(++++) GIFTS BIG AND BEAUTIFUL

Weather: The Ultimate Book of Meteorological Events. Accord Publishing/Andrews McMeel. $40.

The Lincolns: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary. By Candace Fleming. Schwartz & Wade. $24.99.

     Books make wonderful gifts for Christmas or any other special occasion, and some books, by their design and heft, really cry out to be used for gift-giving. Weather, assembled from material by the contributors of the Weather Guide Calendar, is both gorgeous to look at and tremendously informative. It is as up-to-date as worries about climate change and possible desertification, and as aware of the past as the history of the still-inexact science of forecasting. The photos are the first things you will notice, and they are simply magnificent: the Grand Canyon’s South Rim as cloud-to-ground lightning strikes; a huge tornado over Kansas, photographed from a small plane; the illusion of three suns over northern Canada, as a polar bear walks by; clouds of all shapes and sizes; the inside of an ice cave; closeup views of the gorgeous geometry of snowflakes – these and many other photos make Weather a feast for the eyes. And it nourishes the brain, too. A timeline of major events in meteorology runs from 600 B.C. to the present. A discussion of North American storm tracks explains why some areas consistently get hit much harder than others. An article on Robert Fitzroy, captain of HMS Beagle, explains his complex relationship with Charles Darwin as well as his invention of a barometer still used today. Another writeup discusses Andrew Ellicott Douglass, an astronomer by training who invented the science of studying tree rings, now used to diagnose the effects of air and water pollution. There are essays on lightning, Earth’s auroras, winds and storms (including dust storms, hurricanes and waterspouts), plus plenty of information on rain and snow and ice and other forms of water. Weather makes a lovely gift in any season for anyone with an interest in the ways the world around us affects our everyday lives – or for someone who simply wants to marvel at some splendid photographs that capture the fascinating phenomena that surround all of us.

     The fascination of The Lincolns is of a different type. Now that a new President of the United States has been elected, many people are wondering how he will measure up against the nation’s greatest leaders – one of whom was indisputably Lincoln. But The Lincolns is more a family album than a book of political analysis. Indeed, even when it delves into politics, as it must, it generally does so from a personal angle, as when Mary Lincoln responds to someone who compares her husband’s looks unfavorably to those of another politician: “Mr. Lincoln may not be as handsome a figure…but the people are perhaps not aware that his heart is as large as his arms are long.” Mary, born Mary Todd, was not young Abraham’s first love, and there is information here on that woman, Ann Rutledge, who died (probably of typhoid) in 1835; and also on Abraham’s second love, Mary Owens – who appears in one of the many fascinating photographs that Candace Fleming includes in the book. Here you will find a Lincoln pay stub, pictures of his friends and family, official Matthew Brady photographs of the newly elected President and First Lady – and a picture of the latter’s dressmaker, a former slave who had previously made dresses for the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. There is considerable material on the Civil War, including information often omitted from traditional history books – such as the strong objections to the Emancipation Proclamation among Northern soldiers who were fighting from loyalty and patriotism and did not want to die for the freedom of blacks. But even in its pages on the war, The Lincolns focuses on the personal as much as possible, with a photo of one of Lincoln’s stovepipe hats, an anecdote about the President’s lack of appetite, a frightening dream he had near the war’s end, even Mary Lincoln’s accusation that Andrew Johnson “had some hand in” Lincoln’s assassination. The book continues through Mary’s death in 1882, touching on the couple’s children and grandchildren – and making it clear that the triumphs and tragedies of this family affected not only the nation as a whole but also, very deeply, the family members themselves. Large in size and laid out in an old-fashioned design and typeface, The Lincolns beautifully reflects the era of which Fleming writes – and also stands as a book very much worth considering in the 21^st century, as today’s families await the inauguration of the nation’s first black president in January.

(++++) WALKS ON THE WEIRD SIDE

The Eclectic Abecedarium. By Edward Gorey. Pomegranate. $9.95.

The Sopping Thursday. By Edward Gorey. Pomegranate. $14.95.

The Hapless Child. By Edward Gorey. Pomegranate. $14.95.

     The 100 or so books by Edward Gorey (1925-2000) are not for everybody, and in particular are not for the faint of heart or tender of soul. Gorey was a master of intricate pen work and of the macabre, a combination that led him to create works ranging from the whimsical (such as his animated opening for Masterpiece Theater) to the decidedly downbeat (such as any number of his books; this was his default setting). Anyone who feels overcome by the often-artificial cheer of the current holiday season will find Gorey a welcome antidote, although it does help to take him with a grain of salt or two (sometimes three).

     The Eclectic Abecedarium is somewhat atypical Gorey, being a miniature book (his first, originally published in 1983) and a comparatively benign one. It is, after all, merely the umpteenth march through the alphabet that most readers will have encountered, with tiny illustrations (originally five-eighths of an inch by one inch, here printed slightly larger) and two-line poems written by Gorey himself. This is a fairly mild introduction to Gorey for those unfamiliar with him, and it is quite enjoyable in its own right. “Pick up loose Crumbs/Upon your thumbs,” for example, shows a child standing on a chair doing just that – while the table sports a teapot nearly as big as the child himself. “There is an Eye/Up in the sky” gets closer to typical Gorey oddity, and the Eye is not shown – the picture is of someone gazing upward through the clouds. “In sorting Kelp/Be quick to help” also has an odd and typical Gorey flavor to it, as does “Be sure a Mouse/Lurks in the house.” Then there is “On any road/May sit a Toad,” the amphibian being nearly half the size of the person encountering it; and “Beware the Vine/Which can entwine,” whose illustration makes it seem that the plant is about to reach out and ensnare an unwitting victim. There’s more than a touch of Gorey’s gorier side there.

     The Sopping Thursday takes a step farther into Gorey’s world. First published in 1970, and now available with illustrations in the original size, it is a book about an oddly skewed rainy day, consisting of merely 30 images and 30 lines of text – with all the outdoor pictures being marvelously detailed in-the-rain views. An umbrella is missing; a loyal dog goes to find it; and while the dog searches, various people comment on the rain while carrying umbrellas; a mysterious all-black figure “stole Mrs. Gumbash’s umbrella”; a man tries to purchase an umbrella, eventually giving up in frustration after concluding that “none of these umbrellas will do”; and after some time the dog, Bruno, finds his master’s umbrella with a child in it, about to go down the sewer – and rescues both child and umbrella. A happy ending? Well, yes, for the umbrella; but this is a Gorey book, and at the end the child is sitting unsheltered in the pouring rain, being scolded by an adult whose head is invisible behind an umbrella, because “that was very naughty of you.” The Sopping Thursday is an odd little book, the world it portrays skewed just enough toward the strange and surreal so it is hard to decide how to react to the story.

     For the full Gorey treatment, though, aficionados – and only aficionados – will want The Hapless Child, Gorey’s long-out-of-print 1961 Dickensian story of the terrible misfortunes of a little girl. This is dark, dark material, showing Gorey at his best – or worst, depending on your point of view. The new edition presents the beautifully detailed illustrations in their original size, making it easy for readers to follow Charlotte Sophia’s tragic story, from the disappearance and presumed death of her caring and well-to-do father, to the decline and death of her harried mother, to her placement in a boarding school whose students tear apart her only doll, Hortense…after which things only get worse. Charlotte ends up enslaved to a drunken brute, pitifully making paper flowers while losing her eyesight, until eventually she gets away and meets a pathetic end when hit by a car driven by….her father, who is not dead after all but no longer recognizes the much-changed child. It is all too sad for words, but not too sad for words plus Gorey’s illustrations, which render this pseudo-Victorian tale of pathos and tragedy with grace and a sort of peculiar beauty, as well as with genuine strangeness: is that some sort of small demon climbing the wall at the end, then flying away? This really is vintage Gorey, but it is a vintage that many people will not care to sample. Those who find Gorey’s work salutary, however, will find The Hapless Child very bracing indeed – in the gloomiest possible way, of course.

(++++) VISITS HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE

How to Make a Cherry Pie and See the U.S.A. By Marjorie Priceman. Knopf. $16.99.

Sourpuss and Sweetie Pie. By Norton Juster. Pictures by Chris Raschka. Michael D. Capua/Scholastic. $16.95.

Doo-Wop Pop. By Roni Schotter. Illustrated by Bryan Collier. Amistad/HarperCollins. $16.99.

Looking for Miza: The True Story of the Mountain Gorilla Family Who Rescued One of Their Own. By Juliana Hatkoff, Isabella Hatkoff, Craig Hatkoff, and Dr. Paula Kahumbu. Photographs by Peter Greste. Scholastic. $16.99.

     Kids in the four-to-eight age range will have a great time taking virtual tours of many different places through these well-written and delightfully illustrated books. How to Make a Cherry Pie and See the U.S.A. is Marjorie Priceman’s wholly successful attempt to create a followup to How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World (1994). Like that earlier book, this one takes a young baker (accompanied by her dog) on a quest to obtain all the ingredients – including raw materials – necessary to make a pie. That means getting, among other things, coal, cotton, clay and granite, in a quest that starts with a perfectly lovely recipe for cherry pie and soon leads to a taxi ride from New York to “the corner of Pennsylvania and Ohio,” where coal (needed to make steel, which is used in pie pans) is mined. Then the trip continues to such places as Louisiana (cotton for pot holders), Washington state (wood for a rolling pin), Hawaii (sand to make glass for a measuring cup), and so on. There is granite (for a pastry slab) from New Hampshire (which “can usually be found between Maine and Vermont”), oil (for plastic spoons) from Texas, and so on – leading eventually to a tongue-in-cheek at-home manufacturing process that results in…well, a cherry pie, of course. The book is fun to read, fun to look at and fun to learn from – and families can try the pie recipe together.

     Speaking of families: Sourpuss and Sweetie Pie is all about what happens when one little girl, who has nice and not-so-nice sides to her personality, visits her grandparents. This too is a followup – to the 2006 Caldecott Medal book The Hello, Goodbye Window. Chris Raschka’s delightfully childlike paintings here enliven a Norton Juster story in which Nanna and Poppy are unsure which grandchild is visiting – Sourpuss or Sweetie Pie. “Most of the time I really am Sweetie Pie,” the little girl explains. “But sometimes I can be a real Sourpuss. Like when…I don’t want to do what I’m supposed to do, especially right now.” The back-and-forth of the girl’s personalities is the charm here, with “I’m going to take care of you” to Poppy on one page and “I won’t wear any of the things you put out for me, Nanna” on the next. There’s an especially dramatic two-page temper tantrum midway through the book, but it soon passes: “Sometimes you can go from Sourpuss to Sweetie Pie so quick.” The grandparents eventually put the girl(s) to bed, wondering who will be there in the morning – an open-ended conclusion that will give parents (or grandparents) a great chance to discuss behavior with their very own Sourpusses and Sweetie Pies.

     The personalities highlighted in Doo-Wop Pop are of a different sort. This is the story of a school janitor named Mr. Searle who used to be a lead singer with a doo-wop band called the Icicles. So the kids in school call him Doo-Wop Pop – and it turns out he has some things to teach them. There’s rhythmic rhyming throughout Roni Schotter’s text, written in the voice of shy Elijah Earl: “I don’t speak. I just stare at my jeans. I’m not stupid! I know what he means.” Doo-Wop Pop gets Elijah and some of the other loners, the shy kids, together after school, shows them some dance moves, and tells them to find their own music: “The very next day, we start to meet, and like Mr. Searle told us, we listen for the beat.” The kids collect sounds (pencils scribbling, basketball dribbling, paper folding, teachers scolding) and turn them into doo-wop – and those five shy kids end up performing, first in the stairwell, then on the school stage. This is a story of finding yourself, learning what’s inside, and discovering how to express it – guided by someone who has been there himself. Bryan Collins’ mural-like illustrations nicely express the students’ initial uncertainty and later bursts of joy.

     All these books are fiction, but there are real-world adventures for ages 4-8 as well. Looking for Miza, from the same Hatkoff family that produced the stories of Owen and Mzee (a hippo and tortoise that became fast friends) and Knut (a polar-bear cub), is the tale of a baby gorilla in the Democratic Republic of Congo and her remarkable rescue by her own family of great apes. Miza and her mother, Lessinjina, disappear one day while searching for food, but Miza’s father, Kabirizi – leader of the largest family of mountain gorillas in the area – successfully finds the baby, although not the mother. In simple language and with stunning photos by Peter Greste, Looking for Miza explains what happens when the baby, too young to be separated from her mother, struggles to adapt after her rescue. The story is basically a happy one – Miza survives and thrives – but as in any real-world tale, it has many loose ends, and the authors do not gloss them over. What happened to Miza and her mother remains unknown; Lessinjina has never been found. Still, the book carefully draws legitimate comparisons between the gorilla family and readers’ human ones: “Miza’s story…shows that family care and protection can help one get strong and feel secure. It shows that dedicated people can help endangered animals survive.” And that is an excellent message for young children – and their caring parents – to take with them after the book ends.

(+++) DELIGHTS FOR CERTAIN SENSES

Best Food Writing 2008. Edited by Holly Hughes. Da Capo. $15.95.

He Is…I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond. By David Wild. Da Capo. $25.

     Defiantly for niche audiences, these books will please the senses of taste and hearing, respectively, for those of the right gustatory and auditory inclinations. Best Food Writing 2008, the ninth in an annual series that began in 2000, collects 48 essays from a wide variety of sources into eight categories: “Food Fights,” “Dining Around,” “The Restaurant Biz,” “Someone’s in the Kitchen,” “Technique,” “Stocking the Pantry,” “The Meat of the Matter,” and “Personal Tastes.” Some of the writing comes from places you would expect to be part of this sort of anthology: Food & Wine, The New Yorker, Bon Appetit, The New York Times, Gourmet, etc. But other essays are from less-expected places: Wired, Hogwash, Raleigh-Durham News & Observer. Whether these articles are the “best” of the year is, of course, arguable, but most are certainly entertaining. We have “The Art of the Biscuit” and “The Belly of the Beast”; “Butter: A Love Story” and “I Melt with You”; “Yes, Virginia, They Do Eat Guinea Pigs” and “Losing My Carnivirginity: The Diary of a Lapsed Vegetarian” and “Why Vegetarians Are Eating Meat.” There may not be something here for everyone, but there are plenty of somethings for plenty of people who enjoy both fine food and fine writing. The styles are in fact as variable as the topics. In “The Surprise Slice of My Cook’s Tour,” from The Washington Post, Jane Black writes about culinary tourists, “Even the simplest things must be off the beaten path: If it’s papa al pomodoro, the simple Tuscan bread and tomato soup, the (stale) bread had better be homemade, and, if possible, the soup should be cooked over a fire made by rubbing two sticks together.” In “Fat, Glorious Fat, Moves to the Center of the Plate,” from The New York Times, Frank Bruni writes that “bellies (most often pork, more recently lamb) are the counterculture’s LSD. Its Timothy Leary might well be David Chang, the chef at Momofuku, where steamed buns are filled with strips of pork belly. Or maybe it’s Zak Pelaccio, the chef at the tellingly named restaurant Fatty Crab. One of its best-selling dishes, called the fatty duck, takes strips of a bird not exactly known for its leanness, dusts them with cornstarch and deep-fries them.” Of course – and this is an inevitable flaw in Best Food Writing 2008 – the articles are tied to particular times and places. Restaurants change management, change menus, go out of business; book readers may find specific essays intriguing but have no way to follow up on them (the book contains only 11 recipes). And even a regional approach to a matter of national interest, such as heritage foods and “eating local,” may leave readers…err…hungering for more. Thus, “Lost Foods Reclaimed,” from The Philadelphia Inquirer, refers to Neshaminy Creek, Bridgetown Pike, Morrisville, the Wissahickon and Bucks County as if they are in readers’ back yards – which they are, for Philadelphians. Still, if these essays are not incontrovertibly the best of the year and not definitive in their subject areas for a broad audience, they are certainly creative and interesting in their own right, and their own write, as in Jason Sheehan’s “Mr. Wizard” from Denver’s alternative weekly, WestWord: “‘I’m one chemical away from making my own Twinkies,’ he added, as if this was a good thing, and then he convinced me that it was.”

     The writing is less bright and the subject more limited in He Is..I Say, David Wild’s tribute to the often-maligned musicianship of Neil Diamond. Wild, a Rolling Stone contributing editor, is well aware that Diamond is considered far from hip by many fans and critics of rock music. But Wild remains a major admirer – to such an extent that He Is…I Say borders on hagiography. “I would argue that it was Diamond’s grown-up masculinity and transparent brooding intensity that would allow Barry and Greenwich’s sublimely constructed recordings to transform him into a real, iconic star.” “Neil Diamond proved once again that he would do whatever it took to continue to grow as an artist and get his share of control in art, in business, and in life.” “If Diamond had been struggling to truly move past his Bang recordings, he won that struggle with the heavenly help of Brother Love, which brought the world the most soul-satisfying sermon yet in the gospel according to Neil.” “As Diamond’s music grew more and more introspective and searching, his audience now seemed inclined to follow anywhere he would dare to take them.” And so on – and on and on. Calling Diamond “the Jewish Elvis,” Wild positively glows over nearly everything the singer has done, with the result that the book reads more like an extended fanzine than a critical (or reasonably objective) tracing of Diamond’s art and its place in rock history. Wild uses exclusive interviews and well-researched behind-the-scenes information to construct He Is…I Say, but the book so obviously starts from a position of near-worship, and so clearly remains there throughout, that it is difficult to read as biography, as analysis, or as anything more than an outpouring of adoration. For the vast majority of readers and music fans, He Is…I Say gets a (++) rating, because if you do not share Wild’s enthusiasm for Neil Diamond, you will find this book to be very tough going indeed.

(++++) MUSICAL KID STUFF

Panda Classics: Piano Time; March Time; Dance Time. Naxos. $19.99 (3 CDs).

Panda Classics: Toon Time. Naxos. $14.99 (2 CDs).

     Here’s a really great way to get the youngest children involved in classical music – either in your family or, through gifts, in others. Naxos has put together kid-friendly packages of short tunes and entire brief pieces drawn from the company’s very extensive catalogue, giving young children a chance to hear a lot of familiar music in its original form. These are serious performances, not jazzed-up ones designed specifically for kids; that is to say, the music is not “dumbed down” in any way. In fact, the performances are simply repackagings of CDs in the existing Naxos catalogue, originally recorded between 1987 and this year. The nice thing about this arrangement is that it makes the “Panda Classics” CDs into “classical gateways” for kids: if children especially enjoy some of the short works here (a Brahms Hungarian Dance, for example) and decide they want to hear more, parents will be able to buy full Naxos CDs (say, the complete Brahms Hungarian Dances) for future gift-giving occasions.

     The three-CD set may require parents to have some familiarity with classical music in order to get children involved. Otherwise, for young ears, there will simply be some interesting piano, march and dance music and some of less interest. Parents with knowledge of the works included on the CDs will be better able to choose ones their kids will enjoy. For instance, Mozart’s “Variations on a French Song” for piano is actually variations on the tune known in English as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” while Beethoven’s “Für Elise” is a perennially popular work often taught to young piano students. The CD of marches may be even more accessible, including such super-popular tunes as Sousa’s “The Stars & Stripes Forever” and Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette.” And the CD of dances will be the most…well, danceable: here are Tchaikovsky’s “Russian Dance” from The Nutcracker, a ballet that many children may already have seen, plus Khachaturian’s highly melodious waltz from his Masquerade Suite, and much more. There are two dozen “Piano Time” tracks, 22 for “March Time” and 18 for “Dance Time,” all of them complete and uncut – so parents who are not highly involved in classical music, but who know enough so they can initially introduce their children to a few familiar pieces, will have plenty of opportunities to expand both their kids’ musical interests and their own. And there is more fun for kids here than just the three-plus hours of music: the packaging includes three coloring sheets, six colored pencils with which to draw on them, and three sheets of stickers – all nice bonuses to keep small hands busy while small ears are occupied with the music.

     The “Toon Time” two-CD set is more focused and has the potential to be even more fun for families whose children enjoy classic cartoons, especially the great Warner Brothers “Looney Tunes” and Walt Disney’s wonderful 1940 film, Fantasia. Those are the sources primarily associated with the two-and-a-half hours of music here, with Fantasia taking up the entire second CD. In fact, that CD traces almost the entire film, except that instead of the movie’s abridgments of such works as Beethoven’s “Pastorale” symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, the CD includes complete elements – such as the full second movement of the Beethoven and the entire “Waltz of the Flowers” from the Tchaikovsky. This CD is a wonderful way to re-enjoy the Disney film or to re-experience it at times when it is impractical to watch the movie itself – during short drives, for example. As for the first CD, it offers complete versions of many works popularized by the wonderful Warner Brothers animators – the pieces being in some cases longer than the six-minute cartoons themselves. So now kids can hear the entire Barber of Seville overture, the complete Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, Johann Strauss Jr.’s whole Blue Danube Waltz, and much more – as well as complete versions of pieces that really are extremely short, such as Rimsky-Korsakov’s minute-and-a-half Flight of the Bumblebee. The only thing parents need to watch out for with this CD is the possibility that kids will enjoy the music so much that they will insist parents go out and buy the cartoons in which the music is used. But of course, that would just produce another opportunity for family bonding. And what could be wrong with get-togethers built around toons featuring all these wonderful tunes?

(+++) RUSSIAN PASSIONS

Tchaikovsky: Manfred Symphony; The Voyevoda. Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko. Naxos. $8.99.

Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition; Night on the Bare Mountain; The Sorochinsky Fair: Introduction; Khovanshchina: Prelude; Dance of the Persian Slave Girls. Russian National Orchestra conducted by Carlo Ponti. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

     The sweep and passion of 19^th-century Russian music continue to make it irresistible to audiences and conductors alike. But its popularity comes at a price: performance expectations for the works of such composers as Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky are very high, and even a perfectly serviceable approach that might be more than acceptable is the music of (for example) Anatol Liadov or César Cui does not quite attain top ranking in the works of more-often-played composers.

     This is true even when the works themselves are not among a composer’s best known. Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony, based on a poem by Byron that is a variant of Goethe’s Faust and that also inspired Schumann and others, has never attained the popularity of the composer’s other late symphonies (it was written between Nos. 4 and 5). It is a huge, sprawling work – at around an hour, Tchaikovsky’s longest symphony – requiring a very large orchestra and a conductor who can really pull together its episodic strands without plunging the audience into the deep depression that lurks within practically all its principal themes. This is a tall order, and Vasily Petrenko tackles it with gusto, producing a finely honed reading that nicely contrasts the work’s relatively few lighter sections with its many dark and dismal ones. Unfortunately, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, although it is a fine orchestra, does not really have the sound needed for this symphony. The work requires very lush, burnished strings playing with so much warmth that they constantly risk turning mushy (but never do). The Liverpudlians have a bright, clean sound, which means middle voices and accompaniments to the themes come through clearly, but the symphony as a whole lacks the melancholy darkness that can make it tremendously effective. This orchestral sound is by no means a failing – in other music, it would be a major asset. But in both the symphony and the tone poem The Voyevoda (in which a minor government official discovers his wife is unfaithful, orders a servant to kill her, but ends up being shot himself by mistake), the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic simply seems a little out of place. There just isn’t enough brooding intensity in the playing to give the works their full effect, even though the conductor seems to understand the music well and does his best to shape it tellingly. Petrenko is this orchestra’s principal conductor, so he does have the opportunity – if he wants it – to shape the ensemble’s sound differently; so perhaps he favors what is heard on this CD. Still, it would be nice to hear how Petrenko’s approach would work with an orchestra of richer, warmer strings – such as the Russian National Orchestra.

     The RNO, however, does not have Petrenko at the helm for its SACD of well-known Mussorgsky works. Instead, it has its own associate conductor, Carlo Ponti (eldest son of the film producer of the same name and actress Sophia Loren), and Ponti does not let this excellent orchestra soar to its very high capabilities. The RNO’s sound is simply wonderful, combining precise playing with deep-hued intensity. But Ponti’s interpretations are superficial. Pictures at an Exhibition is certainly all right, but there is nothing distinguished about it – so hint of swagger or thoughtfulness in the repeated “Promenade,” no sense of mystical quietude in “Con mortuis in lingua mortua,” no fairy-tale menace in “The Hut on Fowls’ Legs.” The miniatures that almost play themselves come off very well – such as “Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks” and, in a very different way, “The Great Gate of Kiev” – but it feels as if the RNO could handle them without Ponti being there at all. Far from imposing an interpretation, Ponti seems to avoid one. The same is true of the shorter works here: nothing snarls in “Night on the Bare Mountain”; the excerpt from The Sorochinsky Fair is pleasant and unassuming; and the same may be said of the Khovanshchina Prelude and “Dance of the Persian Slave Girls,” the latter of which lacks any sinuousness. This is a very well-played recording, and the sonic reproduction, as usual in PentaTone SACDs, is of the first quality, but the disc is sadly lacking in interpretative elegance.

(++++) YOURS FOR A BEAUTIFUL SEASON

2009 Calendars: Day-to-Day—Mind-Bending Puzzles; Anguished English; Wall—Antique Maps; Desk—CatCalendar. Pomegranate. $12.99 each (Day-to-Day); $13.99 (Wall); $14.99 (Desk).

Holiday Cards: CatTidings; Winter Trees. Pomegranate. $15 each.

     It’s that time of year: celebrate winter holidays and get ready for a restart of the calendar. And what better way to celebrate than to get calendars that will engage your eyes and mind throughout 2009? That is easily done with the offerings from Pomegranate, which each year produces a truly amazing array of intelligent, amusing, artful, focused, traditional, unusual and always high-quality calendars – with subject matter so varied that the Pomegranate line can be a bit overwhelming. What all the calendars share is very high quality: they are well researched and well made, and are sure to keep you engaged all year with whatever subject you choose.

     A couple of mind-twisting (or mind-amusing) examples from among many are Mind-Bending Puzzles and Anguished English. The first of these 365-day calendars was put together by Nathan Haselbauer, founder and president of the International High IQ Society, www.highiqsociety.org. But don’t be intimidated by all the “high IQ” stuff: this calendar is packed with puzzles to challenge your mind, not make you feel inferior. There are six different puzzle categories, so even if you don’t like verbal analogies and math (perhaps they remind you of SAT tests), you may enjoy fact questions, visual memory, or sequential or analytical reasoning. One day may show you a set of words and ask which does not belong; another may show you irregularly shaped pieces that combine to form a square, then throw in an additional piece and ask how you can form another square; still another may be an old-fashioned word problem similar to those on (yes) the SAT. Of course, you have a full day to solve each problem (a full weekend for Saturday and Sunday problems: those days share puzzles and pages); and yes, the answers are provided if you just can’t wait or want to check yourself. This calendar’s pages are especially useful for note-taking (or figuring out the problems): each has a generous amount of blank, lined space beneath its puzzle.

     Anguished English tickles the funnybone more than the mind. Richard Lederer’s perennially popular compilation of malapropisms includes errors by journalists, teachers, doctors, and many others who really should know better – how about a headline reading, “Death Causes Change”? These are real-world mistakes, too, which makes them both funnier and somehow more worrisome.

     Of course, our idea of the real world has changed dramatically over time; and if you are looking for a striking wall calendar that shows a number of beautifully rendered maps of how people used to think the world looked, you will love the gorgeous Antique Maps calendar, showcasing cartography from the British Museum. The oldest of these maps are Flemish ones from 1571, including several by Abraham Ortelius and one by Gerardus Mercator, for whom the Mercator flat-world projection is named; there is also a Mercator map from 1595. The most recent map is a Portuguese one of Africa that dates to the early 1840s. Accuracy or inaccuracy aside, these maps are true works of art, a pleasure to examine again and again for their detail, coloring and gorgeous draughtsmanship. Each one of the 12 is worth looking at for a full month based simply on its coloration and shape.

     Colors and shapes are also in the forefront of the amusing drawings of B. (for Bernard) “Hap” Kliban (1935-1990), and you really don’t have to be a cat lover to appreciate Kliban’s pictures of things that sort of look like cats but equally resemble small aliens from a planet not too different from ours. A plump cat flying thanks to itty-bitty wings? A cat walking along at the bottom of page after page, wearing four cowboy boots with spurs? A cat sitting on a park bench, feeding riotously colored birds, from flamingos to peacocks? You can find all of them in the 2009 CatCalendar, which is in spiral-bound, open-flat desktop format. Desk or engagement calendars have lost popularity as electronic organizers have gained it, but no PDA can match the solidity, the colorfulness or the wonderful illustrations of this calendar; and no PDA can let you see so much of your week at a quick glance. CatCalendar does not, however, let you see your whole week at one time, unless you are careful to avoid adorning it with Post-It notes, bills to be paid that week, etc. The reason is that this calendar splits weeks between pages – three days on the left page, four on the right, with Wednesday’s space often shortchanged to allow more room for art. The result is that CatCalendar is delightful to look at, but it may not be an ideal planning tool – at least for business purposes. How about for home, or a home office?

     Kliban’s fine and funny felines also adorn some of the holiday cards you can send to share wishes of the season and welcome people to the upcoming year. One cat in the 20-card set called CatTidings actually behaves like a real-world feline, climbing a Christmas tree to get to the star on top – while the treetop bends under the cat’s weight and the star stays just out of reach. The other cards here are more Klibanic than real-life feline: one cat is adorned with a colorful wreath; one sports huge antlers and is apparently connected to Santa’s sleigh; and one card shows two cats, one outside a big wooden crate and the other, wearing a big bow, inside. Cat lovers, of course, will especially enjoy CatTidings, but the cards are amusing enough for just about anyone.

     If you prefer something more fully from real life, though, consider Pomegranate’s extensive line of Sierra Club cards. A portion of their purchase price goes to the Sierra Club – and the cards themselves make strong arguments for preserving the beauty of the natural world. One example is the box called Winter Trees, which includes 20 cards – five each of evergreens gently coated or completely covered with snow, in settings ranging from a thick forest to a woodland’s outskirts. The pictures by Oregon photographer Dennis Frates fully capture both the beauty and the serenity of snow upon trees, giving a sense of the peace that passeth all understanding that, for many people, represents the true meaning of this winter holiday season.

(+++) PICTURE THIS, AND THAT, AND THAT

Walter Wick’s Optical Tricks. By Walter Wick. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $14.99.

The Baby-Sitters Club #4: Claudia and Mean Janine. By Ann M. Martin. Adapted and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier. Graphix/Scholastic. $8.99.

It’s Happy Bunny Ultimate Sticker Book. By Jim Benton. Scholastic. $7.99.

The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror: Dead Man’s Jest. By Matt Groening. Harper. $15.95.

The Lady and the Chocolate. By Edward Monkton. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

     It is scarcely a revelation that we live in a highly visual age – and book publishers know it. Now there are books of all types, for readers of all ages, in which the pictures are the focus. Walter Wick’s Optical Tricks, by the photographer of the I Spy book series, is now available in an attractive 10^th-anniversary edition in which the impossible objects and phantom images look every bit as good as they did when the book originally appeared in 1998. Wick is an extremely clever photographer and designer of photographic assemblages. In this book, he explains something about what is going on in the pictures: how mirrors reflect and distort objects, how the use of multiple mirrors creates scenes that feature many items that do not exist, even how an impossible triangle and an equally impossible building (the latter based on a famous M.C. Escher drawing) can apparently be created in three dimensions through clever photography. Wick reveals some secrets (how the “triangle” really looks, for instance) and leaves readers to figure others out for themselves – resulting in a treat for both eyes and brain.

     The graphic novels based on Ann M. Martin’s popular series, The Baby-Sitters Club, are visually focused in a different way. These are simplified retellings of Martin’s stories, illustrated in black and white with straightforward art that moves the action along briskly (much as in a comic book). The fourth graphic novel in this series focuses on sisters Claudia (a member of the club of the title) and Janine (a dedicated computer nerd who is studying to be a physicist). There is a very serious element at the heart of the book: the girls’ grandmother suffers a stroke, and requires multiple hospital visits and then at-home and rehabilitative care. The girls work out their differences (and they do work them out) against this background; any actual babysitting becomes something of a side issue. Middle-school girls who are unfamiliar with the Martin novels, or prefer to approach books in a more visual way, will enjoy this latest series entry.

     It’s Happy Bunny is also a series, in a sense: it’s the cynical sayings of an apparent escapee from greeting-card land, whose open and simple appearance is at odds with the nasty observations he makes. In fact, the latest entry in this series says “Now Extra Unpleasant!” on the front cover. That’s an exaggeration – it is no more unpleasant than previous Happy Bunny books – but this time, Jim Benton has created something that is almost purely visual. Left-hand pages show Happy Bunny in various poses; right-hand ones have Happy Bunny sayings (such as “I’m happy – don’t wreck it by talking”) but no illustrations. The book includes Happy Bunny stencils and stickers, plus self-adhesive words and phrases that you can use to create your own little bits of Happy Bunny awfulness. This is clever of Benton – he makes readers do the work, which is a very Happy Bunnyish approach – and the book will be fun for kids (and emotionally stunted adults) who can’t wait to put their own spin on Happy Bunnyisms.

     Speaking of emotionally stunted, there’s The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror: Dead Man’s Jest, which is a comic book made to look like a graphic novel – and which, almost in spite of itself, has some very clever elements. Although the stories mostly adhere closely to traditional Simpsons plot lines (Homer’s obsession with doughnuts, Ned Flanders’ obsession with religion, Krusty’s obsession with being evil), this book (Halloween-themed but suitable for Simpsons fans anytime) also includes clever stories tied into the personalities of singers Alice Cooper, Gene Simmons, Rob Zombie and Pat Boone (yes, that Pat Boone). Even more interestingly, it is a tribute of sorts to the wonderful E.C. Comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s: Vault of Horror, Crypt of Terror and all the rest, including war comics. Matt Groening draws actual characters from the comics in some stories, and also creates tales that parallel (with a Simpsons twist) those from the old E.C. line: “Squish Thing,” in which Homer becomes a sort of Swamp Thing and tears apart the person responsible for his transformation, and “Two Tickets to Heck,” in which Bart and Lisa find themselves trapped in E.C. sequences after going through doors with dates on them (“1950” lands Bart in a war comic, while “1952” leads to the “comic-book corruption of youth” arguments that eventually emasculated comic books and destroyed the E.C. line). You need some familiarity with comics history to pick up all the references in these stories (“squa tront” and “spa fon,” anybody?), but there is plenty of Simpsons-style fun even if you don’t have that background – and some pages that are all Simpsons-style humor (such as Bart’s “Halloween Candy Classification”).

     The humor is on a different, more adult level, and the graphics are gentler, in The Lady with the Chocolate, the latest little hardcover gift book from Edward Monkton (pen name of poet Giles Andreae). The cover simply shows a lady and a chocolate bar (which is larger than she is), and the pages are a discussion between them. The Lady argues that “the weight that you put onto my THIGHS, my WAIST and my BOTTOM is not worth the satisfaction of the eating,” but the chocolate eventually persuades her that “being EATEN is the only reason for my existence” and so she really should go ahead. Which she does – the moral being that Ladies who eat chocolate “are performing a very great and GENEROUS service indeed.” Monkton’s ultra-simple drawings are just right for this ultra-simple (and silly) story, right down to the final one showing the Lady with an angel’s halo hovering above her because she has helped the chocolate fulfill its destiny.

(+++) ADVENTURES OF THEN AND NOW

Time’s Chariot. By Ben Jeapes. David Fickling Books. $15.99.

Danger Zone 1: The Devil’s Breath. By David Gillman. Delacorte Press. $16.99.

     Preteens and young teenagers looking for rousing adventures with nonstop cinematic action will enjoy both these books, even if neither spends much time on character development or scene-setting (perhaps because neither spends much time on those things). Time’s Chariot is about a “routine” expedition in time, back to 5000 B.C., that turns decidedly non-routine when the body of Commissioner Daiho is discovered. The commissioner has been murdered, even though murder is supposed to be a thing of the past. And he has been murdered in the past – which requires time traveler Ricardo (Rico) Garron and his partner, Su Zo, to open an investigation that spans the ages and quickly turns out to point in some very uncomfortable directions. Ben Jeapes writes for pacing more than philosophy – not for him the famous time-travel paradoxes of SF writers of old, who would have made much of Daiho’s dying before he was born, which means he couldn’t have been born, but he was, and so on. Jeapes uses parallel time streams and other familiar SF concepts only to further his plot: “Looking like a man and woman of the reasonably prosperous merchant classes, they strolled…through the Prater park in the Vienna of 1508, capital of the Khanate of Austria. This was the gamma stream, one of several parallel Earth histories. …The alpha stream was the ‘official’ history…” It turns out that Rico and Su’s Home Time is itself in jeopardy, and that the problems are tied up with the murder. How? One character explains, to the extent that it is an explanation, “The Home Time is a period of set probability flux. There’s a singularity…that makes transference possible because it vibrates at a fixed, unchanging probability frequency. It’s a permanent referent. …But it won’t last forever, it’s decaying, and the day will come when it ends and transference won’t be possible any more.” Best not to take all the pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo at all seriously here – focus on the twists and turns of the story (and it does twist and turn) and you’ll have an enjoyable ride that, if thoroughly unbelievable, is undeniably exciting.

     It’s best not to look too closely at the plot of The Devil’s Breath, either. This first novel by British screenwriter David Gillman is clearly intended to become a movie eventually, with its easy-to-grasp story, one-dimensional characters and heaping helping of action. This is also the first book of a series called The Danger Zone, which tries to stay up to date with a series of environmental twists. The central character here is Max Gordon, a teenager whose father, Tom, studies environmental catastrophes worldwide and champions the causes of Third World countries. He is so good that of course he must have enemies – people who are really bad. But it is Max, not his father, who finds himself the target in The Devil’s Breath, as an assassin comes after Max at the teen’s boarding school. This is a pretty inept assassin: he can’t take out an unsuspecting, unarmed teenager during the boy’s nightly run. But no matter – the assassin himself is conveniently killed, so Max cannot learn anything about what is going on and therefore has to set off on his own to search for his father in the wilderness of Namibia (yes, there are plenty of other things Max could do, but it really does not pay to examine this plot too closely). The environmental issue at the forefront here is safe drinking water – a billion people have no access to it – and Gillman makes sure the water issue is central to the book. He also makes sure that Max gets involved with tribal shamanic practices, attacking crocodiles, evil scientific experiments, an airplane crash, and international criminals with simplistic motivations: “Pressure was what he thrived on. He had always won, by fair means or foul – mostly the latter. Winning was everything.” The bad guys don’t win, of course, and the conclusion – of this book, anyway – is along these lines: “Strange place, Africa. Things happen. Things you can’t explain.” More such things will surely happen in later books.

(+++) TRIALS AND TRIUMPHS

I Am Potential: Eight Lessons on Living, Loving, and Reaching Your Dreams. By Patrick Henry Hughes, with Patrick John Hughes and Bryant Stamford. Da Capo. $24.

The Brenner Assignment: The Untold Story of the Most Daring Spy Mission of World War II. By Patrick K. O’Donnell. Da Capo. $25.

     Here are two books that show, in very different ways, the resiliency of the human spirit. I Am Potential is one of those sure-fire tearjerkers about someone with extremely severe handicaps who not only overcomes them but also finds a way to thrive and to get great enjoyment out of life. However, it is possible to celebrate Patrick Henry Hughes’ remarkable achievements without necessarily finding his book a must-read. Hughes has a rare birth defect that makes it impossible for him to walk or extend his arms fully – and he was born without eyes. Yet he has become an award-winning pianist, trumpeter and singer and has performed at venues as different as the Grand Ole Opry and the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. He plays in his college’s marching band (University of Louisville) as his father, Patrick John Hughes, pushes his wheelchair. And his musical talent showed up astonishingly early: he started playing piano at the age of nine months. Clearly, Patrick Henry Hughes is a remarkable individual, his story serving as proof that being disabled in some ways does not mean being disabled in all ways. But I Am Potential is written in less than captivating prose, even with the help of Patrick Henry’s father (whose voice is heard in some sections, while his son’s is heard in others) and Hanover College professor Bryant Stamford. “My parents were my earliest and best teachers.” “I’d hear [people] say things in front of me as if I wasn’t there or wasn’t smart enough to understand I was being talked about.” “When Granddaddy passed away [from Alzheimer’s disease], I knew it was a blessing that he was back with God.” “What I’m going to do for the rest of my life is an important decision, but I don’t spend a lot of time dealing with it, because I don’t want it to take away from what’s going on in my life right now.” These are all heartfelt sentiments – and very common ones, stated in very plain language. The entire book is written this way, with the result that Patrick Henry’s story is more inspirational than the way he tells it. It is impossible not to be moved by who this young man is and what he has overcome to accomplish so much. But the tale is better than the telling.

     The story of The Brenner Assignment is much more distant in time: this is yet another of the World War II books that continue appearing, in a trickle if not a flood, six decades after the end of the war. The book’s story is told with novelistic, even cinematic impact, and is sure to thrill fans – if “fans” is the right word – of the derring-do of that war. Military historian Patrick K. O’Donnell writes nonfiction as if he is creating a thriller. Nevertheless, The Brenner Assignment will have limited appeal because it is military history, not fiction, and cannot be neatly packaged and perfectly paced to maximum effect. The book is the story of a behind-enemy-lines assignment in the waning days of the war. The Brenner Pass has been a crucial military (and trade) route through the Alps since the days of the Roman Empire, and the Nazis used it to get to and from Italy and continue fighting there. The American special operatives’ mission was to parachute into the area, link up with local partisans, and sabotage the pass so supplies could no longer be brought through it. Some of the characters seem like Hollywood central-casting types, although O’Donnell says they were real, such as the seductive double-agent Italian countess and the fanatical SS officer leading his forces against the would-be saboteurs. O’Donnell takes readers through the planning and preparation for the assignment: “The training for an OG [German Operational Group] operative was informal and rank was dropped. The mission always came first.” He effectively presents not only the American operatives but also their enemies: August Schiffer, Gestapo chief in Northern Italy, “had complete and utter loyalty to the Nazi cause” and “considered himself a patriot” whose use of torture was fully justified in combating those he considered terrorists. O’Donnell often creates cinematic transitions to move the story along: “Unbeknownst to [Stephen] Hall, his journey was about to take a dramatic change of course.” And he traces the Brenner Pass assignment carefully, including what went right and what went wrong – bringing to life the small triumphs and failures that, collectively, can win or lose a war. Indeed, the level of detail will be a lot for casual readers to follow, and the many names of people and places sometimes tumble over each other in a cascade of proper nouns. O’Donnell’s use of primary sources is impressive, as is his ability to knit the various parts of this story together. It is a well-told, true tale, but its very detail and attentiveness to minutiae mean it will be of considerably more interest to World War II aficionados than to the general reader.

(++++) MUSIC THAT SINGS

Ives: Songs, Volume 5. Jana Baty, Lielle Berman, Patrick Carfizzi, Jennifer Casey Cabot, Michael Cavalieri, Robert Gardner, Ian Howell, Sumi Kittelberger, Ryan MacPherson, Tamara Mumford, Mary Phillips, David Pittsinger, Kenneth Tarver and Leah Wool, vocalists; Jooyeon Kong, violin; Kelli Kathman, piccolo; Ryan Johnston and Cary Parker, trombones; Frederick Teardo, organ; Douglas Dickson, Laura Garritson, J.J. Penna and Eric Trudel, piano. Naxos. $8.99.

Bottesini: Fantasia “Lucia di Lammermoor”; Romanza drammatica; Introduzione e bolero; Romanza: Une bouche aimée; Capriccio di bravura; Elégie in D; Fantasia “Beatrice di Tenda”; Grande Allegro di Concerto. Thomas Martin, double bass; Anthony Halstead, piano; Jacquelyn Fugelle, soprano. Naxos. $8.99.

Leopold Mozart: Sinfonias in G, D and A; Kindersinfonie (Toy Symphony); Sinfonia in G, “Neue Lambacher Sinfonie.” Toronto Chamber Orchestra conducted by Kevin Mallon. Naxos. $8.99.

     The odd decision to produce an alphabetically arranged six-volume set of the songs of Charles Ives pays handsome dividends in the fifth volume, which – by sheer abecedarian coincidence – is the meatiest and most interesting one yet (as well as the longest: at a full 80 minutes, it strains the capacity of a CD). This volume runs from “Paracelsus” (1921) through “Swimmers” (1915), starting and ending with fascinating items; and it includes Ives’ very first song (“Slow March” from 1887, when Ives was 13) as well as his last wholly original one (“Sunrise” from 1926, a work that was left unfinished and nearly illegible and was rendered performable by John Kirkpatrick). There are wonders on almost every track here: “Premonitions” (1921) is fatalistic and defiant at once; “Peaks” (1923) is tonally and texturally ambivalent and altogether fascinating; “The Rainbow” (1921) has an improvisatory feeling and makes the well-known words of William Wordsmith (“My heart leaps up”) sound quite fresh; “A Sea Dirge” sets Ariel’s words from Shakespeare’s The Tempest in an exceptionally dark way; and such less-than-a-minute gems as “The Side Show” (1921) and the wonderfully titled “Slugging a Vampire” (1902) are marvels of pithy expressiveness. Also here is an exceptionally amusing take on the college tune “A Son of a Gambolier,” which is early Ives (1895) but which looks forward to later Ives humor through its de-emphasis of words and inclusion of parts for violin, piccolo, piano, trombones – and four kazoos. Also of special interest among the earlier songs on this CD is “Rough Wind” (1902), to words by Percy Bysshe Shelley, featuring music that Ives used as well in the opening movement of his first symphony. This volume is a winner on all levels.

     The latest Naxos re-release of 1980s recordings of music by famed 19^th-century double-bass virtuoso Giovanni Bottesini may not be as instantly appealing as the earlier ones, since it uses piano rather than orchestral accompaniment. But it shows Bottesini’s skill in chamber music, and thanks both to Thomas Martin and Anthony Halstead, it in some ways has as much sweep as does Bottesini’s music for double bass and orchestra. As Franz Liszt so famously did with the piano, Bottesini used his double bass to create encapsulations and expansions of themes from various popular operas of his day, including Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor and Bellini’s Beatrice di Tenda. These fantasias are fascinating, showing the string family’s largest member to be as adept and soulfully expressive – in sufficiently skilled hands, such as Martin’s – as its smaller cousins. The remaining works on this uniformly well-played CD are of somewhat less appeal, although the song Une bouche aimée is an interesting curiosity and a souvenir of the tours that Bottesini did with leading sopranos of his time. One other especially interesting work here is Grande Allegro di Concerto, a somewhat Mendelssohnian tour de force in which the degree to which the double bass is pushed to its limits (notably, the top of its range) is truly hard to believe. Like Paganini, to whom he was in his lifetime compared, Bottesini wrote mainly for himself and not for the ages, but his music retains considerable charm – and its exploration of the extremes of which the double bass is capable is amazing.

     Leopold Mozart’s posthumous obscurity as a composer is quite different from Bottesini’s: the considerable reputation of the elder Mozart was completely overwhelmed by the brilliance of his son and the love-hate relationship between the two. Little of Leopold’s music is performed nowadays, except for his “Toy Symphony,” which exists in several versions – and may not be by him at all, or may be by him in only one version (including four movements that for some reason are omitted in Kevin Mallon’s performance). What is especially interesting about the Toronto Chamber Orchestra’s fine playing of Leopold Mozart’s music is the seriousness, even intensity, that orchestra and conductor bring to it. Even the “Toy Symphony” is treated as a seriously constructed work, not a mere throwaway. The CD is oddly arranged for those who might like to listen to it straight through in order to hear Leopold’s growing mastery of the orchestra: the first work played was the third composed; the third played was composed first; and so on. The reason this matters is that Leopold did develop significantly in his style, to the point at which some of his symphonies (including the “Neue Lambacher Sinfonie” and the G major on this CD) were for a time believed to have been written by Wolfgang. On their own merits, these are tuneful, well-constructed works that break no more ground than had the Mannheim School but that flow well and are even – in the case of the “Neue Lambacher” – substantial four-movement constructions. No one will think Leopold Mozart a great musical rediscovery after hearing this CD, but the elder Mozart may well gain new respect among listeners who have previously thought of him only in the context of his thorny relationship with his young genius of a son.

(++++) CHORAL WONDERS, NEW AND OLD

Orff: Carmina Burana. Laura Claycomb, soprano; Barry Banks, tenor; Christopher Maltman, baritone; Tiffin Boys’ Choir, London Symphony Chorus and London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Richard Hickox. Chandos. $19.99 (SACD).

Pergolesi: Messa di S. Emidio (Missa Romana); A. Scarlatti: Messa per il Santissimo Natale. Concerto Italiano conducted by Rinaldo Alessandrini. Naïve. $16.99.

Corigliano: A Dylan Thomas Trilogy. Sir Thomas Allen, baritone; Ty Jackson, boy soprano; John Tessier, tenor; Nashville Symphony Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin. Naxos. $8.99.

Schoenberg: A Survivor from Warsaw for Narrator, Men’s Chorus and Orchestra; Prelude to Genesis for Mixed Chorus and Orchestra; Dreimal Tausend Jahre for Mixed Chorus a cappella; Psalm 130, De Profundis, for Mixed Chorus a cappella; Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte for String Quartet, Piano and Reciter; Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. Rolf Schulte, violin; David Wilson-Johnson, Narrator and Reciter; Jeremy Denk, piano; The Fred Sherry Quartet; Simon Joly Chorale; Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Robert Craft. Naxos. $8.99.

     There is such a wide variety of choral music available on CD nowadays that it is easy to become lost in the sheer sonic splendor of it all. The really good performances, though, go beyond excellent singing to illuminate the music in fresh ways. Thus, although Orff’s often-recorded Carmina Burana is primarily a choral work, the new Chandos SACD featuring a live 2007 performance led by Richard Hickox turns out to belong as much to the excellent soloists as to the chorus. The sound here is more SACD-focused than in many similar recordings – that is, one needs a multichannel system to get its full benefit; the chorus sounds a touch muffled (or perhaps oddly miked) when the recording is played on a standard two-channel CD player. This is a performance that improves as it goes along: the opening chorus and first section, “Primo vere,” are a little mannered, but “In Taberna” (which features first-class vocal acting by baritone Christopher Maltman and an especially fine “roasted swan” solo by Barry Banks) is top-notch, and “Cours d’amours” is as bright, bouncy and occasionally operatic as a listener could wish (Laura Claycomb’s “Dulcissime” is just splendid). Carmina Burana is often described as crude music, and its tonal clarity seems a touch out of place for a cantata written in 1936. Hickox’s approach nicely highlights a number of instrumental details, then makes the more striking parts of the score as forthright as possible (the bass drum has never sounded better). The result is a performance that shows Orff’s work to have more subtlety than it is usually credited with having.

     There is subtlety aplenty in both the music and the performances in the new Naïve CD featuring Concerto Italiano and Rinaldo Alessandrini. Giovanni Pergolesi’s Missa Romana is far less known than his often-recorded Stabat Mater. The mass is one of only two that are certain to be by Pergolesi, who died at age 26 (in all, nine masses have been attributed to him). Missa Romana was first performed in Rome in 1734, but traces its origin to an earthquake that hit Naples in 1731, leading city leaders to choose St. Emygdius, Bishop of Ascoli, as a patron who could intercede with God to prevent further catastrophes. What is interesting in the 21^st century is the extent to which Pergolesi’s work transcends not only its time but also its strictly religious text and reason for being. It is a moving, near-operatic work that Alessandrini – a fine conductor of 18^th-century opera – does not hesitate to perform with emotional intensity, while remaining true to performance practices of the era. And the Alessandro Scarlatti Messa per il Santissimo Natale is just as well done: Alessandrini makes it elegant, assured, well-balanced and emotionally involving in a way that Italian Baroque religious music would not necessarily be expected to be. The sensitivity of both the singing and the playing on this CD makes it an outstanding achievement.

     John Corigliano’s A Dylan Thomas Trilogy is a work of our time, written in 1960 and revised in 1999, and might be expected to speak more directly and clearly to a modern audience than the music of Pergolesi and Scarlatti. But this is not quite so: it speaks differently but with no greater clarity. Corigliano’s setting of “Fern Hill,” “Poem in October” and “Poem on His Birthday” also includes two separate parts of “Author’s Prologue,” one to open the hour-long work and one after “Fern Hill.” The darkness lying just beneath the surface of much of Thomas’ poetry is what seems to interest Corigliano most. In “Fern Hill,” he emphasizes the way in which Time comes to hold the poet “green and dying”; “Poem in October” has the poet using his birthday to reflect on the past and meditate, rather melancholically, on the future; and “Poem on His Birthday” contains images of the River Styx and of herons walking “in their shroud.” But not all is darkness here, with “Author’s Prologue” bringing an intense sense of life and liveliness to the work – abetted by well-constructed music that captures its moods as effectively as it does the darker moods of the other sections. This world première recording features fine singing by the Nashville Symphony Chorus and sensitive playing by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, plus solo parts that highlight the many moods of Corigliano’s work, showing Thomas’ poetry to be dark but scarcely without hope.

     Arnold Schoenberg’s late choral works are dark, too, but they use the voices quite differently from the way Corigliano did several decades later. Schoenberg carefully established contrasts in his vocal writing among singing, a declamatory spoken style and Sprechstimme. His use of a narrator in A Survivor from Warsaw (1947) provides a contrast with the male chorus that enters at the end and helps make this seven-minute work a full-fledged music drama. The reciter in Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (1942) functions differently in this non-choral work, intensely and often sarcastically presenting a text drawn from Lord Byron’s scornful poem, written after Napoleon’s abdication in 1814. The wordless chorus in Prelude to Genesis (1945) is just one part of the overall texture, but it is the choral focus that brings power to Dreimal Tausend Jahre (1949) and Psalm 130, De Profundis (1950 – Schoenberg’s last completed work). The last of these, in particular, contrasts pure speech with pure singing in a way characteristic of Schoenberg and used by him to heighten the different emotional elements within a piece. All these works, performed under the direction of Robert Craft, are highly effective, but no more so than the purely instrumental work on this CD – the Violin Concerto, which lasts almost as long as all the other works put together. Rolf Schulte gives a knowing and intense performance of this work, whose three-movement structure seems completely in line with classical practice and whose movements even bear traditional tempo indications. But this is quite clearly Schoenberg, not Brahms, although some of the compositional techniques hark back to those of the earlier composer. The metrical variations and tempo and rhythm changes all clearly reflect Schoenberg’s view of the concerto form, and the magisterial ending caps the work with his unmistakable imprint. This concerto was begun in 1934 and finished in 1936 – the same year as Carmina Burana. Listening to the two in close proximity highlights Schoenberg’s modernism, Orff’s primitivism, and the huge gap between compositional styles of the 20^th century – a gap that only listeners can close, by finding ways to open their ears to a very broad spectrum of music.

(++++) PICTURE THIS, PICTURE THAT

Pierced: A “Zits” Close-Up. By Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

The Future’s So Bright, I Can’t Bear to Look. By Tom Tomorrow. Nation Books. $16.95.

     Anyone wondering what the difference is between a good comic strip and a great one can get the answer – or one answer, anyway – from Pierced, the latest collection of Zits strips. Unlike earlier Zits Sketchbook collections, this 13^th compendium (not counting seven oversized “Treasury” volumes) homes in on a single character instead of simply reprinting an entire sequence of strips in the order in which they originally appeared. The character, Pierce, is a close friend of central character Jeremy Duncan and is – on the surface – as unlike Jeremy as can be imagined. Where Jeremy is essentially a nice, middle-class guy who dreams of becoming a “rock god” but whose appearance and actions scream “future dentist, like his father,” Pierce has so many metal parts that he is practically a cyborg – and he is always ready for another piercing, tattoo, or dangerous stunt. He is thus, on the surface, a “foil” (in the Shakespearean sense) for Jeremy; but that, it turns out, is not all he is. For underneath the rebellious, devil-may-care exterior, it turns out that Pierce is – gasp! – a nice, decent guy. And that is what makes this character, and the strip he inhabits, great rather than merely good: there is depth to Pierce, and to Zits. But before it starts sounding as if this strip is an intellectually challenging one, it’s worth pointing out that Pierce’s character, including its touching elements, is presented in ways that are out-and-out hilarious. For example, Pierce is an animal lover – especially of vermin – and doubly especially of his pet rat, for which he arranges a colonoscopy, a heart-lung transplant and subsequent life support. Pierce decorates for Christmas – by hanging ornaments from his many facial piercings. He wishes Jeremy and Hector “Merry Christmas” in the middle of an extended “AAAAAAAAAAAAA” as he runs past, with birds pecking at his seasonal suet-and-sunflower-seed earrings. He has his driver’s license, and agrees to drive a group home from the beach when the parent who drove them there loses her glasses – but he insists no one mention that he is a cautious and polite driver. Pierce is fun, and funny, and real (to the extent that any unreal comic-strip character can be “real”); and he is a perfect example of anti-stereotyping in Zits, since it’s certainly possible that he’ll one day have a dental practice just down the hall from Jeremy’s – even though he looks like someone who has only a small chance of making it in so-called polite society.

     And speaking of politeness: there is little of it in Tom Tomorrow’s latest collection, and that’s just fine with the cartoonist and the sorts of publications that run his strips (principally The Village Voice and various so-called “alternative newspapers”). Tomorrow’s weekly “This Modern World” comics are a deliberate blend of 1950s-style drawing with up-to-the-minute left-wing political commentary. Many of them do not wear very well – only readers who have stayed intimately in touch with every bit of political minutiae since 2005 will understand all the references in The Future’s So Bright, I Can’t Bear to Look. But that is a flaw of editorial cartoons in general. Tomorrow’s strips are a lot to take in book form, even if you agree with their underlying premises (most of which involve the Bush administration as the root of all evil). Individually, the strips are often pointed and somewhat less often funny. Collectively, they are repetitious and, after a while, dull. But there are high points throughout the book. The occasional appearance of Sparky, an angry, masked penguin who seems to be Tomorrow’s alter ego, is frequently entertaining in its own way, although Sparky does get to launch many of the longest-winded attacks on Bush administration policies. Tomorrow’s art is best when it tweaks the conventions on which it…err…draws. One strip on the housing market, for example, features a character who could come straight out of the 1950s – except that his head is a hand. The periodic appearance of newscasters from Planet Glox (with the strip’s title shown in “alien” lettering) is a highlight – the newscasts parody Fox News, one of Tomorrow’s frequent targets. Interestingly, some of the funniest Tomorrow strips are the ones that unexpectedly go against type by attacking Democrats. For instance, a strip based on the famous Charles Atlas ads showing a beach bully taking advantage of a boy who needs some muscles is recast as a contest between bully George W. Bush and weakling Harry Reid, with Bush coming out ahead even after Reid “bulks up” by leading the Democrats to take over both houses of Congress. The Future’s So Bright, I Can’t Bear to Look is worth a (+++) rating for cleverness, persistence and a unique approach to art. Fans of its politics will surely rate it higher, while opponents will rank it lower. Both of those responses would no doubt suit Tomorrow very well.

(+++) WHEN BAD IS GOOD

The B List: The National Society of Film Critics on the Low-Budget Beauties, Genre-Bending Mavericks, and Cult Classics We Love. Edited by David Sterritt and John Anderson. Da Capo. $15.95.

Into the Volcano. By Don Wood. Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. $18.99.

     Bad movies – good bad movies, that is – have charms all their own. Movies known to be of less-than-top quality, because of plot or acting or directing or all of the above, used to form the second features on movie theaters’ double bills. The double feature is nearly extinct nowadays (although it survives at a few theaters and some drive-ins), but the B movie not only survives but also thrives. Why? Some answers are to be found in The B List, but in order to find them, editors David Sterritt and John Anderson need to redefine the term “B movie” itself. For the films discussed in the 58 reviews and essays in this book range from ones whose titles makes their “B-ness” obvious (The Rage: Carrie 2, The Girl Can’t Help It) to ones that are out-and-out cult classics (The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Night of the Living Dead) and others that are serious films whose inclusion in The B List seems, on the face of it, a touch odd (Reservoir Dogs, Platoon). The editors say they have defined B movies as ones “that fall outside the mainstream by dint of their budgets, their visions, their grit, and frequently – sometimes essentially – their lack of what the culture cops call ‘good taste.’” That’s a pretty broad definition, though, and would fit far more films than those discussed here. No matter; the book is a good starting point. But what is it the start of? Some writers describe the plots of the films in detail – a good thing, since many of these films were never in wide release or have long since been forgotten. Others assume readers know the movies already, as co-editor Anderson himself does in his article on The Last Seduction (1994), writing that actress Linda “Fiorentino has created a criminal genius/hottie-libertine who’s a moral bankrupt and can’t quite stay in her heels, and we arrive at the question of what the viewer, male or female, makes of her, knowing nothing about her except her voracious appetites for money and sex, and her use of the latter to attain the former.” And if that seems like a mouthful, consider co-editor Sterritt’s take on David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1977): “Its idiosyncrasies bespeak the courage and tenacity of a screen artist exquisitely attuned to inner voices the rest of us may never hear, and eager to share their darkling echoes despite the likelihood that the conundrums, paradoxes, and enigmas they raise will be sounded by almost nobody and fathomed by fewer still.” Whew. These are B movies taken very seriously indeed. But if that is justified for Eraserhead (and it probably is), is it equally justified for I Walked with a Zombie, To Live and Die in L.A., or Red Planet Mars? Not all the writers feel they need the language of academia to discuss these films: Stephanie Zacharek writes of Grindhouse (2007) that some movies try to answer deep questions, “But what about our littler questions? Questions like, Can nuclear splooge really turn us into flesh-eating zombies?” The B List could do with more of that sort of humor – but it does have some to leaven its more serious essays, and the book as a whole offers its own kind of fun for fans of films that, in most cases, never quite made the A list because they wouldn’t be caught dead there.

     Into the Volcano would make a pretty good B movie itself. Don Wood’s handsomely rendered graphic novel, in which a not-very-attentive father hands over his two boys to people who may be family members, crooks or kidnappers, resulting in the boys’ traveling to an island nation (based clearly on Hawaii) and having an adventure inside an erupting volcano, has many of the classic B-movie elements: danger, lots of drama, serious but non-fatal injuries, a hint of sex (but only a hint), strained humor – and, unfortunately, a rather creaky plot. The boys, Duffy (the brave, athletic one) and Sumo (the scared one who turns heroic when heroism is most needed), get mixed up with some very unsavory-looking characters sporting such names as Come-and-Go and Mango Jo, and mystery follows mystery as the expedition on which the boys are made to go finds a way inside the volcano in search of – what? Well, that is one mystery. Another is why the boys’ father subjects them to all this. A third is who the good guys really are – even at the end, when everything seems happy enough, it is not quite clear whether there were ever any bad guys and, if so, who they were. The most interesting parts of Into the Volcano are not the action sequences – although those have the most immediate appeal – but the discussions of how volcanoes function, what their eruptions mean, how new volcanic islands are formed, and so on. The primary mystery turns out to revolve around a fictional material that supposedly has important scientific applications, such as making it possible to create “a room-temperature superconductor.” The mixture of fact and fancy is attractive here, the book is fast-paced, and the art is very well done, with a kind of noir cast to many scenes. It is best, though, not to examine the plot or the characters’ motivations too closely – which puts Into the Volcano, whether or not a film of it is ever made, squarely into the B-movie world.

(+++) AFTER THE APOCALYPSE

The Hunger Games. By Suzanne Collins. Scholastic. $17.99.

Books of Ember IV: The Diamond of Darkhold. By Jeanne DuPrau. Random House. $16.99.

     Books for young readers are a niche. Within that niche, there are fantasy/science fiction books. And within that niche (or genre), there are more and more post-apocalyptic stories to be found. A social phenomenon, or reflection of the wider society? Books that recently came to market were in progress from idea to novel to production for several years – did things seem so apocalyptic in 2005 or 2006? In any case, these are books whose brutality – emotionally if not physically, although it exists physically as well – is likely to shock many parents. But the books are not designed for them.

     Thus, we have Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games, about a world in which the United States has dissolved into chaos, out of which has emerged a nation called Panem, whose Capitol rules the 12 outlying districts with an iron hand. There used to be 13 districts, but the Capitol completely destroyed one of them when it defeated the others that had rebelled against its authority. And to make sure the remaining districts acknowledge, again and again, just how firmly under the thumb of the Capitol they are, the rulers created the games of the title – which are games only in the sense that the Romans’ fight-to-the-death gladiatorial combats were games. In fact, the Hunger Games bear more than a passing resemblance to the brutal entertainments of ancient Rome: “Each of the twelve districts must provide one girl and one boy, called tributes, to participate. The twenty-four tributes will be imprisoned in a vast outdoor arena that could hold anything from a burning desert to a frozen wasteland. Over a period of several weeks, the competitors must fight to the death. The last tribute standing wins. …To make it humiliating as well as torturous, the Capitol requires us to treat the Hunger Games as a festivity, a sporting event pitting every district against the others.” And the tributes themselves are chosen in a way that favors the well-to-do over the poor: everyone’s name has a chance of being picked, but poor people can obtain some basic necessities of life by entering their names multiple times – increasing the chance of their being selected. And then there is the case of Katniss Everdeen, protagonist of The Hunger Games, whose name is not picked but whose sister’s name is – so Katniss volunteers to take her place. One result: “I enter a nightmare from which I wake repeatedly only to find a greater terror awaiting me. All the things I dread most, all the things I dread for others manifest in such vivid detail I can’t help but believe they’re real. Each time I wake, I think, At last, this is over, but it isn’t. It’s only the beginning of a new chapter of torture.” Katniss does survive, winning in an unexpected and dramatic way – and then it turns out, not surprisingly, that there is a lot more to the Hunger Games and the world of which they are a part than will fit in a single book: this is the first of a series.

     The Diamond of Darkhold is, at least for now, the last of a series, following The City of Ember (2003), The People of Sparks (2004) and The Prophet of Yonwood (2006), the last being a weaker book that was essentially a prequel, filling in some background of the first two novels. The Diamond of Darkhold, written somewhat more simplistically than the other three books, brings Lina Mayfleet and Doon Harrow back to now-deserted Ember. Familiarity with the story so far is a must – Jeanne DuPrau’s brief summary is not really enough. The book is written from multiple points of view, not just Lina’s and Doon’s, and as a result tends to drift. It is basically a quest novel, with Lina and Doon returning to Ember to look for supplies and a mysterious pre-Disaster device that may have been left behind for the people who have fled Ember to use in their new lives. Really, though, The Diamond of Darkhold is a discursive tale that adds little to the previous books beyond a re-emphasis on alternative energy sources. Readers who enjoyed all three prior Ember books – even the disappointing third installment – will be happy to get some answers to unresolved questions here. They will be even happier with an ending that suggests there could be additional Ember books in the future, even though this one pretty much ties up the series’ loose ends. Readers less than enthralled by the later Ember books – the first was by far the best – will find little captivating in this fourth installment; and in truth, anyone who stopped reading after the first two books will have at least as satisfying an experience as those who continued to the third and fourth volumes.

(+++) FANTASIES OF BEAUTY AND DANGER

Under the Blood Red Moon. By Mina Hepsen. Avon. $13.95.

This Year’s Model. By Carol Alt. Avon. $13.95.

     Pick your unlikely romance. Will it involve London in the 19^th century, where vampires are real and rich and handsome and where noble but financially threatened orphans must bend the rules to survive? Or will it focus on New York City today, where the cutthroat world of professional modeling suddenly opens wide to a fresh new face, a young woman who must find her own center and values quickly if she is to make it on her own terms and avoid the descent into depravity that afflicts so many in the profession?

     The first plot outline goes with Under the Blood Red Moon, the first historical romance by Mina Hepsen (a name strongly echoing Mina Harker of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it is the pen name of Hande Zapsu, daughter of a Turkish politician). The second outline belongs to This Year’s Model, the first novel by real-life model Carol Alt. Neither book has much of a feeling of believability about it, despite Hepsen’s skill in setting her scenes and Alt’s use of her own experiences in modeling to frame the characters in her novel. Neither of the books is more overwrought than is usual in its genre, but neither stands out from many other books of a similar type.

     In Under the Blood Red Moon, the central characters are Princess Angelica Belanov and her brother, Mikhail, who are orphans with only one surviving relative and who are living off their old family fortune – but are close to losing it. The solution (this being the 19^th century and all) is to find a rich husband for Angelica. But Angelica, for all her beauty, has an ability that she regards as a curse: she is a telepath, listening to people’s thoughts whether she wants to or not. This is why she wants to live at a quiet country estate (preferably in the seclusion of its library) – but for proper husband-hunting, as Mikhail points out, she will have to come to the city. And that is where, at an appropriately fabulous ball, Prince Alexander Kourakin turns up. He seems like ideal marriage material, except for a couple of problems: first, he is a vampire; and second, he is a clan leader and has been given the assignment of finding and stopping a rogue vampire named Sergey, who is determined to start a war between vampires and humans. Despite their mutual attraction, the prince and princess realize they must part and forget each other; but of course that is not what happens. The most interesting thing about Under the Blood Red Moon is that its vampires are governed by a Book of Laws, and drinking human blood is decidedly not by the book. In fact, many of the basics of vampire lore – hatred of garlic, inability to move around during daylight – are discarded by Hepsen as she weaves a romance with tinges of the otherworldly rather than a traditional vampires-vs.-humans novel. It is the underlying sexuality of vampirism that Hepsen brings, rather predictably, to the fore: “His lips were soft and hard all at once as they brushed against hers. Her eyes closed gradually, her shoulders losing some of their tension. Alexander recognized her inexperience instantaneously, but the knowledge did nothing to cool his ardor. …It was as if he were kissing for the first time again, the feelings were the strongest he had had in almost two hundred years.” It is obvious where this is going, and after another hundred pages or so, that is just where it goes. There is a twist ending (a rather predictable one), but basically the book ends in the same dramatic-romantic-vampiric fashion in which it began.

     There is something vampiric about the real-world fashion industry, which sucks the liveliness and often the life out of attractive young women in order to turn them into hangers on which to display outlandish and extraordinarily overpriced garments intended purely for the delectation of people who are far too rich to have anything more worthwhile to do with their money. But there is a lot of money in modeling, and (as Carol Alt points out) it is one field where women make much more than men. So it is easy to understand modeling’s attractions to Alt and to her Alt-er ego, Melody Ann Croft, in This Year’s Model. Croft is working her way through college as a waitress when a fashion photographer spots her and insists she ought to be in pictures – high-fashion pictures, that is (although the parallel with movie stars being discovered at what were then called soda fountains is obvious). Alt says this is pretty much how she herself really was discovered – even to the detail that Croft accidentally runs the photographer’s business card through the wash, which Alt says she did with the card of the photographer who brought her into the modeling world. It turns out, at least in This Year’s Model, to be a high-pressure, high-stakes, high-stress world that Melody (renamed Mac for professional purposes, although that seems like an unappealingly androgynous name) initially breaks into smoothly and with considerable ease. But then she has to deal with the rumors, the lies, the day-long photo sessions in uncomfortable poses, the prima donna photographers, the sexual come-ons, the drugs – all the temptations and titillations you would expect from an “inside” book about the field, fiction though it may be. Mac pushes through to success: “The knot in my gut grows tighter, knowing the other models are now watching me on the monitor backstage. …And suddenly something in me relaxes. Suddenly my legs begin to move in slow, easy strides, hips gliding forward. It’s as if I’m floating above the stage, the world around me one big blur of brilliant light.” But she just can’t figure out parts of the business: “Even more frightful are the bisexuals. You can’t tell which way they are going to go and I can’t imagine sleeping with a guy one night who might want to sleep with my brother the next night.” The mixture of fashion, sex, drugs and all the rest eventually leads to predictable heartache for Mac and a greater tragedy for one of the other models – but there is really nothing surprising about that. Or about much else in this straightforward “girl makes good but success comes at a price” story. With or without a background in reality, it comes across simply as a fantasy of the modern world.

(++++) INCIDENTALLY….

Grieg: Peer Gynt—complete incidental music; Before a Southern Convent; Bergliot. Soloists, Malmö Chamber Choir and Malmö Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bjarte Engeset. Naxos. $17.99 (2 CDs).

Tchaikovsky: Hamlet—Overture and Incidental Music; Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture—original 1869 version. Russian National Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

     Every classical-music lover knows a little bit of Edvard Grieg’s music for Henrik Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt. Very few know more than a little. Ibsen’s play is a strange one, with a picaresque but far from admirable title character who uses and misuses people throughout, is victimized himself but learns little or nothing from his experiences, and eventually attains a level of peace in a manner related to a form of religion in which Ibsen did not believe. By turns almost realistic, wholly symbolic and surreal, Peer Gynt is as much an oddity and mystery now as it was when Ibsen wrote it in 1867 and Grieg created music for it in 1874-5. The suites drawn from the music do little justice to either Grieg or Ibsen, for all their charm; indeed, their charm is part of the problem, since neither Peer nor the play is particularly charming. By taking the music out of dramatic context, the suites are faithful to neither the playwright nor the composer. Bjarte Engeset, on the other hand, is faithful to both, even though he takes liberties with Grieg’s scoring and includes folk as well as classical musicians in his performing ensemble. Peer Gynt is, perhaps more than anything else, about Norway, and may inevitably be opaque to non-Norwegians (not to mention non-speakers of Norwegian). What Engeset does is present all Grieg’s music – more than an hour and a half of it – and snippets of the play’s dialogue as well (listeners must go online to get the text and translation, but that is a small inconvenience). This approach inevitably gives short shrift to parts of Ibsen’s play – especially the third of the five acts, for which Grieg wrote only 12 minutes of music – but it gives listeners a chance to hear Grieg’s pieces in much better context than any in which they are usually heard. The folk-music performers fit well with several of the themes of Peer Gynt, as do such additions as a children’s chorus and cowbells (in a scene where Grieg considered using them but did not). This is quite a wonderful performance, with drive and emotion and orchestral color galore, and if it does not remove many of the puzzling aspects of Peer Gynt, that is only because they are unremovable, so thoroughly are they woven into the play’s fabric.

     As bonuses on the second CD of this set are two Grieg works that are almost completely unknown outside Norway and are rarely performed even there. Before a Southern Convent (Foran Sydens Kloster) was originally to be a scene in a larger work, based on an epic poem by Björnstjerne Björnson and dealing with events of the 11^th century. The work is the song of a chieftain’s daughter at the gate of a convent, where she has come to try to cope with feelings of guilt and despair over her attraction to the outlaw warrior-hero who killed her father. In form it is a series of questions by a nun to the woman seeking entrance; in emotional content it is effective and moving. Bergliot is a melodrama – spoken narration with music – and is based on another work by Björnson. The title character is a woman whose husband and son are lured into an ambush and murdered, after which she first demands vengeance and later comes to acceptance and resignation. The form of melodrama inevitably downplays the importance of a work’s musical content, but Bergliot does have some dramatic power (when followed with the text) and is an interesting work, if scarcely major Grieg.

     Nor is the incidental music to Hamlet major Tchaikovsky – but it is nevertheless worth hearing. Vladimir Jurowski and the Russian National Orchestra offer not the moderately well-known 1889 Fantasy Overture but a set of mostly short incidental pieces created for a performance of the play in 1891. There is actually a much-shortened version of the Fantasy Overture at the start, but it is followed by fanfares, trumpet flourishes, entr’actes and other pieces that are mostly of little consequence, although several of the entr’actes are lovely – including one that is an excerpt from the composer’s balletic Symphony No. 3. However, there are a few items that are really worth hearing, including a march for Ophelia’s funeral and three songs – two for Ophelia and one for a gravedigger. Tchaikovsky was not a particularly prolific composer, so it is especially interesting to discover that there are works by him with which most listeners will be wholly unfamiliar. The Hamlet incidental music certainly belongs in that category. And so does Romeo and Juliet – not the thrice-familiar 1880 version of the overture heard so often in concert halls and on recordings, but the original one from 1869. This was not well received at its 1870 premiere, and in retrospect – after knowing the 1880 version – it is easy to see why. Apparently it was easy enough even in 1870. The famous love theme is present, in fact appearing earlier than in the 1880 version, and there are some interesting touches (such as having the timpani play the “conflict” theme at one dramatic point), but the tightly knit sonata form of the 1880 version is nowhere to be found. The 1869 version is essentially a contrast between the love theme and a theme of conflict – effective enough in its way, but without the sweep and drama of the 1880 version. That one is in fact the third Romeo and Juliet, since Tchaikovsky revised the 1869 version in 1870, and the second version was initially performed in 1872. There are fewer differences between the second and third versions than between the first and second (the third version’s main change is a reworked ending), but it would be nice to hear the second version once in a while, too. The 1869 tone poem, even when played as well and enthusiastically as it is in the sonic splendor of the Jurowski SACD, seems mostly like a pale foreshadowing of the far better work that was to come a decade later.

(++++) PORTRAITS

Vladimir Ashkenazy: Master Musician. Christopher Nupen Films DVD. $29.99.

David Oistrakh, Artiste du Peuple? A film by Bruno Monsaingeon. Medici Arts DVD. $24.99.

Tony Palmer’s Film about Benjamin Britten: A Time There Was… Tony Palmer Films. $24.99.

     With the inevitable caveat that these three DVDs will be of interest only to a subset of classical-music lovers – themselves a subset of all music lovers – it has to be said that two of these three are the sorts of documentaries that really do have the potential to attract the interest of more people than the artists’ fanatical fans. It helps that all three subjects profiled on these DVDs are major artists. It helps further , in the case of Christopher Nupen’s exploration of Vladimir Ashkenazy, that this is not a single film but a collection of short works that collectively give a more interesting portrait of Ashkenazy than might emerge from a single, lengthier presentation. Among the films here are The Vital Juices Are Russian (1968), made when Ashkenazy had just moved from London to Iceland and well before he had become a noted conductor – at the time, he was simply (to the extent that such a thing is simple) an outstanding piano virtuoso. Also here are excerpts from some of the films Nupen has made showing Ashkenazy conducting and his career progressing as he aged toward his 70^th year, which he reached in 2007. In many ways the most interesting film is the most musical of all: it is about Rachmaninoff’s Corelli Variations, and it features Ashkenazy discussing this very Russian work – based on a decidedly non-Russian theme – and then performing the entire piece. What emerges from this DVD is a portrait of Ashkenazy partly in words, partly in pictures, partly in small doses of music, and partly in one large chunk in which words, pictures and music all come together. By the end of the DVD, viewers will truly feel they have come to know and, to some extent, understand Ashkenazy, and their experiences of his concerts and recordings will be richer for that understanding.

     Bruno Monsaingeon’s film about David Oistrakh has a question mark in its title, and the question the director poses is never really answered. But it scarcely matters: Monsaingeon has put together a wonderful portrait of a great violinist and fascinating personality who flourished (if that is the right word) under Stalinism in the Soviet Union, and after Stalin’s death became a worldwide phenomenon. Oistrakh (1908-1974) is present here mostly through wonderful archival footage that includes some of his performances as well as offstage material. Much of the commentary comes from Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Mstislav Rostropovich, and Igor Oistrakh (David’s son), all of whom are seen performing themselves – as are Sviatoslav Richter, Gennady Rozhdestvensky and others. The discussions about the privations of the Stalinist years and of World War II are nothing really new, and Oistrakh was not alone in finding a way to survive musically despite the hardships – Shostakovich, for example, famously worked out his own way of doing so. But Oistrakh, especially the young Oistrakh, remains little known in the West, and the chance to see and hear about him is irresistible. The reasons Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian and other major composers wrote for Oistrakh become clear in this thoroughly human portrait of a violinist who was largely self-taught and whose brilliance still has much to teach the players of today.

     Tony Palmer’s film about Benjamin Britten is of somewhat more limited interest and for that reason gets a (+++) rating. A Time There Was… (the ellipsis is part of the title) is mostly a story, one among many, of Britten and his longtime companion and lover, Peter Pears. It is Pears’ remarks that provide most of the narrative thread, Pears’ reminiscences that guide the film’s focus. There are plenty of cameo appearances by other musicians, among them Leonard Bernstein, Kathleen Ferrier, Julian Bream and John Shirley-Quirk, and there are quite a few short musical excerpts from Britten’s operas (and some from other works). There are also some interesting remarks on Britten as a person (rather than as a musician) from the family that housed him and Pears after they left England as conscientious objectors, from Britten’s housekeeper, and from the woman who nursed him through his final illness. There is nothing wrong with any of this, and this 1979 film is shot well and presented with sensitivity. But Britten’s music, which is the main thing for which he is and will be remembered, gets somewhat short shrift in Palmer’s story arc, with the result that A Time There Was… will appeal mainly to people who are already thoroughly familiar with Britten’s work and are looking for some additional insights into his personality, as told by some of those who were close to him.

(++++) JOURNEYS TO WONDER

Icarus at the Edge of Time. By Brian Greene. Knopf. $19.95.

Dreaming Again: Thirty-Five New Stories Celebrating the Wild Side of Australian Fiction. Edited by Jack Dann. Eos. $16.95.

     Couple the magnificence of NASA photos of the universe with the ancient tale of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun, and you have the basic idea of Icarus at the Edge of Time. But only through seeing the book will you have a sense of its impact. Brian Greene takes old science-fiction ideas and twists them in a new way, producing a graphic display book (not really a graphic novel) that is gorgeous to see, elucidates a major scientific concept, and tells a story well updated from Greek myth – in which a spacefaring Icarus is lost to the world as surely as if his wax wings had melted. This Icarus is on a generational ship, the only kind that (as far as anyone knows) can possibly make a journey to the tremendously distant stars. It is a ship on which whole generations are born and die without ever seeing anything but the ship itself; for faster-than-light travel, although the darling of space opera, remains pure myth to modern science. Icarus, young and highly inventive, devises a way during the journey to use a small ship to take a very close look at a black hole, approaching its event horizon (the point beyond which everything is sucked in). Convinced of the accuracy of his calculations, he dismisses his family’s warnings and sets out – and is successful in approaching the black hole and returning safely from it. But he loses everything when he does return – for it is now thousands of years in the future. Icarus at the Edge of Time explains why, using much-simplified Einsteinian science: a black hole’s gravity results in the slowing of time near the event horizon, so that someone near the black hole experiences time normally but (in terms of relativity) is living at a tremendously slow rate. An hour near a black hole may equal thousands of years of time away from it. This is a tough concept to understand, and Greene makes no attempt to explain it in depth – he simply illustrates the consequences. And what illustrations! The black hole looms ever larger as Icarus approaches it, against astonishingly detailed and beautifully colored two-full-page Hubble Telescope images of the Orion, Swan, Cone, Lagoon and Eagle Nebulas and other amazing-looking celestial objects (each actually made up of uncountably large numbers of smaller objects, including suns and planets). The book is a mere 32 oversize thick-cardboard pages in length, but its haunting story is the stuff of legend, and its illustrations will pull readers in again and again.

     There is much that is haunting in Dreaming Again, too – some of it science-fictional, but even more from the realm of fantasy. This is a sequel of sorts – a decade later – to Dreaming Down-Under, an outstanding 1998 collection of short stories by Australian writers. But Dreaming Again stands entirely on its own, and many of the tales – although not so many of the science-fictional ones – are really excellent. The SF elements are cleverly handled in Sean McMullen’s “The Constant Past” (how does one stop a serial killer who travels through time?) and Simon Brown’s “Empire” (an interesting rethinking of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds); but they are handled in ordinary-to-fairly-silly ways in such stories as Ben Francisco and Chris Lynch’s “This Is My Blood” (First Contact involving religious missionaries, a very old theme) and Adam Browne’s “Neverland Blues” (Michael Jackson transformed into a spaceship, still hunting young boys). Some of the stories are new takes on fairy tales, and they are much more effective: Angela Slatter’s “The Jacaranda Wife” is both odd and moving, while Kim Wilkins’ “The Forest” neatly and scarily rethinks “Hansel and Gretel.” There are fantasy tales that are out-and-out spooky, such as Terry Dowling’s “The Fooly” and Richard Harland’s Lovecraftian “A Guided Tour in the Kingdom of the Dead”; others that are simply weird (Christopher Green’s “Lakeside”); and still others that are too overdone to be fully effective (Aaron Sterns’ “The Rest Is Silence,” which takes its title from Hamlet – as does Isobelle Carmody’s far more successful “Perchance to Dream,” which is vivid, beautifully imagined and thoroughly involving). There are a couple of detective stories: Stephen Dedman’s “Lost Arts,” whose solution is distinctly Asimovian, and Trent Jamieson’s “The New Deal,” which takes the noir concept to extremes. There are even a few instances of humor – dark humor, to be sure: it creeps into Jason Fischer’s wonderfully titled “Undead Camels Ate Their Flesh” and is pervasive in Rosaleen Love’s “Riding on the Q-Ball,” a particularly silly journey to just about everywhere and everywhen that involves a rogue fax machine threatening the existence of the universe and includes such scintillating dialogue as “Arwwkk Orrkk Warrkkk” and “Uh Uh Uh Urk.” There is also one “rediscovered” and previously unpublished story here: “Grimes and the Gaijin Daimyo” by A. Bertram Chandler (1912-1984); but it is minor Chandler and, in truth, lacks the stylistic punch of many of the newer tales by younger writers. Dreaming Again is a particularly fine anthology – even the less-than-successful stories usually have their intriguing moments – and serves as a reminder that the Dreamtime, the Aboriginal creation myth, has about it not only many wonders but also its share of nightmares.

(++++) ANTICIPATING 2009

2009 Calendars: Day-to-Day—Dilbert: We Have a Motion to Adjourn; Pearls Before Swine: Lying een Wait at da Watering Hole; Liō; Joy of Cooking; The Office. Andrews McMeel. $12.99 each (Dilbert; Pearls; Liō; Cooking); $11.99 (Office).

2009 Calendars: Wall—Georgia O’Keeffe; The Metropolitan Opera 125^th Anniversary Season; Desk—Edgar Allan Poe: A Year of Mystery and Imagination. Universe/Andrews McMeel. $13.99 each.

     One of the pleasures of a waning year is the anticipation of Andrews McMeel calendars for the next one. Year after year, this publisher produces tons of amusing calendars – and some informative ones – that actually make it a pleasure to end one day and start the next. A little bit of a day brightener is welcome no matter what the weather, the week or the year. As usual for 2009, some of the best Andrews McMeel day-to-day calendars are based on top-notch and frequently very offbeat comic strips. Scott Adams’ Dilbert, whose astonishing popularity continues unabated (and is fueled anew with every boneheaded decision by managers of major corporations), is in full color for 2009, as the intelligent but hopelessly naïve Dilbert continues to imagine that something he does will someday make some sort of difference; Dogbert continues finding new ways to express his contempt for people; Alice’s Fist of Death keeps taking its toll (but not quickly enough); Wally continues to make work avoidance an art; and the Pointy-Haired Boss remains as clueless and buzzword-addicted as ever. Equally clever and even darker is Stephan Pastis’ Pearls Before Swine, whose weird 2009 title is in “crocodilese” and whose cover shows one of the hapless reptiles trying to trap Zebra at Zebra’s watering hole – which is a dispenser topped by a huge bottle in which the croc is clearly visible. The Pearls Before Swine calendar continues to be in black-and-white for most days, but the Sundays are now in color – a bonus for fans of sweetly naïve and ever-put-upon Pig, cynical and egocentric Rat, and the rest of Pastis’ characters. There is darkness in Mark Tatulli’s Liō, too, but of a different sort, as the title character – who does not speak – befriends Death, zombies, vampires and such; creates a “super-realistic piňata” by filling a donkey-shaped shell with raw liver, sausages and the like; and loves to cuddle with the neighborhood cephalopods and tarantulas. The strip works so well because Liō may be called a weird kid (indeed, he watches the Weird Kid Network on TV), and may do (and be subjected to) weird things, but he looks endearing, with his wide eyes and strand of hair that sticks straight up. And the lack of dialogue gives a daily dose of Liō an extra visual kick.

     Prefer something where words are the focus? Then it helps to move away from cartoony calendars – and there are plenty of places to go. If you enjoy cooking, for example, The Joy of Cooking – based for 2009 on the 75^th-anniversary edition of the perennially popular cookbook – will be…well, a joy. This is one calendar that contains undated pages in addition to the usual dated ones. The undated entries provide recipes and step-by-step instructions, while the ones with dates include a wide variety of facts and helpful kitchen-related ideas. The especially nice thing about the recipe pages is that they are easy to save, if you wish; and because they are the same size as the calendar pages, they will fit nicely in a very small storage space somewhere in your home. And what about your office, where storage areas may be limited? Well, if the Dilbert approach of illustrated office-related oddity is not for you, The Office offers words instead – a series of one-liners, work-related jokes, quotations and buzzwords to help you keep a sense of humor even if your company is on the level of Dilbert’s (well, maybe not then, but you get the idea). The neat thing about this calendar is that every page is a sticky note – just peel off the ones you like and stick them on a wall, desk, or in a colleague’s cubicle (although if you’re the only one with this calendar, he or she will know who stuck them there!).

     Each dated page of all these day-to-day calendars is, of course, for short-term use only – which is part of these calendars’ charm: if that day’s cartoon or saying is a loser, you only have to wait one day for something that is (hopefully) much better. But wall calendars are held to another standard: you live with each page for a full month, so each really needs to be something you won’t mind seeing day in and day out. On the other hand, each page is far bigger than the pages of a day-to-day calendar, so if you do pick a wall calendar focused on a subject dear to you, it offers much more room for enjoyment. The 2009 Georgia O’Keeffe wall calendar is an example: O’Keeffe (1887-1986) is best known for her flower and plant pictures, which show the flora tremendously enlarged and meticulously colored; and those who love this side of her art will have several months in 2009 during which to enjoy it. But O’Keeffe also did wonderful paintings of shells, of American Southwest landscapes, even of dried bones – and all of these are represented in the 2009 wall calendar as well. It’s a dozen views of aspects of an artist who was more versatile than even many of her admirers know.

     The celebratory calendar for The Metropolitan Opera 125^th Anniversary Season is beautiful in a different way, and will be a real treat for opera lovers. Long the preeminent opera house in the United States, and one of the world’s great venues for opera presentations, the Met has a storied history that cannot possibly be told in a mere 12 photos. But this calendar certainly gives it a try. From archival pictures of famous old productions (the black-and-white one of the gingerbread house used in Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel is a gem) to closeup, behind-the-scenes views of opera stars and splendid color photos of especially gorgeous stagings (the Rainbow Bridge for Wagner’s Das Rheingold is gorgeous), this is a calendar for opera fans to revel in day after day and month after month, while celebrating a century and a quarter of one of the most important American musical institutions.

     Desk or engagement calendars fill a different need from both day-to-day and wall calendars. Many have been supplanted by electronic organizers; but plenty of people still enjoy looking easily at a full week of plans or appointments. These calendars need to provide some room for writing while also, ideally, reflecting a person’s moods and interests. If your tastes run to Edgar Allan Poe, there is a particularly handsome 2009 calendar available that includes pictures by five famous illustrators: Aubrey Beardsley, Harry Clarke, Gustave Doré (some of whose famous illustrations for The Raven appear in the March pages), Edouard Manet (his pictures for The Raven are used in September), and Arthur Rackham. All the artists capture Poe’s dark moods and writings with consummate (if very different) skill, and this black-and-white desk calendar (with touches, appropriately, of red) also includes Poe quotations and notable Poe-related events (such as his date of death: October 7, 1849). Poe’s grotesqueries are not for everyone, so neither will this calendar be. But desk calendars can be a strong reflection of a person’s interests and thought patterns – and if yours are, like Poe’s, on the dark side, you will find them reinforced every day of every week by this well-crafted, spiral-bound, open-flat compendium of “mystery and imagination.”

(+++) ON THE WAY TO CHRISTMAS

The Nutcracker. Retold by Stephanie Spinner. Illustrated by Peter Malone. Knopf. $16.99.

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell! By Lucille Colandro. Illustrated by Jared Lee. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $5.99.

If Jesus Came to My House. By Joan G. Thomas. Illustrated by Lori McElrath-Eslick. Harper Blessings. $16.99.

     The Christmas season is nigh, and whether you celebrate it with gift-giving, music, religious observance or some combination of those elements, you can find books that will heighten your enjoyment of this special time of year. The Nutcracker has been a child-oriented Christmas-season ballet standard for more than 60 years, and its confectionary delights – including a second act set entirely in the Land of Sweets – continue to thrill and engage even very young children. Indeed, for many it is their first exposure to classical music, as well as to ballet. Stephanie Spinner’s abridged retelling of the story, for ages 4-8, dances lightly over much of the partying in the first act and the journey to Candyland at the start of the second, focusing on the magic of the wooden nutcracker coming to life and on the many sweets-related dances in Act II (whose total lack of drama disturbs music critics but rarely troubles audiences, especially those filled with children). Peter Malone’s illustrations have a lovely old-fashioned touch, and several reflect actual ways in which the ballet has been staged. And the book comes with a CD of a performance – not of the full ballet, but of much more than the more-often-heard Nutcracker Suite. It is an older recording, with Maurice Abravanel conducting the Utah Symphony, but the sound is fine and the chance for parents and children to cuddle with the book while hearing bits of the music makes the package, shortened and sweetened though it is, well-nigh irresistible.

     Young children will also enjoy the latest “Old Lady” collaboration between Lucille Colandro and Jared Lee: the seasonally focused There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell! Based, like the other Colandro-Lee books in this series, on the old song about the old woman who swallowed a fly, a spider, a bird, and so on, this entry has the old lady swallowing a bell, bows, gifts, even an entire sleigh (the picture of her doing that is especially enjoyable). She eventually swallows – what else? – flying reindeer, and that leads to a happy conclusion in which the old lady brings everything back up and heads off with Santa Claus. The premise of this book (and its predecessors) is odd enough so some children will likely ask, “Do you mean she threw up all of Santa’s gifts? Ewwwwww!!” But kids who don’t take things seriously will enjoy the whole absurd idea.

     Families that do take Christmas seriously, as a religious holiday, are the target audience for If Jesus Came to My House, which is set in warm weather but which these families will find appropriate at any time of year. Intended for ages 3-8, it is a fable about the young boy Jesus – about whom the New Testament says very little – visiting a modern little boy’s home, sitting in the rocking chair, playing with the cat and dog, hiding behind the stairs, and otherwise taking part in the boy’s everyday life. The book communicates a feeling of camaraderie and warmth, and in the first half, most of its preachiness is downplayed. For instance, the boy shows Jesus a hall corner where the shadows are sometimes scary: “I always have to hurry/ when I’m going past at night,/ but hand in hand with Jesus/ I’d be perfectly all right.” In the second half, the boy says he knows Jesus cannot actually come visit him this way – and the rest of the book communicates a more strongly religious message as it explains what can happen, including kneeling, praying, doing things to help other people, sharing, and so on. Parents who want young children to focus on the religious underpinnings of the Christmas season will find Joan G. Thomas’ book a gently insistent way of putting across their expectations for their families.

(+++) ANIMALS AND ADVENTURES

Warriors: Power of Three—Book Four: Eclipse. By Erin Hunter. HarperCollins. $16.99.

Warriors: Tigerstar & Sasha (Manga Book 1)—Into the Woods. Created by Erin Hunter. Written by Dan Jolley. Art by Don Hudson. Tokyopop/HarperCollins. $6.99.

The Porcupine Year. By Louise Erdrich. HarperCollins. $15.99.

     The world of Erin Hunter’s warrior cats continues to expand, not only as Hunter writes new stories but also as others adapt existing tales to new formats. The fourth book in the Warriors: Power of Three series picks up the tale of the three grandchildren of legendary ThunderClan leader Firestar: Lionpaw, Hollypaw and Jaypaw. At the end of the previous book, Outcast, Jaypaw finally decided to share with the other two the prophecy he had heard from the ghosts of their ancestors: “Three will come, kin of the cat with fire in his pelt, who hold the power of the stars in their paws.” In Eclipse, the three young cats, their knowledge and abilities still developing, know their destiny is crucial not only to ThunderClan but also to the three other Clans and the cats’ entire way of life. Yet the three apprentices take to their coming power quite differently. Lionpaw dreams of becoming undefeatable in battle – his is truly the way of the warrior. Hollypaw wishes to become a great Clan leader. And Jaypaw, the visionary of the trio, retains an inward focus, with visions not only of the true past but also of a future for all the Clans, including ShadowClan, RiverClan and WindClan as well as ThunderClan. As in all of Hunter’s books, threats emerge both from outside (the Clans are suddenly attacked, which has happened often before – but in a way with which they may not be able to cope) and from within (the warrior code itself is called into question). As always in the Warriors series, there are issues of power and loyalty, battle and romance, and the true meaning of strength. The watchword here – as it is in the Warriors books in general – is well expressed by one character: “Listen to your inner voices, to the instinct that in every other cat would merely help them find food or shelter. Who’s to say that in you, these instincts won’t help you achieve more?”

     Among the achievements of the Warriors series itself – not just the characters within it – may now be numbered the start of a new set of graphic novels, Warriors: Tigerstar & Sasha. In her introduction to Into the Woods, Erin Hunter explains that these books provide a chance to follow one of the byways of the series: the relationship that develops between Tigerstar and Sasha, the loner – even though Tigerstar had sworn himself the enemy of all cats outside the Clans. The graphic novel nicely handles the first meeting of Tigerstar and Sasha, an abandoned “kittypet” who has killed a frog near the border of ShadowClan’s domain, and who replies to Tigerstar’s warning to stay away, “You can keep your frogs, and anyway, who needs borders? There’s plenty of prey in the forest.” The growing relationship between the two cats, and the bad blood between ShadowClan and ThunderClan, form the basis of the narrative, which ends at a dramatic point – where the next book in the series is sure to pick up.

     The Porcupine Year, for ages 8-12, is a story of humans, not animals, although there is a porcupine in it – and the relationship between humans and animals is very much a part of it. Louise Erdrich’s book is her third about a young 19^th-century Ojibwe girl named Omakayas, and her family, following The Birchbark House (2000) and The Game of Silence (2006). The Porcupine Year is set in 1852, when Omakayas is 12, and follows her family after it is forced by the coming of white settlers to leave its home on the Island of the Golden Breasted Woodpecker. A porcupine that stumbles into the family’s life, pointing his nose toward the West, comes to symbolize the family’s journey, which Erdrich bases on her own family’s history. The book is nicely written and filled with warmth and traditional Native American values; readers of the two previous books will certainly enjoy it. But it does partake of what used to be called the fallacy of the “Noble Savage,” suggesting that the old ways are inevitably best and the new ones (and those who bring them) offer nothing but harm. This is a view as one-sided as that of the white settlers who so casually (and often brutally) displaced the Native Americans from their traditional lands. The hardships that Omakayas and her family face and overcome on their journey are well told, and the narrative of the way these troubles cement the family members’ relationships is heartfelt and believable. And the insights into Ojibwe culture – including a glossary and pronunciation guide to the Ojibwe language, offered as an appendix – are attractive. But the nearly unremitting nobility and steadfastness of Omakayas and her kin, even if it is based on fact (as interpreted by Erdrich as a descendant, of course), is finally rather hard to swallow, making the book a largely one-dimensional one, even for preteens.

(+++) PIANO PLEASANTRIES

Chopin: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2. Sa Chen, piano; Gulbenkian Orchestra Lisbon conducted by Lawrence Foster. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD plus bonus DVD).

Tchaikovsky: The Seasons; Sonata in C sharp minor, op. 80. Ilya Rachkovsky, piano. Naxos. $8.99.

     Not all piano music storms the heights; and even when the music is great, not all performances bring out all its nuances. Obvious observations, perhaps, but they are worth keeping in mind in considering these very fine but ultimately not compelling recent releases of 19^th-century piano works.

     The Chopin concertos are warhorses, and remain tremendously popular despite their formal shortcomings: the orchestra exists merely to introduce and showcase the piano; indeed, Chopin composed the concertos only because he felt that he had to in order to get his piano music played. This is why, after finishing both concertos in 1830, when he was 20 years old, he never wrote another. Chinese pianist Sa Chen, who is 28, gets the flavor of the concertos right and certainly handles them with youthful enthusiasm in their lengthy first movements and with a sort of wistfulness in their second ones – nothing profound in those slow movements, but plenty of tinges of romantic (and Romantic) yearning. The more martial sections of the first movements show Sa Chen at her best, keeping the piano forthrightly in the forefront of the music – abetted by very sensitive conducting by Lawrence Foster, who seems quite content to have the fine playing of the Gulbenkian Orchestra Lisbon take a back seat to the soloist. The two finales, though, are a touch lacking in both warmth and humor; that of Concerto No. 1(the second of the two composed, although not by much) seems particularly stilted. Sa Chen certainly knows how to get the notes right, and the bonus DVD that accompanies the SACD of the concertos shows her thoroughly involved in the recording of the slow movement of Concerto No. 1. But the DVD also hints at what is missing here, containing a 20-minute interview in which Sa Chen really has nothing much to say to set herself apart from other young, technically skilled pianists. She does not seem to have thought very much about the music, perhaps because playing it seems to come so naturally to her. But thoughtfulness, at least as much as technique, is what separates an excellent performance of these concertos from a fairly routine one. The SACD sound is excellent – PentaTone consistently does a superb job sonically – but the recording simply is not a particularly memorable one from a musical standpoint.

     Nor is Ilya Rachkovsky’s very well-played CD of Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons and his early (but posthumously published) Sonata in C sharp minor a disc to which many listeners are likely to turn again and again. The Seasons is pleasant but minor Tchaikovsky, written on commission for amateurs to perform. Its 12 movements, one for each month, contain many lovely moments (and some challenges for the amateur), but The Seasons is not a work of much substance and not one that gains depth through repeated hearings. Individual movements are enjoyable enough – the quiet “By the Fireside” for January and the hectic “The Hunt” for September, for example – and Rachkovsky handles the whole suite well; but this is simply not very substantial music. As for the sonata, it wants to be substantial music, but much of it (especially the outer movements) sounds derivative and does not lie particularly well on the piano. Written in 1865, when Tchaikovsky was 25, it is a work more interesting for its glimpses of the future than for anything inherent in itself. The most interesting look ahead is the Scherzo, which Tchaikovsky reused a year later as the third movement of his Symphony No. 1, “Winter Dreams” – although he wisely wrote a new Trio, the one in the sonata having little to recommend it. This sonata is a work that lovers of Tchaikovsky will surely want to hear – once in a while, anyway – but not one with significant inherent musical attractions.

(+++) WELL DONE, BUT WHY?

Wagner: Prelude and Liebestod from “Tristan und Isolde”; Berlioz: Love Scene from “Romeo et Juliette”; Tchaikovsky: Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture. Oregon Symphony conducted by James DePreist. Delos. $16.99.

Opera Gala: 35^th Anniversary Tribute to Delos Founder Amelia S. Haygood. Delos. $16.99.

     The music is excellent, the performances are fine, and the recordings are good; but sometimes, it is hard to understand why CDs have been released. The title of the latest one from James DePreist and the Oregon Symphony is “Tragic Lovers,” which means one piece devoted to Tristan and Isolde and two to Romeo and Juliet. But none of this music will be new to most listeners, and none of the interpretations is especially insightful, although all are all right – except for one wholly unnecessary slowdown in the middle of the Tchaikovsky, probably intended to communicate more emotion but actually merely ruining the music’s flow. The Oregon Symphony is a good orchestra that plays well for DePreist, its laureate music director. But it is not one of the world’s or nation’s very best, and simply shows on this CD that it can handle standard repertoire well. And the CD itself is short, at 54 minutes. There may be a specific business purpose to its release: the Oregon Symphony has a recording fund that partly paid for it. But why would a listener not affiliated with that orchestra and not strongly devoted to DePreist as a conductor select this CD for this repertoire? No reason is readily apparent.

     The reason for the existence of Opera Gala is spelled out in the remainder of this CD’s title: the recording is a celebration of 35 years of Delos, a fine California-based independent label that was founded by Amelia S. Haygood. The CD’s 15 tracks range from two to 11 minutes in length – the longest, surprisingly, is from the little-known Raffaello by Anton Arensky – and include music both from well-known works (I Pagliacci, Il Trovatore, Turandot) and from less-known ones (Tchaikovsky’s Oprichnik, Villa-Lobos’ Forest of the Amazon, Rimsky-Korsakov’s May Night). Among the performers are Dmitri Hvorostovsky, Renée Fleming, Vassily Gerello and Ewa Podleś. Most of the orchestras, like most of the singers, are Russian, including the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, Moscow Radio Symphony and Philharmonic of Russia. But what music lover will pay $17 for this compendium of all-over-the-map short pieces – and why? It certainly makes sense for Delos to celebrate Haygood, and this sampler CD certainly shows some of the strength of the Delos catalogue; but it is a sampler, the sort of thing that Delos might have considered giving away as a promotion (perhaps as a companion to some of its recent releases) – not the kind of CD that really justifies being sold, as a standalone disc, for full price.