(++++) TREASURABLE “TREASURIES”

My Bad: A “Zits” Treasury. By Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

Stop and Smell the Roses: A “Mutts” Treasury. By Patrick McDonnell. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

     Andrews McMeel “Treasury” collections are a great way to get a big dose of your favorite comic strips in larger-than-usual format – larger than you will find in most collections, and much larger than the increasingly diminutive size in which comics are being printed in what seem to be America’s rapidly vanishing newspapers. Strips whose art work is a big part of their charm, such as Zits and Mutts, do especially well in the oversize “Treasury” format, which strongly emphasizes the visual quality of the strips. In Zits, for example, the multiple piercings of Jeremy’s friend Pierce show up in all their oddly shaped glory in My Bad. The 12 poses in which Jim Borgman draws Jeremy’s girlfriend, Sara, dancing – contrasted with Jeremy standing stock-still on the dance floor – come through with great clarity here, as do Sara’s many expressions as she moves to the music. A Sunday sequence in which Borgman illustrates how much mental space Jeremy takes up in the mind of his mom, Connie, is hilarious – and poignant – in drawings that show the 15-year-old crawling out of his mother’s ear. But excellent drawing without top-notch writing does not make an outstanding comic strip, and Zits is outstanding. Jerry Scott (who also writes the differently but equally wonderful Baby Blues) comes up with dialogue that fits the parents-raising-teenager scenario perfectly. For example, Jeremy objects to a 10-minute wait for Connie to pick him up because “ten minutes is a larger percentage of life at my age than it is at yours.” Pierce finds out the high school has a dress code that he is not violating, and is upset because “I hate it when I inadvertently conform.” After the school year ends, Jeremy suggests to his mom, “This summer why don’t you assume that I’ll procrastinate and I’ll assume that you’re ticked off at me? That way, you won’t have to nag and I won’t have to wonder if I’m in trouble” – and Connie is worried because “that almost makes sense.” In fact, a lot of things in Zits almost make sense – both in the writing and in the often-surrealistic art. When Jeremy and Sara call each other names (“immature,” “chicken,” “pig” and so on), the dialogue has the ring of reality, and the drawings – which show the characters changing into whatever they are called – add hilarity. It is this sort of thing that makes Zits a treasure of a strip – even more so in “Treasury” format.

     Mutts is precious, too, in both senses of the word: valuable and almost a little too sweet. Patrick McDonnell both write and draws the strip, so it is clearly 100% what he wants it to be; and what he wants is the most animal-friendly comic around, involving not only domestic creatures but also wild ones (such as tigers and other endangered species) and semi-wild ones (suburban denizens such as squirrels). McDonnell’s art, with its clean lines and abundant white space, is something of a throwback, and it is clear from the cartoonist’s introductory Sunday panels – which often pay loving tribute to great comics and “high art” of the past – that this is exactly how he wants his comic to look. McDonnell frequently gives his central characters, Earl the dog and Mooch the cat, week-long or even longer adventures, although they are not very adventurous in a traditional sense – instead, they are explorations of topics from a variety of angles. In Stop and Smell the Roses, for example, Earl and Mooch try to figure out how to hibernate; quotations from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Evelyn Waugh and others are used as reflections on Valentine’s Day and the animal-human relationship; other quotations (from Albert Einstein, John Muir and others) are used to reflect on “Earth Days”; a beach vacation features the ever-irascible Crabby the crab; and so on. Mixed in with these multi-day sequences are single-day jokes, such as a Sunday strip in which Mooch gets an “arm extender” so he can reach items on high shelves and knock them off, and a weekday strip each of whose three panels represents one-third of a sofa over which one of Mooch’s alleged owners (one never really owns a cat) is climbing to search for the exercise DVD that Mooch has hidden. Other strips feature Mooch as “the Shphinx” that “sees all, knows all”; McDonnell’s regular “Shelter Stories” sequence that encourages adoption by having animals plead their case directly to comics readers; Bip and Bop, the squirrels who constantly bonk other characters with acorns; and plenty of warmth-filled lines, such as the perpetually chained-up but nevertheless sweet Guard Dog’s thought, “The chain’s around my neck, not my heart.” McDonnell lays things on a touch too thickly at times, but the strips that cloy are more than compensated for by the ones that amaze – such as a Sunday sequence of Earl and Mooch riding a toy car through all sorts of far-flung landscapes, ending up in what can only be Coconino County from George Herriman’s famed Krazy Kat. McDonnell knows his history, his art, his characters and his readers, making Stop and Smell the Roses a very worthwhile stopping point indeed.

(++++) OUTDOOR DOINGS

A Garden of Opposites. By Nancy Davis. Schwartz & Wade. $10.99.

The Bug Book and Bug Bottle. By Hugh Danks, Ph.D. Workman. $13.95.

     A thoroughly charming way to teach young children the concept of words with opposite meanings, A Garden of Opposites uses familiar outdoor sights, plus drawings somewhat reminiscent of the work of Lois Ehlert, to showcase differences. “Short,” for example, is a squiggly bug that looks a bit like a slug, except with tiny legs, while “long” is a snake – same basic shape. “Big” is a huge green beetle, “small” a six-spotted ladybug. “Dull” is a trowel, “sharp” a pair of garden shears. Nancy Davis gives kids more chances to think things through than do many authors of “opposites” books. At the end, for example, a little girl stands in a garden, holding a jar that contains butterflies, and the word is “in.” It takes a moment’s thought to realize that the word refers to the insects in the jar. Fold out the full-page flap – the only flap in the book – and the word becomes “out,” as the girl releases the butterflies and runs happily through the grass as they fly away. That foldout also contains a challenge to find other opposites – a nice way to end a book that teaches an important concept and then gives young readers a chance to find out for themselves whether they have understood it.

     And speaking of bugs and gardens, The Bug Book and Bug Bottle is a delightful hands-on exploration tool for any budding entomologist (author Hugh Danks is one) – or just for kids who want a closer look at the innumerable insects that live all around us. The kit – packed in a sturdy, nicely designed, cylindrical plastic bottle – includes the bottle itself, a magnifying glass, a 110-page book with information on 47 common insects and suggestions on how to catch and care for them, a bug identification chart, and a small journal for taking notes on these denizens of the backyard. Well illustrated and packed with information, the kit explains exactly what bugs are and discusses their extreme importance to the environment. The instructions in the book are straightforward and easy to follow: “”Make the bug feel at home. Create a miniature habitat… Any bug found feeding on a leaf should be given the same kind of leaf.” There are, of course, admonitions to avoid bugs that can hurt you – there is a special symbol to show which ones those are. And there is interesting information on every insect mentioned. For example, “the leafhopper uses a sucking tube to feed on sugary plant juices, which pass rapidly through its body. The bug converts the sugar it doesn’t use into a sweet liquid called honeydew; it drops this liquid onto plant leaves, where ants and other insects eat it.” Danks shows kids where to find bugs beyond their yard, too: in fields, woods, at a pond and elsewhere. The identification chart is easy to carry (it folds neatly into the bottle or fits in a pocket), and its full-color pictures make it simple to use. The “bug journal,” with spaces to write about bugs and draw pictures of them, is a nice touch. And the bottle even has a measuring tool on top, in both inches and centimeters. The Bug Book and Bug Bottle is a clever, scientifically accurate and easy-to-use introductory guide to a large number of fascinating creatures – and a great thing to give children who are trying to figure out what to do outside during the spring and summer.

(++++) SF OF THE MIND AND BODY

Genesis. By Bernard Beckett. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $20.

The Repossession Mambo. By Eric Garcia. Harper. $7.99.

     Brain adventures can, in the right hands, be far more exciting than body adventures, even in the SF field. Bernard Beckett’s Genesis is a book in which very little actually happens, except to a limited extent in flashbacks; yet it is a tremendously stimulating short novel that raises complex and profound questions about human beings, intelligence (artificial and otherwise), power and numerous other subjects. It is far and away a better book than the very good but much more typical chase-scene-filled The Repossession Mambo, although Eric Garcia’s novel would translate much more readily into a film (and will: a movie is already in the works).

     Genesis is the story of Anaximander, who has applied to admission to an extremely powerful and highly secretive organization called The Academy that stands at the pinnacle of her society. The book follows, hour by hour, her four-hour entrance examination, which consists of answering intense and probing questions posed by a three-member panel while presenting an extended thesis on her chosen subject. That subject is Adam Forde, a long-dead progenitor of the current society who, even though he died at age 19, made decisions with consequences that have continued to reverberate until Anaximander’s time. The nature of those decisions, the reasons Adam made them, and their importance, are revealed only gradually as Anaximander presents her arguments and analyses to The Academy, whose society was built on the ruins of one that attempted to implement in the real world Plato’s philosophy-based Republic from ancient Greece. Anaximander must explain to The Academy – and to readers – how that prior society worked and why it failed, and how Adam played a major role in its undoing. Then she must explain Adam’s punishment for what may or may not have been a crime: to interact on a 24-hour-a-day basis with a failed (or at least incomplete) experiment in artificial intelligence, a mobile being known as Art. Beckett, a genetics researcher as well as a novelist, knows exactly what he is doing in choosing names such as Adam and Art – and Anaximander, who in our world was a Greek philosopher with a strong belief that nature, like human societies, is ruled by laws, and that anything that disturbs the balance of nature does not last long. It is entirely in line with the real Anaximander’s teachings to discover that the fictional Republic of Genesis failed by disturbing the balance of nature. But what of the fictional Anaximander’s own society – one in which, by the way, her tutor is named Pericles? How does The Academy preserve it? Does it preserve it? And what was the true genesis of Anaximander’s society, and how does it relate to the differences and similarities between human and artificial intelligence? In fact, what exactly are those differences? These are disquieting questions, and Beckett’s answers (and refusals to answer) are more disquieting still. Genesis is an intense intellectual exercise that is not for the psychically or emotionally squeamish. So little seems to happen in it, in the sense of present-tense action; but so much of greater importance takes place that this is one of those novels that continue to resonate long after they are over.

     In contrast, The Repossession Mambo is nothing but action. It started as a short story and has also existed as a screenplay, and it is easy to see how it could become a slam-bang action film, maybe even (if well enough made) a cult classic along the lines of Blade Runner or Minority Report, both of which it strongly resembles. This is not a book that will stay with you after you finish it, but it is one of those thrill-a-minute rides that offer plenty of excitement while they endure. The “repo” here is not of cars but of bodily organs: the underlying assumption is that, in the near future, you can replace just about anything with a nearly indestructible artificial copy, provided you pay (and pay and pay and pay) for the replacement. Payment goes to an organization called the Credit Union, and if you balk or go broke or stop paying for any reason whatsoever, a Bio-Repo agent comes after you and cuts you open, pulls out the organ in question, and leaves you very dead. The book is the story of a top-notch Bio-Repo man named Remy, who has gone through five marriages, been knocked unconscious four times, is distanced (deservedly, as it turns out) from his one child (by his third wife), and is very good at what he does – until he finds himself a target for bio-repossession of his artiforg (artificial organ), his heart. “Let’s face it: Anyone who keeps knocking back the booze even after they’ve been fitted with an artiforg doesn’t deserve a whole lot of dignity in death,” opines Remy early on, in what passes for introspection. Later, when he is twelfth on the Hundred Most Wanted List and fleeing for his life, he gains no significant additional insight, although at one point he does say he has learned “to see color in a world that used to be so perfectly black-and-white.” But as Remy chronicles his life on the run (using an old manual typewriter, of all things), readers do learn more and more about the culture of Bio-Repo agents – not only the rough camaraderie but also the tremendous potential for abuse of trust, which in Remy’s case has to do with his best friend, Jake, who (in the tradition of many stories of this type) ends up being assigned to hunt Remy down. The twists and turns here are expertly done, although mostly to be expected; the novel gets a (+++) rating as a fast and furious read packed with considerable intensity – even though its plot and all its characters ultimately turn out to be forgettable.

(++++) PERIODS OF ADJUSTMENT

The Secret Lives of Boys: Inside the Raw Emotional World of Male Teens. By Malina Saval. Basic Books. $25.95.

The First Year: Autism Spectrum Disorders—An Essential Guide for the Newly Diagnosed Child. By Nancy D. Wiseman. Da Capo. $16.95.

     Ten boys in ten chapters. “Madolescence” as shorthand for “male adolescence.” Chapters called “The Mini-Adult,” “The Sheltered One,” “The Rich Kid” and “The Gay, Vegan, Hearing-Impaired Republican.” It is almost as if Malina Saval wants not to be taken seriously. But The Secret Lives of Boys is a very serious book indeed, and its content is much better than some of the excesses of its presentation. Saval profiles 10 boys ages 14 to 19, largely in their own words but with plenty of connecting copy and interpretation. The boys’ own comments are by far the most valuable thing here. “The Rich Kid,” 18-year-old Preston, was clinically depressed a couple of years ago and “started viewing myself as a tortured artist and I looked up to quote-unquote other tortured artists like David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Robin Williams, and Tom Cruise.” This is a much better and more interesting revelation than the oh-so-superior reaction of Saval, who has an MFA degree from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts: “That he considers Tom Cruise a ‘tortured artist’ could be the most curious discovery of my fact-finding mission on the secret lives of boys. I can do nothing to mask my visible disappointment.” But, see, this is not, or is not supposed to be, a book about Saval, and it is a much better book to the extent that she keeps out of it and lets the boys reveal what they choose to about themselves, their worldviews, their opinions, their fears and worries. Christopher, the 17-year-old “Gay, Vegan, Hearing-Impaired Republican,” comments, “I don’t have a lot of experience with people bashing me because I’m gay, and my hearing impairment might have something to do with that. Those who do approach me are those who wouldn’t be inclined to believe those misconceptions about deaf people anyway, so I get a ‘purer,’ if you will, crop of friends.” Aziz, a 17-year-old practicing Muslim whom Saval labels “The Average American Kid,” talks about the importance of fitting in: “If you want to avoid the stereotyping, you have to mesh as much as you can, but without losing your entire identity. This goes for everyone, regardless of religion. It’s a delicate balance. Also, if you want to be social, don’t go home at 2:30 after school. Join a club. Join a sports team. The key is to get involved.” Tyrone, who at 19 is a father and has been to prison for drug possession, says, “I kind of fight myself a lot to change a lot of things. I’m sure there is a way out, but when you grew up seeing one thing, that’s kind of what you move towards.” The boys’ comments in The Secret Lives of Boys are far more revealing, interesting and sometimes even profound than Saval’s heavy-handed analysis and the predictable remarks by psychiatrists and other adults. It would be a mistake to think that Saval’s book provides good generalized insight into today’s teenagers – she has chosen her subjects far too carefully for that, as she tries to include one of every “type” she can while insisting that these boys are not “types” at all. But what is so good in this book is the chance to hear a variety of different teens, from a variety of different backgrounds, facing some similar challenges and many different ones, and handling them (for the most part) with much greater maturity and thoughtfulness than most media coverage of teenage boys would lead a reader to expect. Yes, the boys’ comments are edited and arranged by Saval, but enough comes through of these teens’ personalities to show that they are all seeking ways to handle the difficulties of their lives and to move past the tough times into what each hopes will be a better future – however defined.

     One boy in Saval’s book, 16-year-old Nicholas, called “The Troublemaker,” turns out to have ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) with “signs” of ODD (oppositional defiant disorder). A diagnosis of this sort can follow a child throughout life, affecting his or her ability to get jobs and health care and resulting in a world in which the child is thought of as if the disease defines him or her. This is even truer when a child is diagnosed with autism or a related condition – the subject of the newest entry in The First Year series. Nancy D. Wiseman, founder and president of a nonprofit group called First Signs, Inc., that focuses on educating parents and professionals about early signs of autism and similar disorders, takes parents step by step through the difficulties associated with understanding autism and helping a child who has it. Wiseman clearly knows this subject inside out – perhaps too well for many parents, for whom even the hint of this diagnosis is likely to be frightening enough without all the detail that Wiseman provides. For example, Wiseman explains that it is important to rule out other possible diagnoses in order to be sure that a child does indeed have autism. She then lists 20 disorders to be ruled out, ranging from early-onset childhood bipolar disorder to Fragile X syndrome, Landau-Kleffner syndrome and selective mutism. Just reading the list and going to the book’s glossary to find out what the disorders are may prove overwhelming for worried parents. In another section, about obtaining services under the federally funded Early Intervention program for infants and toddlers with disabilities, Wiseman says “the process is quite simple” for obtaining help – and then gives a 14-point list of things that have to happen, several of which are acronym-heavy and complex. In reality, it is complex, time-consuming, difficult and potentially overwhelming to try to understand autism and related conditions, to accept this type of diagnosis for your child, to understand the lifelong implications for the child and the rest of the family, and to try to develop a treatment program. The complexity of Wiseman’s book is thus in large part a reflection of the complexity of the situation. Certainly it is helpful that she addresses such realities as the financial burden of caring for an autistic child – although the figure of “easily upwards of $70,000 a year” will likely only upset families even more than they already are. Likewise, her chart of treatments and goals is well-designed and carefully organized – but parents facing its subdivision into five categories with a total of 29 treatment elements, each with three goals, will likely cringe. Wiseman deserves great credit for pulling together so much information on such a difficult subject. Parents dealing with a child’s autism will find a great deal of highly useful information here. But this may not be the best place for parents facing such a diagnosis to go first, since the matter-of-fact, even clinical tone – while wholly appropriate for the information being disseminated – will likely to be off-putting to families already facing deep and severe distress.

(++++) OPERATIC RESCUES

Beethoven: Fidelio. Andrew Kennedy, Lisa Milne, Brindley Sherratt, Anja Kampe, Peter Coleman-Wright, Nathan Vale, Anthony Cleverton, Torsten Kerl, Henry Waddington; Glyndebourne Chorus and London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder. Glyndebourne. $29.99 (2 CDs).

Wagner: Lohengrin. Kwangchul Youn, Johan Botha, Adrianne Pieczonka, Falk Struckmann, Petra Lang, Eike Wilm Schulte; Prague Chamber Choir, NDR Chorus, NDR Radio Choir Cologne and WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne conducted by Semyon Bychkov. Profil. $50.99 (3 SACDs).

     In one of those ironies with which the operatic world is rife, the greatest surviving example of French rescue opera is in German. Beethoven’s Fidelio follows its formula closely, and in the wrong hands comes across as rigid: Leonore, disguised as Fidelio, is perfectly pure and the epitome of wifely duty; Florestan, imprisoned for boldly stating some never-identified beliefs that put him at odds with authority, is perfectly put-upon and a supremely devoted husband; Don Pizarro, Florestan’s enemy, is evil simply because he is evil; and Don Fernando represents mercy from the king because kings are supposed to be merciful. It takes really committed performers to break through these emotional straitjackets, and the new, live Glyndebourne recording is fortunate to have that sort of commitment at all levels. Anja Kampe brings fire and fervor to the role of Leonore/Fidelio – and also shows a touching vulnerability that is missing in other sopranos’ handling of the role, notably when she thinks she recognizes her chained and emaciated husband but is not quite sure. Torsten Kerl is appropriately distraught and subject to moments of alternating hope and fear as Florestan, although his voice is too strong to be that of a long-imprisoned, nearly starved victim (a flaw more in the role than in his handling of it). Henry Waddington is a forceful, upstanding Don Fernando, and Brindley Sherratt makes Rocco a far more human and humane jailer than in most productions – he is not merely following orders; he is trying to figure out why he must. The one significant weakness here is Peter Coleman-Wright’s portrayal of Don Pizarro, and this seems to be more a flaw in the recording than in his singing. There is something pinched in the audio when Coleman-Wright sings – his boasts and his hatred of Florestan sound as if they are being sung well but are curiously muffled, as if he is placed farther from the microphones than any other solo singer. Indeed, there are other recording oddities, such as sound effects that are much too loud for the music (knocking on a door during the overture, stage movements during the march in Act I). Nevertheless, this Fidelio packs an emotional punch, and the Glyndebourne Chorus is particularly good. Mark Elder has an excellent sense of pacing, making the opera into a unified whole rather than a series of episodes through well-chosen and well-contrasted tempos. And kudos to Glyndebourne for including the complete libretto, with translations into English, French and Italian side-by-side with the original German.

     The full libretto is included with the new Profil recording of Lohengrin, too, but it is arranged oddly: the entire German text is offered, followed later in the booklet by the entire English translation, and still later by a version in French. This makes following the opera’s progress line by line difficult if you are not fluent in German – but it is one of the few flaws in an otherwise excellent production, presented in really top-notch SACD sound. Lohengrin is a rescue opera in its own right, but formulaic it decidedly is not. There is considerable complexity in this story, even though Wagner was just 35 when he wrote it. It requires multiple levels of suspension of disbelief: the audience must, among other things, accept trial by combat as an accurate way to assess truth, and move willingly into a world in which perfect obedience and restraint are the only ways to ensure what has the potential to be an ideal marriage. Preventing Lohengrin from seeming a mere fairy tale is by no means easy, but Semyon Bychkov’s knowing conducting goes a long way toward doing so by letting the music sweep listeners inexorably into the story. And the singers really inhabit their roles. Adrianne Pieczonka manages to make Elsa simultaneously naïve and strong, even though she fails the ultimate test that Lohengrin poses. Johan Botha sings the title role with power and majesty – his ardor seems genuine, making his necessary abandonment of Elsa at the end all the more tragic. Petra Lang’s rich mezzo-soprano turns Ortrud into a force to be reckoned with, and it is scarcely surprising that Falk Struckmann as Friedrich is badgered and ultimately overwhelmed by his wife’s sheer power. Add a stately performance by Kwangchul Youn as King Henry and some powerfully declamatory singing by Eike Wilm Schulte as the King’s Herald, and the result is a Lohengrin that rarely flags throughout its three-and-a-half hours (it is, happily, presented uncut). Excellent choral work and fine playing by the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne abet the strong solo performances to produce an interpretation that effectively mixes Wagnerian power with a very human sense of pathos.

(++++) SECOND ACTS

Janáček: Orchestral Suites from the Operas, Volume 2—Kát’a Kabanová; The Makropulos Affair. New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Breiner. Naxos. $8.99.

D’Indy: Orchestral Works, Volume 2—Symphony No. 2; Tableaux de voyage; Karadec. Iceland Symphony Orchestra conducted by Rumon Gamba. Chandos. $18.99.

     These second volumes in series devoted to particular composers’ orchestral works continue and expand upon the promise of the first entries. Peter Breiner is in the midst of a three-volume set of orchestral suites he has assembled from Leoš Janáček’s operas, and here as in the first volume (which included Jenůfa and The Excursions of Mr. Brouček) he shows himself to be an adept arranger and a fine conductor of his countryman’s music. The suites this time are arranged a bit differently from those in the first volume. The one from the tragic Kát’a Kabanová more or less follows the action of the story, as did both suites in the earlier volume, although here Breiner’s choice of multiple excerpts that include the work’s ominous eight-note timpani strikes makes the suite even darker and more claustrophobic than the opera itself. This is a deliberate decision on Breiner’s part and is certainly not a flaw, but it gives the suite an intensity and strong focus that the somewhat more sprawling opera lacks. The suite from The Makropulos Affair is a bit more problematic, since here Breiner substantially deviates from the opera’s sequence in order to fashion a more dramatic work – and one which, incidentally, also emphasizes ominous timpani strokes, which the composer used frequently in his operas (but more sparingly than it would seem from the music Breiner selects). Listeners unfamiliar with The Makropulos Affair, and even many who know the opera, will not be bothered by Breiner’s decision here to create a suite with as much cohesion as this one has: it begins with a sense of glory for central character Emilia Marty (Elina Makropulos) in her long-ago days as an opera singer – a musical element that appears near the end of the opera, as a sort of flashback – and ends with a different sort of triumph when Emilia rejects a potion to extend her long life further and decides to die naturally. Thus, the suite both begins and ends with music from the opera’s conclusion, with various elements of the story sandwiched in between. Breiner’s approach to all these suites, which involves using originally vocal material converted into purely orchestral form, results in a kind of “opera without words” that effectively conveys much of the power of Janáček’s writing. The fine playing of the New Zealand Symphony adds to the suites’ effectiveness.

     New Zealanders playing Czech music and the Iceland Symphony beautifully handling some very French works – orchestras are nothing if not international in orientation these days. Conductors, too: Rumon Gamba is British, but his feeling for Vincent d’Indy’s music is strong and intuitive. Last year’s first volume of Gamba’s survey of d’Indy’s orchestral works included Jour d’été à la montagne, La Forêt enchantée and Souvenirs, showing d’Indy both in his musical maturity and in his earlier phase, when he was heavily influenced by Wagner. In the second d’Indy volume the whole orientation is Romantic, with the latest work here – Symphony No. 2 in B-flat – dating to 1903, but being constructed very strongly on mid-to-late-19^th-century lines. This is a big symphony and a very well-made one, with a huge number of tempo changes within movements (d’Indy was a stickler for such things) and considerable use of leitmotif-like mottos that recur and are developed skillfully. The symphony often sounds darker and more sinister than its B-flat major tonality would indicate, thanks in part to d’Indy’s choice of instrumentation – the melancholy solo viola in the third movement, for example. This is not a forward-looking work – d’Indy was as conservative musically as he was in his strict Catholic theology – but rather is a strong assertion of the importance of maintaining structural ideals in the face of the rise of Impressionism and other post-Romantic trends. Gamba takes the work at face value – it is not, in the final analysis, argumentative – and presents it with a pleasing mixture of fervor and dignity. He does very well with the two earlier, smaller works on this CD, too. Tableaux de voyage is an 1892 arrangement for orchestra of six pieces from a 13-piece set for piano that d’Indy wrote in 1889. Largely solemn in mood, the work expresses d’Indy’s feelings during hikes through Germany’s Black Forest and Tyrol regions. The sound here is sometimes simple, notably in a Schubertian trumpet melody in a section called “La Poste,” but d’Indy’s frequent forays into minor keys, and his sophistication in repeatedly recalling earlier themes during later sections, give the work a level of gravitas. This is notably lacking in Karadec, a lovely little suite for small orchestra that d’Indy composed in 1890 based on his music for a play by André Alexandre. By turns martial, gentle and jaunty, and always melodious, Karadec provides a fine encore-like conclusion to a CD that otherwise leans toward d’Indy’s serious side – and will make listeners eager to hear more of the music of this underperformed composer.

(++++) BOARD BOOKS AND BEYOND

Pajama Mamas. By Kate Spohn. Random House. $4.99.

Momnesia: A Humorous Guide to Surviving Your Post-Baby Brain. By Shannon Payette Seip & Adrienne Hedger. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

The Wonderful Man. By Edward Monkton. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

I See Stupid People and They Are Getting on My Last Nerve! By Cheryl Caldwell. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

     A revelation: when board books grow up, they become…gift books! Short, small-format books for the youngest children that convey basic emotions and information become short, small-format, easy-to-read books that convey expressions of concern and a little humor to lighten the toils of everyday adult life.

     If you doubt this, start with the lovely Pajama Mamas board book by Kate Spohn to get an idea of the basics of this form of expression. Here are mothers and babies in matching or complementary bedtime clothing, with very simple six-word statements for each mom-and-baby pair. For example, one right-hand page says, “Strum strum Mama,” opposite a picture of a mother playing a guitar; open the right-hand page – the entire page is a flap – and you see baby smilingly sleeping, with the words, “Hum hum baby.” Another right-hand page says, “Happy hug Mama,” opposite a picture of a mom in flowered pajamas holding a baby whose nightcap sprouts antennae; again, open the flap that is the right-hand page, and there is blissful baby with the words, “Happy bug baby.” This is a gentle and lovely little bedtime book for ages 2-4.

     But how about a book for the moms? Well, that’s where the grown-up version of a board book comes in, in the form of Shannon Payette Seip and Adrienne Hedger’s Momnesia. There’s a lot more text here than in a board book for babies, but not too much, because women with momnesia wouldn’t be able to follow all those words – so allege the authors. In fact, when “a mommy with momnesia attempts to explain momnesia,” she rouses herself from exhaustion only long enough to get distracted from the topic. The authors, whose previous work was a humorous book about breastfeeding, remind moms that even if a baby has taken “your brain, your milk, and all your time,” at least he or she hasn’t taken the hairdresser’s phone number, Internet connection or extra-strength Tylenol (but just wait until that baby gets older!). Unfortunately, Seip and Hedger point out that babies do not take your credit-card debt, upper-leg cellulite or premature gray hairs. Throughout this little book, using bright colors, engaging design and amusing illustrations (as any good board book should), the authors offer ideas about “what to do if you start crying in public for no logical reason,” “times when it’s good to be in a fog,” and “times not to fall asleep,” and they provide multi-cartoon-panel looks at nights and mornings in Mommyland, plus a couple of pages of “proof you were once smart.” No flaps here, but women with momnesia would probably just tear them out anyway, then wonder where they came from.

     Even closer in appearance to board books for adults – they are just about the same size as most board books for kids – are The Wonderful Man and I See Stupid People. The first of these could make a good companion for (or antidote to) Momnesia. It is the latest little gift book from “Edward Monkton” – pen name of British poet Giles Andreae – and includes his usual mixture of uplift and fairy-tale silliness. The man of the title is just an ordinary male, not a with-it singer or built-up beach bum or wealthy limousine owner with “a ladyfriend with overly large BREASTS and overly tight outfits.” The ordinary man is one thing those other people are not, though: he is nice, and that includes being nice to the very people who are not nice to him. And so he is rejected, reviled and abandoned by the world – just kidding! This is a Monkton book! What happens is that “small WISPS” of the ordinary man’s niceness – that is, NICENESS – spread “like seeds in the wind” and cause “twinges of NICENESS” in the impressive-but-not-nice people, who become so happy with their changed natures that they call the ordinary man “The WONDERFUL Man.” Hey…it’s a fairy tale. It will be a little too one-dimensional and silly to please either ordinary or impressive men, but it’s cute enough and well-meaning enough for a (+++) rating.

     I See Stupid People gets a (+++) rating as well. It is an often-clever rant about the office and work in general, with delightfully ragged illustrations, but Cheryl Caldwell does not seem to realize how cliché-ridden her writing frequently is: “”How can I miss you if you won’t go away?” “I’ll help you out. Which way did you come in?” Luckily, not all her writing is like that. “You inquire about [co-workers’] lives: So when’s the Wizard going to get back to you about that brain?” “Some people are like Slinkies – not really good for much, but you can’t help but smile when you see one tumble down the stairs.” On balance, I See Stupid People is childish and petulant and sometimes very funny – sort of an anti-board book, or a testament to how inadequate the niceness of children’s board books can be for adults confronted with the everyday pressures that grown-ups face.

(++++) EXPLORATIONS

Down, Down, Down: A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea. By Steve Jenkins. Houghton Mifflin. $17.

What’s Inside? Fascinating Structures Around the World. By Giles Laroche. Houghton Mifflin. $17.

     Here are some real-world journeys that are every bit as fascinating and surprising as most fictional ones. Down, Down, Down proceeds exactly as its title indicates: Steve Jenkins starts with a view of Earth from space, then drops to a level just above the Pacific Ocean, and then – after showing what sorts of sea creatures live near the surface (and even move into the air occasionally), he begins the long journey to the deepest spot in the ocean, almost 36,000 feet down. Near the surface, where “the water is warm and brightly lit by the sun,” we encounter familiar-looking sea creatures, accurately portrayed in Jenkins’ drawings. By a depth of 33 feet, sunlight is fading and water pressure increasing, but still the dwellers are familiar: tuna, sailfish, sea turtles and more. At 10 times that depth, though, light is far less and water pressure is 10 times what it is at the surface; here, soft, fluid-filled animals such as jellyfish thrive. Go down twice again as far, to 660 feet, and “there is not enough light for plants to survive – only animals live below this depth,” a surprising revelation for anyone who thinks of plant and animal life as inextricably intertwined. And now the denizens get stranger – this is where the goblin shark and snipe eel are found. And down, down, down readers go, encountering ever-weirder creatures as the waters become darker and the pressure vastly more intense. “Nine out of ten animals that live below the sunlit layer of the ocean are bioluminescent,” Jenkins explains – a fascinating statistic, and just one of many here. The deeper we explore, the more peculiar sea life is: the huge-mouthed pelican eel, the deep-sea jellyfish that resembles a flying saucer, the female hairy angler with a glowing lure at the end of a stalk that sticks out from her head, the small but huge-toothed loosejaw stoplight fish, and many others. Then we reach the weird layer of ooze 13,000 feet below the surface, called the abyssal plain – as strange a place as any imagined planet in science fiction, yet it is right here on Earth. And there is still more, for even in the deepest part of the ocean, an area still virtually unexplored, there is known to be life. This is a truly extraordinary tale, scientifically accurate yet as fascinating as a work of fiction, and with five pages of additional details on the animals portrayed in the book at the end – for young readers captivated by this amazing visit to the world far beneath our feet.

     There are amazements on the surface of Earth, too, and Giles Laroche explores some of them in What’s Inside? Laroche shows the outside of places both well-known (King Tut’s tomb, the Parthenon) and less familiar (the arched Puerta del Sol, through which one enters Toledo, Spain). And these are not merely monuments: Laroche takes readers inside a Shaker dairy barn in Massachusetts, a circus tent, and the Petronas Twin Towers in Malaysia, in each case not only showcasing the structure but also discussing the people who built it and the ones who use it today. So we learn that in the ship-shaped Georgia Aquarium, built in landlocked Atlanta, visitors can walk along a 100-foot-long glass tunnel that makes them feel as if they are under the sea. We discover that the Sydney Opera House, that Australian city’s most distinctive landmark, took 12 years to build because of the complexity of architect John Utzon’s design. We find out that the castle of Segovia, where Queen Isabella once lived, is the model for the castle at Disneyland. We discover that the temple of Kukulcan at Chichen Itza, Mexico, has four stairways, each with 91 steps – which, added to the single step at the top, makes a total of 365, the number of days in a year. Packed with pleasantly presented information and accurately rendered drawings, and offering an illustrated glossary of architectural terms at the end, What’s Inside? provides a fascinating journey through some remarkable buildings and places. An insider’s guide, you might say.

(++++) A MAJOR UNKNOWN SYMPHONIST

Rued Langgaard: Symphonies Nos. 1-16 (including two versions of No. 5); Drapa (On the Death of Edvard Grieg); Sphinx; Hvidbjerg-Drapa; Danmarks Radio; Res absùrda!? Danish National Vocal Ensemble, Danish National Choir and Danish National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Thomas Dausgaard. Dacapo. $69.99 (7 SACDs).

     Ostracized by the Danish musical establishment, unappreciated by audiences elsewhere in Europe even when his works could get a hearing, his career derailed by World War I after a promising symphonic debut performance in Berlin in 1913, Rued Langgaard (1893-1952) spent essentially his whole career as an outsider. He brought part of this on himself, clinging defiantly to a largely Romantic view of music in which tonality remained important and music represented a reaching for something extramusical and somehow purer and finer. But much of what happened to Langgaard was a function of rapid changes in 20^th-century tastes and expectations rather than a commentary on the quality of his music. The evidence for this lies in Langgaard’s 17 symphonies, which are numbered 1-16 and which include a piano concerto and a six-minute work. Langgaard’s musical language may have been largely tonal, but his approach to the word “symphony” most emphatically was not.

     Between 1998 and 2008, Thomas Dausgaard recorded all the Langgaard symphonies and a few of his shorter orchestral works, and the totality of this production is now available as a boxed set. This will likely be a limited-interest issue, but it deserves to be more than that. For Langgaard, although he certainly has flaws, was an important 20^th-century symphonist. His works have all the variety of the symphonies of Shostakovich – and are just as lacking in obvious musical progression from start to finish (in contrast to those of, say, Mahler). And Langgaard pushed the boundaries of symphonic form so far as to make listeners question the very definition of the word “symphony,” and thus to wonder about the importance of this major musical form in the 20^th century and beyond.

     The longest of Langgaard’s symphonies is his first, which runs a full hour and dates to 1908-11 – it was completed when the composer was just 17. Subtitled “Klippepastoraler” (“Mountain Pastorals”), it feels in part like an extended tone poem (think of Richard Strauss’ slightly later “Alpine Symphony”) and in part like a series of five interconnected tone poems. This symphony is somewhat overinflated and overlong. The first and longest movement, subtitled “Surf and Glimpses of Sun,” would stand well on its own as a Lisztian portrait in music, but the symphony as a whole is really quite a lot to absorb, and with all its Sturm und Drang (more Sturm than Drang, actually), it is an impressive but not particularly involving work.

     Symphony No. 2, “Vårbrud” (“Awakening of Spring”), is here performed in its 1912-4 version (Langgaard revised it in 1933). A somewhat more modest and collected work than No. 1, it includes a soprano solo (here, Inger Dam-Jensen) singing the poem “Spring Sounds” by Emil Rittershaus in the third movement. This is one of those naïve “purity of nature” poems popular in the 19^th century, set in a way that nicely caps this three-movement work.

     Symphony No. 3, “Ungdomsbrus – La melodia” (“The Flush of Youth”), is also in three movements; and it is really a piano concerto (the soloist here is Per Salo). Written in 1915-16 and revised between 1925 and 1933, this piece makes the pianist “first among equals” rather than a soloist dominating the musical discourse. It is well structured and contains interesting elements, such as the brief use of a wordless chorus in the finale; but it is less “symphonic” than, say, Brahms’ First Piano Concerto.

     Symphony No. 4, “Løvfald” (“Fall”), moves in a new direction, being in 13 movements – none longer than three minutes and two shorter than 60 seconds. Written in 1916 and revised in 1920, it is essentially a tone poem, with such section titles as “Glimpses of Sun,” “Thunder” and “Sunday Morning Bells” – and finishes with a movement marked “Forbi!” (“Over!”). This is Langgaard’s first self-referential and oddly titled movement but scarcely his last.

     Symphony No. 5 exists in two very different versions, being in this way akin to Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 4. Both of Langgaard’s “Nos. 5” were written in 1917-18; the first version was revised in 1926, the second in 1920 and again in 1931. The first version carries no subtitle, but the second has two: “Steppenatur” (“Steppe Landscape”) and “Sommersagnsdrama” (“Summer Legend Drama”). Langgaard seemed unsure just what he wanted from this symphony (or these symphonies). Both share some thematic material, but the four-movement first version develops it much less extensively than does the five-movement second version – although neither version runs as much as 20 minutes.

     Symphony No. 6, “Det Himmelrivende” (“The Heaven-Rending”), written in 1919-20 and revised in 1928-30, is in a single extended movement in theme-and-variations form, with the theme presented in two versions and then varied several times, including as a toccata and a fugue. By this time, Langgaard has clearly pushed the bounds of symphonic form beyond anything previously recognizable as being a “symphony,” although his language has remained largely tonal.

     The language itself starts to change with Symphony No. 7, although it is a mistake to read this work as a bright line of demarcation, since Langgaard revised so many earlier works after writing No. 7 in 1926 (there is also a revised version of this symphony, dating to 1932, but the 1926 version is played here). This work has no subtitle and is in the traditional four symphonic movements, although the movements bear some odd tempo indications (the finale is marked “Fastoso allegro”). Here Langgaard starts to assert the musical primacy of the Romantic ideal, creating a work that seems more backward-looking (assertively so) than anything since No. 1.

     Symphony No. 8, “Minder ved Amalienborg” (“Memories at Amalienborg”), is Langgaard’s second to use vocals: a tenor solo (here, Lars Petersen) and chorus. It was written in 1926-28 and revised in 1929-34. Although not a long work – it runs under 20 minutes – it is a very magisterial one, with words (in the third movement, not the concluding fourth) referring to a passage in the Book of Revelation.

     Symphony No. 9, “Fra Dronning Dagmars By” (“From Queen Dagmar’s City”), came only after a long hiatus during which Langgaard revised his symphonies but created no new ones. It dates to 1942 and combines elements of traditional symphonic structure (four movements with standard tempo indications) with ones of tone poems (each movement represents a scene involving the city of Ribe).

     Symphony No. 10, “Hin Torden-bolig” (“Yon Hall of Thunder”), fits the “tone poem” designation even more clearly, being written as a single extended movement and sounding quite a bit like a work by Richard Strauss. It dates to 1944-45 and looks back in some ways to Nos. 6 and 9, while in other ways developing Langgaard’s commitment to tonality and the Romantic ideal of music “standing for” something “beyond” music even further. It was written at the same time as the genuinely strange Symphony No. 11, “Ixion,” which is Langgaard’s shortest symphony (running just six minutes) and is monothematic – a puzzling work that Langgaard may have labeled “symphony” in part to show just how far he felt he could (and needed to) push the form.

     Even stranger, and not much longer (seven minutes), is Langgaard’s first post-World War II symphony, No. 12, “Hélsingeborg,” which dates to 1946. There are no fewer than 12 tempo indications in this short work, and many of them use exclamation points to emphasize an outlook that is somewhere between surrealistic and just plain weird: “Fornemt!” (“In a distinguished manner!”) and “Som trivielle dommedagsbasuner!” (“Like trivial last trumpets!”), for example. The final section – amid musical language that is still largely Romantic, although increasingly absurdist – is marked “Amok! En komponist eksploderer” (“Amok! A composer explodes”).

     After this, Symphony No. 13, “Undertro” (“Belief in Wonders”), seems almost conventional. Dating to 1946-47, it is another work in essentially a single extended movement, although it has seven clearly denoted sections and the overall feeling of acceleration almost throughout (four movements contain the word “hurtigt” [“fast”] in one form or another).

     Symphony No. 14, “Morgenen” (“The Morning”), is another vocal work, and Langgaard actually designated it “Suite for choir and orchestra” even though he also called it a symphony. Written partly in 1947-48 and completed in 1951, it is in seven movements with such titles as “De trætte står op til livet” (“The tired get up for life”) and “‘Farmænd’ farer til kontoret” (“‘Dads’ rush to the office”). Its portrayal of modern life and its accompanying angst is set against words from the Bible and, in the final movement, Langgaard’s own ironic exclamation, “Long live beauty!”

     Symphony No. 15, “Søstormen” (“The Sea Storm”), was started in 1937 but not completed until 1949. It contains a short, very effective and surprisingly lyrical Scherzo, but its Adagio funebre slow movement is more Romantic in form than in substance. However, the final movement is quite impressive. This symphony is for bass-baritone solo (here, Johan Reuter), male chorus and orchestra, and the finale is an effective tone painting of a poem called “Stormy Night” by Thøger Larsen.

     Symphony No. 16 is called “Syndflod af Sol” (“Sun Deluge”) and was seen by Langgaard as summing up his life’s work; he wrote it in 1950-51. Like No. 15, it has a very short and effective scherzo and a significantly longer but not completely gripping slow movement, here labeled Elegi (“Elegy”). This is a somewhat scattered work, incorporating a variety of techniques and looking back at some of Langgaard’s earlier pieces – perhaps less a summation than a revisiting of some of the journeys on which the composer went.

     The Dacapo boxed set also includes a few shorter Langgaard works that in some cases are more effective than his longer-form ones. Drapa (an Old Norse poem of homage) and the tone poem Sphinx, both of whose final versions date to 1913, are atmospheric and show a strong command of orchestral color. The remaining works all date to 1948 and have not been recorded before. Danmarks Radio, a short series of fanfares, is nothing much, but Hvidbjerg-Drapa, for choir, organ and orchestra, is highly impressive. It recalls a 13^th-century murder in a church in Jutland and is both grand and emotionally impressive – all within three minutes.

     And then we have the most “modern” (or modernistic) work of all: Res absùrda!? for choir and orchestra. The words of the title are repeated, again and again, faster and faster, as the orchestra sends out a series of yawps in accompaniment. The piece seems self-referentially to comment on some of Langgaard’s own excesses in symphonic compression and odd titling, but it is also an indictment of technique for its own sake, and a critique of composers who avowedly turned their backs on the Romanticism that Langgaard continued to embrace. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to think about other mid-20^th-century composers using elements of its approach seriously.

     These recordings are uniformly excellent in both sound and performance, arguing very strongly that Langgaard’s music – which is not always easily approachable, despite its largely tonal language – deserves to be much more widely known. The only disappointment here is the very sketchy enclosed booklet, which does not even discuss all the symphonies; does not explain the meanings of any of the works’ titles, which are by no means always easily correlated with the music; and does not even provide biographies of all the vocal soloists. It is extraordinarily poorly done – but not poorly enough to detract significantly from the wonderful job that Dausgaard and his musicians have done with Langgaard’s music itself.

(++++) OPERATIC CURIOSITIES

Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari: Suite from “I gioielli della Madonna”; Prelude and Intermezzo from “I quattro rusteghi”; Suite-Concertante for Bassoon and Orchestra; Overture and Intermezzo from “Il segreto di Susanna”; Overture and Intermezzo from “L’amore medico”; Intermezzo and Ritornello from “Il Campiello”; Overture from “La dama boba.” Karen Geoghegan, bassoon; BBC Philharmonic conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. Chandos. $18.99.

Franz Schmidt: Symphony No. 1; Introduction, Interlude and Carnival Music from “Notre Dame.” Malmö Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vassily Sinaisky. Naxos. $8.99.

Daron Hagen: Shining Brow. Robert Orth, baritone; Brenda Harris, soprano; Robert Frankenberry, tenor; Matthew Curran, bass-baritone; Elaine Valby, mezzo-soprano; Gilda Lyons, soprano; Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Naxos. $17.99 (2 CDs).

     Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari, the Italian-born composer whose works for many years were more successful in Germany than in his home country, remains best known today for his lighthearted romp, Il segreto di Susanna, a period piece (1909) in which Susanna’s husband suspects she has a secret lover but her actual secret is that she has picked up the then-scandalous habit of cigarette smoking. But the bright and bustling music of this one-act comedy is far from representative of Wolf-Ferrari’s 14 operas. Nor is the work for which this composer is most notorious: I gioielli della Madonna (1911), his sole venture into verismo, which includes everything from an on-stage orgy scene to love between a brother and his (adopted) sister. As it happens, the four-movement suite from I gioielli della Madonna that the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda plays with such spirit on the new Chandos Wolf-Ferrari CD shows the composer’s fluency with melody, his knack for beauty and his distinctly Rossinian roots. But there is more to Wolf-Ferrari than these two operas, and this disc provides an unusual chance to hear music from some of his other works. It turns out that tunefulness, limpid orchestration and hummable melodies are characteristics shown by Wolf-Ferrari throughout his career, as early as I quattro rusteghi (1906) and as late as La dama boba (1939, based on a Spanish play and with its title in Spanish). A few of the operatic excerpts here also show the composer’s skill at writing for solo instruments: the Intermezzo from Il segreto di Susanna showcases John Bradbury’s fine clarinet playing, while the one from L’amore medico has lovely solo cello work by Peter Dixon. And then there is the one non-operatic work here, the Suite-Concertante for Bassoon and Orchestra, which gives Karen Geoghegan ample opportunity to show herself highly expressive in the first movement and quite jaunty in the remaining three. The cumulative effect of this CD is to show that Wolf-Ferrari’s melodic inventiveness was substantial and is worth hearing more frequently.

     Franz Schmidt was a far less prolific composer than Wolf-Ferrari, and he wrote only two operas, Notre Dame (based on the Victor Hugo novel) and Fredigundis. The Malmö Symphony Orchestra under Vassily Sinaisky plays three excerpts from Act I of Notre Dame with intensity and depth on the new Naxos CD of Schmidt’s music. Notre Dame dates to 1904-6, three decades before Schmidt’s huge oratorio, Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln, but already in this opera the composer is showing his mastery of large orchestral forces and his ability to produce telling effects – notably, in these excerpts, with the harp. This music ties clearly back to that of Wagner, but already displays signs of originality in structure. Schmidt’s first symphony (he wrote four) also ties back: written in 1899, it sounds more like a mid-19^th-century work than like one written on the eve of a new century. It is nevertheless an impressive achievement, with fine writing for all sections of the orchestra, a generally upbeat mood, and a particularly interesting scherzo marked Schnell und leicht. Although the work breaks no new harmonic ground, it shows Schmidt’s early mastery of large forces – he was 25 when he wrote the symphony – and indicates that a release of Schmidt’s later symphonic works would be most welcome.

     Like Schmidt, American composer Daron Hagen (born 1961 in Milwaukee) has four symphonies to his credit; but unlike Schmidt, he has a strong operatic focus, with four of his six operas set to libretti by Paul Muldoon. The first of these, Shining Brow (1992), is now available on CD for the first time, and it is a considerable achievement. The title is the English translation of the Welsh Taliesin, the name of one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most famous and ill-starred houses, and the opera is a set of scenes about Wright, two of the women in his life, and his relationship with Taliesin and with the architectural establishment. Hagen is essentially a tonal composer, but Shining Brow is also filled with polytonality (reflecting the interrelationship of principal characters) and a variety of 20^th-century techniques (reflecting their emotional state). It is an impressive if, oddly, a rather dry opera, considering its emotionally explosive content. Part of it involves the estrangement of Wright (Robert Orth) from Louis Sullivan (Robert Frankenberry), an establishment-architecture figure. Even more of it involves Wright’s initially passionate affair with an early feminist, Mamah Cheney (Brenda Harris), whose husband, Edwin (Matthew Curran) will not grant her a divorce – just as Wright’s wife, Catherine (Elaine Valby) will not set Wright free (they had been married 20 years and had six children when the affair with Mamah Cheney began). Hagen’s opera jumps from scene to scene as Wright meets Mamah Cheney, designs Taliesen, “elopes” to Europe with Mamah (who becomes increasingly dissatisfied with their relationship, in scenes that parallel Sullivan’s dissatisfaction with Wright on a professional level), and eventually returns to the United States and a completed Taliesen. Then the opera plunges into tragedy as Taliesin is destroyed by fire, Mamah and her two children are killed, and four other people also die – an event that really happened in 1914 when a hatchet-wielding employee committed mass murder and arson, then killed himself. This is certainly tragedy at an operatic level, but it fits a trifle uneasily into Shining Brow, since the work’s episodic structure never really prepares the audience for what is going to happen – and the tragedy itself, in the opera as in real life, seems to have no direct connection with Wright’s personal or professional activities. On balance, Shining Brow is an often-effective opera that it is good to have on CD – JoAnn Falletta keeps everything moving smartly, and the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus and Orchestra handle their roles with strength and even passion. This Naxos set is a worthwhile purchase for anyone curious about one direction that American opera is now taking.

(+++) VISIONS OF PAST AND PRESENT

Toscanini: In His Own Words. A film by Larry Weinstein. Medici Arts DVD. $24.99.

Martha Argerich Plays Mozart – Live from Tokyo. Opus Arte DVD. $29.99.

Amor, Vida de Mi Vida: Zarzuelas with Plácido Domingo and Ana María Martínez. Medici Arts DVD. $24.99.

     Performers today generally are quite public about what they do – not just during concerts but between them. Whether through self-aggrandizement or a desire to bring additional attention to the music they offer to the public, they appear on TV and the Internet, make lots of recordings, grant plenty of interviews and generally put themselves as well as their performances “out there” for the world. There are certainly exceptions – Sviatoslav Richter comes immediately to mind – but in general, the idea of an unassuming superstar performer is something of a contradiction in terms. But this was not so in earlier days, and Arturo Toscanini (1867-1957) was an exemplar of those times. Aristocratic and autocratic on the podium, Toscanini was famous (or notorious) for letting his interpretations stand on their own. He was not known to be introspective – he left no diaries or journals – and he did not grant interviews. So for those who remember Toscanini and were influenced by him, Larry Weinstein’s film, Toscanini: In His Own Words, is a 70-minute gem. The key to it is secretly recorded conversations of Toscanini speaking with his children and friends in the last three years of his life – 150 hours of private talks recorded by the conductor’s son, Walter. To say that Toscanini would have disapproved of this is a vast understatement – he would have been horrified and likely in a towering rage. But 50 years after the conductor’s death, the recordings were made available to Weinstein and his film coauthor, Harvey Sachs. That is the good news. The bad news is that these were audio recordings only, and the film itself is strictly a reenactment (and thus an interpretation) of Toscanini’s thoughts on music, family, love and his own early career. With Barry Jackson as Arturo Toscanini and Joseph Long as Walter Toscanini, Weinstein’s film has a sense of family intimacy that is as false as any reenactment must inevitably be; and because Toscanini’s comments are on a wide variety of subjects, the film itself is a once-over-lightly of the maestro’s thoughts rather than an in-depth study of them. So if this is a gem for Toscanini fans because of its underlying content, it is at best semi-precious for those less familiar with the great conductor or those hoping for greater insight into his performances.

     The live recording of Martha Argerich’s concert on January 27, 2005, at Sumida Triphony Hall in Tokyo, is more typical of what today’s audiences have come to expect to see from performers. This was one of three concerts that Argerich gave to honor the memory of her teacher, Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000). In fact, in addition to Argerich herself, Gulda’s sons, Paul and Rico, also perform as pianists – in Mozart’s Concerto for Three Pianos, K. 242. This 1776 concerto, often called “Lodron” because it was commissioned by Countess Antonia Lodron to be played with her two daughters, Aloysia and Giuseppa, is a work suitable for talented amateurs – and one often used for special multiple-piano occasions such as this Argerich concert. It sounds fine here, and it is enjoyable to watch the three pianists (and the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Christian Arming); but the DVD format adds little on a strictly musical level to the performance. The same is true for Argerich’s performance of Piano Concerto No. 20, the orchestra’s handling of the brief Symphony No. 32, and the rest of the music here, which includes one non-Mozart element that sticks out like a sore thumb: the third movement of Beethoven’s Triple Concerto, in which Argerich is joined by violinist Renaud Capuçon and cellist Gautier Capuçon. The performances are all fine, and Argerich’s tribute to Gulda is certainly heartfelt, but there is nothing very special about the DVD except that it gives Argerich fans a chance to see as well as hear her at one particular concert.

     There is something special about Amor, Vida de Mi Vida, even though this is also a “fan” DVD. This 2007 Salzburg Festival performance came about when tenor Rolando Villazón became ill and could not perform with his frequent vocal partner, soprano Ana María Martínez. And who stepped in to save that evening’s concert? None other than Plácido Domingo, who despite his association with traditional opera is also a strong supporter of the Spanish zarzuela – indeed, he was born in Madrid to parents who were zarzuela performers. Domingo was 66 at the time of this performance, and although his voice retains considerable beauty, it is not quite the finely lyrical instrument that it once was. But that scarcely mattered to the Salzburg audience and will surely not matter to the Domingo (and Martínez) fans who will be most attracted to this DVD. Those who are unfamiliar with zarzuela music will not recognize the names of many of the composers here (Federico Cheuca, Reveriano Soutullo Otero, Pablo Sorozábal and others), nor will they know the names of the works from which the arias are taken (El bateo, Los claveles, Don Gil de Alcalá, La marchenera, and so forth). But anyone seeing and hearing this DVD will enjoy the high spirits of the music and the singers, as well as the excellent support from the Mozarteum Orchester Salzburg under Jesús López Cobos. Actually, it is the orchestra that performs the best-known music here: excerpts from Manuel de Falla’s El amor brujo and El sombrero de tres picos. And it is a non-zarzuela encore that is one of the high points on the DVD: “Lippen schweigen,” the famous waltz from Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow. A number of the zarzuela arias tend to blend together, although in a generally very pleasant (and often sensuous) way. So although this is a DVD for fans of the two singers and of zarzuelas, it is a particularly enjoyable offering, even though, at 101 minutes, it does provide something of an overdose of short musical excerpts.

(++++) BOARD BOOKS WITH THE WOW FACTOR

Bow-Wow’s Colorful Life; Bow-Wow 12 Months Running. By Mark Newgarden & Megan Montague Cash. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $4.99 each.

The Giant Jam Sandwich. Story and pictures by John Vernon Lord, with verses by Janet Burroway. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $6.99.

     The youngest children deserve the special attention they get from publishers – after all, the younger they are when they start enjoying books, the longer their relationship with publishers’ future volumes will be. Add to this understandable (and understated) commercial motivation the simple fact that well-done board books can be excellent ways to introduce kids to all sorts of concepts, and you have a potentially wonderful melding of form and substance. But it is only potential – until authors such as Mark Newgarden and Megan Montague Cash come along. Newgarden and Cash’s silent but always expressive canine, Bow-Wow, has consistently amusing and interesting adventures that fit perfectly into board books. Bow-Wow’s Colorful Life, about colors, and Bow-Wow 12 Months Running, about the months of the year, are delightful mixtures of whimsy and education – as entertaining for parents as for young children. The key to both books is repetition-with-a-difference – the repetition itself helping learning and the difference keeping things interesting for both adults and kids. Bow-Wow’s Colorful Life starts with our intrepid dog following someone who is walking in socks, and sniffing determinedly at the foot covering. When the person, seen only from the ankle down, sits, Bow-Wow pulls off a sock (“Red!” says the single word on the page) – revealing another sock underneath. Bow-Wow pulls that one off: “Orange!” And so on, through yellow, green, blue and purple, until finally a foot is revealed – which Bow-Wow appreciatively licks. In Bow-Wow 12 Months Running, the title explains everything: the dog, startled by a man blowing a New Year’s noisemaker, runs from page to page, with the name of a month at the top of each page and some very clever drawings. Snow is falling on Bow-Wow in January; by February only his ears and tail tip can be seen; in May he demurely pees (maybe she, from the position of his or her hindquarters), causing flowers to grow; in August, the whole page is red and we see a hot, panting dog in the midst of the “dog days” of summer; and so on. As always, there is an amusing surprise at the end of the book: someone else with a New Year’s noisemaker – this time a baby, whose antics finally bring Bow-Wow to a stop. The bright colors, simple but effective drawings, and well-thought-out story lines make these new Bow-Wow board books, like earlier ones, a real family treat. They certainly have the wow factor – or, if you prefer, the Bow-Wow factor.

     The Giant Jam Sandwich comes to board-book format differently but is, in its own way, just as much fun. John Vernon Lord’s book, originally published back in 1972, was distinguished not only for its gently absurd story (which involves using a giant jam sandwich to trap wasps that have been disturbing the peace of a town called Itching Down) but also for its detailed art. The art does not translate perfectly to reduced board-book size, especially when formerly full-page illustrations from a larger edition are turned into half-page ones in this smaller format. Nevertheless, the sheer exuberant absurdity of the tale comes through very well here, and a few of the illustrations – notably the one showing a giant loaf of bread taking up almost a whole page – work just as well as they ever did. The fun here will come as parents read the amusing rhymes with which Janet Burroway presents Lord’s story (“A truck drew up and dumped out butter,/ And they spread it out with a flap and a flutter./ Spoons and spades! Slap and slam!/ And they did the same with the strawberry jam”) while kids pore over every little detail of the drawings: the individually crafted townsfolk, their many different expressions, the details of tree branches and thatched roofs, the bricks of the old mill where the giant loaf is baked, and much more. The Giant Jam Sandwich will appeal to slightly older children than the Bow-Wow books will; and by the time kids are ready to read the jam tale by themselves, they should, with any luck, be ready to start reading some simple non-board books – gateways to a lifetime of learning and adventure. And if that’s not a wow factor, what is?

(++++) SINGLE PANELS, MULTIPLE LAUGHS

If You Weren’t a Hedgehog…If I Weren’t a Hemophiliac… By Andrew Weldon. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.

F Minus: This Can’t Be Legal. By Tony Carrillo. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Brevity 4. By Guy Endore-Kaiser and Rodd Perry. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Suture Self: A Book of Medical Cartoons. By Leo Cullum. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

     There is something particularly pithy – that’s p-i-T-H-y – about single-panel cartoons. Often thought of as the province of editorial cartoonists (although some of those nowadays work in multiple panels), the single-panel comic does indeed date back hundreds of years as an editorial device. But as entertainment, it also has a long history, all the way back to Richard Outcault’s “Yellow Kid,” a turn-of-the-last-century Alfred E. Newman prototype who made his observations via writing on his Zippy-like garment. Nowadays, single-panel cartooning is flourishing for both good and not-so-good reasons. On the positive side, single panels make their point quickly and, when well done, provoke an instant guffaw (or at least a chuckle). On the negative side, newspapers – whose ongoing shrinkage of space for cartoons has almost reached the point at which the papers will have to start giving out magnifying glasses to readers of the comics – can fit several different single-panel offerings in the space needed for just one multi-panel strip.

     Thank goodness there are so many good single-panel cartoonists out there, operating in blissful ignorance of the economic pressures facing their field – or at least not letting those pressures pinch their senses of humor. Good single-panel cartoons can be found worldwide: A. Weldon’s delightfully weird book, If You Weren’t a Hedgehog…If I Weren’t a Hemophiliac… comes from Australia. Weldon’s skewed worldview translates to this side of the Pacific quite well, despite an occasional “too right” or a reference to “biros” (pens, that is). A ditzy woman asks a man who is missing one arm and one leg whether he has recently lost weight; a pirate mistakenly wanders into a Pilates group; a doctor tells a drug-addicted patient that methadone is also known as “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Heroin”; two desert-island castaways think "Gilligan’s Island” is a reality show; a product called “There, There Absorbent Shoulder Pads” is recommended for guys who often have women crying on their shoulders; and so on. Weldon’s drawings fit his oddly skewed view of life exceptionally well, as he manages to capture everything from the expression of a woman from “Bourgeoisie sans Frontieres” (goal: clean, bottled mineral water for Africa) to those of two “starving economists reduced to eating pie graphs.” This is humor that is decidedly off the beaten path.

     F Minus and Brevity have their share of weirdness, too. These are distinctly American strips, but their peculiarities would also likely cross borders quite well. For example, in Brevity 4, Guy & Rodd (as they sign themselves) present a king objecting to the attentions of the paparazzi (painters); a “comic mom” tells her kids that the world isn’t always black and white – specifically, not on Sundays; ants hesitate to eat mayonnaise at a picnic because it has been out in the hot sun for a while; an insecure comedian does his act at a hyena enclosure; a fashion designer explains that for his latest line, he bought clothes at Target and changed the labels. You get the idea, or rather the ideas – mostly presented in only a few words (hence the Brevity title) and with drawings that are just peculiar enough to reflect the underlying strangeness of the thoughts. The F Minus drawings are more consistent in style, and this strip is a bit of an oddity in that its single panel takes up as much room as a multi-panel strip – so much for space saving at newspapers. Tony Carrillo’s strip is worth the space it needs, though, because his panel layouts are clean, without wasted space, and he thinks horizontally in terms of character and word placement. He thinks peculiarly, too: instead of sleepwalking, a boss indulges in “sleep firing”; the final exam at a karate studio is a woman with a bat; a mismatched couple tries to decide whether to name the baby Colin Timothy or Earthlove Rainflower; the devils in Hell make up their minds to uninstall the fire extinguishers; vegetarian zombies march through fields demanding grains; artificial turf comes with plastic bugs – this is the way the world really almost is.

     And then there’s the world of The New Yorker. Yes, The New Yorker, where single-panel cartooning meets esoterica. But not all New Yorker cartoons are abstruse or strongly oriented toward the denizens of a certain big city. Leo Cullum’s medical cartoons strike the funnybone almost every time. Cullum’s style is immediately recognizable – all those long-nosed, lumpy men, plus an occasional cow or lion. And he certainly has his finger (or some other part of his body) on the wonders of modern medicine. One man in a bar to another: “I’m taking my Viagra with Prozac. If it doesn’t work I don’t care.” Pediatrician dressed in “child-friendly” getup to patient: “Of course I’m a real doctor. Would I be sticking you with this big needle if I were a clown?” Doctor to patient: “You have a generic illness. Generic drugs should work fine.” Doctor to man with a lightbulb head: “You’ve got moths.” Mouse to lion with thorn in its paw: “I’d like to help, but you’re in a different HMO.” This is humor that’s a bit highbrow without being self-consciously snooty – and with a whole book of Cullum’s cartoons, you don’t have to say you buy The New Yorker for the articles.

(+++) ETHICS, TEENAGE STYLE

Is It Still Cheating if I Don’t Get Caught? By Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D. Illustrations by Harriet Russell. Flashpoint/Roaring Brook Press. $12.95.

     Life is complex, but its ethical rules are pretty simple – that is the basic message of Bruce Weinstein, who writes about ethics for BusinessWeek.com and creates a syndicated column under the name “The Ethics Guy.” Weinstein is a “professional ethicist” – nice work if you can get it, and how exactly do you get it? (Weinstein doesn’t say.) This teen-oriented book – Weinstein’s first for this age group – starts by tracing ethics back to roots in Cicero, ancient Greece, and John Donne (booooorrrrriiiinnngg, some teens will say), then offers an example of a wrong code to live by (a “me-centric” one), and then gets interesting. First, Weinstein dispels two myths about ethics – that what’s legal is right and what’s illegal is wrong; and that if everyone does something, it must be right. And then he offers “the five life principles,” whose application to the real world takes up the balance of the book.

     The principles are pretty straightforward, but many teens may never have thought of them or seen them presented this way: do no harm; make things better; respect others; be fair, and be loving. These principles can be presented in just a few words, but Weinstein understandably feels the needs to expand upon their meaning. For example, respecting others, he says, entails keeping private things private, telling the truth and keeping your promises.

     But life does not make implementing these principles easy, because the principles can come into conflict with each other. For instance, if someone is wearing a really ugly outfit and asks your opinion of it, do you tell the truth, or do you show respect for the other person’s taste by lying, or do you “do no harm” by finding something neutral to say and then quickly changing the subject? Weinstein does a good job of raising issues that may come up in teenage life and that can make it hard to behave ethically, but he tends to oversimplify not only his explanations but also the language in which he gives advice. For instance, when discussing whether a girl should tell her friend what other people are saying about her, Weinstein writes, “you’re much better off taking the high road and leading by example.” This sort of clichéd writing comes across as preachy, which will make it unappealing to many teens.

     Still, Weinstein deserves credit for presenting real-world situations – and including “what do you think?” sections providing readers with behavior options to consider before giving his own answer. Among the subjects he tackles are breaking up by E-mail (bad idea if it violates the “respect others” and “be loving” principles); not wanting to make love to a boyfriend or girlfriend who does want to (“pressuring someone to have sex is a major violation of Life Principle #3, ‘Respect Others’”); plus handling bullies, downloading music illegally, and more. Weinstein mixes together some really serious matters (what to do about drug pushers) with much less important ones (whether to tell the end of a movie to someone who has not seen it yet), intending to show that ethics is important at all times but sometimes tending to blow minor matters out of proportion. But his chapter on “Messing Up, Fessing Up, and Forgiving,” is especially strong, although that “fessing up” wording may be a little off-putting to some. On balance, Is It Still Cheating if I Don’t Get Caught? is likely to be of greatest help to preteens and young teenagers, who will be less unhappy with its sometimes oversimplified language and preachiness. Younger readers are also likely to find Harriet Russell’s cartoonish illustrations less simplistic. Older teens may wonder how an author who writes that “my field is ethics, not psychology,” can claim as much insight into the minds of teens – both individually and in groups – as Weinstein’s scenarios and solutions suggest he believes he has. Weinstein does have good ideas and a good grasp of ethical issues, but he sometimes misfires as he tries to put his thoughts across to the audience at which this book is aimed.

(+++) FAMILIAR FANTASY WORLDS

The Demonwar Saga, Book One: Rides a Dread Legion. By Raymond E. Feist. Eos. $26.99.

The Diamonds. By Ted Michael. Delacorte Press. $8.99.

Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian—A Capital Adventure; Larry’s Friends and Foes; To the Rescue!; The Quest for the Golden Tablet; Made You Look! HarperEntertainment. $4.99 each (Adventure; Made); $3.99 (Quest). HarperTrophy. $3.99 each (Friends; Rescue).

     There is a certain comfort level about returning to well-worn paths in well-known nonexistent realms, even when – perhaps especially when – the journey involves a frisson of fright. Fans of Raymond E. Feist’s many Midkemia novels will welcome the start of his new series, The Demonwar Saga, and will probably realize immediately that the title is intended as familiar rather than confusing. The uninitiated might wonder, who rides a dread legion? But of course the title is really Feist’s quasi-archaic way of saying, “a dread legion rides.” This book takes place a decade after the Darkwar, at a time when Midkemia is briefly at peace (peace is always brief in this land). The Dread Legion of the title is pursuing an ancient race of elves called the Clan of the Seven Stars, which has fled through a galactic rift and is determined to preserve itself by brutally subjugating Midkemia (negotiated live-and-let-live treaties among races being as uncommon in this land as peaceful boundary agreements). This puts the Clan’s leader, the conjurer Laromendis, on a collision course with Midkemia’s erstwhile defender, the magician Pug – and to make matters more complicated, in one of Feist’s typical plot arrangements, it turns out that Pug is familiar with the Dread Legion and its Demon King, Maarg, and knows that he is not strong enough to withstand the Legion’s onslaught. So he must forge a magical alliance – which requires him to work with a variety of magic wielders who are his enemies and not very fond of each other, either. “Find allies, Pug,” advises a character called the Oracle. “Find those who in the past you have not sought out. Seek strength where you are weak, and find those who have knowledge where you are ignorant.” And so it shall be. There is plenty of material here for multiple books, and as usual, Feist keeps his novel’s pace fast and the majority of his dialogue easily comprehended and colloquial, so readers can return to this land they know well and enjoy their latest adventure within it.

     You might think that a modern high school has little in common with the land of Midkemia, but high schools as envisioned in the many Mean Girls variants are also lands of fantasy, involving too-perfect queen bees given their comeuppance by too-perfectly-positioned, too-honest good characters who just happen to have the knowledge needed to emerge triumphant. The veneer of the real world is strictly on the surface in these books – including The Diamonds, Ted Michael’s first novel. This book is fun on a strictly formulaic level: the girl quartet of the title rules at Bennington School, a private and (of course) oh-so-exclusive establishment. A well-meaning but (of course) clueless teacher suggests that the Diamonds join the mock trial team, and the girls use that bit of school-sanctioned power to monitor and manage the social fates of their classmates. In the middle of all this is basically-nice-girl Marni, who is best friends with Diamonds leader Clarissa until she gets on Clarissa’s bad side by getting a little too close to Clarissa’s ex, in whom Clarissa retains a proprietary interest because, well, that’s just the way things are. So Clarissa immediately starts taking oh-so-petty but oh-so-typical revenge on Marni, but Marni is just too spunky to take that lying down forever, and she knows how the Diamonds work, and she knows who some of their victims are, and she knows how to pull some of those victims together, and…well, you can imagine where all of this goes, and that’s just where it does go. “We have to prove the Diamonds are actually doing the opposite of what the administration thinks they’re doing,” says Marni as she thinks about “how Clarissa had twisted all the privileges she’s been given.” With help from journalist Tommy, daughter-of-a-police-detective Darcy, and other good-guy co-conspirators, Marci hatches a plan; but there is a traitor in her group (of course), and things go awry (of course), but eventually the Diamonds are conquered (of course) and all ends less-than-happily (of course). But Marni gains self-knowledge and personal growth. Of course.

     And speaking of familiar fantasy worlds, the Hollywood approach to films and their nearly inevitable sequels is returning moviegoers to the Museum of Natural History next month – not the real one, but the one in which an ancient curse causes animals and exhibits to come to life and make a big mess of everything. That was the plot of Night at the Museum, released in 2006, so of course it is also the plot of the new Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, except that this time the living exhibits have been moved to Washington, D.C., and some new characters have been introduced (along the lines of the 2006 ones, of course). There’s nothing remotely serious about this frothy concoction, but it may produce a couple of hours of fun for kids up to about age 10. And, not coincidentally at all, that is the age group at which a number of already-available movie-spinoff books are aimed. A Capital Adventure, by Jasmine Jones, is a novella-length retelling of the story of the new movie. Larry’s Friends and Foes and To the Rescue! – both by Catherine Hapka – are “I Can Read” Level 2 picture books giving simplified, large-type elements of the story. The Quest for the Golden Tablet, by A.J. Wilde, includes multiple movie stills and is designed to be read to preschoolers. Made You Look! – by Lucy Rosen – is a “find the differences” book, also for preschoolers, using slightly altered movie scenes whose changes kids are supposed to pick out. These are all essentially movie-souvenir books, worth (+++) ratings for families that decide this is a highly enjoyable film worth remembering long after leaving the theater. For everyone else, the books will be of no interest and get no rating at all.

(++++) CONDUCTORS TAKING CHANCES

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 11, “The Year 1905.” Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko. Naxos. $8.99.

Bach: Mass in B Minor. Les Musciens de Louvre-Grenoble conducted by Marc Minkowski. Naïve. $27.99 (2 CDs).

Britten: Double Concerto for Violin and Viola; Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge; Les Illuminations. Pieter Schoeman, violin; Alexander Zemtsov, viola; Sally Matthews, soprano; London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. LPO. $16.99.

     A conductor starting a Shostakovich cycle would, in conventional thinking, begin either with Symphony No. 1 (perhaps paired with No. 9), or with the well-known Symphony No. 5. Not Vasily Petrenko. The first volume of his Shostakovich cycle is Symphony No. 11, a commemoration of the 1905 “Bloody Sunday” massacre of demonstrators by Czarist forces – and a four-movement, hour-long work that is played straight through, with each of the first three movements leading directly into the succeeding one. This is quite a gamble by Petrenko, which makes its success all the more impressive. For this is an outstanding performance in which the symphony rises far above its propaganda value (its primary use to the Soviet regime under which it was composed). This is a work of high drama, and while its full effect requires understanding the events on which it is based, it is emotionally involving from start to finish in Petrenko’s interpretation even for listeners unfamiliar with the history it interprets. Petrenko is now principal conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, and if he cannot quite make it sound like a lush Russian orchestra, he can certainly get the players to bring out every bit of Shostakovich’s percussive intensity (the timpani are excellent), the juxtapositions of consonance and dissonance, the long line of the revolutionary song “You Fell as Victims” on which the third movement is based, and the multiple thematic transformations that drive this symphony. The high drama of this work, its brass-driven intensity, its (admittedly somewhat overdone) emotionalism, and its powerful conclusion filled with bell strokes add up in Petrenko’s performance to a viscerally involving experience that will certainly whet listeners’ appetites for the conductor’s next Shostakovich symphonic disc.

     Marc Minkowski’s handling of Bach’s B Minor Mass is in its own way as dramatic as Petrenko’s tackling of Shostakovich. This is Minkowski’s first Bach recording, and it is highly successful with an approach that is very unusual: the soloists are also the chorus. Minkowski has assembled 10 young vocalists: sopranos Lucy Crowe, Joanne Lunn and Julia Lezhneva; mezzo-soprano Blandine Staskiewicz; contralto Nathalie Stutzmann; countertenor Terry Wey; tenors Colin Balzer and Markus Brutscher; baritone Christian Immler; and bass Luca Tittoto. He has then had them sing all of the mass, solo portions as individuals and choral portions as a group. A number of scholars believe this is how the B Minor Mass would originally have been performed; Minkowski agrees with them. But this is by no means a universal opinion, and performances today almost always use a separate chorus, thereby avoiding strain on the soloists. Minkowski’s approach works brilliantly – a huge argument in its favor. Hearing the same voices individually and as part of a group adds to the cohesion of the mass, and surely the singers themselves came to a greater understanding of the music and the meaning of the work through the need to learn and perform the whole thing rather than just certain parts of it. The singing itself is excellent, even if it is not always quite as polished as it is in performances featuring experienced soloists with a separate chorus; and the work comes across, from a listener’s perspective, as more tightly knit and thoroughly integrated than it does when soloists and chorus are kept separate. Add in beautiful, carefully controlled, idiomatic playing by Les Musciens de Louvre-Grenoble, and you have a B Minor Mass that is outstanding on multiple levels.

     The boldness of Vladimir Jurowski’s new Britten CD with the London Philharmonic Orchestra is at a somewhat lesser level, but it is there nevertheless. This is an all-Britten CD devoted exclusively to early works by the composer, only one of which -- Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge – is very frequently heard. The CD is made up of two live performances, the Double Concerto for Violin and Viola dating to December 2006 and the other two works to April 2008. The Double Concerto, edited by Colin Matthews (Britten left only a short score, albeit with detailed markings as to his planned but never realized orchestration), gets a thoughtful and effective performance here, with Pieter Schoeman and Alexander Zemtsov emphasizing emotional connection – as if the second movement’s designation as “Rhapsody” pervaded all three movements. In contrast, the Bridge Variations are bright, intense and thoroughly engaging, their quicksilver mood changes zipping past again and again until the final fugue gives them an appealing stateliness and grandeur. Les Illuminations is another sort of work altogether, with Sally Matthews singing Arthur Rimbaud’s poetry with a sound that is sometimes sensuous, sometimes intense, sometimes deliberately harsh – a virtuosic interpretation of a complex work in which Jurowski provides excellent backup that supports Matthews’ vocals while complementing and deepening their effect. It would be a risk to combine this much early Britten in a single concert, and perhaps it is one to put it all together on a single CD as well – but if so, it is a risk worth taking, and one that Jurowski has assumed quite successfully.

(++++) BRITISH FAREWELLS

Ries: Piano Concerto in A minor, op. 132 (“Farewell to England”); Grand Variations on “Rule Britannia,” op. 116; Introduction et Variations Brillantes, op. 170. Christopher Hinterhuber, piano; Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Uwe Grodd. Naxos. $8.99.

Dowland: Lute Music, Volume 4. Nigel North, lute. Naxos. $8.99.

     Ferdinand Ries’ “Farewell to England” concerto is more or less his seventh – the publishing sequence of his works is very confusing, and he numbered the concertos independently of what instrument they featured, so his first piano concerto is actually his Concerto No. 2. The work, however difficult it is to pin down its designation, dates to 1823 and was written when Ries, after a decade of life in London and marriage to an Englishwoman, decided to return home to Germany. As an envoi, he composed a very grand concerto whose impressive majesty comes through fully in Christopher Hinterhuber’s elegant performance. This work – the only Ries concerto to start with a slow introduction – progresses from a very large-scale first movement, which includes an extended cadenza midway through, to a slow movement of considerable delicacy and a rondo finale that gives the soloist plenty of chances for virtuosic display. This is one of the most satisfying of all Ries’ piano concertos – quite a goodbye gift to England. And the Grand Variations on “Rule Britannia” are also quite something: designed primarily as a showcase for Ries’ own virtuosity, they are very ingenious in structure (being a mixture of sonata and variation form) and particularly well-wrought in instrumentation. Ries presents the familiar British tune in multiple keys and several meters, moving from a fairly straightforward theme-and-variations approach early in this 16-minute work to a more complex blended form later on. This is a showpiece, to be sure, but it is not just a showpiece; and again, Hinterhuber’s performance – along with that of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Uwe Grodd – is highly impressive. The Introduction et Variations Brillantes is somewhat less interesting than the other works here, being simpler and structurally more straightforward than the “Rule Britannia” variations, but it is a well-made work that once again gives the soloist the opportunity to display considerable virtuosity – a challenge to which Hinterhuber adeptly rises.

     The new release in Nigel North’s collection of John Dowland’s lute music is a farewell of a different sort: it is the fourth and last of these volumes. North, essentially self-taught as a lutenist, has a remarkably fluid style that fully explores the many aspects of Dowland’s art, from the melancholic to the bright and dancelike. This fourth North CD is a bit more of a pastiche than the earlier three, with early and late Dowland works jumbled together and with little apparent order to much of the sequencing. True, some back-to-back works fit perfectly by subject matter, such as “Galliard on Walsingham” followed by “Walsingham.” And others are beautifully matched musically, such as “Awake Sweet Love” in a version by Dowland’s contemporary, Francis Cutting, followed by the same tune in a version by North himself. But many of the pieces are arranged in a somewhat helter-skelter manner. Not that this in any way detracts from how enjoyable they are: Dowland was a grand master of the lute, getting it to express innumerable varieties of emotion though works of highly varied virtuosity, and North is a superb interpreter of this repertoire. Although most of these works run two minutes or less, a few are considerably longer, with “Loth to Depart,” a six-and-a-half-minute ballad setting, especially impressive in its contrapuntal design. Dowland was England’s foremost lute master in Shakespeare’s time, and North is a remarkable re-creator of Dowland’s music 400 years later. It is a shame to have to say farewell to this series, but it is one that will give listeners many pleasurable rehearings in years to come.

(++++) THIRDS

The 39 Clues, Book 3: The Sword Thief. By Peter Lerangis. Scholastic. $12.99.

Allie Finkle’s Rules for Girls #3: Best Friends and Drama Queens. By Meg Cabot. Scholastic. $15.99.

     The 39 Clues – think a much-changed, much-updated version of Alfred Hitchcock’s mystery, The 39 Steps – continues apace in its third installment, as this unusually clever mixture of books, card packs and a Web-based game keeps twisting and turning the saga of Amy and Dan Cahill, two young members of the far-flung and notoriously deception-prone Cahill clan, as they race around the world seeking clues to their family’s immense wealth and power. Each of these books is written by a different author, but there is so little individual style to the volumes that it scarcely matters whose name is on the cover. What counts is each book’s setting (exotic) and pacing (fast). The third book in the series, The Sword Thief, focuses on Japan and on the uneasy alliance into which Amy and Dan enter, with considerable trepidation, with their uncle, Alistair Oh. The key to this book, and to the series as a whole, is putting Amy and Dan into perilous situations in which they suddenly discover clues to the 39 important clues. For instance, at one point in The Sword Thief, the kids and Alistair are within an underground train system, menaced by the yakuza (Japanese gangsters akin to Sicily’s Mafia), and all at once, this happens: “‘Cube!’ Amy blurted, suddenly breaking loose and racing back to the pile. ‘Look! Sphere! Cylinder! Para – parallelowhatever! Those are geometric shapes – right, Dan? They’re right here!’” This does turn out to be important – and it is a fair sample of the humor that creeps into the excitement from time to time (a page earlier, there is a reference to “trying to find a hypotenuse in a haystack”). The point here is that we know Amy and Dan will make it past their nefarious competing relatives, through each adventure and on to the next, but we also know they will have a tough time of it: Dan comments at one point, “We were in a ninja fight…for the first time in my nonvirtual life. And I hated it.” What we do not know is how the other Cahills will interfere with Amy and Dan, and to what effect; and what will happen to anyone with whom the young protagonists ally themselves (Alistair’s encounter may prove fatal to him – or maybe not). Furthermore, we do not know for sure where the clues are pointing, except that at the end of one book, it will be clear that the next clue is somewhere else in the world (Book 4 will be set in Egypt). The result of this blend of knowing and not knowing is an attractive adventure series that works as a multimedia event, not just a straightforward story; and that has plenty of “perils of Pauline” cliffhangers to keep young readers’ attention – plus clue-related cards (six of them) bound into each book, plus a Web element to keep things interesting in between issuance of new volumes.

     Meg Cabot’s Allie Finkle series has reached its third volume, too, and it too has settled into a routine – a lower-key and more everyday one than The 39 Clues. But this is not to say that Ally’s life lacks drama; in fact, the title of the third book, Best Friends and Drama Queens, has “drama” built right in. But of course this is fourth-grade drama rather than the world-spanning, highly dangerous type. It all comes from Cheyenne, a new girl from Canada who is now attending Ally’s school, Pine Heights Elementary (thereby relieving Ally of new-girl angst, which she duly suffered in Book 2). Cheyenne turns out to be a super-bossy, take-charge type who manipulates or shames Ally and her friends into doing things Cheyenne’s way so as not to be considered “big babies.” This means the other girls have to play Cheyenne-approved roles and start getting involved with boy-chasing and kissing games at recess – all while feeling so put-upon that Ally ends up “really, really wishing I could go back through time to that first day of the new semester and, instead of Caroline having big news about a new student starting at Pine Heights, her big news could have been that she’s gotten a horse instead.” This being impossible, Ally has to figure out some other way of coping with Cheyenne. It takes a fair amount of cat cuddling and the willingness of Ally’s mom to crawl into the closet with a very upset Ally before a solution to the problem is found – involving some name-calling, some rule-setting and the timely intervention of a number of the best friends’ parents. Best Friends and Drama Queens gets a (+++) rating for its lighthearted and upbeat – but rather too simplistic – approach to issues of maturity, friendship and the unending questions of boy-girl and kid-adult relationships.

(++++) SOUTHERN STRATEGIES

Mama Makes Up Her Mind and Other Dangers of Southern Living. By Bailey White. Da Capo. $14.

An American Trilogy: Death, Slavery, & Dominion on the Banks of the Cape Fear River. By Steven M. Wise. Da Capo. $26.

     The American South remains, for better or worse, a less homogenized area than most of the rest of the country. Its differentiation is not strictly geographical– northern Florida is more “southern” than southern Florida. It is a matter of attitude and lifestyle rather than having anything to do with the Mason-Dixon Line (which passes north of Maryland, a state that few would regard as “southern” in any meaningful way except for its now widely reviled state song, which is a pro-Confederacy remnant). What is especially enjoyable about Bailey White’s Mama Makes Up Her Mind is the small number of words the author needs to communicate the essential Southernness of her Georgia roots. The 225 pages of text in White’s book comprise no fewer than 55 short-short stories, and most of them are small gems. Sometimes White needs only a sentence or two to convey in full the atmosphere of a particular part of the South: “I drive through Mayo and Day, tiny little towns that are slowly being reclaimed by flora and fauna. Wisteria is quietly disassembling the abandoned Victorian hotel on the only street in Mayo, and spreading fingers of Bermuda grass grow out over the white streets of Day.” At other times, it takes her a bit longer to make a trenchant point, for example in her story of the “Imagination Game” that she was at first unable to play as a child – she closed her eyes but did not see anything – until one day she began seeing giant dancing chicken feet. At still other times, White uses matter-of-fact language to make readers accept extraordinary things: “My mother is old, but she doesn’t make up stories that aren’t true, and she doesn’t see things that aren’t there. That’s why we didn’t doubt her for a minute when she told us she had seen a flying saucer go over the house early one spring morning.” White’s vignettes of herself, her region and her childhood enthrall and charm through their very simplicity and brief duration. These are small stories of small occurrences in more-or-less-ordinary everyday life, which touch on “big-picture issues” associated with the South only occasionally, as when White’s mother campaigns in south Georgia for a black politician who is foredoomed to lose because of the region’s lingering racial history. But even this story is told in a matter-of-fact manner, without a trace of the hostility or condescension so often inflicted on the South by people from other U.S. regions and by self-proclaimed “enlightened” Southerners themselves.

     One of that latter group would be attorney Steven M. Wise, who lives in the far southern reaches of Florida amid scads of transplanted Northerners. Wise, author of Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals and other animal-equality books, is a polemicist who marshals his arguments with lawyerly tendentiousness. In An American Trilogy, he uses his interpretation of religion to examine and interconnect the shameful past treatment of Native Americans and African-American slaves with what he considers to be the equally shameful current treatment of pigs. There are very strong arguments to be made against factory farming, and in favor of pigs in particular: these are intelligent animals scarcely deserving of the horrendous conditions in which they are often kept. But Wise, who focuses on the town of Tar Heel, North Carolina, both as an exemplar of what he and other members of the self-proclaimed intelligentsia regard as the Deep South mentality and because it is the site of the world’s largest slaughterhouse, is so over-the-top that he is likely to dismay people who might otherwise support at least some aspects of his cause. Wise’s jeremiad leads him, for example, to discuss the wonderful life of Francis of Assisi in ways that make the saint seem a trifle unbalanced (“he removed worms from the road so they would not be trampled”). Wise is simply trying too hard: “Ending the industrial farming and slaughter of hogs does not contradict a single biblical verse. Instead, the Bible demands that we end them: ‘the earth is the Lord’s,’ and we are its steward, not its enemy. But we are also sinners. Once we sinned against Native Americans. Now we repent that past. But the Indians are nearly gone. Once we sinned against black slaves. Now we repent that past. But slavery ended 150 years ago, racial segregation half a century ago. Today we sin against much of God’s Creation and grievously against the hogs of Bladen County. We have an opportunity, not to repent a past, but to repent the present, to become salt and light and end our sinning when it can do some good.” Nearly 300 pages of this sort of thing becomes immensely tiresome, and it is hard to imagine that Wise is preaching to anyone but the converted. The Wise dittoheads would surely give this book a (++++) rating, but for the vast majority of potential readers – the ones Wise would have to reach to have a real chance of making a difference in the fight for expanded animal rights – this one-dimensional bit of hectoring barely rates (++).

(+++) MEMORIES

Christian the Lion. By Anthony Bourke and John Rendall. Delacorte Press. $14.99.

One Last Time: Good-bye to Yankee Stadium. By Ray Negron. Illustrated by Laura Seeley. HarperCollins. $19.99.

     Media interconnectedness has now reached such a point that a real-world gaffe quickly ends up in the virtual world of the Internet, typically on YouTube – much to the dismay of politicians and others who thought their microphones were off when they weren’t. Now it turns out that the connection can run both ways: Christian the Lion is, as its subtitle says, “based on the amazing and heartwarming true story” that was a big YouTube hit last year. The Web video showed Anthony “Ace” Bourke and John Rendall reuniting in Africa with a full-grown lion that they had released there – after raising it from a cub that they originally bought at London’s famous Harrods department store. In their book for ages 8-10, Bourke and Rendall explain their spontaneous decision to buy the cub, the way they integrated him into their lives and their furniture shop, and the havoc that ensued as the cub grew and became, by the time he was four months old, a bigger challenge than his owners had expected. The big cat’s wild instincts start to emerge, Bourke and Rendall realize that he needs to be free, arrangements are made to take him to Africa (and shoot a TV show about the event), and a closely monitored two-year process of introducing Christian to the wild begins – under the auspices of George Adamson, who was well known for the book and film Born Free, another tale of a lion raised with humans and then released into the wild. The eventual reuniting of Christian with Bourke and Rendall occurs at the end of the book, and it is a bit of an anticlimax – certainly for readers who picked up the book in the first place because of the YouTube video. But it does make for a nice finish. However, Christian the Lion leaves many questions not only unanswered but also unasked – for example, what it means that highly dangerous big cats can (or at one time could) legally be sold to people living in the middle of one of the world’s major cities. Furthermore, the book is presented as if the events happened recently, when in fact it is based on a 1971 version of the same story – and many more-recent events are omitted, such as Adamson being shot to death in 1989 by Somalian bandits. There is also no introspection in this book, which is a lighthearted look at a situation that could have become quite serious. The amusing photos add to the book’s charm and its aura of being a modern fairy tale – but the reality underlying it is more serious than many young readers will realize.

     Baseball has plenty of fairy-tale stories of its own, and many of them revolve around the fabled Yankee Stadium, which was built in 1923 and used by the Bronx Bombers for the final time last year. Ray Negron, author of another sentimental baseball book for young readers, The Greatest Story Never Told: The Babe and Jackie, gets soupy almost to the point of trying to extract tears from his readers in One Last Time. It is actually doubtful that kids ages 5-9, the book’s target audience, will have as intense a set of feelings for the old Yankee Stadium as Negron clearly has, but they will surely pick up some of the author’s sentimental attachment if they are sufficiently interested in baseball to know the names Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio and many others. In the book, Negron has owner George Steinbrenner ask the team batboy, Ray, to use the old stadium’s “magic room” to get in touch with the great players of the past and allow them one last visit to the stadium. With lovely illustrations by Laura Seeley that accurately depict the appearance of the long-gone players helping propel the story, Negron has the famed, long-gone Yankees take the field for one last time, playing a game that ends only when the walls start to come down. At the end, the last two greats to leave – Ruth and Gehrig – promise that their magic will transfer to the new Yankee Stadium; and Negron himself promises that, too, in an “open letter” after the story. Well…maybe. And maybe the young kids who read this book will develop from it a sense of history, of what baseball used to be. But in truth, the book is so self-serving for the Yankees – Negron is a personal consultant to Steinbrenner – that it is hard to imagine the children of anyone other than rabid Yankees fans finding One Last Time as enthralling as Negron himself certainly seems to find it.

(++++) KEYBOARD ENTHUSIASMS

Handel: Harpsichord Suites Nos. 1-8 (“Great”); Chaconne in G Major. Jory Vinikour, harpsichord. Delos. $19.99 (2 CDs).

Schumann: Piano Concerto; Grieg: Piano Concerto; Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto No. 2. Howard Shelley, piano and conducting Orchestra of Opera North. Chandos. $18.99.

Fazil Say: Violin Concerto, “1001 Nights in the Harem”; Alla Turca Jazz, Fantasia on the Rondo from the Piano Sonata K. 331 by Mozart; Patara Ballet; Summertime Variations. Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin; Luzerner Sinfonieorchester conducted by John Axelrod; Burcu Soysev, soprano; Aykut Köselerli, percussion; Celalettin Biçer, ney flute; Fazil Say, piano. Naïve. $16.99.

     Here are three excellent offerings that, in combination, provide a fascinating look at how keyboard virtuosity and the music that brings it forth have changed over the centuries. Jory Vinikour offers more than two hours of Handel’s wonderfully varied harpsichord music in the two-CD Delos set of all eight “Great” harpsichord suites, plus the Chaconne in G and its 21 variations. Handel is not well known as a keyboard composer – he is famed for oratorios, operas and orchestral music – but he was a harpsichord and organ virtuoso, and it is clear from these suites that he knew how to get the maximum effectiveness from a keyboard. Interestingly, five of the eight suites are in minor keys, including one in the unusual key of F-sharp minor (which Haydn used for his “Farewell” symphony, No. 45). The generally big sound of Vinikour’s harpsichord (a 2001 copy of a 1739 instrument built by Johann Heinrich Gräbner, with an unusually large range), so apparent in the A major, F major and E major suites – and in the Chaconne – becomes far more intimate and inward-directed in the minor-key works. Vinikour fully explores the different tempos and moods of the suites’ various movements, bringing forth lyricism and brilliance in equal measure and handling ornamentation and balance with ease and skill. Handel’s harpsichord suites are far less well known than the harpsichord works of Bach, but on the basis of this recording, they are as deserving of a place in listeners’ collections and – for those who can surmount their technical difficulties as elegantly as Vinikour does – a place in harpsichord recitals as well.

     The works on Howard Shelley’s new Chandos CD are as familiar in the concert hall as Handel’s harpsichord suites are unfamiliar. But these Schumann, Grieg and Saint-Saëns concertos have rarely sounded like this. Shelley has gone back to the original manuscripts to find out the composers’ tempo intentions and has discovered, he says, that many modern performance practices are out of kilter – especially in the Schumann and to a lesser extent in the Saint-Saëns. In restoring the tempos to what the composers planned, Shelley offers very spirited performances that will seem over-fast to many listeners on a first hearing – but that bear repeated listens surprisingly well, since they are internally consistent and make up in verve what they somewhat lack in expansiveness. The Schumann is particularly revelatory, bouncing along at a brisk pace that is not without lyricism but that does not allow either piano or orchestra to dwell on the piece’s long lines and broad musical brushstrokes. In the Saint-Saëns, the bright and bouncy second movement is followed by a finale that is truly played Presto, as the tempo indication says – it is a real rouser that has rarely sounded so intensely rhythmic and effective. The most conventional performance here, and therefore the least interesting, is of the Grieg: it is by no means bad, but neither is it revelatory. Shelley does a good job conducting Orchestra of Opera North from the keyboard – a technique more often practiced in Handel’s time than in the Romantic era – and the musicians stay right with him throughout his thought-provoking versions of these concertos.

     From Handel’s 18^th century to the 19^th and early 20^th on Shelley’s CD to the late 20^th and 21^st on Fazil Say’s new Naïve disc is a journey not only of time but also of sensibility. Say is a fine if somewhat self-indulgent pianist – and a fine if somewhat self-indulgent composer as well. He gets to showcase his pianistic prowess here in two encore-like works that draw heavily from the past but give it Say’s own twists and turns. Alla Turca Jazz, Fantasia on the Rondo from the Piano Sonata K. 331 by Mozart (1993), uses the famous finale of Mozart’s A major sonata for a set of intricate, occasionally dazzling variations. Summertime Variations (2006) draws on the iconic Gershwin song from Porgy and Bess, but takes the jazz elements of the music several steps beyond what Gershwin did, creating a sort of hybrid classical-jazz piece that has a pleasant lilt as well as plenty of opportunities for virtuosity. Say also participates in the very interesting Patara Ballet (2005), written for soprano (or violin), ney flute (or alto flute/treble recorder), piano and percussion – a work that, as in much of Say’s oeuvre, brings Turkish sounds and motifs into play alongside Western European ones, often resulting in fascinating juxtapositions. There is a similar blend in Say’s Violin Concerto, heard here in a live recording from its world premiere in February 2008. The subtitle of this work, 1001 Nights in the Harem, invites comparison with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, and in fact Say’s work also uses the solo violin to tie the four movements together. But if Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestration is grander and his conception more grandiose, Say’s work is more authentic and exotic in its use of Turkish percussion instruments and its third-movement variations on a well-known Turkish song. The concerto meanders through the harem, introducing the women there, presenting them in dances, and eventually culminating in a sensuous, dreamy conclusion that – once again – seems partly to echo the quiet ending of Rimsky-Korsakov’s work. Yet Say’s concerto, which Patricia Kopatchinskaja plays very well indeed, is wholly his own and very clearly, in harmonies and use of instruments, a piece born in the 21^st century. Its virtuosity is different from that of Handel, Schumann, Grieg and Saint-Saëns, but it is as much a part of the music of today as their displays were of the music of their own times.

(++++) AMERICAN MUSICAL PICTURES

Abraham Lincoln Portraits: Music by Ives, Persichetti, Harris, Bacon, Gould, McKay, Turok and Copland. Soloists, Nashville Symphony Chorus and Nashville Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin. Naxos. $17.99 (2 CDs).

Samuel Jones: Symphony No. 3, “Palo Duro Canyon”; Concerto for Tuba and Orchestra. Christopher Olka, tuba; Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Naxos. $8.99.

     How much Lincolniana is enough? The Naxos “Lincoln Portraits” set offers nearly two hours of music inspired by the United States’ 16^th president, the bicentennial of whose birth is being celebrated this year. The works have little in common except their inspiration, and are quite diverse in length, form, approach and – in truth – effectiveness. Best known is Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait (1942), an exercise in hagiography (as are just about all the works here) that remains effective, if somewhat overdone, 60-plus years after it was written. Narrator Barry Scott avoids pomposity in his delivery, and that helps. Strongly contrasted with Copland’s work is Charles Ives’ Lincoln, the Great Commoner, the shortest work in this set (three-and-a-half minutes) and the most pointed, filled with Ives’ Yankee forthrightness without devolving into soupy sentimentality. Between these poles are works of greater or lesser historical and musical interest. Vincent Persichetti’s A Lincoln Address, which like Copland’s work is for narrator and orchestra, uses Lincoln’s second inaugural address as its basis, but the many references to the Civil War were thought to hit too close to home during the Vietnam War – with the result that the work was yanked from Richard Nixon’s 1973 inauguration, for which it was commissioned (although it was widely played once the circumstances of its removal became known). The piece no longer seems controversial; neither is it especially challenging either to the ear or to the mind. Roy Harris’ Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight, however, comes across as particularly thoughtful. Based on an evocative Vachel Lindsay poem and written for mezzo-soprano (here, Sharon Mabry) and piano trio (here, Roger Wiesmeyer, piano; Mary Kathryn Van Osdale, violin; and Anthony LaMarchina, cello), the work reflects the dark introspection in which Lincoln often engaged – and has the effect of humanizing him. Ernst Bacon’s Ford’s Theatre: A Few Glimpses of Easter Week, 1865, at half an hour the longest work in this set, dates to 1946 and is a cycle of 12 short movements based on a Paul Horgan play. Some parts are effective enough, but the work as a whole is episodic rather than cumulatively moving. More effective – and half the length – is Morton Gould’s 1941 Lincoln Legend, which makes its points without overdoing them and also reflects the wartime in which it was written. From George Frederick McKay, who is perhaps better known as a teacher of John Cage and William Bolcom than as a composer, To a Liberator (A Lincoln Tribute) is another work of the World War II era, dating to 1939. Of the five movements, the most impressive are the third (a march) and the last, which provides a quiet and thoughtful ending. Also interesting is Paul Turok’s Variations on an American Song: Aspects of Lincoln and Liberty (1963), which is based on the “Lincoln and Liberty” campaign song of 1859 that in turn uses an Irish tune, “Rosin the Bow.” That tune uses only the seven white notes of the piano, but Turok creates an impressive set of musical effects from it, and the work is more upbeat than many others here. Leonard Slatkin leads the Nashville Symphony Orchestra and Chorus with his usual verve and spirit, and if the Lincoln theme does tend to wear a bit thin as one piece of praise follows another, the individual works are all worth at least an occasional hearing, and several are worth more than that.

     Samuel Jones (born 1935) offers Americana of a different kind. Jones, now in his 12^th year as composer in residence of the Seattle Symphony, wrote his one-movement Third Symphony (1992) for the Amarillo Symphony Orchestra and based it on Palo Duro Canyon, a natural wonder some 20 miles from Amarillo. This is program music in a very general sense, starting by portraying the windy plains and then, when it comes time to “see” the canyon musically, using a broad, noble theme in the brass. There are also Comanche Indian melodies incorporated into the music. Jones is unafraid of dissonance but not wedded to it for its own sake. As a result, his music tends to be tuneful and expressive, although not particularly challenging or profound. His Third Symphony is certainly one of the more accessible American works from the last decade of the 20^th century. And Jones’ Tuba Concerto, which dates to 2005, is accessible as well, although not very easily so for the soloist. The work was written for Christopher Olka, who plays it with great skill and apparent enjoyment. It is the first of three Jones concertos for lower brass instruments, the second being for horn and the third and newest for trombone. The interplay of orchestra and solo instrument is particularly well handled in the Tuba Concerto: the tuba’s deep sound is never overwhelmed by that of the other instruments, and there are even some amusing sections in which the largest of all brass instruments is paired with the highest woodwind, the piccolo. The concerto showcases the dexterity of both Jones and Olka, and Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony provide carefully calibrated backup that brings out Jones’ colorations as effectively here as in the Third Symphony. It would be exaggerating to call Jones a major American composer, but he is a highly skilled craftsman whose work deserves to be more widely known.

(++++) FANTASTIC VOYAGES

The Fantastic Undersea Life of Jacques Cousteau. By Dan Yaccarino. Knopf. $16.99.

The Swamps of Sleethe: Poems from Beyond the Solar System. By Jack Prelutsky. Illustrated by Jimmy Pickering. Knopf. $16.99.

     The wonders of life beneath the sea are things that today’s children can take almost for granted, so common are they on television shows and in books filled with real-life pictures or carefully rendered drawings based on underwater photography. So it may come as a big surprise to kids ages 6-9 that there was no easy way to explore the oceans and take those marvelous photos until one man, Jacques Cousteau, made ocean exploration and preservation his life’s work. Dan Yaccarino’s The Fantastic Undersea Life of Jacques Cousteau traces the great undersea explorer and inventor from his childhood as “a weak and sickly boy” to his great successes as an adult – and his determination to help preserve the oceans when he discovered that they were being systematically damaged by human activity. Yaccarino shows how much the ocean gave Cousteau: he built up his boyhood strength by swimming, and later (after a serious car accident while he was still a boy) recovered full use of his arms by further water activity. Cousteau gave much to the oceans, too, exploring their beauties and the creatures living in them for his entire adult life, using his famous ship Calypso and such inventions as the underwater camera and the aqualung, of which he was co-discoverer. The inventor in Cousteau comes through clearly in this book, and young children will enjoy Yaccarino’s drawings of him tinkering with a camera and, later, creating things to make ocean exploration more practical. Yaccarino talks about Cousteau’s famous documentary films and his TV series, The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, which ran for a decade. And he sprinkles his narrative with quotations from Cousteau himself – the language a little advanced for the 6-9 age range, but not overly so. Because he is targeting young children with this story, Yaccarino omits or downplays the many tragedies in Cousteau’s life, including the death of one of his sons and the sinking of Calypso in Singapore Harbor in 1996. But these gloomier facts are available at the end of the book, and older children who become interested in learning more about Cousteau will want to know them – and perhaps pursue further information in the books that Yaccarino recommends.

     And speaking of gloomy: that is not an adjective usually applied to the poetry of Jack Prelutsky, so it is a good thing The Swamps of Sleethe is recommended for kids ages eight and up rather than for younger children, because this is the darkest poetry book Prelutsky has written. There are no wonders of the universe here – every poem is about an imaginary place where terrible things can, do and will happen to any space explorer intrepid enough to set foot on it. The title poem features “malignant beings…Abhorrent things that need not breathe,/ And yet are quite alive.” In the forests of Festor, Prelutsky writes, “Every bush, every bud, every blossom/ Is filled with malevolent will./ The prettiest mosses may poison,/ The loveliest lichens may kill.” This is not at all what readers expect from the usually upbeat and offbeat Prelutsky; and the illustrations by Jimmy Pickering, although they are not as strong as the words of the poems, reinforce the rhymes with skull-and-crossbones flora, a frozen space explorer about to shatter into bits, and one of the swamp-thing-like Globulings of Wolvar Sprod: “They’ll place you on a pedestal,/ And endlessly revolve you,/ Until they weary of their sport—/ And that’s when they’ll dissolve you.” This is a book in which a planet that makes you cry and one that makes you laugh prove equally deadly; and it is a universe in which nothing less than Lovecraftian echoes resound: “The Beholder in the Silence/ Keeps its vigil all alone/ For a reason and a purpose/ That forever stays unknown,/ On that chill and nameless planet/ Where no wind has ever blown” (this poem gets Pickering’s eeriest illustration, too). The Swamps of Sleethe is probably not chilling enough to give most kids in the target age range nightmares, but it ought to be kept away from younger siblings. For children with a well-developed liking for the outré and generally weird, Prelutsky has now shown that he can be their poet as well as the bard of fizzier and funnier topics.

(++++) IT’S ALIVE! (WELL, ALMOST)

Gallop! A Scanimation Picture Book. By Rufus Butler Seder. Workman. $12.95.

Swing! A Scanimation Picture Book. By Rufus Butler Seder. Workman. $12.95.

Gallop! Cards: 8 Scanimation Gift Cards. By Rufus Butler Seder. Workman. $16.

     Words such as “zoopraxiscope” and “kinetoscope” may have little meaning at the modern multiplex, but without them, today’s films would not have evolved as they did. The zoopraxiscope, created by photographer Eadweard Muybridge, projected images that were drawn in sequence around the edge of a glass disc. This produced the illusion of motion – that is, a movie. The kinetoscope, developed by Thomas Edison after he saw the zoopraxiscope and subsequently met with Muybridge, moved perforated film of sequential images across a light source equipped with a high-speed shutter – again, creating the illusion of motion, although not for projection but for one person at a time to see through a peephole (this led to the once-infamous, risqué “peep shows”). These 19^th-century inventions were marvels in their day, and now there is a modern successor that is a marvel in itself: Rufus Butler Seder’s Scanimation. It is a patented process that makes animals, people and objects seem to move, using no special lighting or electricity. Seder developed it after creating a design called Lifetiles for museums and other public places two decades ago. Lifetiles are optical glass-tiled murals that move or change when a viewer walks or rides by. The connection with the zoopraxiscope is clear, as is the connection of Scanimation with the kinetoscope. But if the most fascinating thing about Seder’s newest creation is its technology, the most important thing about it is its sheer creativity. For Scanimation has made it possible to create two absolutely wonderful books for Workman – plus a set of cards based on one of the books.

     What you see when you turn to a page of Gallop! or Swing! is an activity in progress. In Gallop! a horse gallops, a rooster struts, an eagle soars, a chimp swings from branch to branch, and other animals go about their motion-filled lives as well – each displayed on a right-hand page that consists of black vertical stripes with an accurate rendition of the animal portrayed in black across the stripes. Moving the page, or moving the left-hand page while leaving the right-hand one stationary, alters the incident light on the Scanimation, creating what seems to be left-to-right motion. In Swing! a batter hits a ball – apparently right at you, in an especially impressive bit of design. On other pages, a child rides by on a bike, another turns a cartwheel, still another twirls on ice skates – and so on. These are short but immensely involving books that will fascinate young readers again and again as they try to figure out how the Scanimation works. The books’ weakness is their text, which is made up of questions and onomatopoeic responses: “Can you soar like an eagle? Whoosh-whoosh-glide!” “Can you run a relay race? Zip! Zoop! Zoom!” There is nothing especially wrong with the writing, but there is nothing especially creative about it, either – particularly in contrast to the amazing illustrations. But no one will buy these books for the words, and no one should.

     Kids (and parents) who want to share Seder’s remarkable work with others will enjoy Gallop! Cards, which includes eight cards – two each of four designs from Gallop! The cards are blank inside, but kids can customize them for any occasion, either on their own or by using the two enclosed sticker sheets, which offer hearts and stars and other decorations as well as brightly colored greetings: “Happy Birthday,” “Congratulations” and “Thinking of You.” The four animals on the cards are a galloping horse, running dog, springing cat and soaring eagle – each of them a truly remarkable illustration to discover upon opening a greeting card. With many ordinary store-bought cards now costing $3, $4 or more, the set of Gallop! Cards at $2 each is even a bargain. Seder’s work is simply extraordinary – and if your kids really do want to understand something of the underlying technology, by all means start them on the road toward discovering the wonders of Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope and Edison’s kinetoscope.

(+++) CURES FOR ALL THAT AILS YOU?

The Hourglass Solution: A Boomer’s Guide to the Rest of Your Life. By Jeff Johnson, Ph.D., and Paula Forman, Ph.D. Da Capo. $25.

Healing through Exercise: Scientifically-Proven Ways to Prevent and Overcome Illness and Lengthen Your Life. By Jörg Blech. Da Capo. $26.

     Just plunk down your 51 bucks (plus tax where charged), follow the prescriptions in these books, and you’ll have a longer, healthier, more fulfilled and fulfilling life. Believe!

     Or don’t. Like self-help books from time immemorial, these two take a good idea and turn it into the be-all and end-all idea for future health, wealth and success. That may be a flaw inherent in the whole self-help-book field – does anyone want to buy a book that says “here’s something you can do that may kind of help your life if you do lots of other things, too”? But one would hope that psychologist Jeff Johnson and sociology professor Paula Forman would not fall victim to overstatement. Maybe the fact that both have also been involved in the advertising business has something to do with it. What they are advertising, and advising, in The Hourglass Solution is that baby boomers think of life as being shaped like an hourglass, with constraints in the “neck” still holding them captive as they age. That is, earlier-in-life decisions about career, lifestyle, relationships, money and more will continue to constrict life unless boomers understand that there is a bottom part of the hourglass that broadens out considerably past the narrow neck – and boomers can and should take advantage of that expanded part. This is one of those clever metaphors that it is best not to examine too closely, since it invites a “sands of time” attitude toward life and a feeling that, after one escapes constriction, one plunges rapidly to the bottom, to death. That’s not what Johnson and Forman mean, of course. What they suggest – using a variety of comments by baby boomers, plus sections in which the two authors speak in alternating paragraphs – is that midlife-and-afterwards is a time for looking at things differently and acting in ways that were not previously possible. For example, one married couple divorced amicably so that she could pursue her dream of living in a bigger city and he could stay in the small town where they had lived for decades, but do a different sort of work. Other people talk about keeping their brains active by trying new things or re-trying old ones: “I got back on roller skates after thirty years – I counted that as new.” And then there is the matter of money: “Our financial obligations may be a product of decisions that no longer work as well as they did when the obligations were undertaken,” so “the issue for boomers in midlife is to evaluate the pattern of their own spending and determine the degree to which their money is enabling choice – or if their consumer choices are actually decreasing their options.” Choice is what The Hourglass Solution is ultimately all about, and the book abounds with comments such as, “Once it was done, there wasn’t a single regret.” But this is where Johnson and Forman show themselves more enamored of the advertising world than of psychology and sociology. For a great many people, if not most, there will be regrets over giving up elements of life that have been central to them for decades; there will be periods of uncertainty over the value of new choices and new decisions; there will be financial, psychological and sociological consequences of making big changes at or after midlife – and not all those consequences will be pleasant. The Hourglass Solution is not the solution at all, but a solution that will work for some people, in some circumstances, some of the time. It is good to know that plenty of choices remain to people as they age, and good to know that some people have made big changes in life and now seem happier than before. But nothing in this book is a panacea for aging, ennui, uncertainty or facing the inevitability of getting older.

     Unless, of course, you combine the Johnson-Forman approach with science writer Jörg Blech’s assertion that exercise is the one thing you need – not only to prevent illness, but also to get well if you do become acutely sick or develop such chronic conditions as diabetes, asthma, osteoarthritis, depression or ADHD. Blech takes the now nearly universal recommendation to stop living a sedentary life in order to stay healthy and reduce the chance of sickness a big step further, recommending exercise as a primary treatment when disease does strike. Exercise helps restructure and strengthen heart muscles! It can help diabetics avoid, or at least postpone, insulin use! It keeps people with cancer alive longer! It even leads the body to produce more stem cells! But – and the “but” is largely missing in Healing through Exercise – exercise is at its most helpful under carefully controlled, managed and monitored clinical conditions, and Blech’s statements about its benefits are generally based on clinical trials, most of them involving a small number of people for a limited period of time. Books that attempt to extrapolate from such trials may certainly be well-meaning, as this one is, but they may also be quite misleading. For example, one recent clinical trial – not mentioned in Blech’s book – found that supplements of B vitamins (folate, B6 and B12) reduced the incidence of age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of vision impairment in older adults in the United States. Great! Just take some B vitamins and protect your eyes! But…although this was a seven-year trial, it involved only carefully screened women over age 40, and participants took the B vitamins at doses ranging from several dozen to several hundred times the recommended daily dietary allowance. The researchers themselves said they need many years to find out what minimum dose produces desirable effects – and whether long-term use of super-high doses produces negative ones. The point is that one-size-fits-all prescriptions are inherently flawed, even when what is prescribed is something as straightforward as exercise. Yes, Blech reports a study showing exercise-induced stem-cell rebuilding in severely out-of-shape men; but even he call the program “torturous” and explains that, “five days per week, the patients had to walk six times until they felt pain.” How likely is it that people will engage in this sort of program on their own? What less-intense level will provide equal or almost-equal benefits while improving compliance? Blech does not say, because he cannot – no one knows. Similarly, Blech correctly points out that “only a few patients who suffer from depression become healthy again by taking drugs,” largely because “up to 60 percent of patients are believed to stop following their prescriptions after three weeks.” Then Blech explains how 156 depressed elderly patients did better when undergoing 16 weeks of carefully monitored exercise sessions lasting 30 minutes each, three times per week. Most improvement occurred after the 16 weeks, because “many of the participants liked exercising so much that they continued to be active even after the official end of the study.” Wonderful…but how will depressed people – for whom motivation to do anything positive is a very serious concern – motivate themselves, outside a clinical setting, to constant, regular exercise; and what happens to people who decide they do not like it, either during an initial period or later? Again, Blech does not, cannot, address these issues. What we are left with in Healing through Exercise is a great deal less than the subtitle promises. Exercise can prevent some diseases and mitigate the effects of others; it may improve both physical and mental health in some people under some circumstances. And it is certainly an easier and cheaper approach to bodily health than medication – for people sufficiently motivated to cause themselves short-term discomfort (possibly a lot of it) in return for long-term gain (possibly not much of it). Once again, there is a very good idea here, with some scientific backing for its effectiveness; but once again, nothing in this book is a panacea, no matter how much Blech would like it to be.

(++) MONSTER MISHMASH

Jailbait Zombie. By Mario Acevedo. Eos. $14.99.

     Mario Acevedo can definitely do better than this. In fact, he has – three times. Jailbait Zombie is the fourth adventure of Acevedo’s vampire detective, Felix Gomez, but it is so much weaker than the other three that readers should assume Acevedo had an off day, or week, or however long it took him to put this silly bit of incoherence together.

     Obviously, one does not seek perfect verisimilitude in a book whose central character is a vampire, who in this case finds himself battling zombies. But why must the zombies’ creator be a prototypical mad scientist? Why must his headquarters be at Ghoul Mountain? And why does Acevedo make so many references to earlier books that readers picking this one up without having read the others will feel lost and cheated at all the talk of alien gangsters (who sound a lot more interesting than anything in Jailbait Zombie – and in fact were when they appeared in the third Gomez adventure, The Undead Kama Sutra)?

     Certainly Acevedo’s third book had flaws; so did his first two, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats and X-Rated Bloodsuckers. But as you can tell from the titles, they also had a kind of raw humor and an offbeat sexuality about them. Jailbait Zombie – whose title is its best bit even though it turns out to refer only to the intention of creating a certain zombie, not actually doing so – lacks the punchiness, the often-played-for-laughs sexuality and the many rethinkings of vampire lore that the first three books contained. A couple of characters from those books do reappear in bit parts here, but only one (Gomez’s fellow vampire enforcer, Jolie) is actually an interesting creation, and that one is underused.

     A big problem here is Gomez himself. His steady increase in intelligence, or at least cleverness, has disappeared here, and he is just as dumb and as prone to fall into a horrible trap as he was in the first book, in which he was supposedly first gaining control of his powers. A second big problem is the zombies themselves: there’s little rethinking of that horror cliché, with the result that Gomez is up against hordes (of course) of shambling and shuffling (of course) brain-eating (of course) things that fall apart but just keep coming (of course). Too many courses, or of courses, here.

     Then there are the elements that make no sense at all, even in Acevedo’s context. For instance, vampires have the power to hypnotize humans, but when Gomez tries to hypnotize the master of the zombies, he fails – for no reason that is ever explained. And the character with whom Gomez is most involved here, a 16-year-old girl with strange mental powers and a disease that will kill her before she is 30 unless she becomes a vampire, is simply not very interesting: she is pouty and self-involved, has some artistic talent, may or may not be a Gomez ally, may or may not be useful to him, and so on. Yawn.

     That “yawn” is actually the book’s biggest problem: much of it is simply boring, which a detective novel or thriller (or combination of both) should never be. True, one character says, early on, “I feel like I’m in the opening minutes of a horror movie. You know when all kinds of freaky gruesome shit happens and no one but the audience has a clue what’s going on?” Yes, we know, thank you, and we know you’re doomed for realizing this, but the thing is that we don’t much care. The few flickers of humor in Jailbait Zombie stand out because they are so few: “I dashed around boxes marked biological waste – to-go food for zombies?” Acevedo seems to have taken a detour here in a move to set up future books, since this one ends with an important challenge to the Araneum – the shadowy organization that rules all vampires and is in charge of making sure humans never learn of their existence. Fans of Acevedo’s earlier books should give him the benefit of the doubt with this one and see what he comes up with next. Don’t give up on him unless he produces something like Jailbait Zombie again.

(++++) SCHUBERTIANA

Schubert: String Quartet in D minor, “Death and the Maiden,” adapted for orchestra as Symphony in D minor by Andy Stein; Symphony No. 8, “Unfinished,” completed by Brian Newbould and Mario Venzago. Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Naxos. $8.99.

Schubert: Piano Quintet in A, “Trout”; Variations on “Trockne Blumen” for Flute and Piano; Piano Trio (Notturno) in E-flat. Martin Helmchen, piano; Christian Tetzlaff, violin; Antoine Tamestit, viola; Marie-Elisabeth Hecker, cello; Alois Posch, double bass; Aldo Baerten, wooden flute. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

     Musical purists will be absolutely appalled by JoAnn Falletta’s new disc of Schubert “symphonies,” and rightly so – but if they pass it by, probably with a scoff, they will be missing the chance to hear some fascinating (if sometimes fascinatingly misguided) music. Andy Stein’s orchestration of the “Death and the Maiden” quartet fits closely with what Schubert might well have done if he had wanted the quartet to be a symphony – which he of course did not. Schubert had 1,000 works to his credit even though he died younger than any other major composer (at 31); he was quite capable of deciding which works ought to be symphonic and which were more appropriate as chamber music. Nevertheless, as a “what if” construction, Stein’s “symphony” is a fascinating one, taking the emotional depth and relatively small scale of the quartet and blowing it up onto a grand canvas, where it fits unevenly but sometimes with surprising effectiveness. The finale, for example, has a level of drama that is quite involving, although quite different from what Schubert intended. The adaptation is wrongheaded at times: in the Andante con moto, for example, a lengthy solo-violin passage serves only to remind listeners familiar with the quartet of how much delicacy is missing in Stein’s version; and in the same movement, one very forceful section comes across, in its orchestral guise, as a pale imitation of the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7. This “symphony” is unlikely ever to be more than a curiosity, but it is a curiously refreshing way to hear Schubert in unfamiliar form.

     The “completion” of the “Unfinished” is less unfamiliar. In fact, Brian Newbould has completed it before, in a version slightly different from the current one that was recorded by Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The myth that Schubert stopped writing this work after the second movement is just that – a myth. A partial, partially orchestrated Scherzo exists, and a fascinating recording some years ago by Max Goberman gave the first two movements and then the remains of the Scherzo, starting as an orchestral piece and then turning into a piano work (in the part that Schubert did not orchestrate) before simply stopping. Newbould’s completion of this movement is in fact fairly satisfying, based as it is on the composer’s extensive sketches. The finale is less so. It is the Entr’acte No. 1 from Rosamunde, which some scholars believe was originally intended as the finale for this symphony – the piece is over-long in the incidental music and in the right key to conclude the “Unfinished.” But it is not a very satisfactory conclusion, fitting neither the mood nor the scale of the first two movements – although Falletta’s rather quick tempo for those two movements helps this “finale” work better. Nevertheless, the poor fit with what has gone before may be the reason Schubert chose not to use this piece in the symphony. In any case, the “Unfinished,” like Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 (for whose finale sketches also exist), is a work that has become so familiar in its traditional form that it is hard to imagine a truly satisfactory completion; this one is about as good as listeners are likely to get, and it is certainly worth a (very occasional) hearing.

     Purists will be much happier with the new PentaTone SACD of the “Trout” quintet and other chamber music, since here the works are played as Schubert wrote them and sound very good indeed, in terms of both performances and sound. The ensemble work in the “Trout” is particularly impressive, with all the instruments playing at soloist level (the performers are in fact soloists in their own right) but with excellent give-and-take and a fine sense of balance. The “Trout” variations in the fourth movement are suitably bright and effective, and the finale, which can be a letdown after the cleverness of all that has gone before, is not one here: in fact, it emerges as clever in its own way, its repetitiveness becoming a form of subtlety. The other works on the SACD are also very well performed. The “Trockne Blumen” variations, based on a song from Die schöne Müllerin, wend their way through a variety of emotions (unlike the song, which is sad in the Romantic manner). Aldo Baerten’s use of a wooden rather than metal flute gives the music a warmer, less brittle character than it would otherwise have – a very nice touch indeed. And the one-movement “Notturno” trio provides an emotionally satisfying conclusion to a very finely honed, well-thought-through recording of Schubert’s music as Schubert intended it to be heard.

(++++) RECONSIDERATIONS

Haydn: Symphonies Nos. 41, 44 (“Trauer”) and 49 (“La Passione”). Arion Baroque Orchestra conducted by Gary Cooper. Early-music.com. $16.99.

Herbert von Karajan Memorial Concert. Anne-Sophie Mutter, violin; Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa. Medici Arts DVD. $24.99.

     Just when it seems there cannot possibly be anything new to hear in Haydn’s music, along comes the Arion Baroque Orchestra with performances of three middle-period symphonies that are so good and so different from what others have offered that they make this grand master of the symphony sound entirely new and fresh again. These are truly remarkable renditions of Symphonies Nos. 41, 44 and 49, in which the very small size of the orchestra (17 players, including conductor Gary Cooper at the harpsichord) makes the symphonies seem larger and far more forward-looking than they sound when played by bigger ensembles. These were, after all, works written for a small group – the Arion’s size – and not for the larger ensembles that Haydn would later be able to use in Paris and London. How much Haydn did with barely more than a dozen instruments, how much virtuosity he required of every single player, and how much intensity the Arion members bring to this music, are all matters of astonishment. Symphony No. 41 in C, the earliest work here and the only one in a major key, is brighter and more festive in this version – which approximates Haydn’s original concept – than in the more overdone revision in which it is usually heard, complete with trumpets and drums. The way Haydn achieves his upbeat effects without those brass and percussion instruments is quite remarkable. No. 44 in E minor, whose slow movement (which Haydn wanted played at his own funeral) provides the only relief from unremitting intensity, is filled with emotional outbursts (“listen” to the silences in the first movement) and highly learned but never dry form (the minuet is a canon between upper and lower parts). The small size and precision playing of the Arion orchestra bring out both the intensity and the structural elements with extraordinary clarity. And the performance of No. 49 in F minor is nothing short of astonishing. This is one of the high points of Haydn’s oeuvre, with all four movements in minor and only the trio of the third movement producing a few rays of light in a major key. Dark and impassioned, the symphony in the Arion players’ hands drops listeners immediately into despair and keeps them in melancholy throughout, eventually making melancholia itself a pleasant state through Haydn’s sheer melodic genius. The first movement here is the slow one, in the old Sonata da chiesa form, and the second movement is taken very fast, pulling the ear in new directions without ever letting it escape from the symphony’s tonic key. The players maintain this level of intensity throughout, capping a remarkable CD that will give any listener even greater respect for Haydn’s genius.

     The word “genius” was sometimes applied to Herbert von Karajan, too, although in our modern age it is a description used rather more loosely than it used to be. The longtime Berlin Philharmonic conductor attracted other adjectives, too, however, from “Nazi” (he joined the party not once but twice) to “martinet.” Still, there is no doubt that he raised the Berlin Philharmonic to the very highest levels, making it competitive even with the splendid Vienna Philharmonic of Karajan’s time. And while many of Karajan’s performances could be willful and stiff – especially a number of those later in his career – it is hard to argue with the very high esteem in which he has long been held as one of the world’s greatest conductors. Last year, in commemoration of the 100^th anniversary of Karajan’s birth, a special memorial concert was held at the Vienna Musikverein; it is now available on DVD. In some ways the music and musicians here are perfect choices. Karajan discovered Anne-Sophie Mutter when she was 13, in 1976, inviting her to play with the Berlin Philharmonic. She and Karajan recorded the Beethoven Violin Concerto together, and it is that work that she plays on the DVD. Mutter’s near-icy manner and imperious on-stage presence strongly reflect Karajan’s own approach to his podium work, and her handling of the concerto seems to provide a direct connection with her onetime mentor (who died in 1989). Mutter also plays the Sarabande from Bach’s Partita No. 2 for Solo Violin, although this seems more a violinist’s encore than part of the tribute to Karajan. The other music here fares less well: it is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, whose heart-on-its-sleeve emotionalism was never Karajan’s strong suit. And Seiji Ozawa was not the best choice to conduct this symphony or, indeed, the whole concert: he is a disciple of Leonard Bernstein rather than of Karajan, but lacks Bernstein’s uncanny ability (when Bernstein was at his best) to meld strong emotionalism with a fine understanding of musical structure. Ozawa is simply sloppy, leaning into every nuance of Tchaikovsky’s pathos without providing the sort of firm underpinning that was Karajan’s specialty. It is thanks to Mutter’s playing rather than Ozawa’s conducting that this DVD gets a high (+++) rating. The two musicians also talk about Karajan on the DVD – Mutter has more interesting insights – and there are some well-chosen film clips of Karajan’s career to round out the presentation. This is a very good tribute concert that would have been better if it had featured a conductor whose style was more in tune with Karajan’s own – which was certainly not perfect, but which retains tremendous power even today, as many of the recordings that Karajan himself left behind amply demonstrate.