over the place. In fact, the title character – Michael Newton Stellar, whose name is typical in a book with such other characters as Hubble Hawking and Mrs. Halebopp – jumps into space, toward Mars, through a wormhole and back, out of and back into a spacecraft, and…well, all over the place. This is K.A. Holt’s first book for young readers, and is cleverly constructed so that it can stand on its own or, if she and her publisher agree, become the first of a series. The book is clever in other ways, too. It is a story of a space-age family, but this is no lighthearted The Jetsons – although it starts pretty much that way and retains elements of humor throughout. Mike Stellar and his scientist parents get eight hours’ notice to move to Mars; that’s how things start. Coming along is his mom’s assistant, whose name is pronounced “Shoo-gah-bear,” certainly not “Sugar Bear.” But Mike’s sister, Nita, isn’t coming, because she is a member of “Earthlings for Earth,” and EFE members are considered faintly subversive because they want money spent on our home planet, not on colonization of others. Mike’s mom and dad don’t seem too upset about all this, though. And then there’s another scientist, Jim, with “an utterly bizarre girl” named Larc who has bright blue braces, bright blue eyes and a lot of knowledge about things that she really shouldn’t know but that Mike is curious about, too. What Holt does so well is give the book increasing depth as it moves along, even if the characterizations remain once-over-lightly. For instance, it turns out that Mike’s parents are under a cloud of suspicion because of the presumed loss of a previous spacecraft they designed. Mike’s best friend, nicknamed Stinky, is the brother of Hubble, who was aboard that earlier ship and was Nita’s boyfriend. Larc knows a little too much about that earlier voyage and about suspicious things involving the current one. Just who is a good guy and who is a bad guy, and why, becomes a hopeless muddle until everything is eventually (and neatly) sorted out. Through it all, Mike’s preoccupation with MonsterMetalMachines remains – and turns out to be important. And although there is no romance – the book is strictly for preteens – there is a bit of handholding between Mike and Larc that turns out to be very important indeed. The future-ish language is overdone (“drivedropper,” “electri-car,” “vis recorder”), but the plot follows the best time-tested SF approach by focusing on human relations more than technology. In fact, a sequel would be most welcome.

(+++) REALITIES AND ALMOST-REALITIES

China: Land of Dragons and Emperors. By Adeline Yen Mah. Delacorte Press. $17.99.

The Other Half of Life. By Kim Ablon Whitney. Knopf. $16.99.

Kaleidoscope Eyes. By Jen Bryant. Knopf. $15.99.

     Three sensitive women writers, three nations, three eras – it all adds up to three books that mix fictional and nonfictional elements and that young readers will enjoy even as they learn from them. China: Land of Dragons and Emperors, for ages 12 and up, is the most straightforward work, but so fascinating is China’s culture, and still so little known in the West, that Adeline Yen Mah’s book is filled with revelations as fascinating as many to be found in fiction. The 10 chapters here – supplemented by a timeline and a useful list of references for further information – trace China’s long history from a disunited group of petty states through a lengthy imperial period, through conquest and being conquered, into the modern era and the establishment of Communist rule over the mainland and Nationalist control of Taiwan. An apolitical book, China: Land of Dragons and Emperors takes no sides in modern (or many older) quarrels, presenting balanced portraits of historical figures and focusing much of the time on the rich tapestry of innovation that is Chinese history. Silk and gunpowder, paper and pigtails, the Great Wall and the reasons for the importance of the numbers eight and nine – all are here, and much more besides. Mah’s names for some Chinese dynasties are a clue to her style: the Ming was the “eunuchs’ dynasty” and the Qing the “crippled dynasty,” for example. In her focus on China’s many cultural achievements, Mah does tend to downplay the nation’s many-centuries-long periods of violence with such simple sentences as “Famine, banditry and strife continued.” And some of her more interesting statements could use a bit of additional explanation: “The Song paid tribute to the Liao and the Jin because it cost them less to pay them than to create an efficient army to fight them.” These are minor matters, though. The book is filled with fascinating snippets of history, lovely drawings and beautiful photographs, and its entire design – including the typesetting – is at once accessible and exotic. It is a fine introduction to a fascinating land and history.

     The Other Half of Life, also for ages 12 and up, has a more modern focus: it is set in 1939 and based on the story of the St. Louis, a luxury liner that carried Jews away from Hitler’s Germany but that ended up being turned back by Cuba, Canada and the United States. Eventually, passengers were allowed to disembark in France, Holland, Belgium and Great Britain, but 254 of the 937 aboard nevertheless died in the Holocaust. With this story as her basis, Kim Ablon Whitney creates a piece of youth-oriented historical fiction focusing on 15-year-old Thomas, son of a Jewish father and Christian mother, who is traveling alone on a ship that is here called the St. Francis; and 14-year-old Priska, who is with her family. Also aboard are Nazi crew members and an upstanding captain (this part is fact) who insisted on treating the Jewish passengers just like everyone else. In the story as Whitney tells it, Priska determinedly remains optimistic, as when the Cubans claim that the passengers’ documentation is not good enough: “It’ll get sorted out with time. If the landing permits were no good, they wouldn’t have given them to us.” Thomas is more of a realist, and wonders about his friend’s attitude: “Before they had arrived in the Havana harbor, her outlook had seemed stubbornly optimistic. Now it seemed only foolhardy.” Together, the two observe the doings of a Nazi spy; Thomas plays chess; the ship’s children write a letter to President Roosevelt; and the two young friends are eventually forced apart, to very different destinies. The Other Half of Life is heartfelt, highlighting an event of some historical significance: the true tale of the St. Louis led to significant improvements in U.S. treatment of refugees. But the book is also highly melodramatic, squeezing the heartstrings in every way possible – and, in the end, rather too tightly.

     Kaleidoscope Eyes deals with much more recent times, but ones that will likely seem just as remote to its intended readers, ages 9-13: the 1960s. Told as a series of poems in free verse – Jen Bryant is a poet as well as a writer of prose – the book is set in 1968 but looks back to the 17^th century. The factual basis of this work is the excavation of a sunken steamship in the mid-1800s by a father and son, added to the many legends of the notorious pirate, Captain Kidd. Bryant weaves these threads together in the tale of 13-year-old Lyza, who discovers three old maps in her late grandfather’s attic. Accompanying the maps is a letter specifically addressed to her – and it sends Lyza, with her friends Malcolm and Carolann, on a secret treasure hunt throughout their small town of Willowbank, New Jersey. The town is, unfortunately, becoming even smaller, as its young men go off to the Vietnam War; patriotism is offset by worries about the safety of the towns’ sons. The whole book is intended to give a kaleidoscopic view of its times, and Lyza’s possession of a kaleidoscope is a little too obviously symbolic. It comes up again and again, for instance at the Fourth of July celebration: “Carolann’s family arrives. They set their chairs/ and blankets next to us, and as we’re/ twirling sparklers and watching/ the first rockets/ and pinwheels go off, I wonder: What must they look like/ through Harry’s color-blind eyes? And what would/ he see inside my kaleidoscope?” There is no particular reason for this book to be told as a series of poems, and in fact some important elements – a letter about the maps’ authenticity, excerpts from the (fictional) log of Captain Kidd, and more – are entirely in prose. The lilting rhythms of some of the poems help move the story along, but the poetic structure often seems arbitrary. Still, the story has a number of exciting elements, and the idea of laying a portrait of the Vietnam War era over a mystery from 300 years earlier is an intriguing one. The characters in Kaleidoscope Eyes never really come alive as individuals, but the story – each of its parts introduced by lines from a song of the 1960s, the last of them of course using a “kaleidoscope eyes” quotation from the Beatles’ Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds – is unusual enough to keep middle-graders’ interest throughout.

(+++) DEATHS AND AFTERMATHS

The Ride: A Shocking Murder and a Bereaved Father’s Journey from Rage to Redemption. By Brian MacQuarrie. Da Capo. $26.

Black Tooth Grin: The High Life, Good Times, and Tragic End of “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott. By Zac Crain. Da Capo. $15.95.

     The search for meaning after a horrible death is frequently undertaken not only by those immediately affected but also by those who feel they were closely tied to the victim in some important way, even if not through an official relationship. The dead thus become symbols, standing for more than they did in life – and symbols become books like these two. The Ride is the more harrowing of the two and is better written, but is also more novelistic in its treatment of a nightmarish scenario. Its focus is what happened after the murder, in 1997, of 10-year-old Jeffrey Curley. The boy was lured into a car by two men, Salvatore Sicari and Charles Jaynes, who took him to the Boston Public Library and used a computer there to visit the Web site of the North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA). Later, Jaynes tried to assault the boy sexually, gagging him with a gasoline-soaked rag when he resisted – eventually killing him and sexually assaulting his corpse. Even in bare prose, this is almost too awful a story to tell, and Brian MacQuarrie’s prose is far from bare. MacQuarrie, a longtime Boston Globe reporter and editor, makes it clear from the outset that his will be an interpretative book, filled with thoughts and feelings that an objective reporter could not know: Jeffrey’s father, Bob Curley, “tossed a glance toward the Boston skyline three miles away” just after waking up, MacQuarrie writes, and later “blocked out the jarring sound of heavy trucks bouncing in and out of gaping potholes.” These are likely things to do but not journalistically certain ones; they are the touches of a novelist. And such touches abound as MacQuarrie focuses more and more on Bob Curley’s remarkable emotional journey after his son’s murder – a journey that eventually turns him into a strong critic of the death penalty rather than the staunch advocate that any reader, and especially any parent, would likely expect him to be. As it progresses, The Ride becomes less the story of one family and one murder than a societally oriented look at the death penalty, tending to emphasize comments like one by state representative Tom McGee after a vote to reinstate the penalty in Massachusetts: “In the pit of my stomach, I had this feeling when you know something isn’t right.” MacQuarrie makes an effort to be fair, and his knowledge of the ins and outs of Boston and its surroundings – and the politics of Massachusetts – is everywhere apparent. And The Ride does tell a remarkable story, for if Bob Curley could become an activist against sexual predators instead of an advocate for the death of his son’s killer, then does that not tell us something about the inherent immorality of the death penalty? The problem is that no, it doesn’t. Bob Curley’s tremendously admirable conquering of the desire for vengeance reflects greatly on him but does not necessarily indicate anything about the way other relatives of murder victims feel or should feel. Curley and his wife, Barbara, did file a lawsuit against NAMBLA, claiming that it had incited Jeffrey’s murder, but they dropped the suit last year when the judge ruled that their sole witness who would testify to a link between NAMBLA and the killing was not competent to give testimony. But except for the lawsuit, Bob Curley’s reaction – after a period of tremendous anger – is an exceptionally positive one. That makes The Ride an uplifting book, but not a convincing one for death-penalty proponents, whose “pit of the stomach” feeling may well be that it is Sicari’s and Jaynes’ continued life after the hellish killing of Jeffrey Curley that they “know…isn’t right.”

     The killer of “Dimebag” Darrell Abbott did not provoke any grand debates about whether or not he should continue to survive after committing murder: Nathan Gale’s rampage, in which he shot three people dead in addition to Abbott, ended abruptly when police officer James D. Niggemeyer killed Gale as the murderer held a hostage as a shield. Unlike The Ride, in which the killing occurs at the beginning, Zac Crain’s Black Tooth Grin puts Abbott’s murder near the end of what is essentially a chronological biography of the heavy-metal guitarist. There is a lot here about Abbott’s influences (Van Halen, KISS), his metal cover band (Pantera), his major-label albums (starting with Cowboys from Hell in 1990), the creation of Damageplan after Pantera’s messy breakup, and of course all the alcohol and drug stories that are de rigueur in books about the rock-and-roll world. In a sense, Abbott’s heavy metal was already fading when he died: punk was on the rise. But Black Tooth Grin is clearly aimed at the remaining fans of heavy metal in general and of Abbott in particular. Crain, senior editor at D Magazine and former music editor of the Dallas Observer, suggests that, despite the inevitable ups and downs of any career, Abbott pretty much went where he was always destined to go: “Darrell never changed. …He just wanted to play his guitar and live his life as loudly as possible. He just wanted to be himself, and being himself was more than enough to make him a star.” If so, it may have been enough to get him killed, too: Gale, an ex-Marine discharged from the Corps as a paranoid schizophrenic, apparently thought that Pantera had stolen lyrics from him – or possibly that Abbott and other band members were reading his mind. Black Tooth Grin is a book for a very limited audience – one that will gravitate to the 16 pages of black-and-white photos, the information that Abbott was killed exactly 24 years after John Lennon was shot to death, and the fact that Abbott was buried in a KISS coffin, and holding Eddie Van Halen’s Fender Stratocaster guitar.

(++++) THE ONCE AND FUTURE BACKUP KING

Seagate Replica. Windows Vista or XP with NTFS format. 250GB single-user version, $130; 500GB multi-user version, $200.

     Seagate Technology makes quiet, efficient internal and external hard drives that are found in computers worldwide. It also makes tough business decisions: in May, it announced a 2.5% reduction in its workforce (about 1,100 people) in an attempt to save $125 million a year and be cash-flow and earnings positive in fiscal 2010. Tough balancing act: make ever-better products to generate ever-better financial results with ever-fewer people. Yet Seagate seems to have the technology and management to do just that. A case in point is its fascinating and super-efficient single-use product, the Seagate Replica external hard drive.

     The reality of computer backups is that everyone advocates them, everyone believes in them, and far too few individuals and small businesses do them. The usual complaints: they are time-consuming; it is hard to set up the software to do them; they interfere with smooth computer operation; they are difficult to configure; even if you do get a backup made, a restoration is complex; they back up data files but not program files, meaning a restoration takes so many hours that you might as well just put the data on a new computer; and so on. All these complaints have some validity. What is wonderful about the Seagate Replica is that it pre-empts them all.

     This is a small external drive – less than six by four inches, less than an inch thick, weighing about half a pound – that looks like a miniature of some Apple products even though it works only on Windows PCs. It is designed to do one thing and one thing only: back up your entire computer, which means not only the data but also the programs, settings and the operating system itself. The first backup takes two to three hours for an average computer; the process is completely silent and does not interfere with or slow down use of the computer for other purposes. Leaving the Seagate Replica plugged in results in constant incremental backups, or you can unplug it (it is powered through a USB port) and start it again when you want an updated backup. The best approach is to leave it plugged in permanently, if you can spare the USB port. In fact, if you can’t, it’s worth investing in a USB hub just to keep the Seagate Replica running. Why? Again, simplicity: this is the easiest-to-use backup drive currently available, and it is hard to see how its approach could be improved (although it will be interesting to see whether it will work with Windows 7 when the new operating system comes out later this year).

     The Seagate Replica has considerable competition, including from Seagate itself: the Seagate FreeAgent Go has as much capacity as the multi-user Replica and is more flexible in letting users design their own backups. But that drive does not back up everything, and its software, although it works well, requires some setup – while the Replica software installs quickly and with minimal fuss. Other companies’ backup-oriented hardware, such as the Maxtor OneTouch line and drives from Clickfree, SimpleTech and Western Digital, will also do a good backup job. Online backup, through such services as Mozy, has its attractions as well – the most important being that your backup is stored remotely, so a disaster that destroys your entire home or business does not wipe out your backup as well as your computer itself.

     But consider, once again, the matter of ease of use. There is no competitor out there offering the simple elegance of the Seagate Replica. This drive is designed to do a single thing – back up an entire PC or, in the case of the 500GB version (which comes with a dock), several PCs – and then restore everything, from the operating system up, in case of disaster. The restoration really works – the software boots directly off the CD drive and functions even if your C drive has crashed and must be replaced. A full restore can take as little as an hour or so, depending on how much needs to be rebuilt. And it really is a full restoration – no searching for original programs or re-downloading software. This is simplicity itself – an increasingly important goal in personal computing: witness the success of limited-function netbooks in a world that was until recently dominated by do-it-all laptops and desktops.

     It is certainly possible to nitpick the Seagate Replica. The supplied USB cable is unusually short; you may need to use a different one. But any standard mini-USB cable works. If you get the 500GB version, the cable hardwired to the dock is two-headed to ensure that it gets enough power – a single USB port is not enough to run it on some laptops. That may make it harder to leave the drive permanently attached, since it could mean giving up two USB ports permanently. But USB hubs are inexpensive, and it is worth buying one, if you need to, for the sake of protecting a computer that may contain everything a household or small business needs to keep functioning. Think of the whole purchase – Seagate Replica plus, if needed, a longer cable and USB hub – as very inexpensive business-interruption (or household-interruption) insurance.

     Ideally, a computer user will supplement the Seagate Replica with online storage of key data files: the argument in favor of keeping crucial material offsite is a compelling one. But the strongest argument of all is to make backups in the first place, and far too many computer users remain far too cavalier about this essential task. Whatever Seagate’s corporate circumstances may currently be, the company has proved one thing again and again: it knows how to make highly functional drives that do their jobs with a minimum of fuss. The Seagate Replica does only one such job – any Seagate or other hard drive, equipped with backup software from Symantec or other companies, can make a backup and do other things in addition. But the Seagate Replica does what it does with such ease, such simplicity and such a straightforward approach to such a critical task that it deserves to be anointed the king of the backup field for all users who have thought, until now, that backups are just too difficult or time-consuming. With the Seagate Replica, they are neither. Procrastinators are hereby declared out of excuses.

(++++) BEETHOVEN PLUS

Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 2 and 6. Royal Flemish Philharmonic conducted by Philippe Herreweghe. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

Idil Biret Beethoven Edition, Volume 13: Symphony No. 3 (Liszt Piano Transcription). Idil Biret, piano. IBA. $8.99.

Idil Biret Concerto Edition, Volume 2: Tchaikovsky—Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 3. Idil Biret, piano; Bilkent Symphony Orchestra conducted by Emil Tabakov. IBA. $8.99.

     Philippe Herreweghe’s march through the Beethoven symphonies continues to be distinguished by some very fine playing and some rather unusual handling of this canonic music. In No. 2, Herreweghe and the Royal Flemish Philharmonic give the work a modicum of weight, but not too much – the work clearly sounds like a successor to No. 1 rather than an anticipation of the “Eroica.” Tempos are judicious – the second movement does not drag, and the third is a bit slower than in most performances – and instrumental balance is careful, with the result that the symphony has more structural interest than it often does while being handled in a fairly matter-of-fact way: Herreweghe makes no attempt to highlight forward-looking elements of the work, simply letting it flow naturally. But his concept of flow is different in No. 6, the “Pastoral.” Here the first movement is significantly quicker than usual – this is no stroll through the country but a fast walk. It takes some getting used to, but turns out to work surprisingly well, with a brightness and bounce that the movement does not always possess. And the contrast with the second movement, whose tempo is much more traditional and therefore seems particularly slow after the speedy opening, is pronounced and quite effective. Here as in No. 2, Herreweghe takes a straightforward interpretative approach: the storm of the third movement is not an overwhelming Romantic-era tempest but a rather moderate downpour. But he is at pains to bring out instrumental touches that other conductors downplay or miss, such as the bassoon in the third movement. These are attractively unusual performances that may not be the best first choice for someone just building a classical library, but that contrast very pleasantly with more run-of-the-mill readings. And the sound, as usual on PentaTone SACDs, is excellent.

     The re-release of Idil Biret’s march through Liszt’s transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies continues, too, and Biret’s handling of the “Eroica” is in its own way as unusual as Herreweghe’s versions of Nos. 2 and 6. The 1986 recording, like others in this Biret series, is flawed by its inconsistent handling of repeats – in large part a function of the original release on vinyl, which has more time constraints than CDs. But leaving that element aside, Biret’s way with the “Eroica” is fascinating. She starts the opening movement so slowly that it seems there will be no forward momentum at all, but it turns out that this is merely Biret’s rather intellectual approach to the work being put on display: she is at pains to bring out all Beethoven’s lines (which Liszt reproduced with considerable care), even at the expense of some of this symphony’s drama. The second movement is also taken at a very slow pace -- it runs 20 minutes – but it actually comes across better than the first, as Biret expertly builds each section while keeping part of her attention on the overall structure. The third and fourth movements are, in contrast, comparatively light – a flaw not of Biret but of Beethoven, if it is a flaw at all. Biret handles the contrasts well in both, and the very end of the finale is a real triumph of virtuosity. But there is a certain coolness to Biret’s interpretation of these movements, as if she has given her all to the symphony’s emotional heart, the funeral march, and now falls back on a certain distancing – a characteristic that she brings to many of her performances of these Beethoven transcriptions. (Incidentally, listeners interested in owning the entire 19-CD Biret Beethoven series will be confused to see that this release is Volume 13 when the previous one was Volume 9. Volumes 10 through 12 will appear later.)

     The performances in Biret’s Concerto Edition are considerably newer than her Beethoven transcriptions. The second volume in this series features Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in a 2004 rendition, and the one-movement No. 3 in a recording from 2007 (actually, No. 3 does have three movements, but only the first is usually played, since the second and third were revised and scored by pianist Sergey Taneyev after Tchaikovsky’s death). There is plenty of Biret’s virtuosity on display in these concertos, and her fondness for slow tempos that border on the ponderous is present as well – especially at the very start of No. 1. Equally clear here is Biret’s thoughtfulness: these are well-designed performances in which the contrast between the works’ episodic elements and their long lines is nicely highlighted. But both performances lack a couple of things. One is headlong emotion: Biret is so tightly in control, especially in No. 1, that the sheer intensity of the work tends to get lost. It is easy to appreciate Biret’s interpretation intellectually, but no one is going to be swept away by it. Secondly, the recording overemphasizes the piano through microphone placement and mixing that relegate the orchestra too far to the background. Even when the ensemble has the main theme, it is the piano’s subsidiary elements that are always heard most prominently. Emil Tabakov paces the Birkent Symphony Orchestra – of which he was music director at the time of these recordings – quite well, but the CD’s sonic design gives everyone but Biret insufficient weight. The CD gets a (+++) rating for Biret’s fine playing and carefully considered interpretations, but it will be of considerably more interest to fans of Biret than to fans of Tchaikovsky.

(++++) FAIRY-TALE AND EVERYDAY FUN

Gone with the Wand. By Margie Palatini. Pictures by Brian Ajhar. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $16.99.

Princess Pig. By Eileen Spinelli. Illustrated by Tim Bowers. Knopf. $16.99.

The Sleepy Little Alphabet. By Judy Sierra. Illustrated by Melissa Sweet. Knopf. $16.99.

Scholastic First Picture Dictionary. By Geneviève de la Bretesche. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $15.99.

     Some fairy tales teach. Some are pure enjoyment. Gone with the Wand is nothing but fun. Told by “Tooth Fairy Second Class, Edith B. Cuspid,” it is the sad (but not really sad) tale of Bernice Sparklestein, “once the best Fairy Godmother in the entire universe and beyond,” who has lost her wand-wielding ability (hence the book’s title). Edith and Bernice are BFFs, and when it comes to fairy-tale creatures, forever really means forever. So Edith tries to help Bernice get over the blues and come up with some new magical position to assume. The ideas, and the costumes Bernice dons as she tries out the various jobs, are hilarious – Brian Ajhar’s pictures are every bit as delightful as Margie Palatini’s story. Alas, fairy dusting, snowflake making, the sugarplum-fairy look – none proves quite right for Bernice. Edith sleeps on the problem and comes up with…well, let her tell it: “I woke up with a snort, a bit of embarrassing chin drool, and late for work, but – with one wonderful dream of a plan!” So Bernice and Edith make the tooth-fairy rounds together, and in so doing, Bernice finds her own idea (well, she thinks it’s her own) of how to be useful; and her expression and Edith’s are utterly delightful as they hatch the plan together. Gone with the Wand is exactly what a just-for-fun fairy tale should be, complete with (of course) a happy ending.

     Princess Pig is a fairy tale, too, but this is one with a message. It’s all about an adorable pig who wakes up one day to find herself bedecked with a banner that says “Princess” (the local Pickle Princess’s sash blew off in the wind). Pig tells all her barnyard friends that she is now a princess, and when they object that she needs certain things – a crown, a necklace, a pleasant smell – she makes sure to get them. Eileen Spinelli’s story is wonderfully complemented by Tim Bowers’ pictures – the expressions of Pig and her animal friends as they look at each other are just right. It is Pony who repeatedly informs Pig that she is not really a princess, but Pig will have none of it – she sits on her royal throne (the seat of an old tractor), insists on royal food (a pie instead of slop), and even has a royal bath (complete with bubbles). Then Pig attracts visitors (who show up when she wants to sleep) and a famous painter (for whom she has to pose in the hot sun); and soon she starts to realize that there is something to be said for being just plain Pig, who can do things that are not appropriate for a princess (such as rolling in the mud and going to a “regular old party”). And so she returns, happier and wiser, to being “just a regular old pig” – and a good time is had by all. Which, of course, is the whole point.

     There is a good time to be had in Judy Sierra’s The Sleepy Little Alphabet, too, but that is not the whole point of the book. It is, of course, an alphabet story – or, more precisely, “A Bedtime Story from Alphabet Town.” The capital letters – that is, the mothers and fathers – need to get the small letters (their kids) ready for bed, but the little letters aren’t ready to sleep just yet. Each letter has a reason for staying awake: “f is full of fidgety wiggles – g has got the googly giggles.” Melissa Sweet’s illustrations are, well, sweet, whether showing k refusing a good-night kiss or m being mopey. But eventually, it gets closer to bedtime, as “t tucks in her teddy bear – u takes off his underwear – v is very, very snoozy – w is wobbly-woozy.” By the end of the book, and the end of the alphabet, there are plenty of zzzzzz’s to go around, with a final two-page spread showing all the letters quietly sleeping (except for naughty n, who is about to start a pillow fight!). Both an alphabet book and a bedtime story, The Sleepy Little Alphabet is fun on two levels.

     The only level on which Scholastic First Picture Dictionary operates is the educational one: the book is packed with more than 700 words and pictures, with everything arranged in six sections focusing on the body, the house, school, the city, the grocery store, and exploring nature. The pictures are super-detailed and make it easy to understand what words go with which illustrations. There are also occasional questions related to the pictures, to give young children’s minds a simple workout – for instance, “Which animals are shown with their babies?” (The answers are upside down, right below the questions). What is slightly disappointing about this book – resulting in a (+++) rating – is the complete lack of scale (a ball, a die and a rocking horse are all the same size) and some occasional oddities in picture selection, such as “book” showing a book open to a colorful two-page illustration of someone playing a xylophone, which seems more like an illustration for the instrument (which actually is shown in the “music” pages within the “at school” section). Scholastic First Picture Dictionary has been updated since the book’s original appearance in France in 2003, but some of the pictures seem a bit old-fashioned – the analog alarm clock, for example, and the incandescent light bulb. And there are some distinctly European illustrations – for example, both black currants and red currants are shown. Nevertheless, as an introduction to hundreds of items, from headbands to pebbles to lobsters, parachutes, leaves, grapes and leeks, Scholastic First Picture Dictionary is attractive, easy to read and easy to understand – a fine introduction to the world of humans and the world around us.

(+++) SUMMER SEANCES AND SUCH

Gifted, Book 1: Out of Sight, Out of Mind. By Marilyn Kaye. Kingfisher. $7.99.

Gifted, Book 2: Better Late Than Never. By Marilyn Kaye. Kingfisher. $7.99.

     Basic summer-reading-for-fun recipe for preteens and young teenagers: keep it light and maybe flirty, typecast characters so readers don’t need much brain power to figure out who behaves how, toss in some interpersonal drama, and if you really want to be trendy, add a dash of the supernatural. And there you have Gifted. Enough said.

     Well, not quite enough. Marilyn Kaye handles the formula with skill, using language transparent in its simplicity to advance plots that move quickly enough so readers ages 10-14 will be able to breeze through the Gifted books with barely a pause for some suntan lotion and a beachfront or poolside hookup or two. The underlying idea here is a clever one: what if “gifted” students weren’t necessarily smart but were actually, you know, gifted with unusual powers? What if Meadowbrook Middle School had nine of them, and all were thrown together into a special class to learn about their powers and how to control them, even though – outside the class – they have little in common with each other and don’t even necessarily like each other very much? What happens if you add a mind reader to a speaker-to-the-dead to a girl who can see the future?

     What happens is actually pretty predictable: everything gets tangled, confused and mixed up. But the “occult powers” gimmick keeps these books from being merely conflict-at-middle-school lightweights. Oh, they’re still lightweight, but with differences here and there. Out of Sight, Out of Mind focuses on Amanda Beeson, who is beautiful and popular and (what else?) the Queen Bee of the school. Her talent, if you can call it that, is jumping mentally into other people’s bodies: she’s a body snatcher. This is not necessarily a good thing, as Amanda discovers when she wakes up one morning to find that the face in her mirror belongs to Tracey Devon – an unpopular utter nobody with whom Amanda would not deign to associate. But now she is Tracey, and can’t wait not to be her anymore. “She’d thought of a way to occupy her time and actually do a good deed while she was here. (Not that good deeds were a habit with her, but she figured she might be rewarded for it by positive forces and get out of Tracey’s body even sooner.)” But nope, it doesn’t work like that, and soon enough, another of the Gifted, Jenna Kelly, figures out that the apparent Tracey is really “Little Miss I’m-Too-Cool-for-Words Amanda Beeson,” and things become even more complicated when it turns out that Tracey too is Gifted – she has the ability to become invisible. So where exactly is she while Amanda is in her body? And will Amanda learn empathy from temporarily being the sort of person she has always scorned? And what’s the deal with Serena Hancock, the new student teacher foisted on the Gifted class that has been firmly under the icy auspices of the woman known as Madame? All will eventually be revealed – well, not all, but enough to whet readers’ appetites for another volume in this series.

     And that volume is Better Late Than Never, where the focus turns to Jenna, the one who figured out that Amanda was in Tracey’s body. Jenna is the streetwise, hard-shelled rebel among the Gifted (Tracey, of course, is the mousy girl; and then there are future-seeing space cadet Emily Sanders, talk-to-the-dead handsome hottie Ken Preston, and so on). Actually, the focus here is on both Jenna and Tracey, who are evolving a friendship despite Tracey being ignored by almost everyone even when she is not invisible, and Jenna being the child of an absent father and a mother who is in and out of rehab. Emily’s prediction of a tall, handsome stranger entering Jenna’s life leads Jenna to wonder if maybe her father is about to come back: “An image flashed across her mind: a family, made up of a mother and a father and a daughter, living in a real house, having a normal life… [But] she was not optimistic by nature, and she wasn’t going to start looking on the bright side of everything now.” The pattern of these books is pretty clear by this second volume: the teens, despite their psychic powers, are going to turn out to be just plain folks with everyday worries and problems, and are going to learn to handle life partly by figuring out how to cope with their powers and partly by learning how to lean on each other. But their underlying personalities will keep peeking through – as when Amanda again takes over someone’s body in this book (on purpose this time). The phrase “if she’d known then what she knew now – about people and feelings” is applied here to one character, but is likely to be applicable to all the Gifted as the series continues, as it will after summer is over: the third volume is due out in October.

(+++) DOWN WITH MEDICINES!

The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs. By Stephan S. Ilardi, Ph.D. Da Capo. $25.

Eating for Autism: The 10-Step Nutrition Plan to Help Treat Your Child’s Autism, Asperger’s, or ADHD. By Elizabeth Strickland, M.S., R.D., L.D. Da Capo. $17.95.

     The medical miracles of the 20^th century, which vastly extended the lifetimes of millions, have become passé in the 21^st, with a groundswell of people proclaiming that medications are not the answer to many diseases and chronic conditions – that, indeed, they may make matters worse rather than better. Most of the “evidence” for these positions is anecdotal rather than scientifically valid, and that is scarcely a surprise: the placebo effect shows that people given sugar pills (or their equivalent) frequently get better, largely because they believe they are getting effective medication and, equally important, are being closely observed and cared for. Opponents of medication – call them pharmaskeptics – turn their attention in particular to chronic, difficult conditions that can be mitigated but not cured by traditional medical treatment. These include mental illnesses and behavioral problems, among others.

     Many promoters of treating medical conditions without medicine are charlatans. Their claims are often transparently loopy, as in the laetrile-from-peach-pits-cures-cancer assertion a few years ago. Today, scammers and well-meaning but misguided pharmaskeptics are more likely to promote “nutraceuticals” and products with impressive-sounding chemical names that they claim (typically in ads filled with anecdotal testimonials) are available only for a limited time or in a limited way, but without a prescription – taking advantage, in the United States, of a major loophole in regulation that allows dietary supplements to be marketed without the proof of efficacy required of prescription medications.

     But – and it is a very large “but” – not all advocates of non-drug treatment of serious conditions are hucksters, and not all such treatments are valueless. There is compelling evidence that certain forms of nutrients and certain lifestyle elements, such as regular exercise, have a strong correlation to health – think of folate enrichment being used as a way to prevent serious birth defects. And both Stephen Ilardi, an associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Kansas, and Elizabeth Strickland, a registered dietitian and specialist in nutrition therapy, have the credentials and experience to back up their assertions about non-medication approaches to serious conditions. This does not mean their ideas will work for everyone all the time; indeed, the word “cure” in the title of Ilardi’s book is an overstatement compared with the more modest “help treat” in Strickland’s. But if you approach these books as sources of potential alternative – or supplementary – treatment plans, you can pick up a lot of valuable information and perhaps ameliorate, if not cure, some serious problems.

     Ilardi, however, does not see his approach as a supplement to drug treatment for depression, but as a replacement for it. Using patient success stories – that is, lots of anecdotes – he says that depression can be defeated by focusing on lifestyle elements that have fallen by the wayside for many people in our industrialized age. His primary dietary recommendation is to consume substantial amounts of omega-3 fatty acids, found mainly in fish; and there is indeed scientific evidence of these compounds’ benefits (although not specifically relating to depression). His other ideas are in the social and behavioral spheres: exercise to stimulate serotonin and other brain chemicals; do things you enjoy so your mind does not turn to negative thoughts; keep your circadian rhythms regular by ensuring sufficient exposure to sunlight; maintain a strong social support network; and develop healthful sleep habits. These ideas are unexceptionable and certainly have value for anyone, not only for people with depression. But for people who are depressed – certainly those with a clinical diagnosis, not ones merely “feeling blue” – they constitute a somewhat naïve prescription. Depression causes withdrawal from social situations; it makes sleep difficult; it makes it difficult to get moving at all, much less in the active way required for exercise; and it prevents sufferers from engaging in enjoyable activities or even identifying activities that would be enjoyable. This “black dog,” as Winston Churchill called his depression, is a controlling factor in life. Ilardi is aware, at least to an extent, that his prescription has flaws – “increasing social connection is easier said than done,” he writes at one point. But his upbeat ideas about overcoming difficulties are themselves much easier to suggest than to implement. In the case of social connection, for example, they include educating friends about your depression, asking them for help, maintaining video or Internet friendships, reaching out through church and volunteer groups, caring for animals, and so on – all fine ideas, but none practical for someone who is truly depressed. Indeed, Ilardi’s comment that “all of us are born to connect, hardwired to live in the company of those who know and love us,” is likely to make an isolated, indrawn depressive feel even more hopeless. Ilardi’s book is useful in many ways – his appendices, a “depression scale” and symptom tracking chart, are a particularly good idea – and his chapter “When Roadblocks Emerge” acknowledges that his book will not work for everyone, “at least not right away.” But still, Ilardi’s unrelenting certainty that depressives can be cured through lifestyle changes flies in the face of the realities of life – and disease – that many depressives, and those who care for or about them, encounter day in and day out. Churchill, after all, attempted to ward off his “black dog” with compulsive overwork and excessive drinking, but even though those approaches worked for him – to a remarkable degree – it would scarcely be responsible to recommend them to others. Similarly, Ilardi’s far more benign ideas, as useful as they can be, are far from a panacea.

     Nor does Strickland have the answer to autism, Asperger’s and related conditions – but she may have an answer for some people, some of the time. This group of conditions – not everyone calls them “diseases” – remains poorly understood. Their behavioral components vary, as do their onset and their progression before and during treatment. Treatment options also vary; none is fully satisfactory. A nutritional component makes intuitive sense: certain foods, such as refined sugar, are known to cause behavioral changes in many children, so it makes sense that they would do so in children with autism, Asperger’s or ADHD as well – and perhaps to a greater extent, since the sensory response of children with these conditions often seems to be exaggerated. Therefore, it is sensible to limit affected children’s exposure to substances that may worsen the behavioral manifestations of their conditions. This also promotes healthful eating in general, and that is certainly a good thing. Strickland talks about artificial colors and flavors, preservatives and sweeteners, trans fats and pesticides, and all the other modern bugaboos of the healthful-eating movement; but she is to be commended for doing so as a clinician, not an advocate trying to score political points. She is too quick to accept anything labeled “organic” as inherently superior, and she is naïve about parents’ stress levels and time availability in suggesting that a child get three small meals and two to three snacks a day – that is, food every three hours – and that the focus of eating be on whole grains, legumes, oatmeal, starchy vegetables and so on. This is a Puritan-ethic approach to food and is likely to increase the tension of parents already pressured by having a child with, say, ADHD – especially if they have more than one child. Still, Strickland mitigates the absolutism of her prescription by providing dozens of appealing recipes, from spaghetti and meatballs to chocolate chip muffins. She emphasizes cooking without gluten or casein – more substances that may affect some children, if not all. And she provides loads of tabular material (probably too much for most people to absorb) on foods’ protein and fiber content and calcium levels, recommended daily intakes of various food-based or supplementary nutrients, and more. She sprinkles the text with stories – those anecdotes again – of children whose conditions improved when their nutrition was modified. And she writes throughout in a straight, no-nonsense style, even when saying such things as, “Pyridoxine and Pyridoxal 5-phosphate (P5P) are not the same thing. …Some healthcare practitioners believe that autistic children may have difficulty converting pyridoxine to P5P, so they suggest using supplemental P5P or a combination of pyridoxine and P5P supplements.” Strickland’s treatment of issues such as this one is detailed to the point of nitpicking, but of course parents seeking help for a child with autism, ADHD or a related condition will want all the assistance they can get. The main thing missing in Strickland’s book is a certain level of humility. An acknowledgment that nutritional changes are not necessarily the answer to the conditions she studies would be welcome; so would a statement that she understands the additional difficulties her approach asks already frazzled parents to assume as they try to cope with children’s conditions that produce more than enough stress on their own.

(++++) A MOUSE (OR TWO) IN (OR OUT OF) THE HOUSE

Microsoft Mobile Memory Mouse 8000. Windows Vista, XP or NT/SP 4, or Macintosh OS X v.10.2-10.4X. Microsoft. $99.95.

Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000. Windows Vista or XP/SP 2. Microsoft. $79.95.

     The interoperability of computer input devices is one of those technological wonders of which everyone is dimly aware but which few users sufficiently appreciate. Just imagine computer hardware as chaotic as cell phones, which require their own mutually exclusive chargers, and you will have a sense of gratitude for the fact that you can switch out a keyboard or mouse pretty much whenever you like for a different one made by the same or another company, and get identical or better functionality. (In fact, the major cell-phone manufacturers are moving toward the computer-hardware model by agreeing to make all their chargers interoperable within the next few years – to which users will say in enthusiastic chorus, the sooner the better.)

     The ability to switch a device such as a mouse whenever your needs change can help extend your computer’s life, enabling it to do functions you did not need when you first acquired it; or you can simply make a switch for fun, out of boredom with your previous mouse, or for any other reason. The simplicity of switching has spawned hundreds of inexpensive mice, some even available for free through rebate programs or as retailers’ loss leaders. More interestingly, it has also spawned some outstanding higher-end mice with neatly tailored functions – such as two of the many notebook-focused mice from the hardware division of Microsoft Corporation.

     Think about it: a mouse designed specifically for use with laptop/notebook computers. That in itself is a significant development. These mice need to be smaller and more readily portable than standard-size ones, but not so small that people with large hands will find them cumbersome to use. They need to be easy to transport – both the ones considered here come with their own carrying cases – and simple to use in a variety of different circumstances; hence a wireless design is significantly better than a wired one (who knows on what sort of surface, of what size, a traveler is going to be working with a computer and mouse?). The days of mice requiring mouse pads for traction are long gone, but not all mice work equally well in less-than-ideal settings. These two, using wireless laser technology, are just fine on airplane tray tables, in coffee shops, at airport lounges, even in gate areas of airports and train stations – where accommodations may be spartan at best.

     Yet the design concepts of the two mice are ultimately quite different, symptomatic of the ability to create specialized and targeted input devices for a wide variety of purposes. The Microsoft Mobile Memory Mouse 8000, which runs on both PCs and Macs, has a particularly neat recharging system, using the same type of magnetic connector found in Apple products. It also has a Bluetooth transceiver with built-in 1-GB flash memory – a wonderful accessory for travelers, since it allows you to bring all the data you are likely to need for presentations or reports in the same place as the transceiver that wirelessly connects the mouse to your computer in the first place. This not only means one thing fewer to carry and potentially forget – it also makes the chance of losing your data much smaller, since the likelihood of leaving behind the transceiver that lets you connect the mouse (and that fits into the case with the mouse itself) is not very high. The mouse is powered by a single AAA battery that is rechargeable – a nice touch, since travelers do not need to be caught in an unfamiliar location with a dead battery, and do not want to be burdened by carrying spares. The mouse even has a neat built-in battery status light that warns you when power is low and you need to recharge. And it has an on-off switch – why don’t more mice have those? – to extend battery life as much as possible. However, left-handed users will be disappointed: the mouse is optimized for righties, although using it left-handed (with a little bit of contortion) is certainly possible.

     The Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000, although it costs less than the Microsoft Mobile Memory Mouse 8000, is even more full-featured – if and only if you have compelling needs for PowerPoint presentations and mouse-controlled media. If you do not have those needs, it is woefully over-engineered. Actually, the Microsoft Wireless Notebook Presenter Mouse 8000 is engineered to integrate particularly well with PCs running Windows Vista (although it works on ones powered by XP as well); this is not a Mac-compatible mouse, and its feature set clearly shows why. The mouse has 12 – count them, 12 – buttons. In addition to all the usual mouse functions, this unit has forward, back and blank-screen controls on the bottom for use in PowerPoint presentations; it has a button that turns the mouse into a laser pointer; and there is even a Digital Ink feature so you can draw on screen. It’s a media-center control as well, with play, pause, volume control, and next- and previous-track buttons (some of the buttons are multifunctional, for both PowerPoint and media use). Yes, it has an on-off switch; and its symmetrical design makes it equally suitable for right- and left-handed users. But this is a specialty product and needs to be seen as one: there is no value to paying for PowerPoint and media functions you will not use. Also, this mouse runs on two AAA non-rechargeable batteries – an irritation, because its really cool clear hardshell carrying case has room only for the mouse and transceiver, not for spare batteries.

     Both these mice have certain features that will be useful to and appreciated by all users, such as four-way scrolling (side to side as well as up and down) and a magnifier (by default, a right-side button – but all the buttons on both these mice can easily be reassigned, which is another very nice and highly useful part of the design). Both come with three-year warranties. And either one will be an excellent addition to your mobile computing – and easy to replace with a different mouse if your needs change. Microsoft is a software company, not a hardware firm, but it is interesting to see just how good a job its comparatively small hardware division does at creating products that make it easier and more comfortable to use computers powered by Microsoft software – or even ones run by software created by Microsoft’s competitors.

(++++) LESS-KNOWN WORKS THROUGH THE CENTURIES

Bruch: Violin Concertos Nos. 2 and 3. Maxim Fedotov, violin; Russian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Dmitry Yablonsky. Naxos. $8.99.

Franz Xaver Richter: Grandes Symphonies, Nos. 7-12 (Set 2). Helsinki Baroque Orchestra conducted by Aapo Häkkinen. Naxos. $8.99.

Henry VIII, King of England (and other composers): Motets from a Royal Choirbook. Alamire consort singers; QuintEssential sackbut and cornet ensemble; Andrew Lawrence-King, gothic harp; David Skinner, director. Obsidian. $18.99.

     Many concertgoers are not even aware that Max Bruch wrote more than one violin concerto, so popular is the first of his three, in G minor. But Bruch did write three violin concertos, the second and third both in D minor, and although neither of the later works has the verve and combination of beauty and tight structure of No. 1 – which was Bruch’s first major work – both the later concertos are quite worthy of occasional performance. And both are undeniably by Bruch, containing his signature sweet themes and rhapsodic handling of traditional forms. The first concerto was dedicated to Joseph Joachim, who in 1867 helped Bruch shape it into the form in which we know it today. The second, which dates to 1878, is dedicated to another great violinist of Bruch’s time, Pablo de Sarasate, and has many of the same expansive elements as No. 1, although its extended finale does seem to go on rather longer than its thematic interest allows. The third concerto dates to 1891 and is the longest of the three, featuring an opening movement that is practically Tchaikovskian in scale and a concluding rondo in the form of a perpetuum mobile. Maxim Fedotov makes a good case for both these works, playing them with sensitivity and, in No. 3, with a sense of grandly heroic scale. And Dmitry Yablonsky and the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra provide fine accompaniment. It is hard to be more than lukewarm about the concertos themselves – this is one case in which less-known works actually deserve to be less known – but it is even harder to justify their nearly complete exclusion from concert programs. Both have lovely elements and ample virtuosic opportunities, and if they do not seem quite as creative as the G minor concerto, that simply means that Bruch set such a high standard for himself that even he could not surpass it.

     Pretty much all the music of Franz Xaver Richter is little known nowadays, but he was a fine composer and, in his day, a well respected one as a member of the Mannheim court orchestra. Yet Richter did not wholeheartedly adopt the techniques of the Mannheim school, believing that some of them glorified form over substance – for example, the famous “Mannheim Rocket,” rapidly ascending broken chords starting in the lowest bass range and ascending to the ensemble’s very top notes. Instead, Richter sought to balance elements of Baroque style with some that were considered quite modern in the mid-18^th century. Thus, his 12 Grandes Symphonies of 1744 – actually written before he joined the court at Mannheim – show considerable contrapuntal skill while also bringing more emotion to their slow movements and greater intensity to their outer ones than would have been the norm in compositions only a few years earlier. This is not to say that these are profound symphonies – they are in fact closer to the sinfonia style than to anything Haydnesque – but they are well structured and show some compositional creativity. Among the six works of Set 2 – two in C major, one in A major, one in B-flat major, one in E minor and one in G minor – are two symphonies in four movements and four in three. But one of the three-movement works (the G minor) has a finale that lasts less than a minute and is over practically before a listener gets used to it. Both the four-movement works end with minuets (which of course were generally placed in the middle, usually in third position, by Haydn), and the E minor symphony has an interesting fugue as its second movement. The pleasures of these works are in their details rather than their overall scope; the pleasures of listening to them on this new Naxos CD have a great deal to do with the verve with which the Helsinki Baroque Orchestra plays them on period instruments. Aapo Häkkinen paces the symphonies well, with suitable contrast among the movements, resulting in a disc that is worth hearing repeatedly by a composer who is not heard very much at all.

     And speaking of original instruments: a CD called Henry’s Music features some that are so authentic-sounding that the music itself seems almost to come from a different world. King Henry VIII was intelligent, cultured and musically skilled – modern views of him merely as a tyrant with six wives (and founder of the Church of England) are, to put it politely, seriously skewed. The highlights of Obsidian’s new CD are nine works written by Henry himself, plus six previously unrecorded motets taken from a famous and beautiful Royal Choirbook owned by the British Museum. Henry’s works express typical courtly sentiments of the 16^th century with grace and delicacy, while the six Royal Choirbook motets present Latin texts that are beautifully harmonized and elegant. Nor are Henry’s works and those from the choirbook the only pieces here: there are 21 works in all, including ones by Robert Fayrfax, John Taverner and Philippe Verdelot – famous names in their day if not in ours. The mixture of Latin, French and English verses, the wide variety of the works’ lengths (from less than a minute to more than 16), the wonderful accompaniments on some unfamiliar instruments, and the overall harmonic beauty of these pieces, add up to a highly unusual listening experience and a fine tribute to a monarch whose court was perhaps the most musical of its time.

(++++) FINE PERFORMERS, SO-SO MUSIC

Korngold: Violin Concerto; Overture to a Drama; Much Ado About Nothing—Concert Suite. Philippe Quint, violin; Orquesta Sinfónica de Mineria conducted by Carlos Miguel Prieto. Naxos. $8.99.

Prokofiev: On Guard for Peace; The Queen of Spades—Symphonic Suite arranged and elaborated by Michael Berkeley. Irina Tchistjakova, mezzo-soprano and narrator; Niall Docherty, boy soprano; Royal Scottish National Orchestra Junior Chorus, Royal Scottish National Orchestra Chorus and Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi. Chandos. $18.99.

Harold Schiffman: Symphony No. 2, “Music for Győr”; Ninnerella Variata; Variations on “Branchwater”; Blood Mountain Suite; Overture to a Comedy. Katalin Koltai, guitar; Győr Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mátyás Antal. North/South Recordings. $12.99.

Marilyn J. Ziffrin: Moods; Sonata for Piano; Elizabeth Bell: Arecibo Sonata; Rami Levin: Passages; Rain Worthington: Hourglass; Tangents; Dark Dreams; Always Almost. Max Lifchitz, piano. North/South Recordings. $12.99.

     Well-played, largely unknown music can be wonderful to discover in recorded form – CDs provide an opportunity to hear pieces rarely, if ever, programmed in concert halls. But other works, no matter how well played, tend to fall a bit flat on CD, no matter how often you listen to them. None of the music on these four CDs could charitably be called “great,” but two of the recordings are worthy of discovery for at least some adventurous listeners – although the other two repay one’s attention less well.

     Erich Wolfgang Kongold (1897-1957) is best known as a film composer, and his works certainly have the sort of immediate melodic appeal and Romantic-era emotionalism that helped him fit well into Hollywood. His Violin Concerto, in fact, is built around a number of his film tunes. But despite this less-than-exalted provenance, it is an effective, interesting work and a genuine showpiece – if a rather superficial one – for an accomplished violinist such as Philippe Quint. Quint plays with enthusiasm and élan, never trying to elevate the music to heights that it does not seek or achieve, but making it quite effective within its limited emotional range. The Orquesta Sinfónica de Mineria plays well, if not particularly distinctively, under its music director, Carlos Miguel Prieto, both in the concerto and in Korngold’s early Overture to a Drama, which shows good command of sonata form but is not in fact especially dramatic – although it is an impressive work for a 14-year-old. Korngold’s Much Ado About Nothing suite is considerably more interesting, progressing in five movements from a fine scene-setter of an Overture to a witty and virtuosic concluding Hornpipe. The most interesting movement, called “Dogberry and Verges,” is a funeral march right out of Mahler – who was impressed with the young Korngold and clearly influenced him.

     The music on the new Chandos Prokofiev CD is decidedly lesser stuff in the composer’s output, but may be worth exploring for those familiar with Prokofiev’s better-known (and better) works. On Guard for Peace, the composer’s final choral work, is strictly a political composition in Socialist Realist style. The 10-movement oratorio is accessible, bombastic, appropriately celebratory of the Soviet Union’s military strength and eternal vigilance, and easily forgettable – a well-put-together propaganda piece. As for The Queen of Spades, it is only more-or-less Prokofiev. The suite heard here is based on film music that Prokofiev created in 1936 but that he stopped writing when Stalin’s regime halted production of the movie. British composer Michael Berkeley took the relatively paltry remains of Prokofiev’s work, expanded and orchestrated them, and produced a half-hour suite that sounds, basically, like fairly undistinguished film music. Prokofiev would probably have done better himself had he been given the chance; but this is all we are ever likely to hear of this particular music. Neeme Järvi leads the Royal Scottish forces with skill in both these works, but neither piece is much more than a curiosity – the CD gets a (+++) rating and will be of interest mostly to those seeking completeness in their Prokofiev collections.

     Two new releases from North/South Recordings get (+++) ratings, too. Both offer solid performances of not-very-memorable music from composers who do not have a great deal to say but have some skill in saying it. The works of Harold Schiffman, a student of Roger Sessions, have interesting parts but are less than convincing when taken as a whole. His second symphony, written last year, was inspired by the Hungarian city of Győr and is well played by that city’s orchestra under Mátyás Antal, but it is more pedantic than loving. Blood Mountain Suite, also from 2008, is a transcription of an earlier song cycle and is affecting without profundity. The remaining three works on this CD are earlier: Ninnerella Variata (Varied Lullaby) dates to 1956 and shows a good command of orchestral color; Variations on Branchwater (1987), for guitar and orchestra, has little of the U.S. South about it even though it was inspired by that region’s fondness for “Bourbon and branch,” but it has some effective writing and pits the guitar (well played by Katalin Koltai) nicely against the ensemble; and Overture to a Comedy (1987), written for a never-completed comic opera, is pleasant and light enough, if scarcely bubbly.

     Pianist Max Lifchitz performs sensitively on his CD of works by American women composers, but none of the featured pieces is especially distinctive. Marilyn J. Ziffrin’s Moods (2005) and Sonata for Piano (2006) are well structured but not very distinguished. Elizabeth Bell’s Arecibo Sonata (1968, revised 2005) is more interesting, with some challenges both for the pianist and for listeners. Rami Levin’s Passages (2002), designed as a work expressing mixed emotions, has effective elements but as a whole is a bit scattered. The four pieces by Rain Worthington, written between 1991 and 2001, also explore varying emotions, mostly superficially but with some melodic skill. All the works on this CD are pleasant rather than intense; there is an overall mildness to the recording that makes it interesting enough on a first hearing but that is unlikely to bring listeners back to it repeatedly.

(++++) YELPS AND GRRRS

A Small Surprise. By Louise Yates. Knopf. $16.99.

Grizzly Dad. By Joanna Harrison. David Fickling Books. $16.99.

     It’s not easy being little, but Louise Yates makes it much more fun for children ages 2-6 with A Small Surprise – which is actually full of surprises. The first one is that the book starts on the inside front covers, not (as usual) after the title page. Those inside covers show a very small bunny walking past a circus poster filled with pictures of HUGE circus animals bearing such labels as “tallest,” “fiercest” and “seriously savage.” On the poster is a notice that jobs are available, but “small animals need not apply.” But this is one determined (and adorable) bunny. He admits that he is “too small to wipe [his] own nose” or “tie [his] own shoes” – matters with which the huge animals, looking a bit puzzled, help him out. The bunny needs help with eating and even with walking! But then he points out that his small size lets him easily disappear and reappear – which he does several times, as the big animals try vainly to find him. (The funniest scene has him disappearing by jumping into the huge snake, which promptly coughs him up into a hat.) This disappearance-reappearance act, the bunny points out, makes him MAGIC! And the huge animals agree – and that is the end of the book, but not of the story. For just as Yates started things on the inside front covers, she ends them on the inside back covers, where the bunny has removed the “jobs available” notice, inserted his own picture into the middle of the poster of all the animals, and is changing the wording – for example, from “magnificent menagerie” to “magical menagerie” and from “biggest tallest longest largest” to “smallest bravest most interesting.” This bunny may be small on the outside, but within, he’s a giant – and that’s a wonderful (and subtle) message for children who may be worried that they too look small and insignificant to the rest of the world.

     On the other side of the size equation, Grizzly Dad is about just what the title says: a father who woke up in a “Grrrrizzly mood” and “grrroaned” and “grrrizzled” all morning until he went back to bed “just like a bear with a sore head.” His son explains that he went to check on him, “but it wasn’t Dad in bed at all…it was a GREAT BIG GRIZZLY BEAR!” Joanna Harrison manages to make the bear’s appearance startling but not scary – in fact, the father-turned-bear seems as befuddled as his son by the transformation. What is interesting here – and will appeal to the book’s target age range of 4-7 – is how quickly son and father accept and adapt to the “beary” unusual occurrence. The father cannot talk anymore, only grunt, but his son tells him not to worry and promises to take care of him. “So I wiped his eyes, combed his hair, brushed his teeth (he was a bit SMELLY) and gave him breakfast,” explains the boy – who, however, is put off by his bear father’s bad table manners, and yells at him for “making a horrible MESS!!!” And then – well, with no logical progression whatsoever (kids will love that), the bear is driving a convertible and taking the boy for a ride to town, where they go to the movies and the park before returning home for honey sandwiches and relaxation. And of course a “GREAT BIG BEAR HUG” climaxes the story, after which Dad stops being a bear, and he and the boy start cleaning up the huge mess they managed to make around the house. A story just amusing enough and just tender enough to engage kids while providing a decidedly soft-pedaled lesson about seeing past parents’ occasional grumpiness, Grizzly Dad will readily grunt its way into plenty of cub-sized hearts.

(++++) FROM COMICS TO CARTOONS

Freedom’s Just Another Word for People Finding Out You’re Useless: A “Dilbert” Book. By Scott Adams. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs—The Junior Novel; Buck the Amazing Dino Hunter!; The Movie Storybook; My Three Dads; Sid-napped!; All in the Family; Momma Mix-Up; Made You Look! HarperEntertainment. $5.99 (Novel); $4.99 (Buck; Made); $7.99 (Storybook); $3.99 each (Dads; Sid). HarperTrophy. $3.99 each (Family; Momma).

     Some comic-strip characters seem ideally suited to the multi-panel drawings-on-a-page mode. Scott Adams’ Dilbert is a perfect example: it could certainly be turned into an animated cartoon (and has been), but a lot of the fun of the strip resides in observing its relationship to the real business world and then imagining (rather than being told or shown) how the characters sound, move and interact with each other. How does Dilbert’s “hee hee” (at an inappropriate time) actually sound? When Wally betrays an effective employee named Jesus (“pronounced Hay-soos”) in return for 40 shares of stock, and is hit with a “Fzeeet,” what exactly does that sound like? It’s more fun to imagine than to know how the Pointy Haired Boss’s voice sounds when he complains to Wally, “You said I was stealing credit for a good idea, you lying liar!!!” And what about that “foop!” with which Admiral B-tang-B’tang demonstrates the reason his firm is the only “company in the galaxy willing to form a strategic alliance” with Dilbert’s? The latest Dilbert collection – No. 32, if you’re counting – features Dogbert as head of “Deus ex Machina Services”; a guy with “the stink of failure,” which follows him around and rubs off on Dilbert after they shake hands; Wally’s participation in “a program to cure uselessness,” in which the other students are a glass hammer and a bag of nothing; an idea that is “dumber than snake mittens,” created by a guy who asks Dilbert, “What do you have against snake mittens?”; the Dogbert Rumor Control Service (“$10 for each false rumor and $1,000 for any rumor I decide is true”); Dilbert losing his moral compass and therefore being promoted to “vice president of making employees feel miserable and helpless”; and many other instances of utterly absurd events that frequently seem more real than the ones that actually happen in corporations every day. Somehow the three-panel format (eight panels on Sundays) seems absolutely right for Adams’ brand of surreal humor.

     But it’s hard to imagine the animated characters of the Ice Age movies being as funny in comic-strip form as they are (intermittently, to be sure) in movies. The latest film in this franchise, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, has predictably spawned a passel of movie tie-in books, and “spawned” seems the right word for a film that is largely about various creatures (mammoths and dinosaurs) having babies. Like other movie tie-ins, these work at the (+++) level for families that want souvenirs of the film because the kids enjoy it so much, but get no rating at all for anyone else. Even with all the stills from the movie, and drawings of the characters, included in these books, it is hard to imagine them enticing kids to see the film. The characters just don’t live very well on the page – unlike Dilbert and his cohorts, the Ice Age denizens are all about motion. The Junior Novel, by Susan Korman, is for the oldest potential fans of the new film, ages 8-12, and includes eight pages of not-exceptionally-interesting movie stills. Buck the Amazing Dino Hunter! by Annie Auerbach – for ages 7-10 – is about a new character in Dawn of the Dinosaurs, a swashbuckling weasel; here, the film stills are rendered in black and white, which makes them less striking. The Movie Storybook, by Layla Rose, although intended for younger kids (ages 3-7), is really the best souvenir item from this film: it is an oversize, full-color volume packed with stills and containing just enough text to explain the rather thin plot. And then, for super-fans of the film, there are various books for preschoolers and kindergartners in which the focus is on only one element of the movie. My Three Dads (by A.J. Wilde) focuses on Mannie the mammoth, Sid the sloth and Diego the sabertooth, while Sid-napped! (by Ray Santos) is about a plot element in which Sid gets carried off by a mother dinosaur. All in the Family and Momma Mix-Up (both by Sierra Harimann) are Level 2 books in the I Can Read! series: both have plenty of pictures and only a few well-chosen, simple words in large type. And Made You Look! (by Nicole Congleton) is a find-the-differences book, with slight alterations of various scenes from the film (and answers in the back). Even for fans of Dawn of the Dinosaurs, the books do lose something in translation from motion picture to still drawings on a page, but kids with happy memories of the movie will have fun recalling their favorite scenes through these souvenirs.

(++++) VISIONS OF THE DARK

Moribito II: Guardian of the Darkness. By Nahoko Uehashi. Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic. $17.99.

A Taste for Red. By Lewis Harris. Clarion. $16.

The Strain. By Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. William Morrow. $26.99.

     The second of Nahoko Uehashi’s 10 Moribito novels to be released in the United States, Guardian of the Darkness retains the intensity and the appealing blend of Eastern settings and Western fantasy traditions that made the first book, Guardian of the Spirit, such a pleasure to read. But this volume is less of a progressive adventure and more of an attempt to recapture and understand the past; it moves at a less headlong pace, but delves into the inner life of the protagonist, Balsa, in ways that the first book did not. This does not mean that Guardian of the Darkness lacks action and adventure – Balsa is, after all, a fighter and a female bodyguard. But it does mean that there is a level of thoughtfulness here that enriches the story and takes it beyond traditional young-adult novels – and beyond the TV series based on Uehashi’s work. Indeed, every section of this book refers to darkness: “Into the Darkness,” “The Advancing Darkness,” “The People of Darkness,” “Facing the Darkness” and, as an epilogue, “Beyond the Darkness.” This is no mere conceit – there are dark forces aplenty as Balsa makes her way back to her native land, Kanbal, only to discover that the evil King Rogsam, who tried unsuccessfully to kill her in the earlier book, has now laid a different sort of trap for her. The king had sent eight assassins after Balsa and her now-dead mentor, Jiguro; now he has framed both Jiguro and Balsa for the assassins’ deaths, putting the young guard’s life in peril. Nor is this all: a conspiracy touching on the mysterious Guardians of the Darkness imperils the existence of Kanbal itself. Having returned to Kanbal seeking reconciliation with her past – her meeting with Aunt Yuka, who has not seen her in two dozen years and believes her dead, is particularly affecting – Balsa instead finds herself in the midst of conflicting clan loyalties, at odds with Jiguro’s kin, enveloped in myths and legends of her homeland, and pursued always by Rogsam’s enmity. It is only, finally, through allowing herself to endure a real-yet-unreal battle with Jiguro’s own shade that Balsa can begin to come to terms with herself, her life and her calling. In lesser hands, this climactic scene could easily deteriorate into melodrama, if not silliness; but Uehashi, having established a world in which such a thing is possible, follows the sequence through to its logical conclusion, resulting in a powerful and affecting end for this story.

     A Taste for Red moves toward what might be called the lighter side of darkness – at first. Lewis Harris’ first novel seems like a fairly standard vampire (or vampire-wannabe) story: Svetlana Grimm starts sixth grade at a new school after her parents move, and tries to cope with the kids and social pressures there while also handling her own oddities – such as sleeping under her bed every night, eating only red foods, and occasionally hearing other people’s thoughts. Svetlana is sure she is a vampire, but she isn’t sure how or why. And her suspicions and uncertainties only become heightened when she encounters the science teacher, Ms. Larch, who also seems able to read people’s thoughts – including Svetlana’s. So far, so good – but what Harris does next is to darken the story considerably. What if Svetlana isn’t a vampire? What if she and Ms. Larch aren’t potential companions but potential enemies? What if some but not all the oddities in Svetlana’s life are relevant to who or what she is? And this is where A Taste for Red starts to get really interesting, and a great deal more serious. Instead of the romanticized version of vampires that is all too common in books today (especially ones for young readers), Harris’ novel takes a strong turn toward the dark and distinctly unpleasant side. There is no overt gore or anything exceptionally scary here – the book is for preteens, after all – but there is an increasing sense, as A Taste for Red progresses, that a vampire is not what Svetlana wants to turn out to be. The trouble is that she also does not much want to be what she finds out that she actually is. How she discovers that, what she does with the knowledge, and where circumstances lead her, are the elements of a story that gets steadily more interesting as it becomes more intense, and that moves toward its conclusion (and the likelihood of a sequel) with impeccable logic.

     Logic is frequently missing, but melodrama is plentiful, in another vampire story – this one decidedly for adults. The Strain, the first book of a planned trilogy, is about (yawn) a vampire war against humans. Guillermo del Toro, director of the outstanding film Pan’s Labyrinth, ought to be too good for this sort of potboiler, which perhaps is more heavily influenced by Chuck Hogan, author of Prince of Thieves and other dramatic but formulaic novels. “Dramatic but formulaic” certainly describes The Strain. There is the airplane that arrives at its destination, then falls into a sinister silence requiring intervention by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There is the elderly Jewish professor who has waited his whole life, even through the Holocaust, to confront the evil that he knows will appear. There is the dedicated CDC doctor trained to confront biological threats, but not the virus that creates vampires. There is description like this, involving the old professor, Abraham Setrakian: “His malformed hands began to ache. What he saw before him was not an omen – it was an incursion. It was the act itself. The thing he had been waiting for. That he had been preparing for. All his life until now.” There is dialogue like this, when Setrakian meets the CDC physician, Dr. Eph Goodweather (yes, Goodweather): “‘There is much you will need to let go of, Dr. Goodweather,’ said Setrakian. ‘I understand that you believe you are taking a risk in trusting the word of an old stranger. But, in a sense, I am taking a thousandfold greater risk entrusting this responsibility to you. What we are discussing here is nothing less than the fate of the human race…’” Oh, ho hum. Give the authors credit for fast pacing and a pretty good sense of the horrific, and The Strain still gets a (++) or (+++) rating, depending on how often you have read this sort of thing before and how tolerant you are of reading it again. Even many fans of horror novels (and films) will give the book the lower rating, though, because the dialogue is so often so laughably predictable. “‘Don’t demonize the sick,’ said Nora. ‘But now…now the sick are demons. Now the infected are active vectors of the disease, and have to be stopped. Killed. Destroyed.’” Well, with verbiage like that, with vampires that “turned feral” and “backed up on [their] haunches,” with the entirely typical use of silver (not just bullets – needles work, too) and fire as weapons, it is inevitable that the action will lead to the lair of “This Thing. The Master.” And so it does, but of course the Master escapes (so there can be two more books), and the scene promises to shift – at least from time to time – away from New York City, where The Strain takes place, to other environs. The Strain is immensely uncreative but is entertaining in its own frenetic way – sort of like a not-very-thoughtful vampire movie, which is perhaps what the authors want this book and its planned successors to become.

(+++) AFTER THE POETICS

Paris Spleen: Little Poems in Prose. By Charles Baudelaire. Translated by Keith Waldrop. Wesleyan University Press. $22.95.

So Long As Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. By Clinton Heylin. Da Capo. $24.

     What do you do for an encore after you produce poetry that shakes up, enrages and captivates the public and quickly becomes both controversial and wildly influential? If you are Charles Baudelaire, you follow up The Flowers of Evil with a series of poetic observations and commentaries on Parisian life – but instead of casting them in the form of poetry, you write them as “Little Poems in Prose.” That is what Baudelaire did in Le Spleen de Paris, now newly and very poetically translated by Keith Waldrop as Paris Spleen. This makes a fine companion book to Waldrop’s 2006 translation of The Flowers of Evil, also published by Wesleyan University Press. But the thin volume – 116 pages – does not quite have the richness or the power of Baudelaire’s earlier work. “These nervous pleasantries are not without danger, and sometime quite costly. But what’s an eternity of damnation to one who has found in such an instant infinite satisfaction?” So asks Baudelaire (as here translated) in a brief story in which the narrator deliberately overdoes a practical joke in such a way as to ruin a glazier’s livelihood. It is a story that Poe could have written, complete with its parenthetical paragraph in which the narrator attempts to explain his motivation for what is essentially a cruel and vicious impulse. And Poe did write something like this, in The Imp of the Perverse, and wrote it much better. Nor is this the only time in Paris Spleen in which Baudelaire seems to deliver something a touch warmed-over. “A Hemisphere in a Head of Hair,” which lasts less than a page, begins, “Allow me long – longer – to inhale the odor of your hair, to bury my face in it, like a thirsty man at a spring, and to shake it out like a scented hanky, flinging its memories into the air.” This is mere tepid Romanticism. “An Heroic Death” is more not-quite-Poe: “This Prince was neither better nor worse than others, but an excessive sensibility rendered him, in many cases, crueler and more despotic than the rest. …Caring little for men or for morals, himself a true artist, he considered Ennui his only foe, and the bizarre efforts he took to flee or to vanquish this universal tyrant would certainly have made a serious historian classify him as ‘monster’ – if, in his domain, it had been permitted to write anything not for enjoyment (or astonishment, enjoyment in a particularly delicate form).” There are some felicitous turns of phrase in Paris Spleen, and the angry intensity and sexuality of The Flowers of Evil sometimes peek through, but not even the lovely flow of Waldrop’s translation can conceal the fact that this book does not present Baudelaire at his best.

     Shakespeare had plenty of encores – magnificent ones – to his sequence of 154 sonnets, but Clinton Heylin’s curious So Long as Men Can Breathe pays little attention to the playwright’s later work or, in a sense, to the sonnets themselves. This is not a book about Shakespeare, about poetry, about sonnets or about love (the sonnets’ primary focus). It is a book about publishing, both legal and illegal, written by a biographer of Bob Dylan and Orson Welles who happens also to be a scholar of the history of Shakespeare’s time. Perhaps Heylin’s multifaceted interests explain the direction he takes here. The great questions raised by the sonnets, including to whom they were dedicated and why Shakespeare seems to have tried exceptionally hard to conceal the identity of the person (or people) to whom they were addressed, come into Heylin’s book only in passing. He is less interested in what the sonnets say than in how they came to be printed, pirated, passed from hand to hand, altered, collected, sold, analyzed and considered and reconsidered again and again. The sonnets were first published on May 20, 1609, by George Eld and Thomas Thorpe, a pair of disreputable characters whose edition may or may not have been authorized. Heylin does a fine job exploring the hurlyburly of the 17^th-century publishing netherworld, including changes that may have been made for the benefit of the publishers but that scholars have assumed for centuries to be elements of Shakespeare’s own intentions. Much of what Heylin discusses is speculative – much of everything that tries to figure out what Shakespeare “really” meant is speculative – but Heylin moves with rather too much enthusiasm into the back-and-forth of unceasing argument and counterargument, returning again and again to questions of how the method of publication of the sonnets may have influenced readers’ acceptance of their sequencing and meaning. At one point, Heylin writes of “the tortured relationship” in the sonnet sequence: “A sense of futility infuses the entire infatuation. The gulf in age, status, and feelings is stated almost ad nauseum [sic].” But he seems more comfortable tossing out the names of people whose claims and counterclaims may flow from piracy in the poems’ publishing history: “The rebuttal to Vickers’s views came soon enough, and from a not entirely unexpected quarter. Duncan-Jones was given two and a half columns in the TLS, a fortnight after Love’s review appeared, to mount her counteroffensive, [which included a claim that] Thorpe had no reason to ‘risk the wrath of’ Shakespeare by publishing something under his name that was not by him – i.e., exactly what Jaggard, Pavier, and Eld had previously done without the slightest repercussion.” It must be said that the rogues’ gallery of publishing pirates – “bookleggers,” Heylin calls them – contains some entertaining characters, and Heylin’s generally bright style makes many of the characters’ adventures and misadventures enjoyable to follow. But in all this, the genius of the sonnets’ poetry, their importance as literature, and their place within Shakespeare’s life and work, all tend to get lost. So Long as Men Can Breathe takes readers through many a byway of the past 400 years, while studiously avoiding the main roads that lead to the sparkle, wit and grace of Shakespeare’s language and poetic sentiments.

(++++) ROMANTICS AND BEYOND

Schubert: Complete Overtures, Volume 2—Overture in D major; Overtures in the Italian Style in D major and C major; Rosamunde, D. 644, from “Die Zauberharfe”; Die Zwillingsbrüder; Overture in E minor; Rosamunde, D. 732, from “Alfonso und Estrella”; Die Verschworenen—Der häusliche Krieg; Fierrabras. Prague Sinfonia conducted by Christian Benda. Naxos. $8.99.

Dvořák: Symphony No. 7; The Golden Spinning Wheel. Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra Amsterdam conducted by Yakov Kreizberg. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

Sacred Songs of the Romantic Period: Music of Dvořák, Wolf, Mendelssohn and Reger. Susanne Bernhard, soprano; Maria Graf, harp; Harald Feller, organ. Oehms. $16.99.

Johann Strauss Sr. Edition, Volume 14. Slovak Sinfonietta Žilina conducted by Christian Pollack. Marco Polo. $9.99.

Johann Strauss Jr. Waltz Arrangements: Wine, Women and Song by Alban Berg; Roses from the South, Lagunenwalzer, Emperor Waltz by Arnold Schoenberg; Treasure Waltz by Anton Webern. Linos Ensemble. Capriccio. $16.99.

     Schubert’s stage works had little success, but his overtures to them – and the overtures that he wrote for concert purposes – remain tuneful delights, with especially prominent woodwind parts and the sort of encapsulation of emotion that is a hallmark of the Romantic era. The second volume of Naxos’ recordings of all the Schubert overtures contains some well-known pieces – the two overtures “in the Italian style” and the Rosamunde overture taken from Die Zauberharfe – amid a number of unfamiliar works. The Rosamunde overture on which Schubert eventually settled flows far more pleasantly and naturally than does his original choice, which came from his opera Alfonso und Estrella. However, Christian Benda pushes the Prague Sinfonia very hard in the overture’s lovely main theme – one of the few tempo miscalculations here. The Overture in the Italian Style in D major is a particular delight on this CD – it out-Rossinis Rossini in its thematic variety and use of the orchestra. The overture to Fierrabras (misspelled “Fierabras” on the CD) is another highly effective work that deserves to be heard more often. The remaining pieces here, if not quite so inherently interesting, all have their moments of charm, and the orchestra plays everything with clarity and enthusiasm.

     The orchestra plays well for Yakov Kreizberg, too, as he continues his rather curious Dvořák cycle. What makes it odd is that Kreizberg seems to lavish more attention on the filler pieces than on the symphonies. His earlier recording, of Symphony No. 6, was truly awful: lumbering, uneven in tempo and utterly dull. But it was paired with a lovely rendition of The Water Goblin. Kreizberg does much better with Symphony No. 7, allowing it for the most part to flow naturally and without silly gimmicks or unneeded tempo changes. The Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra Amsterdam certainly does its part, presenting beautifully rounded tones and full- throated brass. It is only at the very end of the symphony that Kreizberg overdoes things with a ritard-accelerando-ritard that undercuts a mostly effective performance. On the other hand, The Golden Spinning Wheel is excellent throughout. All the Dvořák tone poems, which he wrote late in life, are based on very gory Czech fairytales, but all unfold to some of the composer’s warmest and most beautiful music. The Golden Spinning Wheel moves from episode to episode with real spirit, its martial sections strongly contrasted with its romantic ones, and its overall effect is quite marvelous. It sounds great, too – as does the symphony – thanks to PentaTone’s always outstanding SACD sound.

     Dvořák also assumes a prominent place on a CD called “Sacred Songs of the Romantic Period.” Eleven of his German-language religious songs, the Biblische Lieder, op. 99, are sung with great feeling by soprano Susanne Bernhard, who is accompanied by harpist Maria Graf in arrangements made by organist Harald Feller. The harp also accompanies two of the three songs by Max Reger on this CD. The rest of the music is accompanied by Feller on the organ – a particularly interesting choice for the two Mendelssohn songs, which were originally written for piano but which Mendelssohn said could optionally be played on organ. They certainly sound more churchlike that way; so does the third Reger song. The only pieces here that seem a touch out of place are five songs by Hugo Wolf, which do not have quite the same overtly sacred simplicity as the other works on the CD. Still, they too are beautifully sung, and the disc as a whole provides some interesting contrasts between the earlier Romantic-era songs and those of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

     Of course, not all Romantic music was heavy – not by a long shot. The 14^th volume in Marco Polo’s wonderful Johann Strauss Sr. series shows once again that the elder Strauss had found the secret to elevating light music to a real art form – albeit not with the elegance that his sons Johann Jr. and Josef would later bring to it. The eight waltzes and a polka on the new CD are all charming, beautifully balanced and unendingly tuneful. Adelaiden-Walzer, the waltz Egerien-Tänze, and Die Tanzmeister – cleverly named to solidify Strauss’ relationship with the dance-masters who taught people to swirl to his music – are especially well crafted, and the Beliebten Annen-Polka is so bright and lovely that it only makes sense for it to be labeled “beloved.” The other waltzes here are not quite as captivating, although each has at least one section of great beauty: Die Wettrenner, Die Debutanten, Stadt- und Landleben, Die Fantasten and Musik-Verein-Tänze. The Slovak Sinfonietta Žilina under Christian Pollack – who has made a specialty of this kind of music – plays with so much lightness of spirit that it brings the days of old Vienna to life once again.

     But those days were long gone by 1921, the postwar year in which three famous (some would say notorious) members of the new Viennese school of composition turned their attention to five waltzes by Johann Strauss Jr. Considering how far into atonality Berg, Schoenberg and Webern were even then pushing music, it is remarkable to find them focusing their skills on lilting, very strongly tonal dance works written as many as 52 years earlier. It is even more remarkable to hear the respect with which they treated Strauss’ music – stripping it of opulence, to be sure, but retaining (especially in the three waltzes arranged by Schoenberg) its emotional underpinnings and genuine loveliness. Four of the five arrangements use the same musical forces: string quartet, harmonium (a pump organ that sounds a bit like an accordion), and string quartet. The fifth, the Emperor Waltz, retains the piano and strings but replaces the harmonium with a flute and clarinet. The Linos Ensemble plays the works with zest, bringing out the passages in which the arrangers somewhat re-harmonized the music (notably Berg in Wine, Women and Song) while making sure that the strong three-quarter-time beat remains apparent throughout. There is some feeling of looking through the wrong end of the telescope about these arrangements, which can certainly be considered curiosities but should not be dismissed as such. Berg, Schoenberg and Webern – Schoenberg most of all – believed they were building on Romantic ideals even as they moved beyond them. Their Strauss waltz arrangements show that they could appreciate the musical structure and rhythmic vitality of Strauss’ music even as they ultimately rejected the era in which it was written.

(++++) TAKING CHANCES WITH CONCERTOS

Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 3. François-Frédéric Guy, piano; Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France conducted by Philippe Jordan. Naïve. $16.99.

Khachaturian: Violin Concerto; Concerto-Rhapsody for Violin and Orchestra. Nicolas Koeckert, violin; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by José Serebrier. Naxos. $8.99.

Copland: Clarinet Concerto; William Thomas McKinley: Clarinet Duet Book II; Concerto for Two Clarinets and Orchestra. Kim Ellis and Richard Stoltzman, clarinets; Slovak National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kirk Trevor. Navona. $16.99.

Joseph Bertolozzi: Bridge Music. Delos. $12.99.

     François-Frédéric Guy and Philippe Jordan have completed their cycle of Beethoven’s piano concertos with a third CD on which they take some risks, and some liberties, with tempo and balance; and this time, for the most part, the risks pay off. No. 2, actually the first of the five numbered concertos that Beethoven wrote (in addition to an early E-flat concerto and a piano arrangement of the Violin Concerto), is not quite as light and fleet here as it can be, but it bubbles along pleasantly, and some of the orchestral touches – notably the strings in the Adagio – nicely complement Guy’s piano, highlighting elements of the accompaniment that are not always brought through clearly. No. 3 has sounded both darker and more magisterial in other recordings than it does here, and some of the balance emphases try too hard to be unusual (such as the timpani just before the end of the finale). But this is a generally subtle and well-integrated performance in which the music flows naturally and the back-and-forth between C minor (the work’s nominal key) and C major is handled fluently. Guy and Jordan deserve credit for taking a fresh look at these standards of the repertoire, and even if not all their approaches prove effective, their CD is very much worth hearing for its attempt to rethink the concertos without being in any way false to their composer or the time in which they were written.

     Nicolas Koeckert’s excellent playing in Khachaturian’s Violin Concerto is the main attraction of his new CD with José Serebrier and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. This is a passionate and warm reading of the concerto, especially strong in the first two movements. Where Koeckert and Serebrier take the most chances is in the finale, which they handle more soberly and with less freewheeling virtuosity than it usually receives. This lends weight to the concerto as a whole, but it prevents the final movement from feeling like a joyous release after the somewhat heavier material that has gone before (although this is scarcely a profound concerto). This is a well-thought-out interpretation even if not a wholly convincing one. As for the Concerto-Rhapsody, which is long enough to be a concerto of its own, it comes across rather less well. Khachaturian wrote three works with this title, one each for violin, cello and piano, and intended them to be mixtures of subtle emotionality and brilliant display. The brilliance is missing in most of Koeckert’s performance, though – not because he lacks the technical ability but because he seems to be holding it in check in order to bring forth the work’s long lines and rather surface-level feelings. As a result, the Concerto-Rhapsody often seems to drag, not because of tempo but because it wades through so much emotion. This is a valid approach to the work but not, in the end, as effective as one in which the brighter and dimmer sections are contrasted more strongly.

     Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, a staple of 20^th-century clarinet repertoire, gets a fine performance from Kim Ellis, principal clarinetist of the Symphony of Southeast Texas, with a particularly strong first movement in which the lyrical elements of jazz – effectively communicated by the composer despite the lack of percussion – come through with particular sensitivity. Ellis also does quite well with the jazz elements contained in the cadenza that links the concerto’s two movements – she says she loves this music, and her affection shines through. Ellis, along with fellow clarinetist Richard Stoltzman, also shows an affinity for jazz in the two dual-clarinet works of William Thomas McKinley on this CD. McKinley is an accomplished jazz pianist as well as a composer, and he has written three solo-clarinet concertos as well as a clarinet sonata. He has worked and recorded with Stoltzman before, and Ellis says it was McKinley who suggested that she and Stoltzman work together on this CD. What matters, though, is the music; and although Ellis and Stoltzman take something of a risk in weighting this CD toward McKinley rather than the better-known Copland (who was McKinley’s teacher at Tanglewood), the approach pays off handsomely. McKinley, now 70, retains a healthy dose of youthful exuberance in the two works here, but there is also considerable tenderness and a call for substantial clarinet virtuosity. The six-movement Clarinet Duet Book II features fascinating intertwining of the instruments, while the two-clarinet concerto (which has a rather off-kilter waltz rather than a traditional slow movement at its center) showcases brightness more than deep emotion.

     It is hard to say what sort of emotion Joseph Bertolozzi wants to evoke in his Bridge Music, which is essentially a concerto for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Mid-Hudson Bridge that crosses the Hudson River between Poughkeepsie and Highland, New York. What Bertolozzi does is look at the bridge as a huge musical instrument, then use parts of it to create sounds that he arranges into a 10-movement suite: “Bridge Funk,” “The River That Flows Both Ways,” “Steel Works” and “Rivet Gun” are among the movements’ titles. As it happens, the bridge’s designer, Ralph Modjeski, was a pianist and classmate of Ignacy Jan Paderewski before he became an engineer, so this bridge actually has a musical connection. But whether this work succeeds as music – or as any sort of art – is debatable, and will no doubt be debated. Bertolozzi, who was born in Poughkeepsie 50 years ago, apparently has an emotional attachment to this bridge, but whether Bridge Music is ultimately more than a gimmick will be a matter of opinion. Bertolozzi clearly approaches the bridge in a musical way – the CD includes s 10-minute audio tour of the structure’s various sounds – and there is enough seriousness to this project to earn it a (+++) rating. But as for what it is, aside from an attention-getter – that is something that listeners must decide for themselves.

(++++) OLD PLOTS NICELY REPACKAGED

Pit Dragon Chronicles, Book Four: Dragon’s Heart. By Jane Yolen. Harcourt. $17.

The Reformed Vampire Support Group. By Catherine Jinks. Harcourt. $17.

Ghost Huntress, Book 1: The Awakening. By Marley Gibson. Graphia. $8.99.

     Fans of Jane Yolen’s Pit Dragon Chronicles will be delighted that the trilogy has now turned into a tetralogy. Yolen didn’t plan it this way: the first three books were complete on their own, and this followup volume comes more than five years after the third, A Sending of Dragons (the first was called Dragon’s Blood; the second, Heart’s Blood). Yolen does such a good job of re-immersing readers in the world of Jakkin and Akki (who have been in hiding for a year and presumed dead) that readers of the first three books will feel an immediate thrill of familiarity. This is all well and good, since Yolen herself dedicates the book in part to “all my fans who wrote demanding a fourth volume.” They clearly demanded continuity, too: Dragon’s Heart is not the place to enter this saga. Yolen knows this: she not only explains what happens at the end of A Sending of Dragons in a preface to the new work but also reprints that book’s last couple of pages. Continuation is everything here, and Yolen handles it commendably. So the question of whether Dragon’s Heart is as good as its predecessors is really irrelevant: it is certainly as well written, it carries forward the story of the three previous books, and it does what it is designed to do by giving fans of those earlier volumes an idea of “what happened next.” What happened is that teenage Jakkin and Akki have now discovered dragon-like powers within, such as a telepathic bond between themselves and with dragons – plus the ability to stay out in the terrible cold of Dark-After. Interestingly, Yolen refuses to take the easy way out by having the teens’ telepathic bond tie them more closely together: much of Dragon’s Heart turns on the two becoming estranged from each other because they see the value of their powers differently. Each becomes involved in potentially life-threatening situations, and both learn more about themselves through handling danger. “We don’t always know a hero when we see him,” says the old bonder Likkarn at one point. “And sometimes, too late to tell him, we recognize what splendid things he’s done.” He is not speaking of Jakkin or Akki, but he might as well be: it is only after they face themselves, their bond with the dragons and the realities and dangers confronting their planet that the full depth of their heroism – and its meaning for the future of their world – can become clear.

     While Yolen continues and expands on a plot she previously established, Catherine Jinks decides to take some old notions about vampires and twist them every which way. The result is a delightfully offbeat book about the sordid “realities” of vampire life and the many errors that non-vampires make when thinking about vampiric folk. For instance, “The garlic myth was triggered hundreds of years ago, when a nameless vampire joked about not attacking some woman because she smelled of garlic. I mean, how could anyone be terrified of a culinary herb?” So wonders Nina Harrison, fanged at 15, unaged since 1973 and thoroughly miserable as she subsists on her diet of one fresh guinea pig a day. Another myth disproved: “People often think that vampires live in decrepit old castles, or mausoleums, or sprawling mansions full of stained glass and wood paneling. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Perhaps it would be, if all the vampires in the world were millionaires. But since the ones I know are just ordinary working stiffs (so to speak), their dwellings tend to be on the modest side.” For her part, Nina lives with – her parents. Jinks cleverly sets up a story about the ennui permeating the decidedly non-glamorous vampire world – and then upends things (and gets her plot really moving) by having one member of the vampire group destroyed. Yes, although other ideas may merely be myths, vampires can indeed be staked, and do indeed crumble to ashes if that happens. And when it does, Nina and her friend Dave (a vampiric former punk rocker) find themselves trying to solve a mystery and keep all the vampires alive. Well, not exactly alive, since they are all dead, but…in existence. The story becomes satisfyingly complex while never losing a certain amount of deadpan (sorry about that) humor. And throwing a werewolf into the mix certainly doesn’t hurt. This is an offbeat tale from start to finish, and one handled with considerable narrative skill. It’s fun, too.

     Marley Gibson doesn’t so much redo an old plot as take it at face value, which is why the first of her Ghost Huntress books gets a (+++) rating. This is a fairly straightforward story of a sensitive-to-the-paranormal teen named Kendall who moves with her parents from Chicago to a small town in Georgia and finds she can’t sleep because it’s too quiet. So Kendall’s dad buys her a white-noise machine – but instead of finding it restful, she finds it freaking her out, because she hears a voice coming through the machine. And it’s not her imagination – she’s able to record it and play it back. “Okay. I’ve got to be calm. I can’t lose my cool every time I encounter a spirit – or a suspected spirit. I am Kendall Moorhead. Psychic. Intuitive. Sensitive. Ghost huntress. No more wigging out.” That’s Gibson’s basic style for Kendall – a slight tinge of humor, chopped-up sentences, and a touch of sort-of-slang here and there. Kendall finds it remarkably easy to communicate with the spirit once she establishes initial contact, but there is nothing especially surprising in the methods of communication – cold spots, a pendulum whose motion changes, tightness in the chest, that sort of thing. Kendall’s enthusiasm can actually get a little irritating: “Man, I’m champing at the bit here. I wish the floaty lady would just appear and talk to me, like how Patrick Swayze blabbers with Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost. I know this isn’t a movie, but I wish it were.” Hmm…maybe that’s the author’s wish peeping through, but there isn’t really enough inventiveness in The Awakening to make a movie (well, not a good one, anyway). Still, there are some interesting exploring-my-gift passages here, combined with some very ordinary conflicts with parents: “You don’t have any abilities, Kendall,” says her mom. “You’re making it all up just to get attention.” Part of the problem here is that Gibson makes Kendall so determinedly normal, except for her psychic abilities. “Adrenaline is flowing through my body like an intravenous drug. This is a high like I’ve never experienced – not that I’ve ever done drugs or anything, but you know what I mean.” Making Kendall more interesting in future books would make the Ghost Huntress series more interesting, too.

(++++) OFFBEAT PEOPLE AND PLACES

The Touchstone Trilogy, Book Three: Winter Wood. By Steve Augarde. David Fickling Books. $17.99.

The Beef Princess of Practical County. By Michelle Houts. Delacorte Press. $16.99.

Love, Stargirl. By Jerry Spinelli. Knopf. $8.99.

     First came The Various, then Celandine, and now Winter Wood, in which 11-year-old Midge Walters must undertake a quest to Celandine in order to save the Various – a well-knit structure not only for this trilogy but also for its titles. The Various, a tribe of fairies that only Midge can see, will perish unless Midge recovers an object called the Orbis, which was last seen in the possession of Midge’s great-great-aunt, Celandine. The names are gently evocative, and the characters’ thinking equally expressive, as when Tadgemole of the Various says the tribe wants “to be gone from here, maid. We must find what we have lost, and so return to our own.” It is the quality of Steve Augarde’s language, more than anything inherent in his plot, that sets Winter Wood and its predecessors above other coming-of-age fantasies for preteens. The books are, quite simply, beautiful to read. Midge knows nothing about the Orbis until Tadgemole mentions it, but “then came a picture, a memory. She sat by water – a pool or fountain – and held some object in her hand, felt the cool weight of it, the smooth curve of the metal against her palm. …‘I…remember it.’” And so Midge, not even knowing whether Celandine still lives – she would be “a hundred fourseasons” if she does – sets off to find her relative…and does so quite quickly. For another charm of Augarde’s trilogy is that he does not spin things out unnecessarily. The book is barely one-fifth old – it runs more than 500 pages – when Midge and Celandine meet, but this is only the start of Midge’s adventure. For Celandine eventually remembers, in fits and starts, that she did indeed receive the Orbis, but she cannot remember what she did with it, and although “Midge had suffered so many setbacks in this quest that she had almost grown used to it,” this is a very great disappointment indeed. But, again, at this point we are but halfway through the book. Augarde piles adventure upon adventure, character upon character, event upon event, and deepens the relationship between Midge and the Various through it all, as clues lead in unexpected directions and treachery within the Various hampers the search for the Orbis – which, it turns out, is not all that must be found. Winter Wood is an unusually thoughtful fantasy, a particularly well-written one, and a most satisfying conclusion to its trilogy.

     The setting of The Beef Princess of Practical County will be just as exotic as that of Winter Wood for many readers: this is a story about competitive livestock showing in the American heartland. It is also a coming-of-age tale, and one told with both warmth and humor. The central character is 12-year-old Libby Ryan, a ranch girl who understands that animals are raised for meat but is having a lot of trouble reconciling that fact with her increasing closeness to two young steers, Piggy and Mule – which Libby has raised on her own. After a showing at the Practical County Fair, Piggy and Mule will be auctioned off, and Libby is far from sure how she feels about that. Nor is she sure why she has entered the Beef Princess beauty pageant, a decision that puts her in direct competition with the nasty Darling sisters. Well, actually, Libby does know why she entered – her mother pressured her – but she is not quite sure what to do now that she is a contestant. Michelle Houts’ first novel has a ring of authenticity and some nicely drawn characters, but it also tries just a little too hard to make its points – not only by naming the nasty characters Darling (and giving them the first names Precious, Lil and Ohma) but also by having Libby’s hometown called Nowhere, Indiana (Libby actually lives “fourteen and a half miles from Nowhere”). Yet even though Houts lays things on a bit too thickly at times, her novel gets a (+++) rating for its endearing protagonist – for whom it is impossible not to root.

     Jerry Spinelli’s Love, Stargirl gets a (+++) rating, too. First published in 2007 and now available in paperback, this companion book to Spinelli’s original Stargirl will be immediately endearing to fans of that earlier book – but there is nothing much really new in it. Yes, it takes place a year after Stargirl has moved to Pennsylvania, and yes, Stargirl has made some new friends (from a quirky five-year-old to a man who spends his time by his wife’s grave – “even in death, Grace was all he needed”). But the things that Stargirl fans will like the most about this book are exactly the ones that make it not quite as good as the original. Stargirl’s circumstances may be different, but she is just the same as she always was, complete with ukulele and rat. The book is written as “the world’s longest letter” to Leo, starting on January 1 and continuing to the following year’s January 2. This is a tale of small discoveries and small adventures, of Stargirl’s ever-so-slightly-skewed perceptions, of friendship and neighborliness and perhaps just a little bit about growing up. It is charming in its way – perhaps even a touch too much so – and those who love Stargirl just as she was in Spinelli’s original Stargirl will be delighted to have even more of her. It is, though, essentially more of the same.

(+++) MANGA AND MORE

Xtreme Art Ultimate Book of Trace-and-Draw Manga. By Christopher Hart. Watson-Guptill. $21.95.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen—The Junior Novel; The Last Prime; Operation Autobot; When Robots Attack!; I Am Optimus Prime; Rise of the Decepticons; Coloring and Activity Book and Crayons; The Reusable Sticker Book. HarperEntertainment. $5.99 (Novel); $4.99 each (Prime; Coloring); $3.99 each (Autobot; Attack!); $6.99 (Sticker). HarperTrophy. $3.99 each (Optimus; Rise).

     The continuing popularity of manga and its animated cousin, anime, is clear from the appearance of innumerable movies now being made for American and worldwide audiences. No longer Japanese phenomena, manga and anime have become true globe-spanning styles, at once distinct from other forms of cartooning and animation and related closely enough so that readers and viewers can immediately comprehend and enjoy them. And part of that enjoyment is in drawing these stylized characters yourself – which young fans will find surprisingly easy to do under the guidance of Christopher Hart in the awkwardly titled but very well designed Xtreme Art Ultimate Book of Trace-and-Draw Manga. The book is in three parts – manga, manga chibi and manga monsters – and explains the basics of each style before showing how to draw specific characters. Anyone who wants to draw manga, or simply understand its appeal more clearly, will find material of interest here – the different shapes of eyes for children, teenagers and adults, for example, or the creation of “monsters” (few of which are really monstrous) by starting with the body shapes of real-world creatures and modifying them (often with bits and pieces of other real-world creatures – a worm with crab claws or a creature with a cat’s body and rabbit ears). Much of the attractiveness of manga is in the characters’ eyes, but some of it is in the proportions: in standard manga characters, the head is about one-fourth of the body, while in super-cute manga chibi, the head is fully half the body’s size. Hairstyles are also important in manga, and Hart shows how to shape them clearly. The drawings here are simple and stylized, sometimes too much so: “Undercover Agent” looks just plain silly in a dress-like trench coat, and calling the adorable Bubble Baby and Cooboo “monsters” is stretching things to the breaking point. Still, the book’s basic structure is sound: each character is presented in four quarter-page drawings that start with its basic shapes and then add touches to give it personality; then the facing page shows the finished, shaded character. Comparisons of character types are especially good here, for instance when Hart draws the same girl in manga style and then as a manga chibi – and points out exactly how the two differ. Younger artists will have some trouble moving from the four quarter-page drawings to the finished one – there are often quite a few additions required – but more-experienced artists should find the book easy to follow, and even younger aspiring cartoonists will find at least some characters here that they can create (although not as adeptly as Hart does). Xtreme Art Ultimate Book of Trace-and-Draw Manga is an attractive introductory book for manga fans – and artists who get good at the basics should be able to move beyond Hart’s characters and create their own.

     Lest there be any doubt of the persistent popularity of manga and anime, one need only head for the local multiplex to find the latest summer movies made in this style. Just a couple of years after the film Transformers (2007) – loosely based on a 1984 TV series and more directly based on a popular line of toys – comes the inevitable sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. And with it come the equally inevitable movie tie-in books, which slice and dice the plot well enough to earn (+++) ratings for families that simply must have some sort of souvenir, but which will be of no interest at all to people who have not seen the film. None of these books is likely to pull people into the theater, but none will disappoint people who have been there already and who really, really liked what they saw. The Junior Novel, by Dan Jolley, aims at the oldest group targeted by the film – ages 8-12 – and gives the story of the not-quite-beaten-yet Decepticons in the most detail; it also includes eight pages of Transformer pictures. The Last Prime, by Tracey West, is an even shorter novelization; it is aimed at ages 7-10 and contains black-and-white drawings rather than color pictures of Transformers. Operation Autobot (by Susan Korman) and When Robots Attack! (by Ray Santos) are picture books for ages 3-7, with big and bright drawings that tell most of the movie’s story and a few words (including the inevitable bam! and AAAAH!) to communicate the action. For roughly the same age range, I Am Optimus Prime and Rise of the Decepticons (both by Jennifer Frantz) are Level 2 books in the I Can Read! series: each gives only part of the movie’s plot, using big, bold drawings and a minimal number of simple words. Families that really want to immerse kids in Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen can even go beyond these books to some novelty items that will appeal to Transformer-fascinated preschoolers. The Coloring and Activity Book and Crayons (by Devan Aptekar) includes a variety of puzzles (with answers at the back of the book) and a number of movie scenes in black-and-white that kids can color with the three clever crayons packaged in plastic on the book’s front page – each crayon offers two colors, one at either end. But of course coloring books lose kids’ interest after the pictures are finished, so some families may prefer The Reusable Sticker Book (by Lucy Rosen), which includes two pages of reusable stickers that can be used to fill in a series of stills from the film. Nothing in any of these tie-ins is educational – or pretends to be – but if there is a Transformer devotee in your house, the various movie-spinoff books can be a recipe for summer fun that extends beyond the movie theater.

(+++) DARK SIDES OF CELEBRITY

Airhead, Book 2: Being Nikki. By Meg Cabot. Point/Scholastic. $16.99.

A Day in the Life: One Family, the Beautiful People, & the End of the Sixties. By Robert Greenfield. Da Capo. $24.95.

     One of these books is aimed at teenagers, the other at adults; one is fiction, the other nonfiction. But both are astonishingly similar in their single-minded fixation on celebrity – not in the sense of being famous for accomplishing something meaningful, but in terms of being famous for being famous. Certainly that is the premise of Being Nikki, the followup novel to Airhead, in which brainy but plain Emerson Watts went to a major store opening to look after her little sister, Frida, and a bizarre and never-explained accident caused Em’s soul to migrate into the body of teen supermodel Nikki Howard, who was on site as part of the store-opening festivities. This setup made no sense, and Meg Cabot – author of The Princess Diaries and other books that also made no sense but possessed the same quality of transformation – wisely got past it as quickly as possible so she could explore the implications of being in the wrong body. In Being Nikki, those implications get darker and more complex, as Nikki’s mother is missing (and Em feels she needs to find out what happened to her); Stark Enterprises, the company in whose new store the bizarre brain switch occurred, begins to look more and more like one of those fount-of-all-evil corporations with nefarious motives galore; and Christopher Maloney, on whom Em had a crush, like, forever, is now coming on strongly to Nikki (or is to Em in Nikki’s body?). While trying to unravel these mysteries of the heart and head, Em/Nikki also has a few things to do with her body – she is a teenage supermodel, after all – and she starts to wonder what Nikki did with the body when it was 100% hers, since a number of girls seem to think Em/Nikki is or was after their boyfriends. This is what passes for introspection in the book: Christopher had “never said he’d loved me back when I had that snaggletooth and didn’t look like the goddess that I did now. I mean, I was still the same person on the inside then that I was now.” And this: “Getting paid thousands of dollars to stand in a pair of leather pants under some hot lights for a few hours wasn’t that big a sacrifice. You do tend to lose your perspective pretty quickly after a while.” By the end of Being Nikki, it turns out that the real Nikki isn’t dead, as Em had thought she was, and that opens up a whole new set of completely unbelievable possibilities, some of which will be explored in the next book in the series, Runaway.

     The thing is, celebrity lives proceed in ways that are completely unbelievable to the mere mortals who follow celebs' every move so attentively. Cabot gets that right, and so does Robert Greenfield in his biography of Tommy Weber and Susan “Puss” Coriat. Never heard of them? They’re old news – very old news – and for that reason alone, A Day in the Life is less than wholly enthralling. Tommy and Puss were wealthy, privileged Brits cutting a swath through Swinging London in the 1960s. Upper crust, enamored of drugs and free love but not of responsibility, they moved among the folk heroes of the day (Mick Jagger, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Keith Richards – who called Weber “Tommy the Tumbling Dice”) in a typical swirl of celebrities feeding off each other. Married in 1964 after a widely followed celebrity romance, they produced two sons and much heartbreak for each other and those around them. Puss died in 1971, Tommy not until 2006; their story is one of failed (or lacking) aspirations, pie-in-the-sky planning, wasted inheritance and (more arguably) wasted talent, and eventual descent into familiar elements of celebrity hell, including wildly extravagant spending and drug smuggling as well as drug use. Greenfield tries to generate some sympathy for Puss and Tommy (whose birth name was Thomas Ejnar Arkner) by focusing on their difficult, neglectful childhoods. But it really doesn’t work – they come across as spoiled “poor little rich kids” who should probably never have had children of their own but whose own children seem to have overcome their parents’ legacy and to be doing all right (one, Jake Weber of NBC’s Medium, is promoting Greenfield’s book). This is a sad story but scarcely a tragic one, and Greenfield fills the book with so many “celebrity moments” – Tommy or Puss with one famous or formerly famous person or another – that A Day in the Life comes across as just the sort of voyeurism it pretends to decry. Greenfield eventually concludes with a cascade of clichés: “Born to privilege, Puss and Tommy threw away opportunities that others never had. …[T]he best anyone can offer is the hope they have both found the kind of peace in death that they never knew in life.” This is a (++) book trying hard to be more important than it is, although generous readers may give it (+++) for its accurate portrayal of some of the less-than-“groovy” aspects of the Swinging Sixties.

(++++) SPARKLING REISSUES

Tchaikovsky: Orchestral Suites Nos. 1-4; Romeo and Juliet; Francesca da Rimini; Capriccio Italien. Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart and Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields conducted by Sir Neville Marriner. Phoenix Edition. $16.99 (3 CDs).

Prokofiev: Piano Concertos Nos. 1-5. Boris Berman, piano (Nos. 1, 4, 5); Horacio Gutiérrez, piano (nos. 2, 3). Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Neeme Järvi. Chandos. $18.99 (2 CDs).

Stravinsky: The Rake’s Progress. Jayne West, Jon Garrison, Arthur Woodley, John Cheek, Shirley Love, Wendy White; Gregg Smith Singers and Orchestra of St. Luke’s conducted by Robert Craft. Naxos. $17.99 (2 CDs).

     Here are three well-priced multi-CD sets that sound at least as good in these newly reissued forms as the performances did when originally released. Sir Neville Marriner’s version of the four Tchaikovsky orchestral suites – all composed between the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, a time when Tchaikovsky also wrote his Manfred Symphony – is the oldest recording here, dating back to 1987. But it still sounds quite fine, and even though Marriner is not conducting his usual Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in the suites, he elicits fine sound and excellent responsiveness from the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart. Marriner and his Academy are together for the three overtures on the third CD in the set, which were recorded in 1991 and 1992. All the performances are very well paced and nicely scaled – the largest and most symphonic movement in the suites, the final Tema con variazoni of No. 3, is as big, loud and brassy as anyone could wish, while the much more modest proportions of the “Mozartiana” suite, No. 4, come across in a performance with fine balance and pleasant flow. Suites Nos. 1 and 2 are the least often heard of the four, but Marriner does not give them short shrift, and in fact uncovers considerable beauty in No. 1 and a fine sense of bounce and drive in No. 2. Romeo and Juliet, Francesca da Rimini and Capriccio Italien all resound with enthusiasm, with the last of them making a very upbeat, encore-like finale to the set. The only real negative here is a set of booklet notes that is truly execrable, featuring inaccuracies, poor translation and omission of any discussion at all of Romeo and Juliet or Capriccio Italien. Luckily, information on these familiar pieces is readily available elsewhere.

     It is the controlling hand of Neeme Järvi – conducting the wonderful Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra rather than the Gothenberg Symphony with which he is more closely associated – that provides the continuity in the set of Prokofiev piano concertos, which feature equally virtuosic performances by two different pianists. Boris Berman’s three contributions date to 1989, Horacio Gutiérrez’ two to 1990. This was a period in which Järvi was quite intensely involved with the Gothenberg ensemble, which he led from 1982 to 2004; but he clearly rose to the occasion of directing the Royal Concertgebouw, a stronger and better-balanced orchestra with especially excellent brass. Both Berman and Gutiérrez are easily equal to the challenges of Prokofiev – or rather, both make it seem easy to surmount these works’ considerable difficulties. And both seem to relish the many purely virtuosic displays of these concertos while also enjoying a bit of respite in the slower and more delicate passages (of which, admittedly, there are not many). Berman’s readings may be very slightly more idiomatic and a touch more attuned to Prokofiev’s frequent sarcastic passages than those of Gutiérrez, but both pianists clearly understand this music deeply and play it with considerable flair.

     There is flair of a different kind in Robert Craft’s handling of Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. This 1993 recording is as significant in its way as Stravinsky’s own Metropolitan Opera version of 40 years earlier. Craft was intensely involved with the creation of this opera – he provides some fascinating biographical and autobiographical details in his booklet notes – and he is at least as strong a conductor as Stravinsky himself, wonderfully bringing forth the composer’s irregular rhythms and his sensitive instrumentation. All the solo performers fit their roles very well indeed, with tenor Jon Garrison as Tom Rakewell especially well contrasted with soprano Jayne West as Anne Trulove; with bass-baritone John Cheek bringing just the right mixture of appeal and menace to Nick Shadow; and with mezzo-soprano Wendy White unusually affecting as Baba the Turk. The Gregg Smith Singers are a big reason for this performance’s success – they are as enthusiastic as they are attuned to the music. And the Orchestra of St. Luke’s has a textural transparency that helps Stravinsky’s musical lines come through with wonderful clarity and in excellent balance with the voices – although there is no libretto provided, the singing is so easy to hear and understand that none is necessary (and the summary of the action is excellent). This latest entry in the Naxos Robert Craft Collection confirms yet again, if further confirmation is needed, that Craft is the pre-eminent post-Stravinsky conductor of the music of the man with whom he worked intimately for more than 20 years.

(++++) KEYBOARDS, ALONE AND PAIRED

Ives: Variations on “America”; Adeste Fidelis; Fugues in E flat major and C minor; Copland: Preamble (For a Solemn Occasion); Cowell: Hymn and Fuguing Tune No. 14; William Grant Still: Reverie; Barber: Prelude and Fugue; Wondrous Love; Stephen Paulus: Triptych. Iain Quinn, organ. Chandos. $18.99.

Scriabin: Poèmes, Valses et Danses. Xiayin Wang, piano. Naxos. $8.99.

George Onslow: Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2; Reger: From “Six Burlesques,” Nos. 4-6; Wagner: Polonaise in D; Liszt: Grand Valse di Bravura; Grieg: From “Norwegian Dances,” Nos. 2-3; Balakirev: Suite for Piano Four-Hands. Elizabeth Buccheri and Richard Boldrey, piano duettists. Cedille. $11.99.

Debussy: Sonata for Violin and Piano; Schubert: Fantasie in C for Violin and Piano; Bartók: First Rhapsody; Jörg Widmann: Étude V for Solo Violin; Astor Piazzolla: Le Grand Tango. Sinn Yang, violin; Marco Grisanti, piano; Harald Oeler, accordion. Oehms. $16.99.

Léon de Saint-Lubin: Grand Duo Concertant; Fantasie sur un theme de Lucia di Lammermoor; Thème original et Étude de S. Thalberg; Adagio religioso; Potpourri on themes from Auber’s “La Fiancée”; Salonstücke, Op. 47, Nos. 1 and 2. Anastasia Khitruk, violin; Elizaveta Kopelman, piano. Naxos. $8.99.

     There is no instrument with a greater range than that of the modern keyboard: 11 octaves on a piano and potentially even more on an organ. Indeed, Iain Quinn takes full advantage of the 61-note manual compass and 32-note pedal compass of the organ of England’s Coventry Cathedral for his fascinating CD of some very American music. Quinn has made an excellent selection of better-known works and little-known ones, including some recording premieres. He has a real way with the music of Charles Ives, presenting Variations on “America” with great flair, and including the two ad lib bitonal interludes that Ives added to the piece two decades after he originally wrote it. The other Ives works here, all early ones, have their own charms, with the surprising end of the Fugue in E flat major being particularly characteristic. Quinn brings his fine sense of style and proportion to all the organ works on this CD, from Barber’s well-structured, rather Romantic prelude and fugue to Cowell’s fairly bouncy fugal work, from William Grant Still’s effective miniature Reverie to Barber’s serious but not overly solemn Wondrous Love variations. The CD is particularly nicely laid out, opening with Copland’s Preamble, created in connection with the Declaration of Human Rights, and ending with Stephen Paulus’ Triptych, inspired by hymn texts and written in 2000 for the 150^th anniversary of the House of Hope Presbyterian Church in St. Paul, Minnesota.

     The layout of Xiayin Wang’s CD of Scriabin piano music is interesting, too: it opens with two waltzes written when the composer was 14, in 1886, and ends with two dances he completed shortly before his death in 1915. Between these bookends are a polonaise, a fantasy, several poèmes and a few other types of piano works. Most are quite brief: the Fantaisie in B minor, the longest piece on the CD, runs less than 10 minutes, with several other works running only a little more than a minute. Scriabin was not essentially a miniaturist, so this CD presents a somewhat skewed view of his compositions, but it is certainly very well played, and it does show some of the ways in which his style evolved from the Chopinesque to the mystical. Wang is a sensitive pianist as well as a technically adept one, and she brings a great deal of style and color to what is essentially a very personal recital.

     There is style and color as well in the two-piano works performed by Elizabeth Buccheri and Richard Boldrey and recently reissued by Cedille. Originally recorded in 1978 and 1985, these pieces sound very good indeed in remastered form, with George Onslow’s two sonatas (in E minor and F minor) being especially interesting. The “big names” on the CD, Wagner and Liszt, are represented by pleasant display pieces, but much of the charm here lies elsewhere, notably in Balakirev’s three-movement Suite for Piano Four-Hands. Cedille is a Chicago-focused company, and Buccheri and Boldrey were faculty members at that city’s North Park University when they began performing together. The music on this CD, though, has nothing provincial about it, although it does lean somewhat in the direction of salon pieces – especially in the selections by Reger and Grieg.

     The piano assumes the role of accompaniment in the works by Debussy, Schubert, Bartók and others performed by violinist Sinn Yang. Yet the keyboard’s range still comes through very effectively on this CD, which – like the piano disc by Xiayin Wang – comes across as a personal recital. Yang handles the standard-repertoire works here skillfully but a trifle perfunctorily: there is not as much stylistic difference among Schubert’s classicism, Debussy’s impressionism and Bartók’s folkloric modernism as there might be, although pianist Marco Grisanti offers very strong backup in all the works. Where Yang clearly comes into her own is in Jörg Widmann’s solo-violin work, written in homage to Paganini’s Caprice No. 6 – this is all flash and dash, and Yang clearly enjoys tossing it off. And Astor Piazzolla’s Le Grand Tango is a real delight in this arrangement for violin and accordion, prepared by Harald Oeler and played by him with great enthusiasm and a fine sense of rhythm.

     The new CD of music by Léon de Saint-Lubin (1805-1850) is also for violin and piano, but here the focus is clearly on the composer rather than on the personal preferences of the performers. Saint-Lubin was a famed virtuoso in his time, and wrote in all the accepted forms of the day: fantasies and variations on opera tunes, potpourris, large-scale chamber works and salon pieces aplenty. The Grand Duo Concertant, the most substantial work here, is well structured and musically effective, if not particularly original; the remaining pieces are pleasant to hear and filled with virtuoso opportunities for the violin and, to a lesser extent, the piano. Anastasia Khitruk and Elizaveta Kopelman pace the works well and toss the themes back and forth with aplomb. There is no profundity on this CD, but there is plenty of enjoyment.

(++++) CARTOONING WITH A PURPOSE

Being a Pig Is Nice: A Child’s-Eye View of Manners. By Sally Lloyd-Jones. Drawn by Dan Krall. Schwartz & Wade. $16.99.

Ocean’s Child. By Christine Ford and Trish Holland. Illustrated by David Diaz. Golden Books. $15.99.

The Amazing Spider-Man: The Lizard’s Legacy; Clash with the Rhino; Spider-Man versus Electro; Spider-Man versus Kraven. HarperFestival: $4.99 (Lizard); $3.99 (Rhino). HarperTrophy: $3.99 each (Electro; Kraven).

     The drawings add immeasurably to the appeal of all these books – but wow, are they different! Dan Krall’s pictures for Being a Pig Is Nice clearly show the influence of Cartoon Network, where Krall has worked on a number of shows. In fact, the little girl who roams through the book, thinking of all the great animals she could be so she wouldn’t have to deal with etiquette, looks a lot like the annoying sister, Dee Dee, on Dexter’s Laboratory, which is one show in which Krall has participated. Unlike that program, though, Being a Pig Is Nice is a “message” book – albeit a decidedly soft-pedaled one. The message, of course, is that it’s good to have manners; and Sally Lloyd-Jones makes that clear not by preaching but by having the girl discover it for herself. Krall’s hilarious pictures show a scrubbed, dressed-up pig being looked down upon as Very Rude because “you have to get muddy or you get in trouble.” But then the girl realizes that “when you’re a pig you smell and that’s not nice.” So how about being a snail, which has to “dawdle and crawl and trail behind and not keep up with the others”? But then you are slimy – again, not nice. And so it goes with the elephant that has to “squirt and splatter everyone and be very naughty in your bath,” and the monkey that must eat with fingers, “sit up crooked, elbows in [mom’s] face, fingers up your nose,” and so on. Each time the girl thinks of all the neat, unmannerly things she could be and do, she finds a flaw in her own idea – but what about being a monster? Now there’s a thought – which leads to a rather monstrous definition of manners that will have kids laughing at the end of the book (but that parents won’t want them to emulate!).

     The pictures in Ocean’s Child, a sweet and loving bedtime book, are also a key to the work’s attractiveness; but their purpose is to lull, not excite. David Diaz makes his pictures flow with gentle curves and lines that mimic the restfulness of ocean waves, as the text by Christine Ford and Trish Holland has a pregnant mother and her young child, in the far north, paddling a canoe and saying goodnight to all the animals of the Arctic: walrus, dolphin, whale, polar bear and more. Each goodnight ends with the same refrain: “To Ocean’s children we say good night. Good night, little puffin [or other animal], good night.” And at the end, after the orca, seal, otter and albatross babies have drifted off to sleep, the mother enfolds her child “in a sea of her own quiet dreams” and lets the waves rock her gently to sleep. Rhythmically restful and illustrated with impressionistic beauty, Ocean’s Child is a lovely nighttime tale for young children in any climate.

     You would expect the illustrations to be the main point of interest in a comic book, or in comic-book spinoffs – be they graphic novels, novelizations, easy readers, what-have-you – and in fact the pictures are the main thing in three of the four new books based on the adventures of Marvel’s redoubtable Spider-Man. The exception is The Lizard’s Legacy, in which John Sazaklis’ rather mundane illustrations take a back seat to Mark W. McVeigh’s story of the chaos caused when Dr. Curtis Connors is accidentally transformed into the evil Lizard. This novella is little troubled by the things that made Marvel superheroes distinctive from those of DC Comics (Superman, Batman, etc.): “superheroes with super problems” and “with great power comes great responsibility.” There is a slight family angle to the Lizard’s tale – Dr. Connors’ transformation endangers his son, Billy – but by and large, this is a straightforward bang-up adventure, worth a (+++) rating for Spider-Man fans ages 7-10. The three other new Spider-Man books also get (+++) ratings for their intended audiences. Clash with the Rhino, by Jennifer Christie, is for ages 3-7, with ample and simple illustrations by Andie Tong. The battles with Electro and Kraven are Level 2 books in the “I Can Read!” series. Both are written by Susan Hill; Electro’s illustrations are credited to MADA Design and Kraven’s to Tong. With their few words, very fast-paced stories and big, bright pictures, these short books will appeal to kids ages 4-8 who are already committed Spidey fans.

(++++) TWO CATS AND A PICKLE

Sugar Would Not Eat It. By Emily Jenkins. Illustrated by Giselle Potter. Schwartz & Wade. $16.99.

Catmagic. By Holly Webb. Scholastic. $5.99.

Magic Pickle and the Garden of Evil. By Scott Morse. Graphix/Scholastic. $5.99.

     Cats are not human. This is not big news, and should not be news at all. But sometimes people treat cats as if they are human – and that can be amusing, troubling or, as in the case of Sugar Would Not Eat It, instructive. Emily Jenkins’ book is about a charming little kitten – adorably rendered by Giselle Potter – who turns up on the steps in front of Leo’s building the day after Leo’s birthday. Leo happily adopts the kitten, takes her up to his family’s apartment, and names her Sugar. The kitten plays and naps and then is hungry, so Leo generously offers her the last piece of his birthday cake – but Sugar won’t eat it. Concerned, Leo asks advice of a number of adults in the neighborhood, none of whom appears to have any familiarity whatsoever with kittens or what they eat (this requires a larger-than-usual suspension of disbelief, but that may not be difficult for children ages 4-8 – the book’s target age range). One man says he was always told to eat in order to grow up big and strong, so Leo tries telling Sugar that – to no avail. Another man says his mother used to talk about how long it took her to make food – so Leo tries explaining that to Sugar, who still won’t eat the cake. A woman says she was not allowed to leave the table until she ate, so Leo tries telling that to Sugar – without effect. Nothing works (of course!); Leo gets frustrated; all the unhelpful adults warn Leo not to “give in” to Sugar’s refusal to eat the cake; the kitten gets sad; Leo gets sad, too, and starts to cry; and then, hungry himself, he gets himself some milk and a chicken sandwich. And guess what? Of course, Sugar leaps onto the counter, indulges in milk and chicken, purrs happily, and falls asleep in Leo’s lap. The book’s ending makes it clear that Leo still has a lot to learn about living with a kitten – but at least he has found out about feeding one. And Sugar has stayed adorable throughout.

     The cats in Catmagic go beyond adorable into, well, magical. Holly Webb’s novel, first published last year and now available in paperback, is actually about lots of magical animals, starting with a dog that warns Lottie which way to go while the girl is being chased by some other girls who are just bored enough to be nasty. Lottie is spending the summer with Uncle Jack and cousin Danny, because Lottie’s mother has to go to Paris on a job assignment. Jack runs Grace’s Pet Shop, which is filled with all sorts of animals – including a passel of kittens. And everything in the shop, it turns out, is magical…for those who are sensitive to the magic. Lottie, it turns out, certainly is, and this proves quite a relief to Jack and Danny, who are pleased to have someone with whom to share the secret that all the shop’s animals can – talk. And plot and plan and make well-controlled mischief, too. Besides, as Uncle Jack explains, “There isn’t really a line between people who have magic and people who don’t. Sometimes you just need to look deep down.” And Lottie does just that, finding unexpected depths in herself – and in a stray kitten she rescues from the same girl bullies who had come after her. Enter a witch named Ariadne, looking for a new familiar so her old one can retire, and strange things are bound to happen – and so they do, things both strange and wonderful. Animal lovers will especially enjoy this book, which often manages to be funny and heartwarming at the same time – and which has already spawned a sequel, not surprisingly called Dogmagic.

     The magic is altogether sillier in Scott Morse’s series of sort-of-graphic-novels about Magic Pickle and his sidekick, Jo Jo Wigman. The pugnacious pickle, also known as Weapon Kosher, fights members of the Brotherhood of Evil Produce through his spectacular powers and unending groaners of puns. Morse’s newest pickle book, Magic Pickle and the Garden of Evil, gets a (+++) rating as a formulaic bit of fun. It reintroduces such characters as Squish Squash, Chili Chili Bang Bang and – in particular – the Romaine Gladiator, a previously vanquished lettuce-head who reemerges thanks to some super-grow food that Jo Jo wins from the Magic Pickle by beating him at checkers (hey, this doesn’t have to make sense). The evil lettuce and the Phantom Carrot, who has escaped from Magic Pickle’s prison in Capital Dill, make all sorts of trouble with a fused-prong fork that brings a bit of monstrous greenery to life, until – well, let’s just say the solution to this problem is very, very bunny. Funny. Whatever. Magic Pickle’s antics come through nicely in Morse’s books, which are part narrative with pictures and part comic strip (or graphic novel, if you prefer). And Morse does great sound effects: not many authors would dare to come up with “SHA – ZORRRKKK!!” Nor should they. But here, it works, because the whole premise is just prickly…err, pickly enough.

(+++) LEGENDS OF YORE AND OF TODAY

The Beautiful Stories of Life: Six Greek Myths, Retold. By Cynthia Rylant. Illustrations by Carson Ellis. Harcourt. $16.

Enemies & Allies: The Dark Knight Meets the Man of Steel. By Kevin J. Anderson. William Morrow. $26.99.

     Some tales stand the test of time – thousands of years. Other stand the test of time – dozens of years. It seems that in both cases, some sort of retelling and recasting is considered necessary in order to keep the stories relevant and interesting, as both these books try to do. Cynthia Rylant’s approach to the legends of Pandora, Persephone, Orpheus, Pygmalion, Narcissus and Psyche is an odd one: she starts (not ends) each tale with a moral or a summing-up of its message. “Pygmalion was a coward. …Perhaps it was not love that Pygmalion wanted so much as notice.” “There are those who fall in love with someone and something and are destroyed by the experience. …So it was with Narcissus.” “While heroism always involves the fight for something, the battle can take place within oneself as commonly as it can without” – this for the story of Psyche. The angles that Rylant takes on these tales sometimes help readers, including ones who already know the Greek myths, see the stories in a new light; but they equally often wrench the characters and actions in directions that do not quite fit. The story of Orpheus shows this most clearly. It has long been a tale of great love and great loss, and of music so beautiful that even the netherworld is moved by it. Not here: “There are some who cannot face reality,” Rylant writes at the start. “Orpheus was one of these, and the inability to accept and live the truth eventually destroyed his life.” Eurydice is not even named in Rylant’s retelling, and Orpheus’ fateful decision to turn around and look at his wife walking behind him from Hades is not the mistake of a lover but just a mistake: “She was still just within the doorway of darkness.” This is an oddly unpleasant version of the Orpheus tale; and although the other stories here are better handled, they too are somewhat strangely skewed. Psyche’s story is essentially a catfight between the mortal girl and the goddess Aphrodite. In Pandora’s tale, Hope does not remain within the famous box – it escapes with everything else, until Pandora puts it back inside; and Zeus comes across as wanting to destroy humanity – “”Hope would not survive in a world so filled with suffering,” Rylant says the wise god unwisely believed, “and he knew mankind could not survive without hope.” Rylant has certainly thought the Greek myths through, but her interpretations of them are somewhat on the odd side. And her words often stand in stark contrast to the very lovely, flowing illustrations of Carson Ellis, who apparently sees more gentleness and warmth in these tales than Rylant does.

     Fast-forward a couple of thousand years, to the legends of our own time, and you will find the comic-book characters Superman and Batman, who have long since outgrown their pulp origins to become stars of stage, screen and story – including Enemies & Allies, in which they co-star. Forget what you know about the characters from the comics – or the movies, for that matter. Kevin J. Anderson reimagines them here as Cold War crusaders in the 1950s. This is a time of fear of both nuclear weapons and aliens – and Superman is, of course, one of the latter. There is some cleverness to the setup and to the contrast between the brightly costumed hero of Metropolis and the darker denizen of Gotham City. Bruce Wayne’s attempts to analyze how Superman could possibly do the things he does are a high spot in the book – Wayne, remember, is an ordinary (if rich) human, relying on his wits and analytical abilities to fight crime, while Superman has all those otherworldly powers. Enemies & Allies is silly fun, with Superman trying to cope with his role as Earth’s protector and Batman copying his playboy image from Ian Fleming’s early James Bond books. Lex Luthor, Superman’s longtime arch-nemesis, is the primary bad guy here, conspiring with one of those dastardly Commies (Soviet general Anatoly Ceridov) to ratchet up international nuclear conflict so the U.S. will have to buy Luthor’s company’s atmospheric defense equipment. Holy Star Wars system, Batman (and Superman)! Sputnik, Area 51 and space scientist Wernher von Braun all figure into Anderson’s plot, which flails around quite a bit while making sure that well-known names from the Superman and Batman comics make appropriate appearances: Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen and Alfred the butler are all here. The best thing about Enemies & Allies is the ongoing suspicion that its author is not taking the whole thing overly seriously – that just as these comic-book heroes have recently been rethought in darker, more introspective ways, Anderson is now rethinking those new versions of Superman and Batman in a more straightforward, action-oriented manner. “President Eisenhower had entrusted him with the protection of America, and Kal-El took his job seriously. He needed to do more. Clark Kent asked for a few days off from the Daily Planet, ostensibly to visit his mother in Kansas. But he had other plans.” How can you not enjoy such superficiality, such childish naïveté? About the only thing missing from this comic-book view of the 1950s is…well, the illustrations of a comic book.

(+++) BOOKS BEFITTING A BETTER LIFE

Getting Past Your Breakup: How to Turn a Devastating Loss into the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You. By Susan J. Elliott. Da Capo. $14.95.

Gluten Free Every Day Cookbook: More Than 100 Easy and Delicious Recipes from the Gluten-Free Chef. By Robert M. Landolphi. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

     The notion that you can spend less than $20 to solve major problems in your life and guarantee future happiness is absurd on the face of it, but that does not keep authors from trying to produce reasonably priced self-help books designed to be far more valuable than their price would indicate. Motivational speaker and grief counselor Susan J. Elliott combines both those roles in telling people who have suffered relationship devastation how to get through the stages of grief associated with romantic implosion – and how to pick themselves up afterwards and come out of their distress better than they ever were before. Like many self-proclaimed experts, Elliott has a harrowing tale of her own to tell, and she tells it early in the book, explaining how her own marriage shattered and how her fear of abandonment led her to try to put back together something that was irretrievably broken. She deserves considerable credit for getting her own life together – but that does not necessarily mean that her experience parallels that of others, or that her advice (given, of course, from her particular perspective) will work in very different situations. Elliott had children and suffered emotional (but not physical) abuse; readers should consider ways in which their situations are similar to and different from hers before accepting her advice at face value. Actually, Elliott’s comments on the stages of grief, although scarcely new, can be helpful to just about anyone who feels devastated by the end of an intimate relationship. She takes readers from “shock and disbelief,” through “review [and] relinquishment,” to “reorganization [and] acceptance,” dealing with such specific emotions as guilt, anger, ambivalence and depression. But Elliott’s main focus is rebuilding after a failed relationship, and this is where her approaches are a bit too one-size-fits-all. Journaling can be helpful, but not for everyone – some people struggle to write down their feelings. Some people believe affirmations help mold reality; others find them a silly sort of wishful thinking. Writing gratitude lists – pages about positive things in one’s life – can be liberating, thought-provoking or immensely frustrating. And so on – even therapy and support groups have their place for some people, but not others. And some of Elliott’s well-intentioned ideas, such as a “relationship inventory” to work through the issues involving your ex, will work well for organized, self-aware people but be overwhelming and even potentially traumatizing for others. The point is that Elliott has many good ideas that may be helpful for people whose approach to life gibes with hers. Ultimately, though, people have to find their own way out of a relationship, just as they found their own way into it. The extent to which Getting Past Your Breakup will help with your breakup will vary quite widely.

     Robert M. Landolphi’s Gluten Free Every Day Cookbook does not attempt to be for everyone – its target audience, obviously, is people with gluten allergies and those who live with (and cook with or for) them. A great deal of attention is now being paid to gluten-free living – whether because the incidence of gluten allergies is increasing, because they are only now being more frequently recognized, or because the whole subject is faddish in some way, it is difficult to know for sure. Like Elliott in the relationship area, Landolphi has a personal connection to his subject: his wife was diagnosed with celiac disease (one of a number of wheat allergies) more than a decade ago, so he started experimenting with ways to make tasty gluten-free dishes. Landolphi arranges his book intelligently, starting with basics (flours, starches and such) and then moving into soups, main courses, side dishes, desserts and breads – offering, at the end, his perspective on the complexities of dining out (“nobody checked to see whether the chicken stock that rice was boiled in does or does not contain gluten”). The heart of this book is, of course, its recipes, and it helps to be a devoted chef to follow a number of them: despite the book’s subtitle, many are more delicious than they are easy. Cayenne-Dusted Chicken Nuggets, for example, require a food processor and overnight refrigeration after the first step. Corn, Potato, and Leek Chowder needs a heavy soup pot and includes cooking bacon, sautéing vegetables, simmering several ingredients and using a blender to purée three cups of the soup. Chocolate Cream Pie requires sugar, cornstarch and egg yolks whisked gradually together over medium heat in a heavy saucepan, then whisked constantly until the mixture boils, and also requires cooling at room temperature for 20 minutes plus refrigeration for one to two hours. None of these recipes will be daunting for somewhat experienced cooks who have plenty of time to spend in the kitchen, and Landolphi’s meals without gluten certainly have a great deal of variety and a number of pleasant flavor variations. People with gluten sensitivity will not feel they are sacrificing food quality or taste with these recipes. But if you are not an experienced chef and do not live with one, Landolphi’s book is more likely to be frustrating than helpful – there is little in it that can be easily thrown together in a minimal amount of time. Opt for Gluten Free Every Day Cookbook only if you really do have plenty of time for cooking every day, and if you truly enjoy putting together satisfying meals that require attentiveness to details of preparation and presentation.

(++++) SYMPHONIES, GROUPED AND INDIVIDUAL

Schumann: Symphonies 1-4. Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern conducted by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. Oehms. $29.99 (2 CDs).

Schubert: Symphonies Nos. 1, 3 and 7 (“Unfinished”); Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4 (“Tragic”); Symphonies Nos. 5 and 6 (“Little C Major”). Bamberger Symphoniker conducted by Jonathan Nott. Tudor. $19.99 each (SACD).

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4; Overture 1812. Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern conducted by Christoph Poppen. Oehms. $16.99.

Szymanowski: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 4; Concert Overture, Op. 12; Study in B flat minor, Op. 4, No. 3. Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Antoni Wit. Naxos. $8.99.

     Two splendid new collections of Romantic symphonies, one complete and one nearly so, show that even well-known works can prove unusually effective and affecting when handled sensitively by top-notch conductors. Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, an excellent but somewhat underrated conductor, brings poise, sensitivity and an attractive muscularity to his cycle of the Schumann symphonies. Skrowaczewski seems genuinely to like this music, which can at times be as awkward as the name of the orchestra he conducts (the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern was formed in 2007 by combining the RSO Saarbrücken with the SWR Radio Orchestra Kaiserslautern). Skrowaczewski embraces Schumann’s symphonies wholeheartedly, giving most outer movements a lightness and flair that other conductors do not always provide; following tempo indications closely when that produces a better effect (the Allegro molto vivace of the first movement of No. 1 is really speedy, and very well done); and altering the tempo markings somewhat if that helps move the music along (the main portion of the first movement of No. 2 is marked Allegro ma non troppo, but it really drags at that pace, and Skrowaczewski wisely takes it faster). Not all listeners will agree with Skrowaczewski’s tempo choices – the finale of No. 1, for example, is marked Allegro animato e grazioso, and this performance emphasizes the “animato” at the expense of some of the “grazioso” – but everything here is well considered and, on its own terms, makes perfect sense. No. 1 is, after all, subtitled “Spring,” and it certainly does burst forth riotously (although its slow movement is taken at a true Larghetto pace – slower than in many other performances). No. 2 is classically proportioned, and Skrowaczewski brings out its structural lines effectively. No. 3, the “Rhenish,” is a little on the heavy side until its particularly sprightly finale, but the performance is well balanced and paced even if not quite as stately as it might be. And No. 4, heard (as it almost always is) in its revised version, manages not to sound muddy – as it frequently does – because Skrowaczewski brings out individual voices (especially brass) so carefully and lets Schumann’s melodic charm as well as the unusual aspects of this symphony’s structure come through clearly. As a whole, the cycle is both atypical of the way Schumann’s symphonies tend to be played – and excellent on its own terms.

     Three new SACDs from Jonathan Nott and his Bamberger Symphoniker – Nott has led the orchestra since 2000 – add up almost but not quite to a complete Schubert cycle. This release uses the less-common numbering of the symphonies – the “Unfinished” is usually designated No. 8 – and a recording of No. 9, the “Great C Major,” is not yet available. One hopes that it will be soon, because Nott and the Bamberg players have a wonderful feel for this music, which consists almost entirely of juvenilia (only No. 6 and the “Unfinished” were written after Schubert’s teenage years, No. 6 when he was 21 and the “Unfinished” four years later). Schubert’s handling of winds is especially felicitous in the early symphonies, and Nott focuses on the wind section in a refreshingly open and pleasant manner. But he pays considerable attention to the strings as well, and the symphonies come across with commendable lightness and excellent interplay among the instruments – aided by truly exceptional SACD sound. It is certainly possible to quarrel with some aspects of Nott’s interpretations: the finales of Nos. 5 and 6, for example, are taken quite slowly, and that of No. 6 is filled with unwarranted tempo variations. Still, everything here is played with great finesse and lovely instrumental balance. And among these performances, which date to 2003, is one very unusual element: inclusion of the 20 or so seconds of a Scherzo that Schubert completed and orchestrated for the “Unfinished.” This is barely a hint of where the composer was trying to go, and in fact there exists more of this movement, unorchestrated by Schubert but largely laid out by him – and completed by others in recent times. Still, this slight addition to the “Unfinished” shows the work in a different light from the one most people know, and makes Nott’s performance (which gives very considerable weight to the complex first movement) even more interesting. Indeed, all these readings will hold a listener’s interest from start to finish, with most of the symphonies’ mostly high spirits coming through particularly clearly.

     Returning to the Deutsche Radio Philharmonie Saarbrücken Kaiserslautern: the orchestra’s principal conductor since it was formed has been Christoph Poppen, and his way with Tchaikovsky comes through clearly in two live performances of the Fourth Symphony (recorded in 2007) and the Overture 1812 (from 2008). This is certainly a respectable CD, worthy of a (+++) rating, but it is not an exceptional one. There is nothing at all wrong with either performance – in fact, Poppen’s handling of the string sections of Overture 1812 is unusually sensitive for this potboiler of a piece. But there is nothing especially revelatory in the interpretation of either work. The Overture 1812 is as exhilarating as ever, and the dramatic and dynamic contrasts of the symphony are very well handled: this is a really fine orchestra, with exceptional balance among sections. And Poppen manages to keep the symphony’s huge, discursive first movement from becoming episodic and spinning out of control. But there is nothing especially new or unusual in the interpretation of either work here – the CD is always pleasant, generally impressive in terms of the playing, but not truly distinctive.

     Listeners looking for distinctiveness in symphonies may want to turn to those of Karol Szymanowski, including the two performed by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra under Antoni Wit on a new Naxos CD. However, Szymanowski’s music will certainly not appeal to everyone, and the particular combination of music on this CD gets a (+++) rating. The Concert Overture (1905), which clearly displays the influence of Wagner and Richard Strauss on the young composer, is a somewhat more interesting work than the similarly influenced Symphony No. 1 (1907), which Szymanowski later dubbed a “monster.” That is an overstatement – the work is not especially long (19 minutes; the Concert Overture runs 14) or especially monstrous in structure or harmony – but neither is it a very individualized piece; there is nothing especially compelling about it. Symphony No. 4, “Symphonie Concertante” (1932), is considerably more interesting, including a prominent piano part (well played here by Jan Krzystof Broja) and combining elements of symphonic structure with ones of a concerto. One thing that both these symphonies have in common is the use of solo violin and solo viola (Ewa Marczyk and Marek Marczyk, respectively). Another is the extent to which they seem to echo other composers: No. 4 has some of the flavor of Stravinsky. The CD concludes with one of Szymanowski’s most popular works, a piano study heard here in an orchestration by Grzegorz Fitelberg. The CD as a whole shows some new directions for the symphony in the 20^th century, but of the works here, only the Symphony No. 4 really showcases Szymanowski at his best.

(+++) COMBINATIONS AND JUXTAPOSITIONS

Grieg: Two-Piano Arrangements of Mozart’s Sonata in D Major, K. 448, and Fantasia for Two Pianos, K. 475; Old Norwegian Melody with Variations. Dena Piano Duo (Tina Margareta Nilssen and Heide Görtz). 2L. $29.99 (Blu-ray audio disc + SACD).

The Nordic Sound: Selections from 15 Recordings. 2L. $29.99 (Blu-ray audio disc + SACD).

Jewish Cabaret in Exile. New Budapest Orpheum conducted by Phillip V. Bohlman. Cedille. $16.99.

American Choral Premieres: Alan Hovhaness, Egon Cohen, Paul Nicholson, Paul French, Easley Blackwood, Robert Kreutz, William Ferris, William C. White, George Rochberg. William Ferris Chorale conducted by Paul French. Cedille. $16.99.

Weber: Concertino for Clarinet and Orchestra; Clarinet Concerto No. 2; Bottesini: Duetto; Debussy: Première Rhapsody; Tchaikovsky: Herbstlied. Richard Stoltzman, clarinet; Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kirk Trevor; Richard Fredrickson, double bass. Navona. $16.99.

Jonathan Sachs: Incantations, Book V; Litanies; Ghost Horses; 5^th (S)eason; Sagittarius Rising; Sirian Blue. Navona. $16.99.

Xibus. Boston String Quartet. Navona. $16.99.

     The nearly complete demise of record stores, and with it the difficulty of idly browsing and perhaps stumbling across an unusual recording that you had not previously considered buying, puts releases like these at a distinct disadvantage. Unless you know to look for them, you are unlikely to find them, because their attraction lies as much in their packaging or the unusual way they assemble collections of works as it does in the performers and performances. The Norwegian label 2L, for example, offers very unusual packages (in a size that will not fit in all CD storage devices) that is designed specifically for Blu-ray aficionados. The Blu-ray format has not yet taken off in the video arena, even though it has defeated the alternative high-definition format, HD-DVD. But 2L believes Blu-ray’s time has come in the audio field, and each 2L package contains a super-high-quality Blu-ray audio disc plus an SACD of the same music that is, in truth, of equal quality when played on anything but the most ultra-high-fidelity Blu-ray-adapted system. Only if you have a strong commitment to Blu-ray and are willing to pay about $10 more than the typical cost of an SACD will you find 2L’s offerings of interest. And if you are intrigued, you must still consider the repertoire. The Dena Piano Duo plays exceptionally well, but how much interest is there likely to be in Edvard Grieg’s arrangements of two Mozart works for two pianos, K. 448 in D and K. 475 in C minor? The works are small gems in themselves, and Grieg’s treatment of them is certainly of some interest, but how much? Grieg did write one work of his own for two pianos, Old Norwegian Melody with Variations, and it too is very well played here, but it is unlikely to inspire many people to acquire this pricey offering. Actually, Blu-ray lovers may be more interested in 2L’s The Nordic Sound, one of those “compendium” releases that are by definition hodgepodges. This offering includes excerpts from 15 2L recordings, made at various churches and cathedrals in Norway. The sound is quite lovely throughout, and the performances are uniformly good – but they are not really the point. The idea here is to showcase just how good an audio recording can be in Blu-ray as well as SACD format, and this 2L offering certainly does that. If you want your sound at the service of specific repertoire, look elsewhere; but if you revel in sound for its own sake, the 2L releases are certainly worth a look – and a listen.

     A couple of new vocal offerings from Cedille, a Chicago label showcasing Chicago-based artists, are of high enough quality to be of interest outside Chicagoland. But they are highly specialized recordings, and unless their topics are ones a listener finds appealing or wants to explore, the quality of the performances will be largely irrelevant. Jewish Cabaret in Exile features music of the Jewish diaspora of the early and mid 20^th century, ranging from cabaret songs that reflect on the human condition to songs of the theater and movies. One composer represented here, Viktor Ullmann, was moderately well known in his time; he died in the Holocaust. Ullmann’s Three Yiddish Songs are a highlight of the CD. The rest of the composers here are generally unfamiliar names, but the point is not to focus on the people but to explore ways in which their music expresses such aspects of the diaspora as “the great ennui on the eve of exile,” “transformation of tradition” and “the poetics of exile,” to cite three of the CD’s seven sections.

     The vocal music sung by the William Ferris Chorale (founded by Ferris in 1971) will be equally unfamiliar to listeners, and that is by design, since the group’s new CD is called “American Choral Premieres.” Most of the works here are relatively short and fairly straightforward, appropriately but not outstandingly using the musical language of the time in which they were written. Standouts are Four Motets, by the prolific Alan Hovhaness, and George Rochberg’s heartfelt Behold, My Servant. Ferris’ own Lyrica Sacra and Who Am I? by Paul French – who now leads the chorale and for whom Ferris was a mentor – provide a sense of continuity in the music and performers. Everything here is well sung and has a religious flavor; the overall impression is of devout spiritual appeal without necessarily any strong adherence to a particular set of dogma or traditions.

     One way an interested listener might stumble upon two new Navona CDs is by searching for performances by clarinetist Richard Holtzman. On a disc called “Phoenix in Flight,” he offers sensitive, warm and beautifully played performances of two of the delightful clarinet-and-orchestra pieces by Carl Maria von Weber, plus three “fillers” that have some interest of their own. Giovanni Bottesini was considered “the Paganini of the double bass,” so it is a trifle odd to feature one of his works on a clarinet-focused CD, but in fact Stoltzman and Richard Fredrickson play the Duetto as equal partners, and the music benefits as a result. Debussy’s Première Rhapsody gives Stoltzman plenty of opportunity to show the warm side of his instrument, and so does Tchaikovsky’s Herbstlied, heard here in an arrangement made by Toru Takemitsu shortly before his death in 1996. Clarinet fanciers will enjoy Stoltzman’s top-quality playing both here and on a CD of some lesser music, by Jonathan Sachs. Sachs is known mostly for his film scores (Toy Story 2, Mr. Holland’s Opus, The X-Files: I Want to Believe and others), but he also works in traditional concert-hall forms, and this CD offers a bit of this and a bit of that. Stoltzman is featured in Litanies for clarinet, violin, cello and piano (1990, revised 2004), and in Ghost Horses for the same instruments plus three voices (1992). The Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra under Carl St. Clair plays Incantations: Book V (2002), and the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra under Kirk Trevor offers Sagittarius Rising (2004). The other two pieces here are the oddly titled 5^th (S)eason for two pianos (1993), played by Vicky Ray and Bridget Convey, and one of Sachs’ electronic experiments: Sirian Blue for tape (1978). The diversity of performers parallels the many styles of Sachs’ music, which never attains profundity (and does not really seem to seek it) but which is invariably well made and generally attractive to the ear.

     The same is a bit harder to say of Xibus, simply because this crossover CD will sound just fine to fans of some genres but is likely to seem odd to other listeners. The Boston String Quartet mixes elements of classically proficient playing with rock, pop and world music here, including some works with vocals (sung by Giorgia Fumanti and Fionnuala Gill) and one, Like It Is, with rock instrumentation performed by Common Thrill. Ranging from the sacred (Ave Maria) to the decidedly secular (Hey Jude), the CD offers fine performances and interesting (if rather disconnected) repertoire. But unless listeners specifically go looking for something by the Boston String Quartet, and then focus on crossover offerings, this is the sort of CD that it is all too easy to pass by.

(++++) ARTISTICALLY SPEAKING

Bettina Valentino and the Picasso Club. By Niki Daly. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $15.95.

Georgia Rises: A Day in the Life of Georgia O’Keeffe. By Kathryn Lasky. Pictures by Ora Eitan. Melanie Kroupa Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $16.95.

     Each of these books offers young readers splendid information on art – but the two come at it from entirely different perspectives, just as two artists would see the same landscape entirely differently. Bettina Valentino and the Picasso Club is a novel so funny that readers will find themselves laughing out loud at some of the antics of the title character and her family and friends – but beneath that amusement are some very serious lessons about what art is, how it is made, and in what ways it appeals to (or fails to appeal to) different sorts of people. The story seems simple: Bettina gets a new, free-spirited art teacher at Bayside Preparatory School and finds her own artistic impulses growing by leaps and bounds as a result. But the plot is barely the point here. Bettina herself is quite a character: “I like art that jumps off the wall and hits you in the eye like a wound-up ninja.” Her old art teacher used to insist she use more pink in her paintings, leading Bettina to create her mantra: “Pink shtinks!” Bettina’s dad drives a falling-apart 1962 Rolls-Royce convertible; her mother is “a fashion designer and is always practicing her French, in case she ever gets to go to Paris to do a show.” This is one girl who comes by her iconoclasm genetically; her best friend, Carmen-Daisy, “calls me an artyfartyfashionloony,” which seems about right. And then – wham! Into Bettina’s life comes Mr. Popart, who walks barefoot to soak up the energy of the Earth and teaches about everything except using more pink. He talks about Paul Klee’s comment on “taking a line for a walk,” about Damien Hirst’s preserved carcasses, and about Picasso – one artist Bettina adores. And Mr. Popart doesn’t just talk: he has the kids create wall art (graffiti, if you prefer), then turns up one day standing on his head to show what the dada movement was all about, and much more. Niki Daly, an excellent picture-book author who here writes his first chapter book, sprinkles wonderful illustrations throughout the story, and manages to make it a fairly complex one, too, because Bayside is in need of serious repair, and one family may contribute a lot of money, but that family (daughter and parents) strongly opposes Mr. Popart and his freewheeling manner, and the head of the school is caught in the middle, which means so is Mr. Popart, and there happens to be an art contest for the students coming up, and…well, there is a lot here, and Daly juggles it all expertly, bringing the book to an entirely satisfactory conclusion – and likely bringing readers more information on art than they would expect to find in such an apparently lighthearted apparent romp.

     Kathryn Lasky’s Georgia Rises is a more overtly serious book, a sensitive portrait of an artist in her 70s struggling to make her body cooperate so she can greet the day as she wishes and draw from it the inspiration that she has received from the natural world for many years. Using many of Georgia O’Keeffe’s own words and the ideas for a number of her paintings – but compressing the action and thinking into a single day – Lasky helps young readers share the sensibilities of an artist: “A bone gleaming white sits as pretty as angel wings just ahead.” “The sky is finally lavender, so pale it’s almost transparent, like the eyelids of babies.” “Soon the stars will climb into the huge blackness of the night and arrange themselves in figures.” Aided by lovely, unsentimentalized pictures by Ora Eitan, Lasky shows how art transcends and transforms the artist, and how O’Keeffe uses the light and the found objects around her desert home to create striking visual impressions, such as her famous flowers “so big that people will have to look” at them. This is a beautiful book for readers already interested in O’Keeffe’s style or ready to experience it, and the biography and selected bibliography at the end will open additional doors of wonder and experience to budding young artists.

(++++) REAL ADVENTURES

Extreme Scientists: Exploring Nature’s Mysteries from Perilous Places. By Donna M. Jackson. Houghton Mifflin. $18.

ER Vets: Life in an Animal Emergency Room. By Donna M. Jackson. Sandpiper. $8.99.

     Donna M. Jackson keeps finding ways in which the real world is every bit as exciting, dangerous and occasionally heartbreaking as anything on TV or in the movies. Both the new Extreme Scientists and the paperback edition of ER Vets (originally published in 2005) show people doing important jobs in difficult, complex and sometimes very scary conditions. Extreme Scientists uses skillful writing and wonderfully selected pictures to profile three people whom Jackson calls “Hurricane Hunter,” “Cave Woman” and “Skywalker.” The first of these, Paul Flaherty, goes outdoors when everyone else is advised to stay in and find a safe place because of a dangerous storm. Flaherty, a meteorologist, is a hurricane tracker – one of those brave people who fly into the eye of huge storms to obtain information that forecasters use to track the storms’ strength and direction, keeping people in their path safe. Flaherty “doesn’t consider himself a thrill-seeker,” but simply someone fascinated by the weather – but he has had his share of close calls, and Jackson also tells of hurricane hunters who have lost their lives. “Cave Woman” is Hazel Barton, who has a tattoo of a partial map of South Dakota’s Wind Cave on one arm and who spends her time studying microbes that live in caves – which includes discovering new ones. As a microbiologist, she is a scientist first and foremost, but she has also been seen in an IMAX movie called Journey into Amazing Caves – she descended both into an ice crevasse in Greenland and into waters beneath Mexico’s rainforests. “Skywalker” is Stephen Sillett, who studies organisms that live in forest canopies – which means he climbs huge redwood trees. Not everything living in the tree canopy is tiny – one photo in this section shows a salamander that Sillett discovered 207 feet above the ground. “The first step’s the most dangerous” in climbing a redwood, Jackson explains, because the tree trunk may have no branches for hundreds of feet. Learning how Sillett, Barton and Flaherty overcome the dangers of their jobs, and how their field work complements their more-mundane laboratory work, makes an utterly fascinating volume – one exciting enough so that many young readers will surely want to check out the publications, DVDs and Web sites that Jackson lists at the end of the book.

     ER Vets tells a more everyday story, and one that readers are more likely to experience, but in its own way it is every bit as breathtaking – and even more heart-tugging – than the tales in Extreme Scientists. An animal emergency room is a world where abbreviations save the doctors time and help them save lives, a world of HBC (hit by car), BDLC (big dog attacked little cat), CHF (congestive heart failure) and FLUTD (feline lower urinary tract disease) – and a world of hedgehogs, rabbits, birds and snakes as well as cats and dogs. Filled with photos taken at the James L. Voss Veterinary Teaching Hospital at Colorado State University, ER Vets shows the tremendous attention and care given by veterinarians to all the animals brought to them at times of crisis – including ones that can be saved and ones that cannot. Even people who do not care for reptiles will be moved by the story of a pet snake named Lucy that could not be revived after it escaped into the dashboard while being carried in a car – and the temperature that night dropped too low for Lucy’s body to handle it. In fact, Jackson’s chapter called “Death of a Pet,” which follows the Lucy story, will be especially helpful to parents trying to support and comfort children when an animal is dying or has passed away. But most of ER Vets is about happier circumstances, as animals that would die without prompt and efficient care recover thanks to veterinarians’ skill. Amid the stories of injured animals rescued and restored to their families are well-done explanations of things that pet lovers should know in order to decide whether to get an animal to a vet – the four pages called “Is It an Emergency?” are especially helpful. ER Vets is ultimately an uplifting and hopeful book, acknowledging that some injured animals cannot be saved but showing that many can be healed and restored to normal lives through the skill of some very dedicated professionals.

(++++) BEHAVIORAL CUTENESS

Milo’s Special Words. By Charise Mericle Harper. Robin Corey Books. $10.99.

Oh No! Time to Go! A Book of Goodbyes. By Rebecca Doughty. Schwartz & Wade. $15.99.

Oops-a-Daisy! By David Algrim. Illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw. Golden Books. $5.99.

     Kids from the toddler stage through kindergarten or first grade can have fun while learning some basic lessons in manners and proper behavior from any or all of these three books. Milo’s Special Words is the most enjoyably offbeat, although it does pose a potential problem for parents at the end. This is the story of a little boy who wants some milk and demands it from his mother, who is dealing with laundry and does not respond even when Milo asks repeatedly and then screams “MILK!” very loudly. Milo’s sister, Lucy, suggests that Milo use “the special word…that will make Mommy move,” so Milo tries saying “floopindoodle” and “shazam” and other words – but of course nothing works until he says “please.” What makes Milo’s Special Words so much fun is the way Charise Mericle Harper tells the story through wheels and flaps, not just straight narrative. Turn one wheel to see Mommy placing clothes in the laundry basket. Turn another to see each word Milo tries before choosing the right one. Open a flap to see Milo figure out that “please” will work, then fold another flap out to see Mommy rush off to get the milk that Milo wants. And so it goes, with Milo also learning to say “thank you” – a pleasant little lesson. But parents need to watch out – and have an explanation of the limits of politeness ready – before the end of the book. For Milo, now that he has discovered the power of “please,” starts using it to ask for several items revealed in both words and pictures on another of those turning wheels: birthday cake, a magic wand, a pony and a rocket. “Now what will Mommy do?” asks Harper at the end of the book. Have your answer prepared – Harper does not provide one.

     Oh No! Time to Go! is about a boy who loves saying hello to friends and relatives but hates saying goodbye. Rebecca Doughty reviews many ways of saying it is time to part, from “toodle-oo” and “kiss-kiss” to “take it easy,” “later, gator,” hand expressions without words, and even a dog’s growl at other dogs. An especially sad goodbye comes near the end of this simply written and simply illustrated book, when the boy’s next-door friend and her family move away: “Don’t be a stranger! Promise you’ll write!/ We watched the van roll out of sight.” But then a new family moves in, with the promise of a new friend to be made, and the boy realizes, as will readers, that goodbye can be the gateway to a new hello – a pleasant message, nicely conveyed.

     Oops-a-Daisy! is a board book that parents of toddlers will find wryly amusing even as toddlers themselves enjoy it. David Algrim’s story – abetted by Rosalind Beardshaw’s illustrations, many on flaps that open and close easily – follows what parents will recognize as an all-too-typical day in a toddler’s life. Daddy asks his little girl to hold her cup of milk with two hands; lift the flap and find out that she did not – the dog is lapping up the spilled milk. Mommy asks her little boy if he needs to use the potty – lift the flap and “Oops-a-Daisy! That’s okay. You can go on the potty next time.” There are unlaced shoes, spilled paint and melting ice cream here, plus super-understanding parents who smile throughout the day and never say anything harsher than “Oops-a-Daisy!” That’s not a bad lesson for adults as well as children – and it is charmingly communicated.

(+++) DOGGED PERSISTENCE

Planet of the Dogs. By Robert J. McCarty. Illustrated by Stella Mustanoja McCarty. Barking Planet Productions. $14.95.

Castle in the Mist: Planet of the Dogs, Volume 2. By Robert J. McCarty. Illustrated by Stella Mustanoja McCarty. Barking Planet Productions. $14.95.

Snow Valley Heroes: A Christmas Tale—Planet of the Dogs, Volume 3. By Robert J. McCarty. Illustrated by Stella Mustanoja McCarty. Barking Planet Productions. $14.95.

     The first thing to realize about the Planet of the Dogs series is that it is only incidentally about the planet of the dogs. It is mostly about the planet of the humans – an alternative Earth, locked somewhere in what seems to be the Middle Ages, where there are weapons and conflicts but no guns. The second thing to realize is that the age targeting of the series is a little uncertain: the books are recommended for ages 6-12, but many children at the lower end of that range will have trouble reading them on their own (the books are primarily text, although the few illustrations are lovingly done), while many children at the upper end of the age range will find them a little simplistic and (especially in the first volume) a little preachy as well. Of course, since what the books preach is peace, love and loyalty, it is impossible to fault their message; and their mixture of adventure with fairy tale and a few touches of humor is welcome as well.

     “Dogs have no worries on their planet because there are no dangers there,” writes Robert J. McCarty in setting up the basic premise of this series. The dogs’ planet is on the opposite side of the sun, and dogs learn through their dreams about what is happening on Earth, the planet of people (but, initially, no dogs at all). The dogs’ planet is a kind of benevolent-monarchy-cum-socialist-utopia: the queen, Miss Merrie, “usually spent little time doing the work of a queen, because there really wasn’t much for her to do. When the road to Shaggy Corners needed repairs, the dogs all worked together and made it happen. When new puppies were born and needed extra care, there were always many volunteers eager to help feed them and give them a bath.” And so on. Nice place – and helpful, too. The dogs bring two children, Daisy and Bean, to the dog planet through dreams, and Miss Merrie explains that “we have become worried [about Earth] because too many people have forgotten about love.” So three dogs named Lucy, Robbie and Buddy come to Earth in body, not just dreams – apparently magically. They bring “our great power of smell, our ability to work together, our loyalty, and our greatest power of all, the power of love.”

     This sort of narrative could become a bit treacly if it continued in this vein, but fortunately there are some amusing elements of the story (such as place names on the dogs’ planet: Waggy Valley, Poodletown, Muttville, etc.) and some adventures and conflicts in the dogs’ and children’s futures. In Planet of the Dogs, the adventures initially involve people’s skepticism about the dogs’ existence and powers; then there is a threat to Green Valley from Stone City invaders, and the dogs help head it off. In Castle in the Mist, things turn more to straight fantasy-adventure (this book can actually be read on its own: the background of the dogs is clear from the narrative). Here there is a stereotypical villain: Prince Ukko, who opposes peace and thinks it is “like a disease that could spread,” interfering with his warlike lifestyle and the comfort of his army. The dogs keep a close eye on the prince and his Black Hawk tribe: “The dogs were always watching the castle. With their sense of smell, their keen eyes and ears and their ability to hide in the forest, they could see the Black Hawk soldiers without being seen. …Prince Ukko was now deeply troubled by the very presence of the dogs as well as their howling.” A kidnapping through which Prince Ukko hopes to further his nefarious aims is thwarted with the dogs’ help, and eventually the prince decides he “will not fight the dogs anymore” and leaves the area with a couple of dogs of his own.

     The conflict is of a different but related sort in Snow Valley Heroes, which can also be read as a separate book – the husband-and-wife creators of this series have done a good job of keeping the volumes both interrelated and readable as standalones. Their third volume is primarily a seasonal book of the “saving Christmas” variety, with the bad King of the North, whose “eyes were cold and fierce,” threatening the holiday by stealing two of Santa’s reindeer. When that is not enough, he escalates things: “We will bring Santa here to the Ice Castle. With Santa our prisoner, there will be no Christmas.” Of course, the dogs make sure – in their peaceful and loving way – that the king’s plans go awry and that the king pledges, “I will never again do harm to any of you.” And he too ends up bonding with a dog: “The King named him Prince and took him everywhere.” The naïve charm of this and the other books in the series will be a special joy for dog lovers (of course!), but even cat people (and bird people and reptile people and families without pets) will find something to celebrate in stories in which the good guys repeatedly triumph not by being stronger or inherently better than the bad guys but simply by being more peaceful and loving.

(++++) NEW VIEWS OF OLD MUSIC

Jean-Féry Rebel: La Terpsicore; Les Caractères de la Danse; Caprice; Les Plaisirs champêtres; La Fantaisie; Les Élémens. Arion conducted by Daniel Cuiller. EarlyMusic.com. $16.99.

Ludovico Roncalli: Capricci Armonici—Sonatas Nos. 1-3, 5, 7-8. Richard Savino, baroque guitar. Dorian Sono Luminus. $16.99.

Adio Espaňa: Romances, Villancicos, & Improvisations from Spain circa 1500. The Baltimore Consort (Mary Anne Ballard, viols; Mark Cudek, guitars, viols and wind instruments; Larry Lipkis, viols and wind instruments; Mindy Rosenfeld, flutes and fifes and wind instruments; Ronn McFarlane, lute). Dorian Sono Luminus. $16.99.

Albinoni: Concerto for Recorder and Strings, op. 9, no. 2; Chen Yi: The Ancient Chinese Beauty; Mozart: Andante for Recorder and Strings, K. 315; Nino Rota: Concerto for Strings; Artem Vassiliev: Valere lubere (To say goodbye); Vivaldi: Concerto for Recorder and Strings, RV 443; Peter Heidrich: From “Happy Birthday Variations.” Michala Petri, recorder; Kremerata Baltica. OUR Recordings. $16.99.

     Some of the oldest instrumental music in the Western canon sounds fresh and thoroughly delightful in a handful of top-notch new recordings. The Canadian baroque orchestra Arion plays period instruments as if they are the most natural things in the world to handle, and Daniel Cuiller directs the ensemble with a gentle and knowing hand in six ballet suites by Jean-Féry Rebel (1666-1747). These range from his first, Caprice (1711), to his last and by far most famous, Les Élêmens (1737). Every dance form of the time is expertly handled by Rebel: gigue, menuet, courante, bourée, rigaudon and more. And the Arion players never lose sight of the fact that this is dance music and was collected into a series of movements to be danced by performers. The rhythms are clear, the pace modest or sprightly as appropriate, and the small complement of instruments (13 strings including theorbo, six winds, and harpsichord) is beautifully blended. Les Élêmens is a special joy in this recording: the famous opening movement, Le Chaos, which Rebel begins with a single chord containing all notes of the octave – that is, a tone cluster – really does sound as if order emerges from chaos, and the tone painting later in the work (slurred bass notes for Earth, flute cascades for Water, sustained piccolo notes that become trills for Air, and bravura violin passages for Fire) emerges with perfect clarity and a wonderful sense of drama.

     The guitar sonatas of Ludovico Roncalli (1654-1713) are slightly earlier than Rebel’s dance music, dating to 1692, and they too are dances – gathered into suites of a type familiar from Bach’s famous ones for solo instruments. Richard Savino plays six of these sonatas with understanding and a fine grasp of period style: No. 1 in G, No. 2 in E minor, No. 3 in B minor, No. 5 in A minor, No. 7 in D minor and No. 8 in C. Although this is Italian music, its textures are as French as those of Rebel, and the sonatas – some of the last works of their time for five-course baroque guitar – sound especially good on the instrument for which they were written (Savino play a copy by José Espejo of a Stradivarius original). These are not really neglected works – classical guitarists often perform them on modern instruments – but they sound altogether different and a great deal more intimate (especially those in minor keys) when played as Savino performs them.

     The music on the CD called Adio Espaňa is even older than that of Rebel and Roncalli, dating to the mid-16^th century or even earlier. Once again, the value of using original instruments or replicas for this music becomes abundantly clear, as The Baltimore Consort’s viols, crumhorns, baroque recorders and flutes, and other period instruments bring out the nuances of these short pieces with beauty and style. The knowing contributions of Brazilian singer José Lemos add to the effective communication of the vocal selections, and this unfamiliar music – much of it anonymous, the balance by such composers as Pedro Guerrero, Juan del Encina and Diego Pisador – proves to be a heady combination of light dances, traditional romances, heroic ballads and even some fascinating improvisations.

     A new CD commemorating the 50^th birthday of Michala Petri, released by the company founded in 2006 by Petri and her husband, Danish guitarist and lutenist Lars Hannibal, contains only a few older works: concertos by Albinoni and Vivaldi, both played stylishly by Petri with excellent backup from Kremerata Baltica. What is particularly interesting on this CD is to hear how the recorder, which largely fell out of favor as the transverse flute gained prominence after the baroque era, continued to hold its own in a limited way (as evidenced by the lovely Mozart Andante, K. 315) and then regained its niche as 20^th-century composers began looking toward its special sound as a way to create new works that would go beyond those of the Romantic era. For Chen Yi (born 1953), this means using the recorder to recall ancient times; for Artem Vassiliev (born 1974), it means intermingling the wind instrument’s sounds with those of strings. Also on this CD are a well-constructed Concerto for Strings by Nino Rota, best known for the music he wrote for Fellini films; and excerpts from Happy Birthday Variations by Peter Heidrich (born 1935) – the only musical indication that this is a “tribute” CD rather than simply a collection of interesting and well-played music. In fact, unlike many other “tribute” recordings, this one truly showcases high-quality music-making, giving Petri a chance to display her considerable skill rather than simply be the celebrity in focus for the day. That makes this one “happy birthday” CD for which listeners will need no excuse to be happy.

(++++) VOCAL ENJOYMENTS

Strauss: Das Spitzentuch der Königin. Jessica Glatte and Elke Kottmair, sopranos; Nadja Stefanoff and Gritt Gnauck, mezzo-sopranos; Ralf Simon, Markus Liske and Hardy Brachmann, tenors; Chor and Orchester der Staatsoperette Dresden conducted by Ernst Theis. CPO. $33.99 (2 CDs).

Schumann: Liederkreis; Frauenliebe und –leben; Die Löwenbraut; Der Nussbaum; Er ist’s; Loreley; Widmung. Marie-Nicole Lemieux, contralto; Daniel Blumenthal, piano. Naïve. $16.99.

Gilles Vigneault and Bruno Fecteau: La Grand Messe. Suzie LeBlanc, soprano; Daniel Taylor, countertenor; Antoine Bélanger, tenor; Olivier Laquerre, bass-baritone; Le Chœur de l’OSQ and L’Orchestre Symphonique de Québec conducted by Richard Lee. CBC Records. $16.99.

     Johann Strauss Jr.’s rarely performed Das Spitzentuch der Königin (“The Queen’s Lace Handkerchief”) neatly encompasses almost everything that is right and almost everything that is wrong in Strauss operettas. The music is simply marvelous, and most of it will be quite familiar even to first-time listeners, since Strauss created one of his most famous waltzes – Roses from the South – entirely from tunes from this operetta. The story, however, is weird, filled with contemporary (and now long-outdated) political references, and mixing real historical characters (notably the writer Miguel de Cervantes, of Don Quixote fame) with made-up ones and some crucial ones who do not even have names (the queen and king are identified only by their titles). The story is set in Portugal, where Cervantes decides to get the weak-willed king out from under the thumb of his prime minister, who has deliberately turned the king into a libertine. The king and his queen are estranged because of their disastrous wedding night, during which he fell asleep before they could enjoy a delicious truffle pastry together. The queen becomes infatuated with Cervantes and writes him a note on her handkerchief; the bit of lace then gets lost and passed from hand to hand at various points. Cervantes is imprisoned, released, declared a mere fool because of the physiognomy of his head, and disguises himself as an English ambassador, an innkeeper and a robber. Cervantes’ betrothed, Donna Irene, does the physiognomy exam while disguised as a doctor; she also dresses up as a lady bullfighter. The queen disguises herself as the innkeeper’s daughter. The prime minister and his main henchman are eventually humiliated by being dressed in a bull’s costume. And…well, it is all ridiculous, perhaps enjoyably so for those fluent in German (CPO again falls far short of best practices by providing a plot summary but no libretto). But the dramatic absurdity only serves to highlight the wonderful music that pervades the operetta. Among the especially delightful pieces are the Trüffel-Couplets sung by the king (here handled as a trouser role by Nadja Stefanoff); a newly rediscovered and quite delightful Trio for the king, queen (Jessica Glatte) and Donna Irene (Elke Kottmair); Cervantes’ (Ralf Simon’s) Romanze; the couplets sung by the prime minister (Hardy Brachmann); and the queen’s wistful song in the third act, Siebzehn Jahre. Lovely singing, excellent choral work and enthusiastic orchestral playing – all under Ernst Theis, a conductor who expertly keeps thing moving smartly along – add up to a wonderful performance of some genuinely lovely music put at the service of an indisputably outdated and creaky plot.

     There is nothing outdated about the emotions of Schumann’s songs, and it is a real pleasure to hear them sung by a contralto with the fluidity and grace of Marie-Nicole Lemieux. The two wonderful 1840 cycles, Liederkreis and Frauenliebe und –leben, sound especially good here, with Lemieux’ rich, full voice thoroughly exploring the emotions underlying the former cycle and the narrative connection of the latter. Lemieux is evocative and thoroughly Romantic in Liederkreis, with Daniel Blumenthal’s sensitive piano work ably backing up the emotionalism of Joseph von Eichendorff’s dozen poems. For Adelbert von Chamisso’s poetry in Frauenliebe und –leben, singer and pianist alike effectively evoke the many emotional stages of a woman’s life. The five individual songs that complete the CD also show Lemieux exploring emotions with intensity and passion; the disc as a whole showcases the singer’s versatility as well as her depth.

     Lemieux is a native of Quebec, and Gilles Vigneault (born 1928) is one of that Canadian province’s major musical figures. But while Lemieux, though Schumann, reaches out to the world, Vigneault seems focused more inwardly, partly in a religious sense (he is Catholic) and partly geographically (La Grand Messe was commissioned by the Quebec Festival of Sacred Music, and the performers are from the province). Vigneault goes beyond the traditional bounds of the Mass to open his work with an Ouverture and Introït before the Kyrie, and close it with Communion and Ite missa est after the Agnus Dei. The additional movements do add some variety to a form that is by its nature highly stylized, but they do not bring any significant additional depth or profundity to the old words. Vigneault worked with Bruno Fecteau, his longtime musical director, on scoring and arranging the texts, and the result is an interesting amalgam of Latin, French and Inuit. La Grand Messe is quite well performed, but somehow seems more clever than profound, as if it seeks through variety to communicate multiculturally even though the words at its heart are longstanding ones of a very specific belief structure. The fine performance and unusual elements of the composition garner this CD a (+++) rating, but this Mass appeals more as a well-thought-out work than as a heartfelt and deeply spiritual one.

(++++) KLISE KUTUPS

43 Old Cemetery Road, Book One: Dying to Meet You. By Kate Klise. Illustrated by M. Sarah Klise. Harcourt. $15.

Regarding the Bees: A Lesson, in Letters, on Honey, Dating, and Other Sticky Subjects. By Kate Klise. Illustrated by M. Sarah Klise. Sandpiper. $5.99.

     Bad puns, convoluted plots, and a storytelling style that brings the epistolary novel firmly into the era of instant messaging – those are the ingredients of books by Kate and M. Sarah Klise. And the sisters have just started a new series that, while not as madcap as their Regarding the… books, promises to have plenty of its own twists, turns and corkscrew motions. 43 Old Cemetery Road is the address of a decrepit house in Ghastly, Illinois, that is rented for the summer by faded and writer’s-blocked author Ignatius B. Grumply (I.B. Grumply, that is) while owners Les and Diane Hope are on a ghost-debunking tour of Europe (“less hope” and “dying hope,” see?). The Hopes have left behind their 11-year-old son, who of course is named Seymour (“see more hope”), a cat named Shadow, and Olive C. Spence, the woman who built 43 Old Cemetery Road and just happens to have died 97 years before the story begins. So much for debunking ghosts. Other characters here are a real-estate agent who needs a sale and is therefore named Anita Sale, and a private detective named Frank N. Beans because – well, just because. The story is told in letters, occasional drawings and some on-screen computer messages, with everything done in different type styles; and there are occasional issues of The Ghastly Times, the local newspaper, included as well (the paper’s editor is Cliff Hanger, the town’s chief librarian is named M. Balm, one ad is placed by Shirley U. Jest, and so on – you get the idea). The basic plot has Grumply attempting to write No. 13 in his Bartholomew Brown “Ghost Tamer” series so he can retire some of the considerable debt he has built up, while trying to cope with the presence of Seymour (who he did not realize was in the house) and Olive (in whom he does not believe, until he does). Grumply grumpily complains to his lawyer, E. Gadds, who is in charge of the dried-up writer’s relationship with his editor, Paige Turner, and the whole scenario becomes a fine mess until eventually Seymour and Olive help Grumply sort everything out – and, not incidentally, free Olive from the circumstances that led her to haunt her old house in the first place. And this is but the first in a series so filled with charm and silliness that it has the potential to go on for many further books.

     And that would put it in the same league as the Regarding the… series, which includes the new paperback edition of Regarding the Bees. Originally published in 2007, this book fits neatly with Regarding the Fountain, Regarding the Sink, Regarding the Trees and Regarding the Bathrooms in its disregard for conventional storytelling in favor of lighthearted absurdity that just happens to include snippets of honest-to-goodness accurate information (about apiculture, in Bees). Drawings, postcards, phone-message pads and lots of old-fashioned “snail mail” letters are the media for this tale of a seventh-grade correspondence course being taught by Florence Waters (Flo Waters, and yes, she originally showed up in Regarding the Fountain) as her students prepare to take the BEES – a standardized test known as the Basic Education Evaluation. There’s a spelling bee here, too; two of them, in fact, one actually being a bee, and the other involving a contest with the Yellow Jackets – whose teacher is Polly Nader (“pollinator”) and whose names are “Moe” Skitto, P. Daddy Longlegs and Horace Fly. Let’s see, what else? There is the HIVE Prize (for a “Highly Innovative and Victorious Educator”); there are marital problems for the acting principal and his pregnant wife; there are romantic entanglements within the seventh grade itself; and there are lots of genuine and fascinating facts about bees – and even a bit about Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which of course contains the famous line, “To be or not to be.” The great thing about all the Klise sisters’ books is that descriptions of their contents make them seem completely incoherent, but everything actually fits beautifully together – like a jigsaw puzzle – for readers. So by all means visit Ghastly, Illinois and/or Geyser Creek, Missouri – or, better, both. The sites…err, sights…are definitely worth seeing.

(++++) IN ITS OWN WORDS, MORE OR LESS

Good Book: The Bizarre, Hilarious, Disturbing, Marvelous, and Inspiring Things I Learned When I Read Every Single Word of the Bible. By David Plotz. Harper. $26.99.

     The Yiddish word “plotz” means “to burst,” usually from strong emotion, and there are times during Good Book when a reader will wonder whether David Plotz will plotz at what he finds in the Old Testament. He doesn’t, and neither will readers, but Plotz’s plodding through everything from Genesis to 2 Chronicles produces plenty that surprises him and much that will likely surprise readers, too.

     Plotz professes himself a committed but essentially secular Jew who had never read the Bible until he undertook a year-long project to do so, originally for Slate, of which he is editor. He started the project, he says, after reading a bit of the Bible that he found appalling: the rape of Dinah in Genesis, in which Jacob’s daughter is raped by a prince who subsequently wants to marry her; and Jacob’s sons say they will accept the union if the prince and all his people are circumcised; and the prince agrees; and while the prince and his subjects are recovering from the pain of the procedure, Jacob’s sons sneak into their city and murder every man, steal their possessions and enslave their women and children. This is tribalism at its ugliest and bloodiest, and Plotz was surprised to find evidence of it, again and again and again, throughout the Bible. He was equally surprised to find a capricious, vicious, inconstant and inconsistent God, a God demanding a hereditary priesthood, a God favoring clever schemers over his own elsewhere-established order, a God who generally could not be trusted, and emphatically not (most of the time) a god of the meek, the mild or even of justice.

     Plotz’s surprise is a touch, well, surprising. He must have been thoroughly insulated from the Bible, and discussions of it, for a great many years, if he truly considered the book internally consistent and a portrait of a firm but loving God. Even lay readers have little trouble finding weirdness and swept-under-the-rug inconsistency in the Bible, including some that Plotz, for all his line-by-line reading, manages to miss. Novelist and Los Angeles Times columnist Jonathan Kirsch, for example, included in his The Harlot By the Side of the Road not only the Dinah story and several other tales that shocked Plotz, but also one extremely peculiar episode that Plotz overlooks: Exodus 4:24-26, in which God tries unsuccessfully to kill either Moses or Moses’ son, and is held off when Moses’ wife, Zipporah, does an impromptu circumcision of her son and throws the foreskin at God’s feet.

     Yet it is Plotz’s sense of nearly childlike wonder, coupled with his apparently unlimited capacity for surprise, that makes Plotz’s Good Book so attractive. Again and again, he is amazed to learn what is actually in the Bible. Leviticus 13: “The author has an obsession with leprosy.” Deuteronomy 26: “This is a very boring chapter.” Joshua 24: “Sometimes, the most fascinating parts of the Bible are the bits that have been left out.” Plotz summarizes every book at the start of his chapter about it, and also gives each one a cute subtitle. Judges: “The Meathead and the Left-Handed Assassin.” 1 Samuel: “The Bible’s Bill Clinton” (that one is a stretch, even for Plotz). Jeremiah: “The Prophet and the Lustful She-Camel.”

     Sometimes the subtitles reveal holes in Plotz’s approach to the Bible. The one about Isaiah (“The Jesus Preview”) shows that he sees the book as a unified totality, when longstanding Biblical scholarship – some of which Plotz says he has read, although apparently he missed this element – subdivides Isaiah into three parts, and it is the material from Deutero-Isaiah (particularly) and Trito-Isaiah that Christians interpret as prophesying the coming of Jesus.

     Plotz likes to put his Biblical ignorance “out there” in amusing ways, but he tends to be unaware of shortcomings in his own thinking about the Bible through which he is marching. Midway through Good Book, Plotz visits Israel to see some of the sites (and sights) mentioned in the Bible, and comments that “wishful thinking is the foundation of Bible tourism.” It does not seem to occur to him that wishful thinking can be seen as the foundation of the Bible itself, and indeed of religion in general: things must have a purpose, our tribe must be better than those others, God must back us and grant us strength, and all the rest of it.

     Despite the shortcomings of Plotz’s deliberately naïve approach, or perhaps because of them, Good Book is an amusing, entertaining read that actually does a good job of explaining “the messy Bible” (as Plotz calls it), including many of its self-contradictions, tribalisms, acts of viciousness, and of course implausibilities. It is fun to read Plotz’s dismissal of Zephaniah, a minor prophet (“that term doesn’t do justice to the dinkiness, the negligibility, the puniness of Zephaniah”) – and then, on the next page, to read about the first appearance of Satan in the Bible (in Zechariah) and find out that the word simply means “accuser” or “adversary” and that Satan “appears to be more like God’s lawyer” than anything else. Plotz’s final chapter (“Should You Read the Bible?”) comes across as a touch argumentative and even holier-than-thou, but he makes up for it with an appendix of Bible lists that includes the 12 best pickup lines, 11 best miracles, 13 “spectacular murders,” eight “trippiest and most important dreams,” and more.

     Good Book both parallels and stands at the opposite extreme from the intense, erudite (but still breezy), analysis-packed studies by Bart D. Ehrman (Lost Christianities, Misquoting Jesus, Lost Scriptures and other books). Ehrman focuses on the New Testament and can read it (and the Old Testament as well) in the original languages. Plotz, in contrast, is an English-language-only Everyman, picking his way through multiple translations of the Bible and trying not only to reconcile the book’s contents but also the different ways translators present them. The result is that Good Book is more interesting than instructive, more of a “how about that?” book than a deeply thoughtful one. But it is a fascinating and often very funny excursion through one of the world’s most influential texts. It may upset readers who think they “know” the Bible because of what they have been taught about it, but that is part of its point: what you think you know about this particular book is likely to be a sanitized version of what is really there. So by all means read Good Book, and then the Good Book itself if you think Plotz has gotten a good deal of it good and wrong.

(++++) TALL TALES FOR THE YOUNGER AND OLDER SET

Paula Bunyan. By Phyllis Root. Pictures by Kevin O’Malley. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $16.95.

Diogenes. By M.D. Usher. Pictures by Michael Chesworth. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $16.95.

Gemma Doyle Trilogy #3: The Sweet Far Thing. By Libba Bray. Delacorte Press. $10.99.

     Retelling old stories for new audiences is an essential part of the continuity of myths and fairy tales. When this sort of recasting of a tale is done cleverly enough, the result is plenty of fun in and of itself – and a chance for ideas that date to much earlier times to survive and thrive in a very different age. Both Phyllis Root’s playful handling of the Paul Bunyan legend and M.D. Usher’s canine remake of the story of the Greek philosopher Diogenes do a wonderful job of giving some old ideas an updated twist, while still preserving much of their original flavor.

     Paula Bunyan is, we are told, Paul’s “little” sister, who could beat Paul half the time in wrestling and “always outran him.” Like Paul, she sets off for the North Woods and has a series of adventures there. No Babe (the big blue ox) for Paula, though: instead, she teaches some wolves how to sing in three-part harmony (Paula is an enthusiastic and very loud singer), and she scares the daylights out of a seven-foot-tall black bear that becomes her companion and foot warmer after she shares with it “a little northern pike, about a hundred-pounder,” that she has just caught. The funniest part of this tall tale – not only in the narrative but also in Kevin O’Malley’s delightful illustrations – involves Paula and the bear encountering some mighty big and nasty mosquitoes that carry the bear off (until Paula saves him). Then comes the modern twist – an ecological one – as Paula becomes “sadder than a forest full of weeping willows” when she discovers that men have been cutting down a bunch of North Woods trees. Paula solves that problem by luring some of those pesky stinging insects to the men – “medium-sized mosquitoes, not much bigger than chickens” – and then she replants trees where the lumberjacks cut them down. It’s a nice story, nicely told and illustrated.

     Diogenes is a more serious narrative, but with funnier pictures. This is how the story of Diogenes of Sinope (412-323 B.C.) might have gone if Diogenes had been a dog. It is a very clever retelling by an author who really knows his subject – Usher is a classics professor at the University of Vermont, and discusses the historical Diogenes in an excellent afterword. The book itself is more of a romp, as Michael Chesworth makes Diogenes the dog a scruffy mutt with a strong sense of self and a determination to be his own master – so he grabs a walking stick and his dog dish and heads (walking upright on his two back legs) for Athens. The Athenian street scenes are highly amusing, as are the directional signs (one points downward to Hades) and the portrayal of Alexander the Great (who has the huge muscles and cleft chin of a traditional cartoon hero). The funny pictures help the seriousness of the underlying message go down more easily, as Diogenes learns to need as little as possible and make do with even less; begs for food when hungry and sleeps outdoors when tired; rolls in hot sand to get used to the heat of summer; deliberately makes requests of statues to become accustomed to being refused; and teaches the Athenians that his simple life really lets him “live like a king.” The famous episode of Diogenes walking about with a lantern looking for an honest man (or a good man, as Usher has it here) is included; and the historical Diogenes’ capture by pirates and sale as a slave is here transformed to the dog being caught by the dogcatcher and stuck in the pound until he attaches himself to a new master. This is a wonderful retelling of a story with which modern children are highly unlikely to be familiar – and one which still has plenty of resonance today.

     For older readers, ages 12 and up, authors tend to find it better to create new stories and new myths than to recycle old ones. And the new tales tend to be long, complex to the point of convolution, and just exotic enough so that teens can identify with the characters while realizing how different they are from real people. Libba Bray’s Gemma Doyle Trilogy handles all these elements well, if rather formulaically. Its conclusion, The Sweet Far Thing, originally published in 2007, is now available in paperback in all its 819-page glory (not counting the Reader’s Guide at the end). This book gets a (+++) rating for the way Bray interweaves, through 75 chapters, all the tales she has told in A Great and Terrible Beauty and Rebel Angels into this finale. The first book began in 1895, with 16-year-old Gemma shipped away from her life in India to Spence Academy in England, where secrets seemed to lie within every room. Gemma was distressed by recurring visions that kept coming true and by finding herself followed by a mysterious young Indian man. In the second book, readers learned more about Kartik, and Gemma became fast friends with Ann and Felicity, as the beauties and dangers of the magical place known as “the realms” became clearer. In the trilogy’s often meandering conclusion, everything points toward the girls’ debut season, and change is coming to the realms as well. Gemma has bound powerful magic to herself, and become enmeshed in the struggle between the Order (the group to which her mother once belonged) and the Rakshana. While Gemma’s friends focus on more mundane matters – Felicity must behave herself or lose her inheritance, while Ann may have to give up her dream of a life on the stage – Gemma must deal with darker matters. Many involve Pippa, the three girls’ friend, whom they meet again in the realms but who may face great danger – or be a great danger. Other mysteries involve Gemma herself, who (in true coming-of-age style) must figure out where she stands, who she is, and what sort of person (mundane and magical) she will become. The Sweet Far Thing wraps up the trilogy satisfactorily, both in magic and in the everyday world, and fans of the first two novels will surely be just as enraptured by the third. But although the story itself is new rather than a recasting of an older one, tales of this type have been so frequently told and retold that some readers will suspect, rightly, that they have seen their share of books like this one before.

(+++) SEARCHES FOR MEANING

Security Blankets: How “Peanuts” Touched Our Lives. By Don Fraser and Derrick Bang. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

The Fire in the Stone: Prehistoric Fiction from Charles Darwin to Jean M. Auel. By Nicholas Ruddick. Wesleyan University Press. $35.

     These are “meta” books, one popular and one more academic, seeking to look beyond the works they discuss to find out those works’ effects and meanings. The authors’ concepts, though, turn out to be better than their executions. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts is a natural touchstone for all sorts of personal searches and has inspired many books about its influence – one of the best, Robert Short’s The Gospel According to Peanuts, dates all the way back to 1965. What Don Fraser and Derrick Bang bring to this field, which is almost a mini-genre of its own, is a series of brief essays contributed by a variety of people – “relatively short stories that could be enjoyed and digested as provocative and enduring appetizers, rather than enormous meals too quickly forgotten,” as the authors put it. That is rather odd wording, though, and the book itself is a touch on the odd side as well. There is no information whatsoever about any of the contributors – nothing on their ages, where they live, how long they have read Peanuts, where (or if) they work outside the home, except to the extent that the contributors themselves divulge snippets of data here and there. Fraser and Bang (and who are they, anyway? – the book doesn’t say) are proud of Security Blankets: “Like many of the world’s best ideas, the concept for this book began with a question.” But readers, including ones deeply affected by Peanuts, may be less charmed. It is not that the anecdotes here are uninteresting – some are amusing, some touching, some heartfelt. But there is no apparent organizing principle anywhere – nothing alphabetical or by age or geography, for example, and the contributions are not even numbered. So enjoyment of the book is strictly hit or miss. Readers may like Merrill Baker’s comment, “I also attribute a lot of my independence to Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang.” Or Miranda Wong’s: “After joining the Peanuts Collector Club, I made friends with some of the nicest people I’ve ever met.” Or Rob Kirby’s: “There was something so devastatingly simple about Charles Schulz’s minimal use of lines to convey what actually was a highly detailed encapsulation of childhood.” You may be charmed by Denny May’s remembrance of his father, who actually flew a Sopwith Camel, the plane Snoopy uses as a World War I Flying Ace, or by textbook writer Karl J. Smith’s memory of the time Schulz used one of his algebra problems in a strip. But you will come upon more- and less-interesting reminiscences strictly by accident, and without a great deal of help from the authors, who are really just assemblers of these brief personal essays.

     Nicholas Ruddick’s book leans strongly in the other direction – Ruddick, a professor of English at the University of Regina, analyzes everything and is careful to point readers directly at whatever points he wants to make. But the subject matter he discusses is of limited interest, and his assumption that readers will be familiar with most, if not all, of the literature he discusses will limit his book’s appeal to people with a strong attachment to what Ruddick calls “prehistoric fiction.” That is likely to be a very small group indeed. Ruddick’s terminology can sometimes be confusing, too. He starts with a straightforward enough definition, if a highly academic one: “Prehistoric fiction, hereafter abbreviated ‘pf,’ is a speculative literary genre dependent on extrapolations from scientific or quasi-scientific discourse.” But just a few pages later, he confuses matters when he makes a distinction among “sf, pf [and] prehistoric sf,” thus requiring readers to wade through an explanation of the differences between science fiction and prehistoric fiction, and the ways in which science fiction set in prehistory differs (in Ruddick’s view) from what he designates pf. Ruddick proceeds to discuss pf in two overall ways, “General Evolution” and “Thematic Evolution,” dealing with works’ believability based on the science of the time in which they were written (and whether that is important) and also discussing what he calls the works’ “poetics.” Along the way, he shows some illustrations from the works he cites, and some of these can be quite interesting – when they are visible. Unfortunately, they often are not: a “cave bear” blends into the illustration’s dark background, for example, and a scene of dinosaurs threatening an ape-woman is so dark that the woman is barely distinguishable from the tree on which she stands. For every well-known author whom Ruddick discusses – Brian Aldiss, Isaac Asimov, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Jack London, et al. – there are many others with whom readers are unlikely to be familiar: F. Britten Austin, Elie Berthet, Austin Bierbower, Nictzin Dyalhis, G. Hagemans, Edmond Haraucourt, Alan Sullivan, and so on (and on). Ruddick tends to mention most authors’ works only in passing, which means readers unfamiliar with them have little to go on in determining whether the author’s analyses are accurate. One example among many: “[C.J. Cutcliffe] Hyne’s The New Eden [1892] is a case in point. On the island where the Archduke is conducting his experimental attempt to recapitulate human social evolution, monotheism evolves from the same psychosexual roots that gave rise to patriarchy.” Readers with a strong interest in pf will surely enjoy Ruddick’s exploration of its byways, and ones familiar with certain specific works in the field will at least be able to get a handle on what Ruddick is getting at by reading how he approaches the works they know. Despite the heavy-handed style, The Fire in the Stone gets a (+++) rating for these groups. But for readers looking for an introduction to prehistoric fiction or a sense of its significance as a genre – without already having a significant level of interest in it – Ruddick’s book gets a (++) rating.

(++++) RUSSOPHILIA

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 15; Hamlet—Selections from the Incidental Music. Russian National Orchestra conducted by Mikhail Pletnev. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

Arensky: Piano Concerto in F minor; Fantasia on Russian Folksongs; To the Memory of Suvorov; Symphonic Scherzo. Konstantin Scherbakov, piano; Russian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Dmitry Yablonsky. Naxos. $8.99.

Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition; Introduction to “Khovanshchina”; Borodin: Symphony No. 2; Polovtsian Dances from “Prince Igor”; Shostakovich: The Golden Age—Dance. Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. Medici Arts DVD. $24.99.

     There is so much that is thrilling and expansive in Russian music – and some new recordings find additional depths even in familiar works. Mikhail Pletnev and the Russian National Orchestra can always be counted on for a big sound, precise playing and wonderful attention to detail, and all these characteristics are on display in the new PentaTone SACD of Shostakovich’s final and very peculiar symphony. This is a work in which echoes of other composers’ music – and of Shostakovich’s own earlier creations – alternate with passages of eeriness that borders on grotesquerie (and sometimes step over the border). Pletnev’s precision and fine attention to detail serve this music particularly well, rendering it understandable as an end-of-life summation whose structure makes logical sense even if some of its elements remain quixotic. The Mahlerian way in which individual orchestral voices emerge is especially well done here, with Alexander Gotgelf’s solo cello particularly good. Paired with the symphony are, in effect, a series of encores: 10 short excerpts from the incidental music to Hamlet that Shostakovich wrote in 1932, plus a Gigue from 1954 tossed in between the Lullaby and Requiem – apparently simply because Pletnev thinks it sounds good there, which it does. These brief pieces are minor Shostakovich, and make a good counterpart to the serious whimsicality of his last symphony.

     The music of Anton Arensky (1861-1906) on a new Naxos CD is all rather minor, and the CD itself is so brief (49 minutes) that it seems a once-over-lightly for a composer whose life was cut short by tuberculosis before his 45^th birthday. Arensky wrote only two works for piano and orchestra, of which the later one -- Fantasia on Russian Folksongs – is the more interesting. This 1899 rhapsody contrasts a warmly expressive song with a more martial one in a tightly knit work that is more nationalistic than most of Arensky’s output. Konstantin Scherbakov plays the piece with enthusiasm that he also lavishes on the earlier Piano Concerto – which, however, does not repay his attentions as well. The concerto is rather disjointed, never quite finding its emotional center – certainly not in the superficialities of the slow movement. The finale, in 5/4 time (a meter that Arensky particularly liked), is the most interesting movement. The other works on this CD are a fairly late march (from 1900) commemorating the centenary of a Russian general and an unpublished and meandering scherzo that is likely a student work. The march is adequately martial and celebratory, but there is nothing particularly memorable about it, and the scherzo is simply disjointed. Dmitry Yablonsky leads the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra with skill in all these works, but the CD gets a (+++) rating rather than a higher one simply because the music itself is not especially distinguished.

     Whether Sir Simon Rattle’s December 31, 2007 performances of Mussorgsky, Borodin and Shostakovich deserve a (++++) or (+++) rating will depend on one’s interest in the addition of visuals to a recording. Certainly there is plenty of enthusiasm at this New Year’s Eve concert, with Rattle in fine form and active podium manner and the audience highly receptive to what is a sort of “Russia’s greatest hits” program; and certainly the Berlin Philharmonic plays with its usual strength and with fine balance among sections. But the interpretations themselves are more celebratory than insightful, with each work offered as a display piece rather than one with much to say. This is particularly unfortunate in the case of Borodin’s Symphony No. 2, which has more depth and less surface glitter than anything else on the DVD. Rattle goes through the motions of bringing out its big tunes and sweeping vistas, but the overall feeling is of a symphony performed rather than one interpreted. And of course the DVD is, like all visualizations of classical concerts, dependent on the specific shots and camera angles chosen by the TV director (Elisabeth Malzer). These can sometimes add to the listening experience (closeups of musicians focusing intently on the music, for example) and sometimes detract from it (as in shots of Rattle or the whole orchestra at times when a listener might prefer to see individual performers or sections). Lovers of Russian music will have heard all the works here innumerable times, but those who enjoy seeing as well as hearing a performance may well find this one especially festive, if not overly profound.

(+++) BOXES FOR THE EARS AND EYES

Haydn: The Complete Concertos. Soloists and Cologne Chamber Orchestra conducted by Helmut Müller-Bruhl. Naxos. $35.99 (6 CDs).

Handel: Tamerlano. Plácido Domingo, Monica Bacelli, Ingela Bohlin, Sara Mingardo, Jennifer Holloway, Luigi de Donato; Chorus and Orchestra of Teatro Real conducted by Paul McCreesh. Opus Arte. $49.99 (3 DVDs).

Janáček: The Cunning Little Vixen. Elena Tsallagova, Jukka Rasilainen, Michèle Lagrange, Hannah Esther Minutillo, David Kuebler, Roland Bracht, Paul Gay; Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. Medici Arts DVD. $24.99.

Messiaen: Saint François d’Assise. Camilla Tilling, Rod Gilfry, Hubert Delamboye, Henk Neven, Tom Randle, Donald Kaasch, Armand Arapian; Chorus of De Nederlandse Opera and Hague Philharmonic conducted by Ingo Metzmacher. Opus Arte. $49.99 (3 DVDs).

     Music can evoke pictures or patterns even without a visual component, and sometimes it is just as effective when heard as when seen. Certainly the fine Naxos set of Haydn’s concertos requires nothing visual to be a delight to hear – even though Haydn was far less distinguished as a concerto composer than as a symphonist and composer of string quartets. In fact, a number of works on these six CDs may not be by Haydn at all, while a number known to be by him have been lost. As a result, we have what is inevitably a rather disorganized set here, although the use of a single fine conductor and top-notch chamber orchestra does give the set some continuity. On these CDs are three violin concertos (with Augustin Hadelich as soloist), three for cello (with Maria Klegel, who is particularly good), one for horn (with Dmitri Babanov), one for trumpet (with Jürgen Schuster), and one for violin and keyboard (Ariadne Dasalakis on the violin and Harald Hoeren playing fortepiano). Then there are 10 keyboard concertos, assigned rather confusingly to different instruments: three are played on the harpsichord (one by Hoeren and two by Ketil Haugsand), three on the organ (Hoeren again), and four – unfortunately – on a modern piano (by Sebastian Knauer). Finally, there are Haydn’s five surviving concertos for two lire organizzate, presumably from a set of six of which one has been lost. It is fascinating to hear these on the original instrument, which was a kind of hurdy-gurdy with wheel, strings, keyboard and organ pipes – performances of a few movements are available on YouTube – but Haydn himself created versions for other instruments, so it is justifiable (if not ideal) to hear two of these concertos played on two recorders (by Daniel Rothert and Philipp Spätling), one on two flutes (by Benoît Fromanger and Ingo Nelken), and two on flute and oboe (by Fromanger and Christian Hommel). The multipurpose booklet enclosed with this boxed set – it is the same one Naxos is using for Haydn’s complete symphonies, string quartets and piano sonatas – does a good job of explaining which concertos are known to be authentic and which are questionable. And the performances, despite the orchestra’s use of modern instruments, are knowledgeable in terms of period style and are nicely played and balanced throughout. This is not a set for everyone or even for all Haydn lovers – individual performances of Haydn’s best and best-known concertos are widely available – but the music is as full of charm as the performances are of enthusiasm.

     There is little charm of plot but much interesting music in Handel’s Tamerlano, one of the composer’s long (four-hour) and often dry (lots of recitative) entries into historical tragedy. A main attraction of the new recording featuring Plácido Domingo is Domingo himself. Now 68, Domingo only recently began singing the role of Bajazet in this opera, and although he has little sense of Baroque style, his verismo passion and impressive death scene make his performance noteworthy. Paul McCreesh leads the orchestra – the Madrid Symphony under a different name – with attentiveness, and Domingo is ably backed by several other very fine soloists, including Monica Bacelli as Tamerlano (a role originally for castrato and now often sung by a countertenor, but effectively communicated here); Ingela Bohlin as Asteria, Bajazet’s daughter and a source of much of his anguish; and Jennifer Holloway as Irene, the spoiled Arab princess determined to wed Tamerlano. The production by Graham Vick is visually arresting, modernistic and not at all in keeping with Handel’s intentions, but it is effective in its own way. Interestingly, Domingo – whose handling of his part is also out of synch with what Handel would have expected and wanted – fits well into Vick’s scenery, his vocal emoting emphasizing the underlying personal drama of the story in a way that might have been unseemly in Handel’s time but that fits quite well into our own. Neither this opera nor this staging nor Domingo’s style will be to all tastes, but all are certainly worth both hearing and seeing.

     The Cunning Little Vixen gets a more traditional staging, by André Engel, on a new Medici Arts DVD. English and German speakers coming to this opera for the first time are often surprised to find that the vixen of the title is not really very cunning at all – the fault of Max Brod’s free translation into German of Janáček’s original title, which is more accurately rendered “The Adventures of Vixen Sharp-Ears.” Elena Tsallagova has a pretty voice rather than a highly dramatic one, and it fits well with what is essentially a fable about the cycle of life and death. Jukka Rasilainen is effective as the Forester, and the bass voices of Roland Bracht as the Parson and Paul Gay as Harašta are particularly fine. Dennis Russell Davies is at the top of his form, too, nicely balancing the fairy-tale elements of the story with the genuine pathos and sense of uplift at its end. The balancing of serious and comedic elements is sometimes a bit off – Janáček’s source was a comic strip that he deliberately made more serious, but the opera still contains amusing elements that are worth playing up when they occur. But on the whole, the production, singing and playing all stand up well.

     The new recording of Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise stands up well, too, if you like this sort of thing, but it has to be said that many listeners – including confirmed opera fans – will not. This is a very long (four-and-a-half-hour) and very episodic opera written late in the composer’s life, between 1975 and 1982 (Messiaen was born in 1908 and died in 1992). Like Janáček in The Cunning Little Vixen, Messiaen here wrote his own libretto, whose three acts include eight self-contained scenes, with mini-scenes within each one. Large forces are needed to perform the opera – Messiaen called for a 150-voice chorus and 120-member orchestra – and the composer’s fondness for exotic sounds is everywhere apparent (the score includes amplified birdsongs, tuned percussion and three ondes Martenot). Like The Cunning Little Vixen, Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise is ultimately about the meaning and purpose of life, but while Janáček emphasizes nature and the cycles affecting humans and animals alike, Messiaen focuses entirely on the faith of the most nature-oriented of saints; in fact, he omits St. Francis’ conflict-strewn early years entirely, confining himself to issues of grace and appreciation of God. The result is a static opera that has the potential to be both monumental and monumentally dull – although Pierre Audi’s elegant staging and Rod Gilfry’s fine singing in the title role keep the proceedings interesting. Equal credit, if not more, goes to the Hague Philharmonic under Ingo Metzmacher, which presents Messiaen’s sumptuous music with tenderness and understanding. This opera is a lot to take in one sitting – viewers of the DVD set will probably want to give themselves intermissions between the acts – but it has many wonderfully heartfelt moments and some of Messiaen’s loveliest and most elegantly scored music.

(++++) LOVING THE UNLOVABLE

Clarence Cochran, a Human Boy. By William Loizeaux. Pictures by Anne Wilsdorf. Melanie Kroupa Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $16.

A Rat’s Tale. By Tor Seidler. Pictures by Fred Marcellino. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $9.95.

     Franz Kafka was never like this. William Loizeaux has turned Kafka’s famed story, Metamorphosis, on its head, changing the very adult and surrealistic tale into a weirdly amusing story for children. For Clarence Cochran, a Human Boy, begins – in language that closely parallels Kafka’s – with an unexpected and never-explained transformation between cockroach and human. But this time, it is the insect that becomes a tiny person, not (as in Kafka) the person becoming a giant bug. Clarence and his very, very extended family live in the Gilmartins’ home, and after Clarence wakes up shaped like a boy (wearing modesty-protecting boxer shorts), the cockroach physician, Dr. Blatt, notes, “Patient presents with pallid exoskeleton, possibly molting; emaciated thorax; amputated cerci, tarsi, and antennae; pronotum and spiracles nonexistent.” Even if Clarence understood all that – not all the words make sense to him – the transformation itself remains inexplicable. Clarence finds himself encountering prejudice and visceral hatred from some fellow cockroaches (assuming they are still his “fellows”), and he finds his senses and his behavior tremendously changed: “He didn’t feel like sliding into a dark, dank, narrow space.…He saw colors in a way he never had before, great patches of them, and details, too!” And he sees the Gilmartins – mother Kathryn, father Larry and daughter Mimi – and they see the roaches scattering rapidly out of the light in their kitchen in the middle of the night. And of course the Gilmartins decide to do the only sensible thing: hire an exterminator. And now Clarence finds himself in the unlikely role of potential hero, because maybe, just maybe, he can find a way to prevent his relatives and friends from being wiped out. But that requires crossing the very substantial gulf between human beings and cockroaches… Well, Clarence goes through many adventures, eventually makes a friend of Mimi, and then finds a way – entirely on his own – to save the cockroaches, by devising a truce between the insects and the Gilmartins. Oh boy, what a fantasy that is, as anyone who has ever experienced a cockroach infestation will immediately know! But the wonderful thing about Loizeaux’ book – and the humorously appealing pictures with which Anne Wilsdorf illustrates it – is that it sort of humanizes cockroaches while in no way denying their real-world habits (such as a fondness for darkness and rotting food). Clarence eventually comes to terms with his transformation – as for Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, it proves irreversible and remains unexplained, although Clarence does get a happy ending that is denied to Kafka’s protagonist. And the Gilmartins come to terms, literally, with the cockroaches (through a written agreement, no less). Real world? No! Delightful world? Yes!

     And speaking of things unappealing to humans, how about sewer rats? And wharf rats? And wild rats in general? Actually, rats have become more socially acceptable, at least in fiction, since the release of the Pixar film Ratatouille in 2007. But Tor Seidler’s A Rat’s Tale long predates that – it was originally published in 1986, when rats were deemed anything but cuddly. Yet even then, Seidler managed to make these creatures into the wonderful inhabitants of an adventure-filled fairy-tale world that intersects with the human one only peripherally (and usually not to the rats’ benefit). Fred Marcellino’s wonderful pencil drawings help brings the rats and their world vividly to life, and Seidler’s story seems even more appealing in its new paperback edition than it did in the past – the Ratatouille influence, no doubt. Seidler imagines a stratified rat society in which the hero, a sewer rat named Montague Mad-Rat the Younger, is looked down upon by the rats living in spacious accommodations (empty crates and such) along the wharves. Then Montague rescues one of the wharf residents, Isabel Moberly-Rat, and a sort of wrong-side-of-the-tracks romance ensues (an entirely chaste one, of course). Much else happens in A Rat’s Tale as well. There is a constant threat of humans trying to spread rat poison – when one rat, Randal, is exposed to it, “the doctor, a general ratitioner, applied a poultice to the poisoned tail. After giving the young rat a piece of a pill pilfered from a pharmacy, the doctor ushered the rest of them out of the sickroom. ‘It may keep the infection from spreading, it may not,’ whispered the doctor, who was never quite sure which pills were for what.” Then there are adventures with pack rats, and Montague’s artistic ability – he paints seashells that his aunt brings him – proves important in a campaign to save the rats of the wharves from being destroyed by humans. Humans are not all bad – some actually do business with the rats – and there is sometimes cooperation with mice, pigeons and other creatures. And Montague becomes a hero – “Montague the Magnificent,” a rat politician calls him (yes, the rats have politicos). There is sorrow in Montague’s tale, too, as in any good fairy tale, but all ends peacefully and with promise for the future – and human readers, who will surely not recognize real-world wild rats in any of A Rat’s Tale, will just as surely be delighted by what happens to Seidler’s unreal creations.

(++++) AT THE TOP OF THEIR GAME

The Saturday Evening Pearls: A “Pearls Before Swine” Collection. By Stephan Pastis. Andrews McMeel. $10.99.

My Space: “Baby Blues” Scrapbook 24. By Rick Kirkman & Jerry Scott. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Ignorance, Thy Name Is Bucky: A “Get Fuzzy” Collection. By Darby Conley. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

     The latest Pearls Before Swine collection is a bargain, costing $2 less than the other two books here and offering just as many pages (128). Being an ex-lawyer, Stephan Pastis may have something to do with the price differentiation – maybe he wants to undercut the competition. It’s certainly not that PBF is worth less than other top-notch strips: why, there is no better place to go for death-obsessed, bottom-of-the-barrel humor in which characters regularly get killed and the book’s cover resembles an old Saturday Evening Post Norman Rockwell moment, except that half a picture of Pastis is visible on the wall as the crocodiles serve a dinner whose main course is Zebra with an apple in his mouth, and the table sports an entire plate of very worried-looking Fruit Buddies that are about to be eaten, and everyone is drinking beer endorsed by Danny Donkey, who hates everybody, and… Hmm. For some people, $10.99 is going to be about 11 bucks too much for this. But those with sufficiently twisted funnybones will have a great time with the lawsuit filed by the crocs against Zebra, who they say “‘willfully failed’ to be their food.” The crocs are represented by Rat and Zebra by Guard Duck, so negotiations go like this: “Hello…counselor? Settle or I firebomb your office.” “Settle or I beat you silly.” Then there is “National Enquirat,” Rat’s tabloid newspaper, in which Goat’s possession of aspirin leads to the headline, “Drug-Addled Goat Busted in Massive Narcotics Sting,” and a brief guest appearance by Beetle Bailey and Zero, who give each other a good-bye hug, produces this screaming headline: “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell?” Let’s see…the hyenas move into the neighborhood and ask Zebra if he has any leftovers – “Dead guys. We’re not picky…. Maybe an uncle or something.” Danny Donkey learns an important lesson after cutting into lines at the market, store and amusement park: line cutting makes him happy. There are sendups of “Peanuts,” soap-opera strips and “Family Circus,” plus one strip whose reference to the Groucho Marx TV show You Bet Your Life will either be hilarious or fall absolutely flat, depending on a reader’s age and knowledge of television. In fact, there is a little of everything in The Saturday Evening Pearls, unless of course you want amusing family-focused humor.

     If that’s what you’re after, go for Baby Blues, which is as delightful as ever, if not more so, in My Space (no direct relationship to the popular social-networking Web site: the cover shows mom Wanda crushed into a tiny portion of the page, indicating just how much space parents get for themselves when they have kids). The three-child MacPherson family is humming (or stumbling) along just wonderfully here. Wanda: “Whoever is doing whatever is going to get you-know-what, if you don’t cut it out!” Zoe and Hammie, after dad Darryl incorrectly says that turtles are amphibians: “Let’s see what else he doesn’t know.” Darryl, while cooking an outdoor meal of hot dogs, Polish sausage, linguisa, andouille, kielbasa and bratwurst: “My barbecue repertoire is pretty much limited to meat in a tube.” Thelma, Zoe’s overnight guest: “My! My! My! If this place was any nicer, it’d be a chocolate Sunday school!” Zoe offering to read a book to baby Wren, who does not speak yet but is clearly making her presence felt: “We have Where the Wild Things and the Dumb Brothers are…Dumb Brother, Dumb Brother, What Do You See?...The Very Hungry Dumb Brother…Why don’t we start with a classic, Harold and the Purple Dumb Brother.” All this verbiage springs from the mind of Jerry Scott (who also writes Zits, thereby proving himself attuned to children and proto-adults of all ages), and is perfectly matched to Rick Kirkman’s ever-more-refined drawings – in which the changing expressions (accomplished with oh-so-minor but oh-so-skilled alterations of the characters) perfectly reflect the ever-changing moods. And Kirkman has developed a fine sense of the absurd, too: just check out the Sunday strip in which Zoe and Hammie pile objects on top of their dad’s super-prominent nose.

     The most prominent thing in the latest collection of Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy is the series of non sequiturs and outright misinterpretations from Bucky Katt. Bucky is equally snide to Satchel Pooch and the hapless human, Rob, whose cluelessness reaches new heights (or depths) nearly every time he opens his mouth. Rob, for example, wants to know why the sport of snowboard cross isn’t called “snoto-cross? Or bordo-cross? I mean, am I the only person who thinks about these things?” And Bucky, in a rare moment of lucidity and insight, comments, “The real mystery is how you don’t have a girlfriend yet, chief.” Most of the time, though, Rob (aka “Pink” or “Dorktator”) is only a distraction from the far more amusing interaction of Bucky with the world around him. Bucky decides to be a filmmaker like “Quentin Tabbytino,” a scruffy cat he brings to the apartment, and when Rob says he doesn’t believe the cat really makes movies, Bucky says, “Your toaster on the way out, Rob, ’cause you just opened an account at the First National Bank of Amerismack!” Buck also creates a “tummy exerciser” called “Ab Solutions” because the Pope “used to sell a product called Absolutions a while back, but the trademark must have run out.” And Bucky, denied access to whiskey, creates “whiskery,” which is “a homemade blend of rubber bands in toilet water.” He also creates the Bucky Museum (the whole apartment) and makes the perpetually put-upon Satchel handle admissions. Then there is Bucky’s determination to model for a hairball remedy: “This face will be synonymous with feline regurgitation.” But not everything in this book is Bucky-centric (although most of it is). There is one very funny week of strips in which Rob (now taking the role not of an advertising executive but of Conley himself) “rips off” and redoes a series of strips from none other than Pearls Before Swine…with “guest” appearances by none other than Stephan Pastis, who previously did the same thing with some Get Fuzzy strips – thereby proving, if nothing else, that oddball humor interfaces well with other oddball humor.

(++++) STILL SPLENDID AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

The Napping House. By Audrey Wood. Illustrations by Don Wood. Harcourt. $17.99.

The Firekeeper’s Son. By Linda Sue Park. Illustrated by Julie Downing. Sandpiper. $6.99.

     Reissued, these books are every bit as charming as they were when first published. This is the 25^th anniversary of The Napping House, a story on the “house that Jack built” model in which each event builds on the one before – until Audrey Wood undoes what she has constructed by removing things one at a time. The simple story starts with a house, within which is a bed, on which granny sleeps; grandson climbs on top; then dog; then cat; then mouse; then flea. But then the flea bites the mouse – and, one at a time, everyone wakes up, as Don Wood’s hilarious illustrations show the wide-eyed, legs-splayed cat in midair, the dog so startled that its fur stands on end, the boy waking with a start, and the granny and boy tumbling upside-down. But everyone turns out to be in a wonderful mood as the sun comes up and a rainbow that ends right at the house indicates the start of a bright new day. Straightforward, yes, but quite delightful – and the new edition includes a CD that features not only a reading of the book but also six original songs. It all adds up to a package every bit as wonderful as The Napping House was all the way back in 1984.

     The Firekeeper’s Son dates only to 2004, but the story – now available in paperback – feels much older, based as it is in the Korean of long ago. Linda Sue Park sets her tale in the early 1800s, when news of possible danger to Korea reaches the king by a series of signal fires. Sang-hee, the young son of the village firekeeper, learns how the system works: the village lights the first fire atop a mountain every night (because it is the settlement closest to the sea, from which danger is most likely to come). Seeing the fire, the next village’s firekeeper lights another one, and so on all the way to the mountain closest to the king’s palace. Seeing the fire, the king knows that all is well; if there is no fire, he sends soldiers to protect the land. Sang-hee wants so much to see soldiers, even if only once; and one night, his father has an accident and is unable to start the fire, leaving the responsibility on Sang-hee’s shoulders. All Sang-hee has to do to fulfill his wish is to avoid starting the blaze…but responsibility wins out in the end, and Sang-hee even learns something about his father’s own boyhood wishes. Park’s telling gives the story the feeling of myth, and Julie Downing enhances the atmosphere with watercolor-and-pastel illustrations that evoke the young boy’s reality and dreams with equal skill. But as Park points out in an Author’s Note at the end, the signal fires are a fact of Korean history – and were actually a far more complex system than this book indicates. Although modern communication rendered them obsolete, they remain part of Korea’s past, and The Firekeeper’s Son remains a lovingly written tribute to them and to the people who made sure they burned brightly.

(++++) SECOND HELPINGS

Beka Cooper, Book Two: Bloodhound. By Tamora Pierce. Random House. $18.99.

Sebastian Darke, Book Two: Prince of Pirates. By Philip Caveney. Delacorte Press. $16.99.

     It has been two-and-a-half years since Tamora Pierce introduced Beka Cooper in the first book of a planned trilogy, Terrier. That book’s title reflected not only Beka’s tenacity but also one of the conceits of this saga – that the Provost’s Guard in the city of Corus is widely known as “the Provost’s Dogs.” The Dogs are law enforcers in a world of magic, and their rookies are deemed Puppies, as was Beka in the first book. Pierce gave Beka some magic of her own, dubbing her a listener: she hears the information that flows like air through the Lower City, where she herself was born – whether the whisperings come from people, pigeons or ghosts. Beka’s story is part of a much larger one on which Pierce has worked for many years: that of the land of Tortall. The new Beka Cooper book is the 16^th novel set there and is, like the first Beka one, subtitled “A Tortall Legend.” It may take readers a little while to get into this lengthy (554-page) novel, as Pierce re-sets the scene and helps readers reimagine Beka herself and the animals with which she interacts in important ways. And the basic plot may seem a touch mundane for a book about a world of magic: Beka, now a full-fledged Dog rather than a Puppy, has to investigate a counterfeiting operation. But Pierce’s skill lies in characterization as much as in action, and as Beka follows the trail of counterfeit coins to Port Caynn, where she finds that that town’s Dogs do not seem to be doing much about the shady operation, she becomes a much more fully formed character as well as a far better member of the Guard. Pierce has an old-fashioned style of writing in which she does not hesitate to spend a paragraph or more simply setting a scene: “The noise swamped us. The smoke that floated along the ceiling made our eyes sting. It came from the fire in the great hearth where kettles full of wines and ales heated. Sweating mots wearing thin dresses and aprons filled pitchers from the kettles and handed them over to serving folk, then refilled the kettles to heat a new batch of drinks. I could smell spices, ale, wine, roasting meat, and hints of puke and piss.” It is through vivid imagery like this that Pierce makes this story come alive – and there is plenty of conflict and action, too, even if not of the nonstop variety. After all, Beka has made enemies in her fast rise in Corus; and now she is traveling with her mentor, Clary Goodwin, as well as with the scent hound Achoo and the pigeon Slapper (who keeps Beka in touch with the voices of the dead). The matter-of-fact use of magic, from balms to concealment spells, adds to the solidity of Beka and Tortall, while Pierce’s invented words (gixie, colemongery) keep the setting exotic. Beka even develops a romantic attachment in the midst of this adventure, although that particular “ache” goes nowhere, and Pierce ends by having Beka assert, “There’s plenty more trouble to get into” – as she no doubt will in the concluding book of this trilogy when Pierce gets around to writing it.

     The seriousness and intensity of Pierce’s writing stand in stark contrast to the lighthearted approach that Philip Caveney takes in his Sebastian Darke trilogy, which has also now reached its second book and which, like Pierce’s Beka tales, is intended for readers age 12 and up. The first Sebastian book, Prince of Fools, introduced the half-elf, half-human hero, who (like Beka Cooper) has some rather unusual traveling companions – in Sebastian’s case, a buffalope named Max and a fighting dwarf named Cornelius. By the end of that first book, Sebastian has realized that he will never make it as a court jester, so the second book, Prince of Pirates, takes him in an altogether different direction. Specifically, it takes him toward the port of Ramalat, from which he plans to take ship to search for the lost treasure of the Pirate King Callinestra. First, though, Sebastian and his companions have to avoid getting lost and waylaid themselves as they travel through the forest of Geltane (where a beautiful but dangerous sorceress awaits). And when, somewhat the worse for wear, they do eventually reach Ramalat, they find themselves dealing with kelfers (really dangerous, sharklike beasties: “not just pure evil, they’re cunning with it”) and a pirate called Captain Kid (real name: Beverly). As their quest proceeds, amid sea battles and pirate-infested islands and such, they are treated to such observations as, “There are many ways to rob somebody, and maybe being a pirate is the most honest method. At least you’re not pretending to be anything other than a crook.” There is a great deal of farce and a great deal of fun in Prince of Pirates, but always within the context of what really is a fast-paced swashbuckling adventure. And Caveney is a fine illustrator as well as a good writer, whether in a picture showing a battle with a huge-toothed, dinosaur-like creature called a yarkle, or in one giving individual character to each of the many faces crowded into a seedy tavern. Still, it is the humor of the writing that is most attractive here: “‘Well, that’s just typical, isn’t it!’ complained Max. ‘That just puts the ruddy cap on it! We go all that way, struggle through the worst odds, face the most terrible dangers, and for what?’” Well, for the amusement and enjoyment of readers, for one thing – and in the genre of heroic fantasy/quest tales, which tends to take itself very seriously indeed, Sebastian Darke’s adventures are especially welcome for their light touch.

(++++) CHAMBER DELICACIES

Brahms: Clarinet Trio in A minor; Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2 for Clarinet and Piano. Loren Kitt, clarinet; Lambert Orkis, piano; David Hardy, cello. Dorian Sono Luminus. $16.99.

Vivaldi: Oboe Sonatas. Burkhard Glaetzner, oboe; Ingo Goritzki, oboe II; Karl Suske, violin; Christine Schornsheim, organ and harpsichord; Thomas Reinhardt, bassoon; Siegfried Pank, viola da gamba; Achim Beyer, violone. Capriccio. $11.99.

Gade: Sonatas Nos. 1-3 for Violin and Piano. Christina Åstrand, violin; Per Salo, piano. Dacapo. $16.99.

Glenn Gould: String Quartet in F minor; Ernest MacMillan: String Quartet in C minor; Two Sketches for String Quartet based on French Canadian Airs. Quatuor Alcan (Laura Andriani and Nathalie Camus, violins; Luc Beauchemin, viola; David Ellis, cello). ATMA Classique. $16.99.

     The intimacy of chamber music – much of which was originally written to be played at home, as a communal event – can sometimes make it more enjoyable to play than to hear. But when there is sufficient joy in the playing, chamber works come through with an emotional immediacy that larger-scale ones do not quite match. Indeed, although the title of the new all-Brahms CD by Kennedy Center Chamber Players members Loren Kitt, Lambert Orkis and David Hardy – “An Emotional Journey” – is a bit overwrought, there is no denying the intense commitment of these superb instrumentalists to these late Brahms works. The Trio, Op. 114, flows beautifully and rather sadly, as if the musicians perceive in it a struggle whose resolution, even at the end, is uncertain (the work ends in the minor). The two Sonatas, Op. 120, are simply gorgeous, with Kitt and Orkis beautifully intermingling their melodic lines and the works’ passion, grace and yearning emerging in performances of overflowing loveliness.

     Vivaldi’s five Oboe Sonatas are of a much earlier time and are, in fact, from early in Vivaldi’s own compositional career, before he focused entirely on concertos. The new Capriccio CD featuring Burkhard Glaetzner is a reissue of a 1988 disc; the performances themselves date to 1986. They have worn well: the playing is strong and idiomatic, and the very different instrumentation of the sonatas (four of which, incidentally, are in four movements, not the expected three) is highlighted to excellent effect. The Sonatas RV 28 (G minor), 34 (B-flat major) and 53 (C minor) are for oboe and basso continuo; RV 81 (G minor) is for two oboes and basso continuo and is the only work here in three movements; and RV 779 (C major) is a real curiosity, being written for violin, oboe, obbligato organ and bassoon ad lib. Despite the fact that three of these five works are in minor keys, none of them plumbs or attempts to plumb any emotional depths; but all are poised, well balanced and full of interesting instrumental touches, very well realized in this recording.

     Niels Gade’s three violin-and-piano sonatas span a large portion of his career. No. 1 (A major) dates to 1842, when Gade was 25; No. 2 (D minor) is from 1849-50; and No. 3 (B-flat major) is from 1885, five years before the composer’s death. It is scarcely surprising that the works cover very different emotional territory. No. 1 is quite Mendelssohnian (Mendelssohn was a major influence on Gade: Gade was his assistant conductor at the Leipzig Gewandhaus and, after Mendelssohn’s death, his successor) and has a well-designed finale that, surprisingly, is in A minor. No. 2 is more compressed (it is the shortest of the three sonatas) and includes an interestingly designed middle movement that is in part a slow movement and in part a scherzo. No. 3 is musically a bit of a throwback, with youthful joyousness in its themes and without the broad emotionalism of Romantic-era works of its time. Perhaps not surprisingly, it has never been particularly popular, although it is very well constructed. Christina Åstrand and Per Salo play all these works with strength, understanding and a fine sense of balance between the violin and piano parts. The only real oddity of the CD is that it presents the works in reverse chronological order. It is easy enough to change the playing order, but the 3-2-1 arrangement does seem peculiar.

     The chamber pieces by Glenn Gould and Ernest MacMillan on a new ATMA Classique CD are also quite well played, but it would be difficult to regard them as major works, although they are considered important in 20^th-century Canadian music; the CD featuring them gets a (+++) rating. The most intriguing piece here is MacMillan’s String Quartet in C minor. MacMillan was in German territory when World War I broke out – he had been attending the Bayreuth Wagner Festival – and was imprisoned at Nuremberg for several months, after which he was transferred to Ruhleben (near Berlin) for the rest of the war. He wrote the first version of this quartet during that time, eventually revising it in 1921. There is no anguish in this work, which is in the traditional four movements and is well balanced among the instruments. It is a well and intelligently constructed quartet, but not music that shows a strong personality. In fact, the Two Sketches for String Quartet based on French Canadian Airs, which include Notre Seigneur en pauvre and Á Saint-Malo beau port de mer, have more character – and in their symphonic version are one of MacMillan’s most frequently played pieces. As for Glenn Gould’s Quartet in F minor, published as his Op. 1, it is his only significant original composition, completed in 1955 (when he was 23). Essentially a large Allegro in classical style, it is intellectually impressive but not particularly moving, although Quatuor Alcan certainly plays it with plenty of fervor and intensity.

(++++) BEETHOVEN AND BEYOND

Idil Biret Beethoven Edition, Volume 8: Piano Sonatas Nos. 23 (“Appassionata”), 28 and 31. Idil Biret, piano. IBA. $8.99.

Idil Biret Beethoven Edition, Volume 9: Symphonies Nos. 7 and 8 (Liszt Piano Transcriptions). Idil Biret, piano. IBA. $8.99.

Idil Biret Concerto Edition, Volume 1: Schumann—Piano Concerto; Grieg—Piano Concerto. Idil Biret, piano; Bilkent Symphony Orchestra conducted by Antoni Wit. IBA. $8.99.

     Although the fascinating Idil Biret Beethoven Edition is not yet halfway through its projected 19 volumes, another Idil Biret Edition is already starting. The Beethoven series continues to have the sonatas as its high points, although Biret’s “Appassionata” is a touch too quirky to be wholeheartedly recommended. It is played with very considerable attention to detail, so that, for instance, figurations rarely heard in the left hand when the right has the melody come through quite clearly. But to accomplish this, Biret uses mostly slow tempos; and what she attains in clarity, she loses in sweep and emotion. This is a cool “Appassionata” rather than a deeply felt one – highly accomplished and very well played, but somewhat too plodding (especially in the main section of the finale) to make the work’s title (given it by its publisher) a good fit. The two later sonatas here, however, are gems. No. 28 has both delicacy and drive, with a pleasant sense of freshness throughout. And No. 31 has just the right balance of solidity and emotionalism, culminating in a very effective handling of the last movement’s fugue – Biret makes the contrapuntal lines clear while still including Beethoven’s near-Romantic sweep and drama.

     Biret’s handling of Liszt’s transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies is still fine but still not up to her sonata recordings, which were made later (Volume 8 of the Biret Beethoven Edition dates to 2001, Volume 9 to 1986). Symphony No. 7 simply drags too much to be effective – it is more than six minutes before Biret even gets to the Vivace section of the first movement. The Allegretto is pleasant and nicely paced, but the finale is so far from “the apotheosis of the dance” (Wagner’s description of this symphony) that it simply plods. No. 8 is much better. The first movement is not exactly “con brio,” but the second has a pleasant “scherzando” feeling about it, the third contrasts with it effectively, and the finale has a sense of hustle that leads to a very effective conclusion (this is one of the few places in the transcriptions in which Liszt dropped Beethoven’s wide range to create a more effective piano finish). Biret brings out Beethoven’s subtleties very well in playing the symphonies, but she tends to lose sight of the overall arch of the works, making her performances more interesting than compelling.

     The first volume of Biret’s Concerto Edition, recorded in 2006, features comparatively slow tempos as well, a state of affairs that works better in Grieg’s concerto than in Schumann’s. Here the interplay between Biret and the Bilkent Symphony Orchestra under Antoni Wit is better than in the performers’ Beethoven concertos, in which the orchestra has sounded rather pale. For the Schumann and Grieg, it sounds fuller and more strongly committed to the music, and this makes it a fine foil for Biret, whose big sound and willingness to turn phrases into proclamations lead to solid, even stately performances. The Schumann tends to be a little stiff as Biret performs it, especially in the first movement (which is supposed to be played “affettuoso”), but the Grieg gets plenty of room to breathe here, and as a result has some of the expansiveness associated with Norway – an effect for which the composer was certainly striving, in light of his use of the Norwegian halling for the primary dance rhythm of the finale. Biret’s performances of these concertos and the Beethoven repertoire may not be definitive – it can certainly be argued that no one’s are – but she shows highly impressive range and great thoughtfulness in all these works, making all the Idil Biret Archives recordings worth hearing for their insights and the sheer quality of Biret’s pianism.

(++++) AN ENDING AND A BEGINNING

Just a Simple Wedding: A “For Better or For Worse” Collection. By Lynn Johnston. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Ink Pen. By Phil Dunlap. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

     After 29 years of intricacy worthy of a novel and emotion worthy of a prime-time soap opera, For Better or For Worse came to an end last year, as Lynn Johnston wound up the story of multiple generations of the Patterson family and their many friends, neighbors, acquaintances and hangers-on. Just a Simple Wedding is the final collection of the strip, and fans will be dripping with nostalgia long before the last page. Johnston does not bring all the elements of her long-running tale together, but she knits up several of the major story lines and provides a full-page Sunday strip at the very end saying what happened to some characters in their later lives. Of course, these are simply drawings – they have no “lives,” earlier or later – but because Johnston’s strip has always been steeped in realism (and is partly autobiographical), these drawings feel real to millions of people. The arc of this final collection primarily includes the deteriorating health of Grandpa Jim and the challenges facing his wife and by-necessity caregiver, Iris; and the increasing closeness of Elizabeth and her high-school boyfriend, Anthony, who is now divorced and has a child. The marriage of Elizabeth and Anthony provides the book’s title and the strip’s climax, but much else occurs before it happens, including Michael’s growing success as an author and the ongoing daily trials he and his wife, Deanna, face in raising their children, Meredith and Robin; “bonus baby” April, now a teenager, learning to drive and discovering what she wants to do in life; John and Elly Patterson facing the realities of aging; and much more. Tossed in among the “story” strips are slice-of-life ones, including some of the wordless or nearly wordless Sunday strips that are a Johnston hallmark: an autumn family outing with leaf collecting; a winter scene with snow, featuring gloves turned into playthings; April’s battle with an umbrella during an intense rainstorm; and more. Fans of For Better or For Worse will be drenched in memories before the end of this book – and fanatical fans will no doubt be happy that Johnston did not exactly retire: she decided to re-draw the entire story from the start, with different perspectives and using some of the knowledge and cartooning skill that she has gained over the years. Still, Just a Simple Wedding stands as the summation and more-or-less conclusion of a remarkable comic strip, and it is impossible not to wish the nonexistent Pattersons well in the continuation of their unreal-but-somehow-very-real lives.

     Will Ink Pen last 29 years? Doubtful – it’s not likely that newspapers in their current form will last another couple of decades, and without them, the entire nature of cartooning is bound to change. But Phil Dunlap’s new strip has the potential to go on for as long as he wants it to, because Dunlap is really on to something here. Johnston’s chronicle-of-life concept was an old one that she handled with unusual skill. Dunlap’s chronicle of cartoon characters trying to find jobs for other cartoon characters by running an employment agency is something new – and seems so obvious, and so amusingly self-referential, that it is a wonder no one thought of it before. There were hints of this sort of approach in films such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit – think of the cigar-smoking midget whose job, within the movie, is to play a baby, or of Jessica Rabbit saying she isn’t bad, that’s just the way she is drawn. But no one has done this in comic-strip form, and it works wonderfully and often hilariously. Dunlap’s chief characters include a corporate-looking dog named Fritz who runs the employment agency, talks like a traditional boss, but lapses into canine behavior and four-footed locomotion when, say, a doorbell rings; a dirty and ugly rat named Bixby who is second-in-command and is a former child star who quickly outgrew adorableness and now spends much of his time wallowing in garbage; a pig named Hamhock who wants quality work but keeps getting jobs as food; a well-spoken rabbit named Ralston who seeks sophistication but gets only slapstick work because he is so good at getting hit and steamrollered; a super-dumb superhero called Captain Victorious and his nemesis, Mr. Negato, who got their powers at the same time and go out for beer together when not thrashing each other; and a number of just-passing-through characters, from another superhero named Dynaman (whose powers may come from steroids), to Joggles the Clown (“I’ve even painted a permanent smile on my face so as to never slip and hint at the searing pain and desperation lying deep in my soul”), to Jenn Erica (“generic,” with a feminine “a” ending), an all-purpose but easily forgettable female character. Dunlap manages to make this motley crew recognizably human through some strange power he appears to have to cloud people’s minds, and the characters’ interactions actually make sense within their weirdly skewed world. Ink Pen is a highly unusual strip that deserves a chance to be seen much more widely – it has the potential to grow in all sorts of interesting ways. And it’s plenty interesting already.

(++++) ANIMAL LEGENDS

Cecily G. and the 9 Monkeys. By H.A. Rey. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $6.99.

Pig-Boy: A Trickster Tale from Hawai’i. By Gerald McDermott. Harcourt. $17.

     Some animals, such as Curious George, become legends in their own time. Others, such as Kamapua’a, are legends in their own cultures. In either case, their stories can be highly entertaining even when retold in far different circumstances from those of the characters’ origins.

     Cecily G. and the 9 Monkeys is a reprint of the American edition of the first book to feature Curious George – and the first book for children written by H.A. Rey (real name: Hans Augusto Reyersbach) and his wife, Margret. George is not the central character here, but it is easy to see how he would quickly come into his own and become the star of umpteen books in the future. Cecily G. (for Giraffe) has the lead role in this book, and George is but one of the eight children of Mother Pamplemoose. Cecily is sad because all her family and friends have been taken to zoos, so when she meets the nine monkeys – who are looking for a new home after the trees in their forest have been cut down – she offers them a place to stay and play. The simple but pleasant story turns on the amusing interactions of the giraffe (for whom the monkeys at one point create a pair of stilts, making her too tall to fit on the page) with the monkeys, each of whom has a different personality trait: James is good, Arthur is strong, and of course George is curious (and clever, too). The Reys’ good humor is already evident throughout this book, as Cecily turns into a sailboat with Johnny (who is brave) as captain, the monkeys use umbrellas as parachutes as they leap from Cecily’s head to the ground, and more. The book ends with a little song that the Reys wrote about the friendship of the monkeys and giraffe – and for parents and those children who want to know how books come to be, there is a wonderful afterword by Louise Borden giving the history of Cecily G. and the 9 Monkeys and the Reys. It is fascinating to find out that Cecily got her start as an amusing drawing for a French magazine, and was named Rafi (in France) and Raffy (in England) when she became the central character in her own book; and that George’s original name was Fifi. The backdrop against which the Reys wrote and drew their warm-hearted stories – World War II, with the two authors, who were Jewish, fleeing the advancing Nazis – will send chills up many spines and cause families to marvel at the Reys’ ability to create books of naïve good humor in the midst of so much tragedy. Cecily G. and the 9 Monkeys is a delightful tale in and of itself; and the story of how it became a story gives it unexpected depth.

     Gerald McDermott’s Pig-Boy is pure fun of a different kind, being a reinterpretation of an old Hawaiian legend. Kamapua’a is a trickster-hero unique to Hawaii but scarcely unique in type (think of Loki, Br’er Rabbit, Coyote, Anansi and many others). He is a shapeshifter who can appear as anything from a handsome warrior to an eight-eyed, four-tusked monster boar. McDermott makes him milder than in the original legend and more mischievous, showing him as “a hairy little hog” with pointy ears, curly tail, bristly back and dirty snout, who is raised by his devoted grandmother. The adventure in this book is all about Pig-Boy’s stomach: after eating everything in his grandmother’s taro patch, Pig-Boy is still hungry, so he steals chickens from the king, who pursues him. But Pig-Boy is good at slipping away: he turns into a hundred piglets, runs to the shore, seeks protection from the goddess Pele, then turns into a pig-nosed fish when she tells him to go away. Returning to shore, Pig-Boy is captured in a net by the king’s men, so he grows huge (McDermott’s version of the eight-eyed, four-tusked monster is funny rather than scary) and gets away again – turning himself small and returning to his grandmother to be cuddled to sleep. Pig-Boy is a slight tale, but in McDermott’s retelling and with his attractive illustrations, it is a charming one.

(++++) DIFFERENTLY DELICIOUS

This Little Bunny Can Bake. By Janet Stein. Schwartz & Wade. $15.99.

I’m Your Peanut Butter Big Brother. By Selina Alko. Knopf. $16.99.

     Food takes on very different meanings in these two books, one of which is actually about baking and the other of which revolves around a woman with “one in the oven,” as pregnancy sometimes used to be described. This Little Bunny Can Bake takes place in a cooking class in which only the little bunny pays attention and follows the rules, while the other students of master pastry maker Chef George drift into their own worlds and come up with some really strange desserts. The dog is determined to make something that involves shoes, the spoonbill wants to be sure fish are included, the tiger is looking forward to meat, and so on. Chef George, a wise if put-upon owl, offers the students a blackboard filled with a complete explanation of the elements of dessert creation – all of them accurate, as it happens (contrasts, sensory stimulation, textures and so forth). But only the little bunny – who alone is shown in color, with all the other characters drawn in black-and-white – pays close attention, takes notes and absorbs the information. Chef George realizes that he needs to take the class back to basics, and he tries to do so, offering nine of his own books of recipes for the students to study. But they – again, except for the bunny – play games, take naps or are otherwise unfocused. When it comes time to “train your noses,” only the bunny takes the blindfold test seriously – everyone else smells what he or she wants or expects to smell (for example, the mouse, holding a banana, thinks he smells cheese). Actual baking – measurement, mixing and all the rest – goes no better, and pretty much everything turns out to be a mess, except for the little bunny’s cake with the message “This Little Bunny Can Bake” on it. Everyone, including Chef George, eats some and enjoys it – a happy (and yummy) ending indeed. The “photos” of the other students’ concoctions, at the end of the book, are very funny – and Janet Stein includes eight real recipes on the inside front and back covers, from cream cheese tarts to chocolate meringue cookies. Kids who act like the little bunny and follow the recipes carefully – with adult supervision – will be able to make some very tasty desserts, inspired by Stein’s own experiences at a cooking school in Barcelona, Spain.

     Food is a metaphor rather than something to be really eaten in I’m Your Peanut Butter Big Brother, a story about the many possible appearances of interracial children. Selina Alko, a Caucasian woman married to an African-American man, was inspired by her own family’s makeup to create this story of a boy who awaits his soon-to-be-born brother or sister while wondering which foods he or she will resemble. He explains that he himself is a blend of “semisweet dark Daddy chocolate bar and strawberry ice cream Mama’s milk.” Will the new baby, he wonders, be “coffee with lots and lots of cream,” or perhaps “ginger cookie brown”? Will his or her eyes look like “hot cocoa footballs set wide apart or a perfect pair of pennies”? “Will you be my vanilla bean ice cream sibling or super-rich double chocolate fudge?” he wonders. Alko’s amusingly offbeat drawings – father looking like stars in a night sky, mother like the sun; contrasting ice-cream cones, one pointy sugar and one flat-bottomed cake; beach and playground scenes filled with different-looking people enjoying themselves as part of the same family – nicely complement her offbeat writing, which contains such phrases as “cappuccino-frosted ‘fro” and “pecan elastic band Sebastian.” The message of absolute acceptance of differences is delivered quietly and poetically, and after the new baby sister is born, the final picture of the boy encircling the little girl in his arms makes a lovely ending to a gently touching presentation of interracial family life.

(++++) WORD AND NUMBER FUN

Palindromania! By Jon Agee. Sunburst/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $6.96.

Math Attack! By Joan Horton. Pictures by Kyrsten Brooker. Melanie Kroupa Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $16.95.

     Both these books deserve to have titles that end in exclamation points! Offbeat, amusing and unusual in both words and illustrations, they turn subjects that can become drudgery – English and math – into fun!

     Jon Agee does this with a mixture of palindromes he invented and ones that have been around for a while. Using comic-strip-like illustrations, including some sequences that really are comic strips, he makes wordplay into a fine art. For example, “The Three-Palindrome Gnu,” a four-panel creation, starts with the title panel and then amusingly illustrates “gnu sung,” “gnu lung” and “gnu dung.” Even cleverer is a single two-page-spread panel of palindromic “Criminal Evidence,” showing a trench-coated investigator looking at a “mirror rim,” “pit tip,” “bird rib,” “trapeze part,” “balsa slab” and “motto bottom.” Elsewhere, we meet “Little Snitch,” who tattles, “Nate bit a Tibetan” and “Dennis sinned.” We see a sleepless man endlessly repeating the unending palindrome, “Six is a six is a six is a six is…” During a journey to Metaltown, a metal owl seems to have a touch of indigestion: “Gag!” “Kak!” Two other birds explain why: “Mr. Owl ate my metal worm.” All this back-and-forthing through words is enjoyable in and of itself, but Agee’s amusing illustrations make it even more so. Just catch the amazed expressions on the faces of an apple and orange that have been debating who is “Fruit of the year.” After one says “Now, I won” and the other replies, “No, Will, I won,” they are astonished at the actual result: “No way! A papaya won?!” One way or the other, Agee’s palindromes are wordplay winners.

     Joan Horton’s foray into silly math is more traditional in format – a story told in rhyme, with delightfully offbeat illustrations by Kyrsten Brooker. And it is just as enjoyable in its own way. A girl tries so hard to remember the multiplication table that, when her teacher asks her to multiply 10 by seven, her head goes wild: “I was thinking so hard all my circuits were loaded./ Then all of a sudden, my brain just exploded” – and numbers fly everywhere, whizzing throughout the classroom and all over the school. The nurse diagnoses “a case of arithmetic strain” and asks just when it happened – and as soon as the girl explains that she was trying to figure out 10 x 7, “Numbers flew out of my head as before./ ‘Gangway!’ cried the nurse/ As she dashed through the door.” The numbers mess affects everyone – the principal, the policemen who show up to find out what is going on, drivers who have to stop because of all the numbers in the road, and even “the clock in the tower/ Was crazily bong-bonging every which hour,/ For sixes and sevens had climbed from its base/ To join the twelve numbers that circled its face.” Can anything stop the number flood? Well, yes, the girl herself can – when she solves the 10 x 7 problem that started it all. And eventually she does remember the answer, and everything is fine – “UNTIL Miss Glass said, ‘What’s eleven times nine?’” And so the book ends with the promise of more hilarity ahead – but take a look at the inside front and back covers for something extra and educational, because they show the girl very proudly completing the entire multiplication table on her class blackboard, from 1 x 1 all the way to 10 x 10, and walking away with a big smile on her face. Math Attack! will put a big smile on yours, too.

(++++) SOUND SERVING SYMPHONIES – AND MORE

Mahler: Symphony No. 1. Bamberg Symphony conducted by Jonathan Nott. Tudor. $19.99 (SACD).

Mahler: Symphony No. 4. Mojca Erdmann, soprano; Bamberg Symphony conducted by Jonathan Nott. Tudor. $19.99 (SACD).

Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring; Symphony in 3 Movements. Bamberg Symphony conducted by Jonathan Nott. Tudor. $19.99 (SACD).

Janáĉek: Sinfonietta; Taras Bulba; Suite from “The Cunning Little Vixen.” Bamberg Symphony conducted by Jonathan Nott. Tudor. $19.99 (SACD).

     For nearly perfect examples of how excellence in recording and sonic reproduction can be put at the service of outstanding musical experiences for the home, listen to any or all of these new Tudor SACDs, in which the sound is so integral to the effectiveness of the presentation that it is in effect a third partner in the music – along with the conductor and orchestra. It is not just that sound quality is clear and background noise absent – any SACD and most CDs will deliver that. But the clarity here is of an unusual kind, whether you hear the discs on a system that fully reproduces the multichannel SACD experience or listen to them as if they were ordinary CDs. It sounds as if every instrument in the orchestra has been individually miked, with the 90 or so audio streams then blended through a sophisticated mixing system by a highly knowledgeable musician. This is nonsense, of course (and in practice wouldn’t work very well); but the clarity of individual orchestral voices, especially the middle voices that are often difficult for conductors to bring out, is truly remarkable here, and all these SACDs create an experience approximating that of the conductor himself – standing at a point where individual instrumental elements can be clearly heard as they coalesce into the totality of large-scale orchestral works.

     None of this would be of much consequence (except on a technical level) if the performances themselves were less than exemplary, but every one of them is highly worthy, and most are outstanding. The Bamberg Symphony may not be one of the world’s best-known orchestras; Jonathan Nott, the orchestra’s principal conductor for almost a decade, may not be one of the biggest names in his profession; but if this is the quality of music-making that this conductor and orchestra deliver consistently, listeners should become much more familiar with both the man and the players. There is, in fact, a responsiveness in the Bamberg Symphony that argues for a return to the practice, now largely discarded, of a conductor having a long-term, focused relationship with an orchestra, so everyone gets to know everyone else’s quirks and can respond almost intuitively when the music being performed is difficult.

     And make no mistake: all the music on these SACDs is difficult. Mahler’s First and Fourth Symphonies are repertoire standards these days, but that makes them, if anything, harder than ever to perform effectively, since audiences bring expectations to them. Nott handles both works with great sensitivity and excellent attention to detail – just the right approach to Mahler, whose huge climaxes are made up of details piled upon each other, and who, as a brilliant conductor himself, knew very well what sounds orchestras could produce if prodded to do so. So Nott, for example, uses the unusually clean and slightly dry sound of the Bamberg Symphony’s brass to highlight horn, trumpet and trombone lines in these symphonies, even as themes are being carried primarily by strings or woodwinds. He paces the works carefully and deliberately, retaining each movement’s forward momentum but allowing himself slight tempo changes that highlight individual sections of the more discursive movements (such as the first of Symphony No. 4). His handling of the finales is particularly adept: in No. 1, the movement begins with startling assertiveness and the brass is elegant and emphatic throughout, but Nott treats the slower sections expansively and with great beauty; while in No. 4, each verse of the sung text gets a slightly different orchestral emphasis, so there is both repetitive continuity in the movement and a sense of development. Mojca Erdmann is not an ideal soprano soloist here – her voice is a touch too rich to produce the childlike quality that the text calls for – but she does sing beautifully, and the orchestra is effectively interwoven with her words.

     On the Stravinsky disc, the sheer barbaric splendor of The Rite of Spring may be a touch too carefully controlled – there is never a sense that the music is about to burst at the seams – but the details of orchestration are highlighted splendidly, and the underlying dance rhythms of what is, after all, a ballet, are very skillfully handled. The Symphony in 3 Movements is top-notch as well, with the important piano and harp parts brought to just the right level of prominence – both by Nott’s skillful orchestral balance and by the excellence of the recording.

     On the Janáĉek SACD, the splendid Sinfonietta is the highlight, the brass ringing out with intensity and drama from the beginning and the rest of the orchestra delivering an angular, rhythmically convincing interpretation. Taras Bulba, with its contrasts between martial and emotional sections, is almost equally effective, and the František Jílek suite from The Cunning Little Vixen – less well known than the later one by Václav Talich – proves dramatic and convincing, focusing on the opera’s “transformation” music and providing the brass with the chance for a grand conclusion. Nott and the Bamberg players make an exceptional team, and Tudor’s outstanding technology captures their performances with such liveliness and transparency that listeners will find themselves hearing and delighting in things, even in relatively familiar music, that they simply had not known were there.

(+++) CHORAL MODERNS

James MacMillan: Seven Last Words from the Cross; Christus Vincit; Nemo te comdemnavit; …here in hiding… The Dmitry Ensemble conducted by Graham Ross. Naxos. $8.99.

Krzysztof Penderecki: Utrenja. Iwona Hossa, soprano; Agnieszka Rehlis, mezzo-soprano; Piotr Kusiewicz, tenor; Piotr Nowacki, bass; Gennady Bezzubenkov, basso profondo; Warsaw Boys’ Choir and Warsaw Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra conducted by Antoni Wit. Naxos. $8.99.