INFODAD.COM: Family-Focused Reviews

(++++) THE ANTITHESIS OF VIRTUAL

2012-01-26T08:50:00.001-05:00

Splat Art: Blops & Dribbles in Need of Your Scribbles. By Andrew Pinder. Klutz. $12.99.

Star Wars Folded Flyers. By Benjamin Harper and the Scientists of Klutz Labs. Klutz. $19.99.

Buzz Lightyear Foam Gliders. By the Editors of Klutz. Klutz. $16.99.

Make Your Own Disney Princess Tiaras. By the Editors of Klutz. Klutz. $16.99.

In our increasingly virtual age, where objects that once had physical reality – books, music storage mechanisms such as CDs and vinyl records – have been more and more often replaced by their digital equivalents, it is good to know that there remains a place for kids to have actual physical interaction with matter. That would be the Klutz “books-plus” line, in which guided crafts projects are presented with the materials needed to complete them. Or so it is most of the time. Splat Art is, on the one hand, very much in line with typical Klutz approaches for ages eight and up; and on the other, differs in one important respect. Its amusing, irreverent tone, featuring multicolored blots and blobs, old photos taken deliberately out of context, collages, and pictures of common objects (ribbon, leaves, rotten tomatoes), is pure Klutz. What it tells children to do with those objects is pure Klutz as well: use them as the basis of creative drawings, whether of colorful ants, companions for “a lonely splodgeosaurus,” fingerprint flowers, dolphins with banana bodies, or “spooky tissue ghosts.” Each set of objects or splotches or blots comes with one example of how kids might create something, and it is up to each child to decide whether to follow the suggestion or come up with an approach of his or her own. Either way is just fine – this book is all about artistic creativity, whether guided or free-flowing. It does differ from typical Klutz offerings in one significant way: it does not include anything with which to make the drawings. But since a few simple pencil lines can make considerable transformations here, pencils or crayons or pens are not really necessary; kids can supply their own, in line with their own imagination.

More typically Klutzian is another project book for ages eight and up, Star Wars Folded Flyers. Here the “guided” element is much stronger and in fact must be followed for the 30 (yes, 30) paper starfighters to emerge from the included foldable pages to fly and loop around the room or outdoors. Some ships from the Star Wars films will be immediately recognizable, such as the Millennium Falcon; others may need some introduction, such as the BTL-B Y-wing. No problem: each ship gets an intro that includes information labeled “About My Ship,” “Weapons and Defense,” and “In Battle,” along with ID cards for the pilots. There are “tips from a master” (Yoda) about assembly, and decidedly Klutzian comments inserted here and there: “Created for the Rebel Alliance by the Incom Corporation, the X-wing was kept secret from the Empire. Fortunately for you, Klutz Labs was able to obtain copies of the top-secret plans.” This is not a book for the impatient: folds have to be done carefully, and small adjustments are required (and inevitable) once the paper craft are put together and given a chance to fly. Klutz anticipates this: there are only six designs of starfighters, with plenty of extra pages provided so additional ones of the same design can be made. There are also pages to fold into display stands – a nice touch. All that is needed to make the flyers is in the book, including tape (provided as a sheet). Of course, Star Wars Folded Flyers is only for devotees of the film franchise, but it seems safe to say that there are plenty of them around (adults as well as kids).

A different franchise – the Pixar/Disney Toy Story sequence – is the basis for flying of a different kind, for younger kids (ages four and up). Buzz Lightyear Foam Gliders includes a Buzz rocket plus gliders associated with Woody, the aliens, Hamm and Emperor Zurg. The pieces punch out of cardboard and are very easy to assemble, and plastic nose caps weight them toward the front so they fly quite well. There is also a sheet of Toy Story stickers for decorating the gliders with lights, characters, glider names and more. Boys too young for Star Wars Folded Flyers (or ones who are not fans of the Star Wars films) will enjoy assembling these planes, which take much less time to make than do those in the Star Wars book. And what about girls? Klutz has a Disney tie-in for them, too – Make Your Own Princess Tiaras, which, like the Toy Story project, is for ages four and up (but not up too far). There is more to do in this book than in the Toy Story one, even though there are only three tiaras (a yellow one for Belle, a blue Cinderella model and one called Ariel Pink). The reasons for the extra activities are, first, that there are lots of decorations included (stickers, jewels, “princess cameos,” pom-poms and sequins, plus glue to attach things); and, second, that Make Your Own Princess Tiaras also contains other projects – mini tiaras for dolls, “wand toppers” to attach to drinking straws, and a tiara stencil that can be used to cut out additional tiaras comparable to the ones supplied by Klutz. There are also jewelry bases: cardboard cutouts that can be used to make rings and bracelets. As with the projects tied to the Star Wars and Toy Story films, Make Your Own Princess Tiaras is only for kids who are fans of the films featuring the characters highlighted by Klutz. But parents who are not enamored of any of the tie-in books can always turn to, say, Splat Art, which is not tied into anything except a child’s imagination.

(++++) VARIETIES OF GARBAGE

2012-01-26T08:47:00.000-05:00

What Happens to Our Trash? By D.J. Ward. Illustrated by Paul Meisel. Collins. $5.99.

The Zombie Chasers #3: Sludgment Day. By John Kloepfer. Illustrated by Steve Wolfhard. Harper. $15.99.

Five pounds of trash per person per day – that is the garbage output of the United States. And that is just one of the pieces of information in the Let’s-Read-and-Find-Out Science book called What Happens to Our Trash? A “Stage 2” paperback for ages 5-9, short and easy to read, D.J. Ward’s book is nevertheless packed with important information for children wondering what they can do to help clean up the environment and make a cleaner world for themselves to enjoy when they grow up. Ward, a high-school science teacher, is careful to balance the pluses and minuses of various approaches to trash control. For example, he points out that “some cities burn their trash. …That puts the trash to good use. But burning trash causes problems, too. It can pollute the air. And it’s expensive.” Paul Meisel’s colorful illustrations help mitigate what could be a relentlessly depressing message about drowning ourselves in our own waste. For instance, he shows a boy looking glum, despite the amusing image behind him, which goes with the words, “The amount of trash produced in America annually can fill up enough garbage trucks, lined up end to end, to reach the moon.” Other illustrations show the clay and plastic liners used in landfills; how methane is turned into electricity (this picture is in the form of a child’s class project); and how everyone can help reduce garbage accumulation. This “what to do” element is the heart of the book, and it is somewhat oversimplified. “Bring our own bags to the store and use them instead of throwaway bags” is a good idea, for example, but Ward does not mention that there are health risks to reusable bags that have led some stores to stop selling them. “Buy a big bag of snacks instead of lots of little bags” makes sense unless it leads to overeating of the snacks (contributing to obesity, itself a significant problem) or results in the snacks going stale before they are used and ending up as trash themselves (as well as a waste of money). Still, this short book does not claim to be comprehensive, and it is certainly an effective starting point for family and class discussions of environmental and ecological issues – and what individuals, including kids, can do about them.

Trash is played for laughs in Sludgment Day, the conclusion of John Kloepfer’s Zombie Chasers trilogy. But then, so is brain-eating; and for that matter, so is fashion: “The zombie man wore a tight white jumpsuit with a bald eagle bedazzled on the front. Thick curly chest hair spilled out of the V-neck, all matted with sludge.” OK, we get it; and OK, yuck. Kids ages 8-12 who like gross-out scenes of messy monsters (and heroic preteens fighting them) are the target audience for Kloepfer’s writing and Steve Wolfhard’s aptly unpleasant illustrations, which the publisher resisted the temptation to call “ILL-ustrations.” The thing about zombies is, you see, they are, like, dead and reanimated, so this would seem to be a problem for the kids after a “zombie virus” attacks their parents, acquaintances, neighbors and most of the country. But not to worry: this being a virus rather than a kill-and-reanimate thingie, it can be fought and eventually reversed, which is just what Zack Clarke and his friends Rice, Madison, Ozzie and Zoe are doing now that they have found the antidote. The first Zombie Chasers book was Kloepfer’s debut novel, and his style has not exactly matured in the sequels. “As he entered the men’s room he could hear the distant din of the zombie plague droning outside the rest stop.” “The sun blazed brightly in the clear blue sky as they sped along the northbound highway up the east bank of the Mississippi River. An infinity of zombies stumbled over the rolling hillsides, casting long shadows in the morning light.” “Red viral streaks climbed up his neck, and his skin turned a deep shade of green. The zombifying bully dropped to his knees, frothing at the mouth, then fell limp on the pavement.” You get the idea. This book gets a (+++) rating for bringing the trilogy to a suitably messy but triumphant end, and for the fact that the illustrations are so ridiculously overdone that they manage to be simultaneously gross and silly – which, of course, is the point of this whole endeavor.

(+++) MANAGING THE MACABRE

2012-01-26T08:44:00.000-05:00

The Girl with the Crooked Nose: A Tale of Murder, Obsession, and Forensic Analysis. By Ted Botha. Berkley. $15.

Television and movies wrap up crimes neatly. Real life is messy. Just how messy becomes clear in Ted Botha’s novelistically written The Girl with the Crooked Nose, a biography of forensic artist Frank Bender (1941-2011) and a look at some of the gruesome cases on which he worked – successfully or not.

Botha’s structure is almost too neat. By jumping forward and back in time, focusing sometimes on Bender’s own past and sometimes on the cases on which he worked, and moving around geographically, Botha creates an expectation akin to those in films and TV shows: that he will knit everything together in the end and there will be a suitably upbeat (or at least ironic and noir) conclusion to the story. But, again, real life is messy, and this is not what readers get – which will likely lead to some sense of disappointment. A 16-page “Postmortem” does explain what happened, or failed to happen, in a number of Bender’s cases and to a number of the people mentioned in the book; then an Afterword explains what may or may not have happened to the book’s title character; and then the back-of-book Acknowledgments pages briefly conclude the story of Bender himself and his wife, Jan, both of whom died after the original publication of this book in 2008. The result of all these postscripts is ambiguity and a sense that things should have worked out more fairly and more neatly. And so they would have in entertainment media; not so in real life.

Readers not looking for clarity or apotheosis will find a great deal that is interesting and quite a bit that is upsetting in this book. Botha returns again and again – as Bender did – to Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, site of the notorious feminicidios (“femicides”) that have claimed the lives of hundreds of women, and perhaps thousands, since 1993. Bender spent considerable time, and took considerable personal risks, trying to help local Mexican police, and later the federales, identify some of the victims and hopefully move toward finding the killers. The depth of corruption of the Mexican police and legal system comes through very clearly here, as does the uncertainty with which Bender dealt all the time – one apparent ally, for example, proves to be a possibly dangerous enemy or even perhaps a man involved in the coverup of some of the killings, if not himself a killer (although, as often in the book, readers never find out just what role this person played; he simply fades away from the narrative).

What also comes through clearly is that forensic sculpture was no way to make a living, at least not for Bender. He was particularly skilled at giving lifelike expressions to his reconstructions of victims, having an intuitive grasp of how they might have looked at things when alive (although, again, this is real life: his intuition was often right but often wrong). But to make money, he did everything from photography to tugboat maintenance – his sculptures of victims paid little, and sometimes the agencies for which he worked did not pay him at all. Yet Bender had more than talent: he had a drive to bring the dead back to life in some way, and maybe bring closure to their loved ones (although, again, he failed at this as often as he succeeded). Bender’s wife, Jan, is a subsidiary character here, but a fascinating one herself: very much a wild teenager (she stole five dollars and used it to run away from home before she turned 18, leaving her one-year-old daughter with her parents), she tolerated her husband’s affairs, generally supported his forensic endeavors, and helped find ways to keep their marriage together for almost 40 years until her death from cancer in 2010.

The Girl with the Crooked Nose is a fascinatingly frustrating book to read. Bender was a multifaceted human being, highly talented but deeply flawed. His conflicts with bureaucrats and corruption will be easy for readers to relate to: at one point he walks out on a forensics meeting and goes to the beach, telling the man who invited him, “It’s just a bunch of fuddy-duddies at the conference.” The skill of his reconstructions is clear not only from Botha’s narrative but also from the book’s eight pages of photos. Bender’s impatience with red tape contrasts with the extreme care he brought to his reconstructions. But for all Bender’s hard work, and that of the honest law-enforcement personnel who appear in this book, the fact remains that the killers of many of the people whom Bender reconstructed got away with murder. And they still do: the feminicidios cases were abandoned by the Mexican federales in 2006, and most remain unsolved.

(+++) SUPERFICIALITIES

2012-01-26T08:41:00.001-05:00

Princess Recovery: A How-To Guide to Raising Strong, Empowered Girls Who Can Create Their Own Happily Ever Afters. By Jennifer L. Hartstein, Psy.D. Adams Media. $21.95.

Psychologist Jennifer Hartstein seems to think she has discovered that it is a bad thing for young girls to focus on how others perceive them and to expect a fairy-tale life in everything from clothing to romance. Memo to Hartstein: where have you been for the last, say, 40 years? The notion that girls and women should be more than adorable playthings awaiting Prince Charming has been around for so long that everyone from 1970s feminists to the Walt Disney Company (whose films long perpetuated the “princess” myth, although they did not create it) has taken notice and made substantial adjustments in child-rearing, education and even movies (just compare more-recent Disney animated characters, such as the book-loving Belle from Beauty and the Beast and hard-working Tiana from The Princess and the Frog, with Snow White and Cinderella from earlier films).

Hartstein’s heart is in the right place, but she seems not to have wrapped her head around several decades of progress in feminine self-awareness – and child-rearing. So Princess Recovery tells parents of young girls (ages 2-8, broken down by Hartstein into 2-3, 4-5 and 6-8) to make sure their daughters appreciate both inner and outer beauty instead of prioritizing superficial appearance; help themselves and others instead of waiting for others to help them; do things “for the right reasons” rather than “for the appearance of perfection”; and define themselves by their own standards, not by the way others perceive them. This is quite unexceptionable advice – and quite unexceptional, even though Hartstein tries to pretty it up (a rather princess-y approach) by contrasting “the heroine” with “the princess.”

There are glimmers of amusement and insight in Princess Recovery. The book’s dedication, for example, suggests that heroines “enjoy wearing your crown as you play in the mud,” and at one point Hartstein says parents can apply a corrective to romantic notions about being a princess by showing their daughters some real-world princesses and explaining how they live and all the things they have to do. On the other hand, Hartstein is enamored of the obvious: do not overschedule your daughter because “she needs some time to herself”; “set your daughter up for success”; “show her how to set boundaries”; “support her interests to the best of your ability”; “expose your daughter to all kinds of career options”; and so on – and on and on. All this is certainly well-meaning, but Hartstein writes as if she is the first person to come up with these very common and commonplace notions, and that becomes irritating after a while (a short while). Even the book’s title is a trifle “off,” implying that the book is for parents whose daughters are already in “princess mode” – when in fact Hartstein is offering an alternative to it (presumably The Princess Alternative would not have been considered as salable a title in the self-help field, but how about Better Than a Princess?).

There is plenty of good advice in Hartstein’s book: “experiences age better than things,” “identify wants versus needs,” “make thoughtful choices,” and so forth. And Hartstein makes good, forthright recommendations on implementing the suggested approaches – in the “thoughtful choices” area, for instance, she says to create wish lists for yourself and your daughter, consider the desired items for an agreed-upon waiting period, decide what you need if you still want an item after that time has passed (“bonus or allowance money,” for example), and then make the purchase after budgeting for it both financially and psychologically. This is a good approach not only for children but also for adults; and indeed, Hartstein says, again and again, that parents need to model the behaviors they want to see in their daughters. “Combat materialism as a family,” she recommends at one point; “teach assertiveness rather than aggression,” at another; “evaluate your own moral values,” at yet another. Introspection, self-awareness and guidance – these are all excellent ideas, although none of them is even slightly new or unique to this book. Princess Recovery makes many good points, even though it is frequently over-earnest (a little fantasizing never hurt anyone) and has a greater-than-warranted sense of its own originality. Parents can get some useful thoughts from Hartstein, but they will have to leaven them with a sense of humor and a modicum of innovative thinking on their own.

(++++) SMALL COMPANY, BIG SUCCESSES

2012-01-26T08:38:00.000-05:00

François Rebel and François Francœur: Zélindor, roi des Sylphes; Suite from “Le Trophée.” Jean-Paul Fouchécourt, Heidi Grant Murphy, William Sharp, Ah Young Hong; Opera Lafayette Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Ryan Brown. Naxos. $9.99.

Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny: Le Déserteur. William Sharp, Dominique Labelle, Ann Monoyios, David Newman, Eugene Galvin, Tony Boutté, Darren Perry; Opera Lafayette conducted by Ryan Brown. Naxos. $19.99 (2 CDs).

François-André Danican Philidor: Sancho Pança, gouverneur dans l’île de Barataria. Darren Perry, Elizabeth Calleo, Karim Sulayman, Meghan McCall, Tony Boutté, Eric Christopher Black, Andrew Sauvageau; Opera Lafayette conducted by Ryan Brown. Naxos. $9.99.

Opera, music’s original multimedia spectacle, is very much an acquired taste – one that even many who enjoy other forms of classical music never acquire. Nearly all opera companies therefore face an ongoing struggle to bring in enough funds to allow quality productions to continue. The smaller the company, the tougher the battle; cutting corners in staging, singing, orchestral size and chosen repertoire tends to be the norm. Let us therefore celebrate Opera Lafayette, a small, period-instrument company in Washington, D.C., that not only avoids many of the compromises typical in the field but also eschews the temptation to bring in audiences by offering only well-known operas – instead producing consistently high-quality productions of unfamiliar works of the Baroque and Classical eras, with a focus on 18^th-century French operas but a willingness to explore other areas as well.

Naxos has issued a string of very fine Opera Lafayette recordings, including Gluck’s Orphée et Euridice in 2005, Antonio Sacchini’s Oedipe à Colone in 2006, a disc of Rameau arias in 2007, and Lully’s The Tragedy of Armide in 2008. The three most-recent releases are at the same high level as the earlier ones, with artistic director and conductor Ryan Brown bringing consistency to performances that often feature different soloists because – as is typical in smaller opera companies, and even in some larger ones – the singers may be brought aboard only for one work, or may stay with the company for a while and then move on.

The CD of the complete Zélindor, roi des Sylphes and excerpts from Le Trophée shows just how willing Opera Lafayette is to explore little-known repertoire. Zélindor was a royal entertainment for the court of Louis XV, first performed in 1745 – at a time when opera (or a combination of opera and ballet, like this work) was intended as none-too-serious entertainment, giving members of the court a chance to listen to pleasant music, watch some interesting dances, and chat and flirt and gossip and indulge in political infighting all the while. The music here is not always riveting, and was not intended to be: it was, to an extent, the 18^th-century equivalent of background music. Yet there is verve and considerable pleasure to be had in this sequence of dances built around a thin and typical plot of the love between a god and a mortal. The Le Trophée excerpts – dances plus two arias – are of the same sort, being pleasant and aurally attractive but not overly challenging to the sophisticated ears and minds of the courtiers for whom the music was created. Tenor Jean-Paul Fouchécourt is particularly good in both the works, singing parts written for very high tenor – and without use of falsetto – with clarity and considerable style.

Le Déserteur and Sancho Pança are more traditionally operatic, even though both are almost completely unknown today. Monsigny (1729-1817) and Philidor (1726-1795) were both highly regarded in their day; each here produced an opera-comique suited perfectly to the taste of the time. Le Déserteur is the more substantial work, as is clear not only from the recording (which presents only the music) but also from the plot (explained in the accompanying booklet). Sentimental and filled with pathos, although not tragedy, this is an early version of the French rescue opera, a form now best known through Beethoven’s adaptation of it in Fidelio. Highly melodic and musically quite varied, Le Déserteur swings from comedy to drama and back again time after time, following a story in which Louise (Dominique Labelle) eventually succeeds, after many difficulties, in saving her fiancé, Alexis (William Sharp), from prison and a sentence of death. Well sung and well paced by Opera Lafayette, the work is not especially memorable musically and remains something of a historical curiosity, its libretto’s humanitarian ideas being somewhat more forward-looking than its music. But it is pleasant, entertaining and even manages to tug at the heartstrings from time to time.

Sancho Pança, gouverneur dans l’île de Barataria, on the other hand, aims not for the heart but for the funnybone: based loosely on Cervantes’ Don Quixote, it is a bit like an 18^th-century musical comedy, with the self-important Sancho Pança (Darren Perry) being repeatedly undermined in his delusions of grandeur by the residents of the fictitious island where he is governor. Cervantes himself generated considerable amusement at the expense of Don Quixote’s “squire,” thus making it possible to turn the self-deluded Quixote into a tragicomic and at times even tragic figure. Philidor’s work seeks no depth, offering a series of short scenes in which the “governor” is at the center of one amusing occurrence or another. As in Le Déserteur, the music is not particularly memorable in itself, but it bubbles along pleasantly and has just the effect of lighthearted entertainment that the composer intended; soprano Meghan McCall, who sings three roles, is particularly well-suited to the comic banter. Opera Lafayette’s exceptionally idiomatic approach to this and the other works recorded by Naxos shows that the opera world has far more to it than most operagoers realize – and that smaller companies, when well run and dedicated to creativity, can offer experiences that, although they are outside the opera mainstream, can be every bit as enjoyable as the umpteenth rendition of the best-known works in the operatic universe.

(+++) EMBRACING ETHNICITY

2012-01-26T08:35:00.000-05:00

Evencio Castellanos: Santa Cruz de Pacairigua; El Río de las Siete Estrellas; Suite Avileña. Orquesta Sinfónica de Venezuela conducted by Jan Wagner. Naxos. $9.99.

Francisco Mignone: String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2; Three Spanish Songs; Two Essays for String Quartet; Seresta No. 2 for Double String Quartet; Barcarola; Minueto from the Opera “O Contratador de Diamantes.” Cuarteto Latinoamericano (Saul Bitran and Aron Bitran, violins; Javier Montiel, viola; Alvaro Bitran, cello). Sono Luminus. $16.99.

Dowland in Dublin. Michael Slattery, tenor; ensemble La Nef. ATMA Classique. $16.99.

These are CDs focused on particular regions or countries, featuring interpretations by musicians steeped in the background and culture that produced the music they perform. The music itself tends to be quite worthy and frequently interesting, although not necessarily gripping for listeners without some sort of connection to the places where it originates. The discs do, though, give interested listeners a chance to sample some well-thought-out pieces that are outside the standard classical repertoire. The works of Evencio Castellanos (1915-1984), for example, are redolent of Venezuela: Castellanos was one of that nation’s first composers to stake out overtly nationalistic territory in his music. Santa Cruz de Pacairigua (1954) is a musical tribute to the construction of a church near Caracas, attractively combining a medieval Venezuelan carol with elements drawn from popular dances – it is easy to see why this is one of the composer’s most-performed works. El Río de las Siete Estrellas (1946: “The River of Seven Stars”) refers to the Orinoco and was inspired by a poem. Castellanos intended it as a recapitulation of events in Venezuelan history, leading up to the country’s independence in 1821. The references will be obscure to listeners not already familiar with the nation’s background, but this work too is carefully constructed and well orchestrated. Suite Avileña (1947) is even more interesting: its five movements relate to the coastal mountain El Ávila, but listeners need not know that to enjoy the well-developed contrasts among the movements and the unusual use of Venezuelan folk instruments, including maracas and the cuatro (a four-stringed guitar). The themes of Suite Avileña are drawn from sources as disparate as popular songs and Christmas carols, giving the work a pleasantly varied set of sounds. The Orquesta Sinfónica de Venezuela under Jan Wagner plays all the music idiomatically and with understanding and enthusiasm.

Cuarteto Latinoamericano’s enthusiasm in a new CD is for chamber music of Brazil, specifically that of Francisco Mignone (1897-1986); indeed, the CD bears the title Brasileiro, with the composer’s name comparatively downplayed. Mignone is not as well known internationally as Heitor Villa-Lobos, but he is often mentioned as being nearly at Villa-Lobos’ level of skill and prominence. His works show considerable ability in multiple forms: opera, ballet, orchestral and choral works, solo songs and piano pieces – and chamber music. His String Quartets Nos. 1 and 2, both of which date to 1957, are tightly knit works in the classical three-movement form, but both use some themes that are noticeably Brazilian – especially so in the second quartet. The Two Essays (1958) also showcase fine writing for the chamber ensemble, and interestingly subtle contrasts between movements whose tempos are not especially different (the first is Andante cantabile, the second Moderato). The other pieces on this CD are lighter and shorter. Seresta No. 2 (1956), in which Cuarteto Latinoamericano is joined by La Cantina String Quartet, is an interesting foray into double-quartet writing, with rich sound that retains the chamber-music qualities of Mignone’s single-quartet works. The remaining works here are earlier: Three Spanish Songs (1932) pleasantly evokes tunes that Brazilian audiences would know well, while Barcarola (1932) and Minueto (1924) are small, pleasant, self-contained pieces. Cuarteto Latinoamericano plays with exemplary tone and a strong feeling for the rhythms and structure of all this music – many listeners will enjoy discovering Mignone’s chamber works through this recording if they do not know his music already.

The enjoyment will be more intellectual, and perhaps a bit forced, in Dowland in Dublin, a CD that considers the possibility that John Dowland (1563-1626), the great English Renaissance composer, might really have been Irish. It will be difficult for those not of English or Irish extraction to generate a great deal of concern about this possibility, but the performance ensemble La Nef uses it as the basis for this whole 17-track CD. With Michael Slattery contributing a light and pleasant tenor, the musicians of La Nef simplify Dowland’s frequently complex contrapuntal works to give them more of an Irish flavor; they also avoid the darker and more expressive pieces for which Dowland is best known and much admired, choosing instead to focus on his lighter pieces. This is a decidedly one-sided view of Dowland and a wholly inaccurate one, with a carefully chosen selection of his music put at the service of an attempt to stir the embers of an “origins” dispute that is not particularly significant except to anyone who may be directly involved in it. But if the rationale of Dowland in Dublin is shaky, the performance is not: everything is beautifully played and sung, and the delights of Dowland come through quite clearly even in the form in which they are given here. There is something faintly odd, if not wholly misguided, about Dowland in Dublin, but listeners who simply focus on the music will enjoy it – while hopefully understanding that there is a great deal more to this composer than is heard on this very pleasant but somewhat superficial CD.

(++++) A DISCOVERY OF INTELLIGENCE

2012-01-19T08:49:00.000-05:00

All Souls Trilogy, Book One: A Discovery of Witches. By Deborah Harkness. Penguin. $16.

Now available in paperback, Deborah Harkness’ A Discovery of Witches remains as fascinating and intriguing as it was at its hardcover publication last year. A novel that rises above not one but several formulaic genres, it is a tale of supernatural wonders for adults – adults who have experienced love, loss, longing and considerable intellectual excitement. It is something highly unusual: a fantasy for thinkers.

It is not simply the book’s excitement, not its confrontations among disparate characters, not its finely tuned attention to the various powers of witches, vampires and daemons that sets it apart from pedestrian books featuring similar characters. It is the integration of the story of Diana Bishop, a descendant of witches who, for good reason, wants nothing to do with her heritage, with a considerable amount of genuine history and an equally large portion of invented but highly plausible historical events, that gives the book a solidity, a feeling of real-world existence even though so many of its characters are the stuff of adolescent fantasy.

But this is emphatically not adolescent fantasy, as is clear from the casual way in which Harkness writes (and expects readers to understand) a line such as, “She missed nothing and had a longer memory than Mnemosyne.” A University of Southern California history professor, Harkness creates non-human characters with complex inner lives permeated by the same emotions that human readers feel: curiosity and wonder, love and desire, jealousy and hatred, anger and fear. There is a sense here that the characters have really lived in the real world, a sense heightened by the accurate depiction of such settings as Oxford’s Bodleian Library, where Anna’s discovery of an enchanted alchemical manuscript called Ashmole 782 starts the plot moving and becomes the linchpin of the exciting and often traumatic events that affect her and all those around her.

On the simplest level, Anna is a type: the protagonist with enormous but untapped and untrained power, gradually coming into her own as she learns more about herself and her background. But Harkness resolutely refuses to let Anna be a cardboard character. Anna discovers her potential powers through genetic analysis of her DNA, for example; and rather than being a typically coy female protagonist, she is sexually experienced and is matter-of-fact when she bluntly says to the character with whom she has fallen in love, “Come to bed with me.”

That character is as fascinating as Anna herself. He is Matthew Clairmont (or de Clermont), a brilliant geneticist with considerable interest in history – not surprising, since he has lived through 1,500 years of it. Matthew is a vampire, and he too seems on the surface to be a type: deadly, driven, handsome, intense and brooding. But here too, Harkness refuses to descend into cliché, giving Matthew depth, solidity and an emotional and sexual life transcending the norm for the vampiric. Yes, Matthew has an ancestral castle (in France, not Transylvania), and yes, his increasing involvement with Anna puts him dangerously at odds with other vampires and with the Congregation, a powerful and frightening nine-member panel that includes three members of each supernatural race and is pledged to prevent mixing and potential interbreeding of witches, vampires and daemons. But Matthew also spends time with Anna at candlelit dinners featuring a multiplicity of fine wines (Harkness is a dedicated and knowledgeable oenophile) and at supernatural yoga classes – and the two quarrel most intensely when his attempts to manage and control her for her own safety run directly into her strong-willed (and often headstrong) determination to handle her own future as her powers begin, slowly and then more rapidly, to emerge. The powers of Anna and others are themselves out of the ordinary: the first scene involving “witchwater” is amazing, and a house with personality, which slams its own doors in anger and adds rooms as they are needed, provides a touch of simultaneous levity and weirdness.

Harkness is not the only current novelist rethinking the supernatural and creating fantasy books with depth, for adult readers. For example, Lev Grossman’s The Magicians and The Magician King are notable for their determination to show that even if magic exists, it will be practiced by highly fallible human beings who will make as many errors as correct decisions – to their own sorrow and that of those for whom they care. But Grossman’s essentially pessimistic vision is quite different from that of Harkness, who includes plenty of darkness and some genuinely scary scenes in A Discovery of Witches but who nevertheless asserts that love has the potential, if not to conquer all, at least to mitigate a great deal of harm – physical, mental and emotional. Although Harkness had done considerable scholarly writing, this erudite and stylistically assured book was, amazingly, her debut novel. The second part of the trilogy, Shadow of Night, is due out this summer. Harkness has set herself a very high standard for that book. This one provides considerable evidence that she will live up to it.

(+++) PERSISTING IN SILLINESS

2012-01-19T08:46:00.000-05:00

Showoff. By Gordon Korman. Scholastic. $16.99.

B Magical #6: The Superstar Sister. By Lexi Connor. Scholastic. $5.99.

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Clover! By Lucille Colandro. Illustrated by Jared Lee. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $6.99.

Gordon Korman’s fourth book about Griffin Bing, “The Man With The Plan,” and his friends – human and canine – will not disappoint fans of the first three, Swindle, Zoobreak and Framed. Nor will it surprise them. Once again, former attack dog Luthor is at the center of a series of misbehaviors and misunderstandings; once again, Griffin comes up with an over-elaborate plan to set things right; once again, things do not go as they should, or as Griffin plans for them to go; and once again, everything works out just fine anyway. The plot involves dog shows: Luthor goes wild at one and is accused of ruining the national champion’s career; Griffin and his friends decide Luthor should become the new national champion; this requires tracking down “mad Russian” dog trainer Dmitri Trebezhov, who has retired and is evading everyone; Griffin and friends manage to find him, even though no one else (including the press) has been able to; Dmitri is attacked with hair remover in what appears to be a misfiring of an attempt to remove Luthor from competition; and at one point, Korman writes that even ”The Man With The Plan had no answer” to the various questions and problems swirling about. Dmitri decides that Griffin will handle Luthor, under Dmitri’s direct supervision, at the Global Kennel Society competition, “the Super Bowl of dog shows,” where the Doberman will be designated “Lex Luthor Savannah Spritz-o-matic.” The last part of that name refers to an invention made by Griffin’s father that, surprisingly, works, and is crucial to finding out who is behind the various threats and attacks on people and animals alike. “‘We may take issue with your methods, but none could argue about what you did for Luthor,’” Griffin’s mom eventually says, in a summation that could stand just as well for the other books in this series, including ones not yet written but sure to come.

Less elaborate and considerably shorter, the B Magical books by Lexi Connor are equally reliable in delivering expected stories in easy-to-read prose. The sixth in the series, The Superstar Sister, involves a visit to B’s school by the TV talent show, You’ve Got It! B (short for Beatrix) is sure her older sister, Dawn, will be “discovered” by the show, since Dawn does a great dance routine. But someone is out to sabotage Dawn – the unscrupulous “nasty freckle-face boy,” Jason Jameson – so B has to find a way to protect her big sister and stop Jason’s nefarious plot. This is a straightforward idea, except for the magic. For B and Dawn are from a magical family (hence the title of the series), with most family members casting spells through rhyme creation but with B doing so by spelling words. So B’s mom rhymes up a recipe for taco salad by saying, in part, “Mash garlic with avocado,/ Onion, and a ripe to-mah-to.” But when B wants to think up a certain type of story, she spells out “R-O-M-A-N-C-E,” and when she wants Mozart, the hamster, to talk for a while, she spells out “S-P-E-A-K.” B herself is not competing for the talent show, but she is taking part in the Magical Rhyming Society’s Young Witch Competition. The two events take place the same night, and there are complications because Dawn is angry at B at the time, and Jason does come up with a way to spoil Dawn’s dance routine, but B saves the day even though it means missing out on success in her own competition, but that’s all right because family values are what matter most, and – well, there is nothing surprising here, but there are lots of warm, fuzzy feelings, and that should be plenty of magic for most readers.

The Old Lady who swallows just about everything in Lucille Colandro’s book series clearly has something magical about her, too: she never chokes on anything and manages to transform all that swallowed stuff into something pleasant and amusing at the end of each book. But even devoted readers of the series may think Colandro and illustrator Jared Lee go a little too far in There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Clover! This is a book with a St. Patrick’s Day theme, as is clear from the clover itself and the leprechaun seen at the beginning as well as toward the end. But the point of the various swallowed objects is not clear here. The original rhyme on which all these books are built has an old lady swallow a fly, then a spider to catch the fly, then a bird to get the spider, then a cat to catch the bird, and so on. Here the Old Lady first swallows the clover, then a daisy (“to brighten the clover”), then a butterfly (“to rest on the daisy”), and so forth – but the connections are at best very strained ones. What eventually emerges from the Old Lady’s mouth as everything she swallows comes back up is something clever, but again, it is strained, and may not even be entirely clear to some readers. These short books are modestly enjoyable, with Lee’s amusing illustrations (especially of the Old Lady) a highlight; but this one has even less substance to it than others in the series. Still, families looking for a touch of St. Patrick’s Day fun will find some here.

(+++) FELINE MIDPOINTS

2012-01-19T08:43:00.000-05:00

Warriors: Omen of the Stars #3—Night Whispers. By Erin Hunter. Harper. $6.99.

Warriors: Omen of the Stars #5—The Forgotten Warrior. By Erin Hunter. Harper. $16.99.

Warriors: SkyClan & the Stranger (Manga Book 2)—Beyond the Code. By Dan Jolley. Art by James L. Barry. Harper. $6.99.

The four-person team collectively known as “Erin Hunter” (authors Kate Cary, Cherith Baldry and Tui Sutherland, plus editor Victoria Holmes) continues to turn out, or churn out, reliably interesting and reliably complex stories of cat clans, under the umbrella title Warriors. The many threads of these multi-generational stories do tend to bog down a bit in middle volumes, though. In the Omen of the Stars sequence, Night Whispers, which is now available in paperback, is the third book of six, and The Forgotten Warrior is the fifth. Night Whispers is about the aftermath of a battle between two of the four major cat groups, ThunderClan and ShadowClan. ThunderClan’s medicine cat, Jayfeather, and the warrior Lionblaze are determined to find out why the battle occurred, so they can prevent further evil from marring the clans’ lives. The Warriors books always use lots of characters, carefully providing each with a brief introduction before the book starts – and also showing maps of the cats’ camps and the geography of the area where they live. These guideposts help readers keep straight what is going on and where things are happening. The books are full of fairy-tale elements that must be taken at face value – not only the entire foundation of Warriors, about cats’ intelligence and forging of civilizations, but also the cryptic warnings scattered throughout the series. One example from Night Whispers: “‘When the Dark Forest rises, ThunderClan must face its greatest enemy alone.’” The cats’ enemies are ones that, in the real world, might indeed be threats to felines – foxes and badgers, for example – but here their malevolence is planned and orchestrated, making them more deadly than in the real natural world. On the fringes of the cats’ realm are humans (“twolegs”), but they have little to do with the story. Instead, human perceptions are given to the cats: “Ivypaw chewed on her mouse, a little surprised to see that the ShadowClan camp worked just like ThunderClan’s. What did you expect? Mice and squirrels doing the work for them?” Night Whispers is part of a buildup to the coming “final battle” (although there is never really a final battle in Warriors); thus, the novel is less significant in itself than as a way station. It is followed by Sign of the Moon and then by the newest book in this particular sequence, The Forgotten Warrior – which is itself part of a continuing buildup to the not-yet-released The Last Hope. In The Forgotten Warrior, the movement toward that last-in-the-series volume continues as Dark Forest spirits gain strength even as tensions among the clans mount and approach a breaking point that could shatter the whole cat civilization. The plot is typically convoluted, involving a wandering cat called Sol, a former “kittypet” who claims to have saved Molepaw and Cherrypaw from a fox and is therefore welcomed to ThunderClan by some cats – but not by others, who are suspicious of him and his story. Sol turns out to be a deceiver and sower of discord, but it takes the other cats quite a while to sort things out. Sol eventually reveals his motives and proves to have poor fighting skills, but is not killed and is allowed to run away as the climactic battle with the Dark Forest cats looms. Readers who enjoy following the intricacies of these stories and their many dozens of cat characters (the partial ThunderClan list in The Forgotten Warrior includes 36 cats, and that is only one clan) will not be disappointed in the latest book, which carries this particular story thread ahead effectively enough.

An easier entry point for readers who are not sure whether they want to wade all the way into the Warriors world are the several manga series based on the novels, which are written by Dan Jolley, with James L. Barry providing the art. Although they are illustrated simplifications of Warriors tales, the manga books are themselves not always easy to follow, since the art is in black-and-white and the cats are differentiated in the novels largely by color. Furthermore, there are multiple manga series, just as there are multiple Warriors novel sequences. Still, the short manga books are action-packed and interesting enough to help potential readers of the bulkier novels decide whether they want to sink their teeth and claws more deeply into the Erin Hunter sequences. Beyond the Code is the second part of the Skyclan & the Stranger trilogy, which will conclude with After the Flood. Sol is a key to this book as much as to The Forgotten Warrior. In the manga work, he desperately wants to become a warrior and has just joined SkyClan, approved by Leafstar. But it soon turns out that Sol’s desire to be a warrior is not enough: he may not fully understand or respect the rules of the warrior code, and that could spell disaster. In fact, it does spell disaster for the clan, leaving Leafstar with an important decision to make as to whether Sol is trustworthy and is really capable of becoming a clan warrior. Faster-paced and simpler than the all-text novels, the manga book ends with a question rather than a decision, so even here, readers will need to wait for the next entry in the series to find out what happens. But all the Warriors books are continuing sagas, and those who decide to follow them need to be prepared for many cliff-hangers and a great number of inconclusive ends to parts of the intertwined stories.

(+++) LOVE FABLES FOR ADULTS AND KIDS

2012-01-19T08:40:00.000-05:00

The Odds: A Love Story. By Stewart O’Nan. Viking. $25.95.

The Mighty Miss Malone. By Christopher Paul Curtis. Wendy Lamb Books. $15.99.

Young and adult readers alike would like to believe that love, in some form, conquers all forms of adversity – in fact, that is why so many authors deliver feel-good novels in which difficult people and difficult circumstances turn out, in the end, pretty much all right, through the conquering power of love. Cynics (and, some would say, realists) will deem books of this sort simpleminded and quite unrealistic; but their target audiences will find their very lack of reality to be a big part of their charm. And so it is in Stewart O’Nan’s The Odds, a bittersweet (but mostly sweet) story of a couple with serious financial and marital troubles blowing everything on roulette bets during a second honeymoon at Niagara Falls. Marion and Art Fowler have been married for 30 years and are a low point in life, jobless and about to lose their home to foreclosure. Their marriage isn’t in great shape, either, which is scarcely a surprise. Because this is not the real world, the Fowlers take all their savings, book the bridal suite at a ritzy Niagara Falls casino, and sightsee by day while gambling at night. Each chapter is headed by odds of some sort: “Odds of being killed in a bus accident: 1 in 436,212,” or “Odds of vomiting on vacation: 1 in 6,” or “Odds of a married couple making love on a given night: 1 in 5.” The story takes place around and on Valentine’s Day – one of many obvious plot manipulations that make the fairy-tale atmosphere clear – and follows Marion and Art as they think about where their finances went off track and where their marriage derailed. The writing is colorless: “He knew better than to try to live on credit, especially at his age, but money was cheap. The interest rate was nothing compared to the penalty they’d pay for breaking into their IRAs early.” The ups and downs of the Fowlers’ life parallel the ups and downs of their desperate attempt to restore themselves financially and emotionally at Niagara Falls (“Odds of surviving going over the Falls without a barrel: 1 in 1,500,000”). Despite the uplifting ending, it will be hard for thoughtful readers to ignore a comment made in passing on the book’s final page: “‘It doesn’t change anything.’” But thoughtfulness is scarcely the point here – the idea is to ignore one’s head and follow one’s heart.

For younger readers, ages 9-12, matters of love frequently involve whole families rather than just two people. In the case of Christopher Paul Curtis’ The Mighty Miss Malone, the Malone family of Gary, Indiana, actually has a motto, and of course a highly optimistic one, about being “on a journey to a place called Wonderful.” But things are scarcely wonderful during the Great Depression, a harder time than the modern one in which O’Nan’s book is set. Curtis introduced 12-year-old Deza, the protagonist, in Bud, Not Buddy, and fans of Bud Caldwell will enjoy this tale of the “mighty” girl as well. Deza is the smartest girl in her class, and dreams of going to college to become a teacher. But her father cannot find work in Gary, and the family must pick up and move to Michigan – the father first, then the rest of the family (Deza, her mother and her older brother, Jimmie) afterwards. Jimmie actually finds a job: he has a beautiful voice and is able to get work as a singer in the Chicago area. That leaves Deza and her mother in a Hooverville near Flint, determined to find Mr. Malone and reunite the family. This is a story that has “heartwarming” written all over it, with its period detail and saga of unending determination to keep a family together carrying a strong if straightforward message. The times portrayed here will be remote for the readers at whom the book is targeted, and the personalities of characters other than Deza herself are not very well fleshed out. But Deza’s caring and intelligence come through effectively, and her attempts to cope with economic pain and the anxiety of separation, to learn from what happens to her and stay anchored through her love of family, are well expressed, with the result that the final scene of reconciliation and hope will leave at least some readers with a lump in the throat.

(++++) THE COLORS OF MUSIC

2012-01-19T08:37:00.000-05:00

Rimsky-Korsakov: Suites from “The Snow Maiden,” “Mlada” and “Le Coq d’or”; “Sadko”—Musical Picture. Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Naxos. $9.99.

Rimsky-Korsakov: The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevronya. Mikhail Kazakov, Vitaly Panfilov, Tatiana Monogarova, Mikhail Gubsky, Gevorg Hakobyan; Orchestra e Coro del Teatro Lirico di Cagliari conducted by Alexander Vedernikov. Naxos DVD. $39.99.

Lawrence Ball: Method Music. Navona. $16.99 (2 CDs).

Rimsky-Korsakov was one of the great musical colorists, sensitive to the nuances of all orchestral instruments and highly adept at combining them into evocative pieces (Scheherazade is a prime example), using them in unfamiliar ways (his trombone concerto), or adapting them to the works of other composers (his version of Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain is almost always the one performed, and while it undeniably smooths some of Mussorgsky’s rough edges too much and undermines some of the original’s bizarrerie, it also produces a more-effective tone poem with a very satisfying conclusion). Rimsky-Korsakov’s coloristic skill was especially evident in his operas, which are enticingly scored and make up in musical attractiveness what they tend to lack in drama. But because they are not particularly action-oriented, they have never caught on in world opera houses in the same way that some of the composer’s orchestral works have become staples in concert halls. However, the musical (if not vocal) qualities of the operas come through quite well in the suites that the composer extracted from them – several of which are played very well indeed by the Seattle Symphony under Gerard Schwarz. Individual movements of these suites are actually quite well known, such as “Dance of the Clowns” (or “Tumblers”) from The Snow Maiden and “Procession of the Nobles” (or “Cortège”) from Mlada. But the suites add other elements to these and provide a fuller picture of the operas’ subjects and the sensitivity with which Rimsky-Korsakov treats them. The Snow Maiden (1880-81) is a folkloric work, while Mlada (1889-90) is a dark fairy tale. Le Coq d’or (usually known by its French title) was the composer’s final opera, finished in 1907 but not staged until 1909, a year after Rimsky-Korsakov’s death: based on a Pushkin poem, it has elements of both legend and fairy tale, and was rightly thought by Czarist censors to be a thinly disguised sarcastic, even subversive work. As for Sadko (1869; revised 1892), it is taken from traditional heroic ballads. Thus, all the works heard here have ties to olden times in Russia, and Rimsky-Korsakov takes full advantage of the settings to produce music that mixes tone painting (the sea in Sadko, for example) with characteristic dances (Mlada) and outright exoticism (the music of the queen in Le Coq d’or). Even though the Seattle Symphony does not have a recognizably Russian sound – the strings lack the depth and lushness associated with top Russian orchestras – the musicians play with verve and beauty, and Schwarz brings considerable understanding to suites that are essentially sequences of miniature scenes. The result is a CD that shows Rimsky-Korsakov’s orchestral effects burnished to a fine sheen.

It is nevertheless somewhat unfair to Rimsky-Korsakov to hear his operatic music in concert form, and a fine new DVD release of The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh shows why. This 2008 performance, featuring a Russian cast and conductor performing with Italian musicians in Sardinia, gives context to the composer’s skill in orchestration while also showing why his operas are not particularly popular outside Russia. It is only Le Coq d’or that has some ongoing international presence; but that work is not, musically, a very typical opera for Rimsky-Korsakov – Kitzeh, his penultimate one, is much more in line with his other operatic works. Indeed, the composer expected Kitezh (completed in 1905 and first staged in 1907) to be his final opera, returning to the form more for sociopolitical reasons than for strictly musical ones. Kitezh stands as an excellent summation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s approach to the stage and to orchestration as well. Its full, rather unwieldy title results from the combination in Vladimir Belsky’s libretto of two separate legends, that of the city of Kitezh (said to become invisible when attacked by the Tatars) and that of St. Fevronya of Murom. This is the composer’s only opera with any sort of religious theme – Rimsky-Korsakov was an atheist – and its plot eventually leads to the triumph of love and justice in a rather secular heaven. This is not an especially stirring conclusion; nor is the story of invasion and mystical triumph told with any particular fervor (there is only one battle scene). The most interesting character here is a typical Russian fairy-tale type: the town drunkard, Grishka Kuterma (Mikhail Gubsky), who mocks Princess Fevronya (Tatiana Monogarova), turns traitor, repents of the betrayal, and is eventually pardoned by Fevronya (but is last seen when he runs off screaming, tormented by nightmares). The princess herself is perfectly good; her betrothed, Prince Vsevolod (Vitaly Panfilov), is perfectly noble and gives his life in battle (the two are united at the opera’s end, after death). But if these characters are not especially noteworthy, their music is, with strong vocal writing and beautifully supportive orchestration in a through-composed work that uses Wagnerian techniques without sounding one bit like Wagner. Kitezh is not an opera that people outside Russia often have a chance to see, so this Naxos DVD is particularly welcome for making its brilliant musical colors and oddly fascinating thematic mixture of legend and religion available to a wider audience.

Color is also a significant element in the multimedia work of Lawrence Ball (born 1951); but Ball deals not so much with color evoked by instruments as with actual color images created with what he calls "harmonic maths” – Ball’s computer-based compositional system for generating electronic music, and specifically for individualizing pieces so that listeners (or users, if you prefer) create their own input and thus produce pieces attuned (yes, that’s a pun) to their personal characteristics. Ball actually creates much of this music nowadays without using computers, despite the computerized basis of the system; and he also generates interestingly shaped and colored images through the system. None of this is a recipe for widespread acceptance of Ball’s work, but the two-CD compilation of pieces created under his system is sufficiently interesting to deserve a (+++) rating – even though many listeners will find that the pieces wear thin well before they hear all of this two-hour set. The first CD contains 11 works under the umbrella title “Imaginary Sitters,” with every work lasting within a few seconds of every other one (just over five minutes) but with audio components of the works differing. Whether they differ enough to make the works interesting listening, or whether the whole fractal-like mathematical creativity underlying Method Music is simply a gimmick, is a matter for individual listeners to decide. Ball is actually a wide-ranging creator in multiple fields, working with artists ranging from the international painting group Collective Phenomena to choreographers, pianists and the female vocal quartet Rosy Voices. But the shapes and colors evoked on this CD are not, sonically, all that different from ones created by other composers of electronic music – ones who do not have, or need, the degree in Computer Science with Mathematics that Ball possesses. The second CD here, which includes three much longer works called Galaxy (numbered 01, 02 and 03 and dedicated to the memories of singer-songwriter Syd Barrett, bass guitarist Hugh Hopper and composer György Ligeti), is more interesting than the first, at least intellectually, because it expands the concept of five-minute individualized electronic portraits (as heard on the first disc) into much more elaborate forms (all lasting virtually the same amount of time: a few seconds over 20 minutes). Listening to the entire second CD at one time can be something of a chore: it is packed with aural material that can be somewhat overwhelming in a 20-minute dose, much less three of them. But those who find the permutations and combinations of Ball’s Method Music intriguing will be enthralled by the way they are used here, although neither Ball’s work nor this particular sampling of it will by any means be to all tastes.

(++++) QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS

2012-01-12T08:48:00.001-05:00

882½ Amazing Answers to Your Questions about the Titanic. By Hugh Brewster and Laurie Coulter. Paintings by Ken Marschall. Scholastic/Madison Press. $9.99.

Dear Dumb Diary, Year Two: School. Hasn’t This Gone On Long Enough? By Jim Benton. Scholastic. $5.99.

How Do Dinosaurs Eat Cookies? By Jane Yolen & Mark Teague. Recipes by Heidi E.Y. Stemple. Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. $7.99.

The questions posed in book titles may be there to elicit genuine answers, as in one of these works; they may be purely rhetorical, as in another; or they may be part of a longstanding title pattern, connecting something new in a series with what has gone before – as in the third. 882½ Amazing Answers to Your Questions about the Titanic is so named because the doomed liner was 882½ feet long (and that is the answer to the first question). Some of the answers really are pretty amazing, because they go well beyond the basic facts already known to many young readers – that the supposedly unsinkable ship struck an iceberg during its maiden voyage and sank, with considerable loss of life. For example, readers will find out here that although the Titanic was the world’s largest ship in 1912, a larger liner was built the next year, and some of today’s huge cruise ships are twice the size of the Titanic. Some question-and-answer entries debunk myths about the ship – for example, no one was sealed inside the hull by mistake, and no one painted “we defy God to sink her” on the stern. There are explanations of why the ship was considered unsinkable (because of a design using multiple watertight compartments), how long it took to launch it (62 seconds), why it carried dragon’s blood (which turns out to be the sap from a certain palm tree), how many crew members it carried (892 – although elsewhere in the book, in one of the work’s few flaws, the number is given as 899), and what animals other than dogs were brought aboard (two roosters and two hens). There is plenty of fascinating information as well about how the fatal collision occurred and what happened to those on board: 23 women worked on the Titanic and 20 were rescued; the first-class passengers had combined wealth equal to $9.8 billion in today’s money; one boy was almost denied entry to a lifeboat because he was wearing a hat that made him look older than he was; the ship’s lights stayed on until two minutes before it sank. Other questions deal with passenger rescues and recovery of bodies (with watches stopped between 2:00 and 2:20 a.m.), and then there is this: “Have any lives been lost due to ice in the North Atlantic since the Titanic disaster? No.” Hugh Brewster and Laurie Coulter carry the story of the Titanic into modern times, up to and past the discovery of the wreckage in 1985; and the book’s illustrations, which range from period photos to well-designed paintings by Ken Marschall, are highly evocative. The final “half question” of the book is whether people will always be fascinated by the story of the Titanic – an unanswerable but perfectly reasonable query.

Middle-schooler Jamie Kelly’s question about whether school has gone on long enough is equally unanswerable, but there is nothing serious about this book – any more than there was about the first 12 in Jim Benton’s ongoing “Tales of Mackerel Middle School.” This may be “Year Two” of the school for Jamie, but she is still, well, Jamie, which means she starts out by warning readers not to read her “dumb diary,” then packs all the pages with a mixture of self-indulgent writing and highly amusing drawings (example: three “hideous math faces” followed by three “gorgeous language arts faces,” just to be sure you know which subject she likes and which she doesn’t). Jamie may have grown a bit older, but she has not grown a bit up; not a bit. She is still jealous of too-beautiful-to-be-real and too-good-to-be-true Angeline, to whom Jamie is now sort of related because Jamie’s Aunt Carol has married Angeline’s Uncle Dan. True, Jamie is now sufficiently self-aware to say of Angeline, “I think I would like her more if she was less likable to others.” But no fear: she is not so mature as to stop being unreasonable. Jamie also still has Isabella as a best friend, and Isabella is as cantankerous and generally difficult as ever – Jamie says her friend’s parents have received “all the Five Known Types of Letters Home” from school, the fifth of which is, “Your child is trouble.” Missing this year is Emmily, who was “not the sharpest knife in the drawer” or even “the sharpest spoon in the drawer. Most of the time, Emmily wasn’t even in the drawer at all. She was lost somewhere in the bottom of the dishwasher.” But Jamie does hear from her – and learns that Emmily is doing better in math than Jamie is. Now there’s a scary thought. So Jamie realizes she must do battle with math, and that is the main theme of the book – which also provides plenty of chances for Jamie to imagine (and draw) things that she would like to see, such as popped produce, on the basis that if there can be both corn and popcorn, there can also be popbroccoli, popcarrots and popwatermelon. Jamie, a year older, is no wiser, or not much wiser, and that bodes well for her continuing saga.

The How Do Dinosaurs books by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague are a saga of their own, coming in multiple formats and designs. And now there is something new in the latest of them, How Do Dinosaurs Eat Cookies? The usual approach of the books has Yolen writing, in the first part of each one, the various things that dinosaurs (stand-ins for the young readers at whom the books are aimed) shouldn’t do…and then, in the second part, the things that they should do. Not this time: the yes and no elements are given on the same page, and for a very good reason. This is a short book, with only 14 pages, including the front and back inside covers – and it is packed not only with things to do and not do but also with scratch-and-sniff illustrations and two full pages of cookie recipes. That’s a lot of material in a little bit of space. On a single right-hand page, for example, Yolen writes, “Does a dinosaur baking just make a big mess, and splatter the batter on Mother’s clean dress? No – a dinosaur stirs with the greatest of care. She adds in some cinnamon just for the flair.” On the same page, below the text, is a dinosaur-shaped scratch-and-sniff panel that smells like cinnamon. And on the facing, left-hand page is one of Mark Teague’s usual, wonderful portrayals of a realistic-looking dinosaur (in this case a nothosaurus) acting like a not-very-well-behaved human child. Short the book may be, but seeing a caudipteryx carrying chocolate chips (the bag is sniffable) or a silvasaurus rushing to get a lemon cookie (which smells lemony) leaves no doubt that this book fits right into the delightful Yolen/Teague series very well indeed. The two recipes at the back of the book, for “Cinnama-Saurus Rex” and “Fossilized Lemon Tracks,” are easy to follow (with adult supervision) and make delicious, simple cookies that will make the book even more fun to re-read, as modern dinosaurs are sure to want to do.

(++++) LIFE ON WRY

2012-01-12T08:45:00.002-05:00

Lunatics. By Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel. Putnam. $25.95.

From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant. By Alex Gilvarry. Viking. $26.95.

It is tempting to call Lunatics “the buddy novel to end all buddy novels,” but of course it won’t really end them – it will just make them ashamed of themselves. To the extent that the genre is capable of feeling shame. Which isn’t a great extent. Still, few writers are as shamelessly exploitative of everything from the latest news headlines to the oldest flatulence jokes as Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel, and as long as sophomoric humor packed in a Keystone-cops-style wrapper is your cup of tea (or an excretion that rhymes with tea), you will have a great time with this bit of international-chase lunacy (which, not the slightest bit surprisingly, has already been sold as a movie). Utterly mindless entertainment that tosses in plenty of gratuitous celebrity references (presumably from Zweibel, an accomplished TV writer) and plenty of equally gratuitous political ones (presumably from Barry, an accomplished newspaper writer, which is a bit like being an accomplished buggy-whip manufacturer in the automobile age), Lunatics lets each author assume his very own alter ego. One wonders how much they are altered from the authors’ true egos, but when you read the book, you will see why it is probably better not to go there. Wherever “there” is. For the buddies – Philip Horkman (“hork”: oh, ha ha) and Jeffrey Peckerman (“pecker”: oh, ha ha ha) – “there” is in fact pretty much everywhere. The two “meet cute” (except that it isn’t cute) when Horkman, the Zweibel character and referee of preteen soccer games, calls the daughter of Peckerman, the Barry character, offside. The two men are typical residents of alternative-reality-or-maybe-just-real New Jersey: Horkman owns a pet store called The Wine Shop (because it was financed by the Wines, his in-laws); Peckerman is a “forensic plumber,” which means he traces the causes of explosive toilet backups and solves poopy murder cases – and, not astonishingly at all, has his own Sunday morning cable show. The questionable soccer call leads to a series of increasingly ridiculous consequences, from an escaped lemur to a clothing-optional cruise on which Horkman starts to fall in love with a nun (who, duh, is not wearing her habit) to a new Cuban revolution (which the buddies co-lead) to – well, there is their capture by pirates in Mozambique, their rescue by the Mossad in Yemen, their protest leadership in Tiananmen Square, and their meeting with Donald Trump in California. Oh, and their nominations for president – Horkman by the Republicans, Peckerman by the Democrats. Think of Lunatics as a cure for sanity and you’ll have it just about right. Horkman tends to be on the prissy side (the Felix Unger role), while Peckerman is crude, sloppy, cynical and frequently incontinent (the Oscar Madison part, but much more foul-mouthed). There is nothing the slightest bit original in the overall plot structure, but there are plenty of outrageous (and sometimes outrageously funny) plot elements, and so many one-liners that people who find TV sitcoms hilarious will be entertained throughout. Typical Horkman line: “I looked at Peckerman and felt the distinct urge to smack him. But we had bigger fish to fry. Plus he was holding the gun.” Typical Peckerman line: “He was trying to look badass, but that’s a look a guy can’t pull off when he’s built like Olive Oyl and he’s naked except for a banana, which for the record – not that I made a point of looking; it’s just the way the angles lined up – was a good five inches longer than his dick.” So: rude, crude, lewd, far from subdued, and altogether unglued – that’s Lunatics. How could it not be a best-seller?

From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant is closer to satire than farce, using its frequent intersections with the real world to make points rather than go for cheap laughs. So it won’t match the popularity of Lunatics. But this over-enthusiastically overwritten debut novel by Alex Gilvarry nevertheless has a lot going for it. Its underlying theme is quite serious: false or mistaken accusations, and how the American political system handles them in the years since the 9/11 terrorist murders – that is, how an innocent person can show he did not do something when the system is set up to prove his guilt. For most of the book, Gilvarry steadfastly refuses to descend into preaching or polemics, managing to pull in such elements as the modern immigrant experience and the things an unknown fashion designer must do to make it in New York City while keeping his novel balanced with enough humor and off-kilter observations to make it a pleasure rather than a chore to read. His central character is Boyet (“Boy”) Hernandez, a Filipino man determined to start his own fashion label. Gilvarry is a Staten Island native, but his mother is from the Philippines, so the choice of Boy’s background is understandable; and parts of the book take place in the Philippines, filling in Boy’s background. In New York, Boy is backed in his dream by his neighbor, eccentric Canadian (or maybe Pakistani) businessman (and maybe arms dealer) Ahmed Qureshi – a fact that eventually leads to Boy’s imprisonment in a six-by-eight-foot cell at Guantánamo, where he is given a Koran (even though he is not Moslem) and locked away as a terrorist. The media jump on the story, giving Boy the title of “Fashion Terrorist,” and the hapless young man is left to prepare for his combatant-status review on his own. As he gets his thoughts in order by writing them down, he discusses everything from the influences on his design style to his publicist (unfortunately named Ben Laden, in one of the book’s weaker attempts at humor). Boy tries hard to retain his faith in American justice and the American immigrant experience, sorely tried though both are. In writing his life story, which is what From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant is intended to be, Boy offers moments of lightness (such as some of his memories and certain exchanges with a guard named Cunningham) in a dark and frightening situation. The juxtaposition of comedy and fear is a difficult one to pull off, and the fact that Gilvarry does so successfully most of the time gives him considerable credit – although the much darker ending of the book is not a fully satisfactory conclusion stylistically. The novel is pulled into some unnecessary areas through some side issues, such as Boy’s determination to explain that he isn’t gay and Gilvarry’s decision to have him become a transvestite and fall in love, presumably for ambiguity’s sake, with a transgendered singer. But despite these flaws, which are concentrated in the book’s final pages, the main narrative, of an innocent and unconsciously witty young man pulled into a horrific situation through his own guilelessness, and trying to make the best of circumstances while retaining his faith in the country to which he has linked his life and fortune, is quite enough to sustain the novel. “I ask you,” writes Boy at one point, “is it fate that I am in here and you are out there?” A good question, and ultimately an unanswerable one. Gilvarry’s willingness to ask it is just one thing that sets the heartfelt intensity of From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant apart from the silly surface-level antics of Lunatics. Yet both novels are quite distinctly American. What a country.

(++++) LIFE LESSONS WELL TAUGHT

2012-01-12T08:42:00.000-05:00

Kitchen on Fire! Mastering the Art of Cooking in 12 Weeks (or Less). By Olivier Said and Chef MikeC. Da Capo. $35.

Your Pregnancy Week by Week, 7^th Edition. By Glade B. Curtis, M.D., M.P.H., and Judith Schuler, M.S. Da Capo. $15.95.

What does it say about modern life that even the most straightforward human activities, such as making food and making babies, come with so many guidebooks nowadays? Whatever the answer may be in your particular case, there are some guides that will address pretty much any of your concerns. For cooking, one such is Kitchen on Fire! The title is rather unfortunate – one does not really want a kitchen on fire, thank you – and the coauthor’s name (“Chef MikeC”) simply screams “trendy” rather than “highly competent and helpful.” Get past those elements, though, and what you find here is a book in which both Olivier Said and his coauthor treat readers to many tricks of the professional chef’s trade, presented with clarity and with exceptionally useful photographs that show just what to do and just how food should look during various preparations. The information sequence in the book is drawn from the chefs’ school (called, of course, Kitchen on Fire, although without the exclamation point). There is pretty much everything here, from information on types of knives and how to use them to the specifics of all sorts of cooking techniques: searing, stir-frying, stewing, braising, roasting, broiling, grilling and more. The visual impact of the book is one of its best points: there are cross-references (similar to online hyperlinks) everywhere, in the form of red dots containing white numbers that refer to chapters where readers will find more information on a topic; and in addition to the expected pictures of finished dishes, there are excellent less-often-seen ones, such as different bones for stock, the basics of thickening beurre manié (a mixture of equal parts flour and softened butter), and the details of making a smoking packet to add flavor to grilled foods. Some of the illustrations are decidedly unusual, such as a full page showing the sizes of various cuts and giving their dimensions: a large cube is shown as ¾ inch on a side, for example, while a shape called paysanne is ½ inch high and wide but only an eighth of an inch thick. Sections called “Tips and Tricks du Chef” offer handy suggestions on teaching yourself techniques and knowing when foods are done as they should be, and each chapter includes recipes that are called “chapter exercises” but are no less delicious for all that. Unlike most “how to” books for the kitchen, this one is not primarily a recipe book, with a little instruction added – the recipes are the natural outgrowth of the techniques taught in the chapters. A reader might pick up the book to find the recipes for roasted fennel and orange salad, citrus-grilled skirt steak and vegetable fajitas, flaky blueberry-ginger scones, vegetable egg rolls with sweet chili sauce, or double cheese and bacon quiche, but it is the context in which those and other recipes are presented, rather than the recipes themselves, that is the main attraction here: 12 pages of “basic shaping methods” for breads, for example, including 60 photographs. Whether you want to work as a chef or just be a better cook at home, a very good place to learn is Kitchen on Fire!

Your Pregnancy Week by Week doesn’t teach readers how to become pregnant – they presumably know that already, since the book is aimed at mothers-to-be (and, to a lesser extent, fathers-to-be). But this excellent book by Glade B. Curtis and Judith Schuler, now available in a new 7^th edition, certainly does make the process from pregnancy to birth (and for the first month or so afterwards) much easier to cope with and understand. New editions of this preeminent guide come out every three years or so, generally without major updates but with new perspectives and information based on the latest scientific research and on changing medical and family attitudes. There is no specific update in the 7^th edition, but the approach to difficult subjects continues to be moderated and modulated according to the latest medical thinking. For example, the discussion of pregnancy in women with HIV and AIDS is entirely nonjudgmental and strikes as optimistic a note as possible: “A person is HIV-positive before developing AIDS. This process can take 10 or more years, due to the medications in use at this time. …We know if a woman is in the early course of the illness, she can usually have an uneventful pregnancy, labor and delivery.” Set against this carefully worded bit of reassurance is the sheer volume of pregnancy-related information in the book, including some material that will be anything but reassuring, especially to women who are pregnant for the first time. “In an effort to give you as much information as possible about pregnancy, we do include serious discussions throughout the book that some might find ‘scary.’ The information is not included to frighten you; it’s there to provide facts about particular medical situations that may occur during pregnancy.” The sensitivity and care with which Curtis and Schuler present all information – positive, negative or neutral – remain hallmarks of this fact-packed and thick oversize paperback (nearly 700 pages). The sheer volume of material can be overwhelming; this is the work’s greatest problem. The authors try to cope with information overload by sticking carefully to the week-by-week format, which helps a lot, although readers must remember that every pregnancy is different and not all will reach the stated milestones in the designated weeks. They also spin out snippets of important information into highlighted boxes sprinkled throughout the pages. One such pullout reads, “Be careful with bottled waters – some contain caffeine.” Another notes that taste tests are not enough to determine whether food is hot enough to be safe to eat and recommends using “a quick-reading thermometer to make sure food has reached an interior temperature of 165F,” at which harmful bacteria are killed. Some of these items are short and to the point; others are more extended, such as “You May Be Sexier than You Think,” which contains 13 bullet points giving statements men have made to the authors about why they find a pregnant partner sexy. One example: “Sex during pregnancy often requires some creative thinking on both your parts.” Most of the book, of course, is devoted to weekly changes in fetus and woman, including detailed drawings showing fetal development (some actual size, some designed to highlight particular occurrences). Body changes, nutrition and exercise recommendations, types of testing, alternative-medical approaches to pregnancy, food cravings, “Dad Tips,” and many other subjects are treated here, sometimes at length and sometimes in brief, but always with care and in substantive ways. Few women will have the patience, or the time, to read this book through from start to finish – but there is no need to do so. Your Pregnancy Week by Week, 7^th edition, really is a book that you can use on a week-to-week basis, perhaps getting a week or two ahead to learn what you can anticipate in the near future. Reading it provides much of the assurance of a knowledgeable 24-hour-a-day companion who can take you through the many vicissitudes of pregnancy with a firm and knowing hand. Even women who have been pregnant before will benefit from the information here – and those in their first pregnancies will find the book invaluable.

(+++) TEEN LOVE, LOSS, AND SO FORTH

2012-01-12T08:39:00.000-05:00

Magic of the Moonlight: A Full Moon Novel. By Ellen Schreiber. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins. $17.99.

The Amanda Project, Book 3: Shattered. By Laurie Faria Stolarz. HarperTeen. $8.99.

If We Kiss. By Rachel Vail. HarperTeen. $8.99.

The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers. By Lynn Weingarten. HarperTeen. $17.99.

Year in, year out, some things don’t change, such as teenage emotional angst and the books about it. That includes both the more-or-less realistic novels and the ones with a supernatural focus. In the latter category is Magic of the Moonlight, which opens with the line, “It was official. I was in love with a werewolf.” And that’s the plot, in two brief sentences. The complications of the plot, though, take a lot longer to present and work out. In this sequel to Once in a Full Moon, Celeste is determined to find a way to “cure” boyfriend Brandon of his werewolfishness, hopefully with the help of Brandon’s scientist father. For the time being, Celeste needs to keep Brandon’s secret safe, so she hides their relationship from her best friends, setting up conflicts on that level. And there’s a big dance coming – can Celeste find a way to go with Brandon? And where does Nash, Celeste’s first crush and also a werewolf, fit into all this? The plot stumbles so much that it practically falls down repeatedly, but Ellen Schreiber gamely pulls, pushes and urges it along until Celeste ends up in the arms of her “hot, handsome, and heroic werewolf” and starts thinking ahead to the next book in the series. Even harder to take seriously than most books in the now-popular werewolf genre, Magic of the Moonlight is so frothy and so easy to read that it will make a tasty but very light meal for teenage girls hungry for a touch of otherworldly wolfishness.

The Amanda Project is no more realistic, but this series – each book written by a different author as a “collaborator” with the title character – is more of a mystery sequence than a supernatural one. Amanda Valentino is the mystery; her friends, Nia, Callie and Hal, are the mystery-solvers – although by now some readers may wonder why they are bothering. The supposed reason is that Amanda is in danger and the friends are determined to help her. Amanda has disappeared and left clues behind; the friends follow those clues to try to help – presumably the secret organization that is supposedly hunting Amanda cannot follow the clues itself or the friends themselves. In Shattered, Nia finds mysterious symbols used by that secret group in various places around town. She also finds the poem “Shattered,” which is “handwritten in [Amanda’s] distinctive penmanship” and which begins: “The rock’s been thrown./ The window is broken./ Shards of glass have torn through your walls of trust./ Do not think I am unaware that your perception of me/ Is shattered.” The entrance of a fourth searcher, Zoe, whose motives and knowledge are mysterious to the three friends, complicates matters further. So does Vice Principal Roger Thornhill, who is given to such pronouncements as “it’s best if they think they’re in control” and “I can’t get into anything now,” just to make sure the searchers don’t learn anything that is too, you know, useful. The Amanda Project gets sillier with each book in the series, but readers who like the sequence so far will enjoy continuing to follow it.

If We Kiss has an unusual title for a book for ages 13 and up – an age range in which something like “If We Have a Baby” would be more typical nowadays. But Rachel Vail’s novel is a deliberate throwback to a more-innocent time, when kissing made life, you know, complicated, and had all sorts of implications. The central character, Charlotte (Charlie) Collins, has never been in love and never been kissed, and no, she is not nine years old; she is a ninth-grader. Her best friend, Tess, has been in love three times and has kissed all three boys. Now Tess is in love with a boy named Kevin – and Charlie, much to her discomfiture, finds she is falling for Kevin herself. Furthermore, Kevin’s dad is dating Charlie’s mom, which means Charlie can’t discuss her budding feelings either with her mother or with her best friend. She is On Her Own (you can practically hear the capital letters). Charlie comes across as immature in many ways – for instance, when worrying about whether her mom might remarry, she is concerned that “I’d get demoted to the backseat. My personal space would be back there with two other kids and no toast-your-buns feature.” And she sticks her tongue out at friends when they argue. Kevin’s eight-year-old sister, Samantha, seems wiser than Charlie – Samantha is the one who tells Charlie that Kevin and she seem to feel the same way about each other, even though Kevin is dating Tess. It takes almost 200 pages until the inevitable kiss, and of course it is wonderful, and of course it creates problems, and of course Charlie eventually suffers and learns and grows because of it. The end; the expected end.

Lucy Wrenn isn’t much older than Charlie – she is just starting sophomore year of high school – but her story, The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers, is written at a very different and more typical teen level. And it gets back into the supernatural. It starts when Lucy’s boyfriend, Alex, breaks up with her just as school starts and just as she lets him know she is willing to give him her virginity; continues as three exceptionally attractive girls named Olivia, Liza and Gil offer to heal Lucy’s heart and initiate her into their “ancient secret sisterhood”; and moves into the magical realm after Lucy learns her initiation: she must get a boy to fall in love with her, without using any special powers or enhancements, and must then break his heart – all within seven days. After much uncertainty about what to do, Lucy ends up drinking “a liquid Magic Magnet” and realizing how much magic the world really holds. She is instructed in the use of Empathy Cream and Involuntary Muscle Control Serum and other magical potions and objects. And she eventually finds a way to join the Sisterhood by following the letter of the girls’ requirements but not the spirit. This is the cleverest twist in the book, and manages to make Lucy into a smarter and more interesting character than she has been through most of the novel. By the end, there is an attractive impishness to her, an awareness of magical power and at the same time an understanding of her powers as a young woman – and of her errors in her relationship with Alex. Although formulaic in many ways, The Secret Sisterhood of Heartbreakers is more interesting than run-of-the-mill teenage-targeted supernatural-romance novels, largely because its emphasis is not really on romance at all, but on empowerment. Teen girls looking for a book that uses and bends genre conventions instead of simply following them slavishly will enjoy it – and wish for a sequel, which Lynn Weingarten seems perfectly capable of delivering.

(++++) THE VIRTUES OF SERIES

2012-01-12T08:36:00.000-05:00

Johann Strauss Sr. Edition, Volume 20. Slovak Sinfonietta Žilina conducted by Christian Pollack. Marco Polo. $9.99.

John Philip Sousa: Music for Wind Band, Volume 10. Royal Norwegian Navy Band conducted by Keith Brion. Naxos. $9.99.

Hanson: Symphony No. 3; “Merry Mount” Suite. Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Naxos. $9.99.

Hanson: Symphony No. 4, “Requiem”; Symphony No. 5, “Sinfonia sacra”; Elegy in Memory of Serge Koussevitzky; Dies Natalis. Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Naxos. $9.99.

Idil Biret Archive Edition, Volume 11: Adnan Saygun—Piano Concerto No. 1; 12 Preludes in Aksak Rhythms; Jean Françaix—Piano Sonata; Charles Valentin Alkan—Le chemin de fer; Mily Balakirev—Islamey. Idil Biret, piano; Orchestre Colonne conducted by Adnan Saygun (Concerto). IBA. $9.99.

Although it is certainly possible for ongoing series devoted to a particular composer or performer to become tiresome, or to be less interesting over time because they offer less and less notable material in the interest of completeness, all five of these releases in continuing series are top-notch in their own ways – giving listeners a better sense of the depth and quality of the work of composers and artists alike. True, “depth” is not a word often associated with Johann Strauss Sr. or John Philip Sousa: both wrote occasional music, very much of its time, intended to entertain and bring enjoyment to audiences rather than to storm the heavens in a Beethovenian sense – and indeed, certainly in the case of Strauss, not necessarily planned to be heard more than a couple of times during a single season, after which the composer would deliver something new to entice audiences. But it is a measure of the quality of the creations of Strauss and Sousa that so much of their work retains tremendous charm in an era so divorced from theirs – almost as if their pieces endure in spite of themselves.

The latest Strauss Sr. volume, performed with the usual relish by the very fine Slovak Sinfonietta Žilina under the expertly idiomatic direction of Christian Pollack, includes six waltzes, two marches and three quadrilles (a form to which Strauss Sr. was quite partial), all from the composer’s very productive years in the mid-1840s. The waltzes were created for specific occasions, ranging from Carnival celebrations to benefits for flood victims and a children’s hospital – Strauss was a highly civic-minded composer and often gave generously of both his money and his music to disaster victims. Sofien-Tänze (“Sophie Dances”), Moldau-Klänge (“Sounds of the Moldau [Vltava]”), Die Vortänzer (“The Dancing Masters,” for an event whose motto was “Life Is a Dance”), Epionen-Tänze (“Epione Dances”), Fest-Lieder (“Festival Songs”) and Die Unbedeutenden (“Those of No Importance,” after a farce by Johann Nestroy) are all very well-made, elegantly assembled and thoroughly danceable, even today. Concert-Souvenir-Quadrille (based on melodies from a work by Félicien David plus, of all things, “Yankee Doodle”), Zigeunerin-Quadrille (“Bohemian Girl Quadrille,” using melodies from an opera by Michael William Balfe), and Eldorado-Quadrille (composed to celebrate improvements made to Europe’s biggest dance-hall, the Odeon) are all bouncy and enthusiastic within their rather foursquare format. And Österreichischer Fest-Marsch (“Austrian Celebration March”) and Esmeralda Marsch are fine examples of works Strauss composed in his role as bandmaster of the First Viennese Civilian Militia.

It is Sousa, though, whose name is most firmly attached to marches, and the 10^th volume of Keith Brion’s excellent survey of Sousa’s works contains seven of them – all comparative rarities. The Salvation Army March (1930), The Free Lance March (1906), The Quilting Party (1889), When the Boys Come Sailing Home (1918), The Beau Ideal March (1893), Anchor and Star (1918), and Who’s Who in Navy Blue (1920) show Sousa, decade after decade, producing gems, most of them as suitable for the concert stage as for the parade ground. Yet there was more to Sousa’s work than marches, as this fine series continues to show. Brion intersperses the marches here with Jazz America (1925), a fantasy that is not so much jazzy as it is inspired by the Jazz Age; People Who Live in Glass Houses Suite (1909), a balletic tribute to various forms of alcoholic beverages by a composer who was scarcely a teetotaler; Myrrha Gavotte (1876), a very early work set in formal classical dance style; Vautour Overture (1886), a Rossinian opening for a play by Adolphe Eugene Philippe d’Ennery; and Look for the Silver Lining Humoresque (1922), a highly amusing work based on a 1919 hit tune by Jerome Kern and several other recognizable songs of the time – and containing a touch of early big-band jazz. One of the best things about the Naxos Sousa series is that it provides a chance to hear both well-known and little-known Sousa marches while also showing, time and again, that the famous bandmaster composed in a variety of forms with considerable flair.

There is more to Howard Hanson’s music than symphonies, but his seven symphonies are of major importance among his compositions, and Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony received well-deserved commendations for their fine Hanson symphony recordings on Delos, from performances done in the late 1980s and 1990s. Naxos is re-releasing the Delos discs, and they have stood up very well – as indeed do the symphonies themselves. No. 3, composed from 1936 to 1938, was written to commemorate the first Swedish settlement in the United States. It is the longest of the symphonies and the most strongly redolent of Sibelius – always a potent influence on Hanson. Expansive, lyrical and knitted together by a recurrent chorale theme, it has a strong spiritual undercurrent that is presented through skillful and colorful orchestration. The suite from Hanson’s only opera, Merry Mount, is a fine complement to the symphony. The opera too is about spirituality – but focuses on its perversions. Based loosely on a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story, the 1934 opera is a grim story of Puritans and Indians, with a libretto whose language was considered unusually blunt. Hanson extracted a suite from it in 1938, and the fervor and intensity of the music come through well in strictly orchestral form – from the austerity of the Overture, to the light-sounding “Children’s Dance” that has a darker undercurrent in the opera, to a “Love Duet” that also is troubling in context, to a final set of “Maypole Dances” that scandalize the Puritans in the opera but that here make for a bright conclusion (and a disconcerting one for those who know the stage work itself).

Hanson’s Symphony No. 4, Requiem, is a wartime work, from 1943, and was one of the composer’s favorite compositions. Its inspiration was not the battlefield, however, but the death of Hanson’s father, to whom he dedicated the score. Its four movements, which bear titles from the Mass for the dead, range emotionally from an acerbic scherzo to a concluding Largo pastorale that dies off in a form of catharsis. Symphony No. 5, Sinfonia sacra, is Hanson’s shortest, a 15-minute work from 1954 written in one movement, with echoes of Sibelius (as in several other Hanson symphonies) and a Gregorian-style theme whose old-fashioned nature contrasts with the modern compositional techniques with which it is handled. Elegy in Memory of Serge Koussevitzky, written five years after the conductor’s death in 1951, combines full-orchestra writing with chamber-like sections that give the piece a more-personal cast – Koussevitzky had given the first performances of Hanson’s piano concerto and three of his symphonies. Completing a CD pervaded by sacred elements even without any overtly religious works, Dies Natalis (1967) is a set of variations on a Lutheran Christmas chorale. It features some particularly effective instrumentation, including impressively constructed brass chords and an eight-bar timpani solo. Schwarz has taken the measure of all this music and conducts it with understanding and considerable sensitivity.

Idil Biret shows those same characteristics, and to quite a high degree, in the music of Adnan Saygun (1907-1991) and Jean Françaix (1912-1997) on the latest IBA release. Small wonder: Biret has been intimately involved in the works heard here from the pieces’ inception. She gave the first performance of Saygun’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1958, the year after the work was completed, and Saygun dedicated his 12 Preludes in Aksak Rhythms to her in 1967; while for his part, Françaix dedicated his piano sonata (1960) to Biret as well. These performances are as close to definitive as these works are likely to get – but this CD gets a (+++) rating rather than (++++) both because of the repertoire and because of considerable sonic deficiencies. The Saygun concerto is a monophonic recording of the work’s 1958 première, transferred to CD from an acetate disc, while the preludes come from a homemade cassette tape recorded in the 1970s. The restoration for IBA is fairly good, but there remain notable sonic inadequacies that mar the flow of the music – making these recordings of historical interest and importance for fans of Biret, but less than satisfactory for a general audience. The remaining works here come from more-modern recordings and are in stereo: the Françaix dates to 1960 and is a studio recording; the Alkan is a studio performance from 1998; and the Balakirev was recorded live in 1993. Despite the engineers’ hard work, there are noticeable differences in sound quality throughout the CD, making it somewhat frustrating to listen to, and at times in the 12 Preludes actually unpleasant. As for the music, Saygun’s concerto is in the traditional three movements, with traditional contrasts among them, although its harmonic language is clearly that of the mid-20^th century. The 12 Preludes are rhythmically derived from Turkish folk music; Bartók used similar rhythms (“aksak” means “limping”) in Mikrokosmos and elsewhere, describing them as Bulgarian. Biret does an especially good job here of showcasing the contrast between the binary and ternary units that together create the “limping” feeling. In the Françaix, which is quite short but packed with technical demands, Biret’s grasp of rhythmic complexity is particularly well shown in the opening Allegrissimo section in 7/4, although she handles this largely neoclassical work well throughout. However, neither the Saygun pieces nor the Françaix sonata will likely be found highly memorable by most listeners – they are competently made works, but do not seem to have a great deal to say. Alkan’s Le chemin de fer and Balakirev’s Islamey, positioned as afterthoughts on the CD, are more interesting pieces, requiring considerable pianistic dexterity but putting the virtuosity at the service of some intriguing musical ideas and expressions. Biret again shows herself on this CD as a technically formidable pianist and a highly thoughtful one, but most of the music, like most of the recorded sound, is less than enthralling.

(++++) COLD COMFORT

2012-01-05T08:50:00.000-05:00

The Polar Bear Scientists. By Peter Lourie. Houghton Mifflin. $18.99.

Little Bea and the Snowy Day. By Daniel Roode. Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $12.99.

These days, the poster child, or poster animal, for global warming is the polar bear, whose struggles to survive as Arctic sea ice shrinks and disappears earlier in the year than it used to have been chronicled in many articles and seen in videos, TV shows and elsewhere. The Polar Bear Scientists, the latest book in Houghton Mifflin’s very well-done series about the real, everyday, often unglamorous lives of scientists working in the field and in laboratories, is built around interviews with biologist Steven Amstrup, “the godfather of Alaskan polar bear research for the past thirty years.” Amstrup talks not only about climate change but also about the history of studies of the largest bears in the world, the capture-release-and-recapture program that makes modern scientific study of them possible, the use of radio collars to track bears that move between polar nations, and more. Other scientists and support personnel, such as George Durner and Kristin Simac, discuss the bears as well, and all are seen with bears, with the equipment used to catch and track them, and in the laboratory and office settings where data are entered, assembled and correlated. Peter Lourie’s words and photos clearly depict the difficult conditions under which scientists work with the bears – and the frigid land where the bears thrive, or try to. Some of the photos tell the story in ways that are more immediately dramatic than the text: a female with three cubs trying to scare off the scientists’ helicopter, a bear print that is elevated because Arctic winds have blown away the lighter surrounding snow, a female bear lying in snow as a scientist prepares gear to weigh and measure her, yearling male bears roughhousing, and of course the adorable cubs without which no study of polar bears would be complete. The sorts of decisions the scientists face are clearly explained. A missing collar, for example, needs to be located if at all possible. “Of course it’s expensive to go find a distant collar, with the cost of fuel and time, but it’s equally if not more important to find a collar in order to determine whether a bear has died or has just dropped it.” A photo showing scientists with pickaxes trying to break through ice to dig up a collar gives some idea of what is involved in retrieval. The Polar Bear Scientists tells as much about the people who study these bears as it does about the bears themselves: the humans are concerned, dedicated and meticulous in their work. The global-warming debate may continue, but Amstrup puts it into perspective after Lourie points out that the bears have gone through at least two periods that were warmer than the current one. In those earlier warm periods, says Amstrup, “we didn’t have nearly as many humans out there competing with bears and otherwise affecting their security. …[A]s temperatures rise and habitat is reduced, polar bears are going to be competing with a lot of human uses of their environment.” The scientists’ concern is not political, although that is the typical framework for global-warming discussions. Amstrup and colleagues have first-hand knowledge of how current climate changes are affecting polar bears, and their worry comes through as genuine and as transcending politics.

A much, much lighter winter-oriented book – created, just for fun, for pre-readers and the youngest readers – Little Bea and the Snowy Day has a bear in it, too, but this is the sort of illustrated bear designed to entertain young children with amusing and pleasant antics. Daniel Roode’s book is a followup to his Little Bea, whose title character really is a bee – a thoroughly adorable one without a stinger who, in the new book, wears a cap and scarf and wants nothing more than to play in the snow with Bear, Rabbit, Beaver, Owl, Deer and Goose. There is really no plot here – the friends simply go outside and do snow-related things, such as making snow angels, sledding, throwing snowballs and building a snowman. All the characters have huge heads and perpetual smiles, and all are cuddly and cute as can be. Scenes in which Roode lines them all up or displays them all at once – going uphill with a sled at one point, ice skating on a pond at another – are especially delightful. So is the hot-chocolate break that everyone takes (no grown-up animals are shown; the steaming cups apparently appear by magic). Little Bea and the Snowy Day is a just-right bit of entertainment for a young child on a winter day that may be a little too cold for outdoor play…or one on which playtime in the snow is over and a little bit of quiet reading, perhaps with some hot chocolate, is just the thing.

(++++) HARD-BOILED AND HARDER-BOILED

2012-01-05T08:47:00.000-05:00

Breakdown. By Sara Paretsky. Putnam. $26.95.

Just how complex do you want a mystery to be? How difficult a character do you want the mystery-solver to be? How convoluted do you want the twists and turns to be? If your answer to all three questions is “very,” Sara Paretsky’s V.I. Warshawski novels are likely to be near the top of your reading list already. Breakdown will keep them there, and maybe even elevate their place a notch or two.

This is Paretsky’s 17^th novel. Of those, only two – Ghost Country (1998) and Bleeding Kansas (2008) – have not featured the female detective first introduced by Paretsky in Indemnity Only (1982). V.I. (Victoria Iphigenia, “Vic” to her friends) has not exactly aged well, although she has aged: in the new book, she is pushing 50. But she is recognizably the same woman she has been throughout this three-decade series: difficult, demanding, quite up to fighting when necessary, not always cooperative with the nuances of the law, but nevertheless inclined to sing along with opera and dress nicely – at least when her good outfits aren’t being trashed in her investigations, as several of them are in Breakdown. “Clothes are a projection of the self,” Vic remarks when one of her outfits proves to be unsalvageable. “I felt personally damaged.”

A multifaceted character, Vic, and not always a likable one in “the world where I spend most of my time, filled with the dying or the lying.” Readers might not want Vic as a friend or drinking companion (she prefers Johnnie Walker Black Label), but most would certainly want her on their side in a fight. And not just a street brawl – a political fight, too, which is a big part of the foundation of Paretsky’s latest book.

It takes an author of considerable skill to create as many confusions as Paretsky builds into Breakdown, and then to pull all the strands neatly together. The book starts with Vic being asked to find seven members of her cousin Petra’s book club, 12- and 13-year-old girls who are out after curfew. Turns out they are in a cemetery, invoking the spirit of the fictional female vampire, Carmilla, Queen of the Night (a nod there to J.S. Le Fanu’s 1872 novel, Carmilla). Also turns out that they are just steps away from a gentleman, or rather ex-gentleman, named Miles Wuchnik, who has been stabbed through the heart in a killing reminiscent of what happens in vampire novels. Wuchnik was a private investigator and not, it turns out, much of a gentleman. And Vic must have had something to do with his death – or so claims right-wing media darling and rabble-rouser Wade Lawlor, from whose party Vic was called to look for the tweens. It seems that one of the girls, Arielle, is the granddaughter of billionaire Chaim Salanter, a wealthy Jewish businessman, Holocaust survivor, and prominent contributor to the senatorial campaign of University of Illinois president Sophy Durango – who is running against creationist Helen Kendrick, whom Lawlor is backing.

Got all that? Then you don’t have the half of it. Vic compares this case to a Rubik’s Cube, and the metaphor is apt, because just as she tries to align certain elements, others go off into non-matching directions. Lawlor, whose one-dimensional bigotry is overstated in a way that will not surprise readers who know of Paretsky’s strong liberal leanings, uses his 24-hour-a-day cable network, GEN (“Global Entertainment Network”), to attack Salanter (as Durango’s proxy) with allegations about how he was really treated by the Nazis. The families of the girls from the cemetery have reasons for wanting to keep the murder quiet, and it is not just the rich and well-connected who feel that way: two of the girls are children of illegal immigrants, whose families want as little light shed on their circumstances as possible. And then there is the matter of Vic’s old friend, brilliant but deeply unreliable Leydon Ashford, a bipolar attorney who has fallen – or been pushed – from a gallery above the University of Chicago’s Rockefeller Chapel, and who provides a cryptic, repeatedly written comment, “I saw him on the catafalque.” Leydon’s mother wants Vic to keep her theories about what happened to her daughter quiet. And she is not the only one who wants Vic to take it easy: Salanter and Vic meet repeatedly, but not to try to solve the cemetery murder – Salanter wants Vic to stay away from the case. Furthermore, the various victims, it seems, have as many secrets as do the perpetrators.

Clearly, the various elements of Breakdown will turn out to be interconnected; indeed, the book’s title has multiple reference points, relating to everything from Leydon’s mental breakdown to the breakdown of civility in politics and by extension in society. Few readers are likely to figure out just how all the pieces join until Paretsky performs her usual sleight of hand – with impeccable logic – in a thrilling climax. Given Vic’s personality (she is a modern inheritor of the “hard-boiled” mantle, even though she is not above pointing out to readers the differences between herself and “a literary detective like Spenser or Marlowe”), and given her determination to see that social justice as well as legal justice is done (reflecting Paretsky’s own commitments to the mentally ill homeless, troubled teens, reproductive rights and other causes), readers will know that Vic will solve the case, or cases, come what may and no matter who gets hurt (herself included). The fascination here is in watching how Vic pulls together elements as disparate as a state mental hospital, class warfare, a wrongful conviction for murder, a couple of highly warped brother-sister relationships, and the incessant nastiness of modern politics – all within a framework that accurately portrays aspects of life in Chicago (where Paretsky lives) even when some of the specific settings are invented. Thirty years after introducing V.I. Warshawski, Paretsky still manages to keep her detective fresh, witty, plainspoken, filled with righteous anger, and dedicated to justice. Breakdown, which is written in Paretsky’s easy-to-read style and is well packed with hard-to-decipher (but scrupulously fair) clues and mysteries, is sure to be a best-seller, and deserves to be.

(++++) THE NEW AND THE TRIED-AND-TRUE

2012-01-05T08:44:00.001-05:00

New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change. By Winifred Gallagher. Penguin. $25.95.

The Smartest Money Book You’ll Ever Read: Everything You Need to Know about Growing, Spending, and Enjoying Your Money. By Daniel R. Solin. Perigee. $25.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose – literally, “the more it changes, the more it stays the same.” Or, as we usually put it nowadays, 163 years after Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr coined the epigram, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Things change faster than ever now – our world, and the information it gives us for processing, seem to run at hyperspeed all the time. Yet some things stay the same, and one of them, behavioral-science writer Winifred Gallagher argues, is neophilia – the human attraction to the new. Like so many human characteristics, this one has positive and negative aspects. Extreme neophiliacs (about 15% of the population, Gallagher estimates) can become so addicted to newness that they jeopardize their safety, fidelity in relationships, jobs and more – yet neophiliacs may also have a creative streak that makes them the first to see things in an entirely different way and create inventions of genuine value to humanity. At the other extreme, neophobes (another 15%, Gallagher says) can be the foundational rocks of society, handling everyday tasks with caution, care and concern, proceeding slowly rather than precipitately – but they can also be significant barriers to progress. Most people, of course, fall somewhere between the extremes, Gallagher says, but she deems it important to understand that we humans, by our very nature, are “hard-wired to be interested in new things.” And that can spell trouble in a world so packed with new information, new gadgets and new consumer products that even if we run twice as fast in an attempt to stay in the same place, we will still have a vague feeling of falling behind. Gallagher makes a series of good points. Some are direct – novel information is like food: some is nutritious and some is junk. Some are made amusingly and in passing – for all the benefits of walking upright, “we’re still paying the price for this handy bipedalism with our fallen arches, tricky knees, and bad backs, to say nothing of the world’s biggest butts, created by [our] ancestors’ repositioned pelvic muscles.” And some of her points are genuinely thought-provoking, such as her discussion of neophobia in an environment where one would expect neophilia: college. “The twenty-first-century college campus offers a dismaying and stunningly underremarked example of how anxiety about the risk associated with new ways of thinking can limit learning and stunt creativity,” writes Gallagher, then quoting a lecturer named Daniel Pink as saying that today’s students “aren’t good risk managers. They overstate the risk of novelty and divergence, and they understate the risk of being compliant with authority figures. It’s a colossal mistake – and frightening.” Frightening in another way is the preponderance of consumer addiction – and it is addiction – to ever-newer versions of products that were really just fine before. This involves the feeling that one must have an iPhone 4S to replace one’s iPhone 4. Patently absurd on the face of it and indicative of a society in which some people have too much discretionary money (or believe they do) and too little discretion in the use of it, this sort of newness addiction – Gallagher calls it the “new boredom” – contradicts and undermines the socially useful elements of neophilia, turning it into an inevitable losing attempt to have the newest everything all the time. What to do about all this? To her credit, Gallagher is prescriptive, not merely descriptive. Her recommendations probably won’t take hold – they are too common-sensical, too middle-of-the-road, in a sense too old-fashioned – but they are clear-headed and intelligent. They include taking time away from electronics and other things and just staring into space; asking whether you really need something before you buy or use it; considering the investment of mental resources in various new things, and deciding whether those resources could better be used elsewhere; and managing E-mail and other potentially useful potential time-wasters carefully and systematically. Good ideas, all of these, and following even a few of them can help our brains tune out some of the junk information in our environment so we will be better attuned to the nutritious stuff – that is, the data that feed creativity and improvement.

And speaking of neophilia and junk information – there are few places more dangerous to become preoccupied with the unimportant (if attractively packaged) stuff than the investment world. And there are few bigger warning signs of financial neophilia than believing the oft-repeated phrase, “This time it’s different.” Fortunes can be and have been lost through precipitous investment in the latest, greatest, newest and soon-to-be-biggest new thing. In fact, it could be argued that the world’s recent deep recession came about in large part through major investors’ determination to put tons of money into such newly developed financial products as collateralized mortgage obligations (first created in 1983) and collateralized debt obligations with multiple tranches. You will find none of this stuff in Daniel R. Solin’s latest plainspoken and intelligent investment book, with a typically somewhat-too-self-important title: The Smartest Money Book You’ll Ever Read. In this (+++) book, Solin deals not only with investing but also with spending, including buying health and life insurance, getting out of debt, minimizing taxes and cutting college costs. He talks about whether it is better to buy a home or rent, how to handle estate planning, and how to go about “making your money outlive you” – always in easy-to-understand prose that tends to oversimplify but that is packed with good thinking and good advice. Each chapter – and the chapters are very short – ends with a comment in answer to Solin’s self-posed question, “What’s the Point?” Among those answers: “Budgeting is the first step toward getting control of your finances and increasing your net worth.” “In general, it’s best to avoid annuities, except for immediate fixed annuities.” “The enemies of high returns are high fees, costs, and taxes.” An occasional answer turns out to be at odds with Solin’s analysis elsewhere in the book. “Avoid debt, but if you do use credit, use it to finance only assets of equal or greater value,” he writes, but almost everyone must go into debt to purchase a home, and “owning a home can be gratifying, but as an investment it is overrated. …[I]t is a gamble as an investment strategy.” Taking these statements at face value would deter anyone from buying a home – although Solin does qualify them to a degree. Still, readers should not be fooled by the ease of reading this book or the brief length of its chapters into believing that the subjects Solin discusses are simple or have one-size-fits-all approaches. Actually, the most irritating thing about the book is not its once-over-lightly approach but its repeated references to Mint.com, a free financial-planning Web site that recommends the book and that (not as a result, says Solin) gets a series of “Mint Hints” throughout. True, there is not necessarily a quid pro quo here, but the repeated urgings to consult Mint.com for information and articles – with Solin saying, for example, that the site offers “several sound approaches to building a solid portfolio” – make it look as if there is a strong tie-in between what Solin is saying and what Mint.com says. Solin is no shill, but he comes perilously close to looking like one here, and that does neither him nor his readers any good. The appearance of lack of independence can sometimes be as damaging as actual lack of independence, and the fact that Mint.com is free and Solin has written other books without the tie-in does not change the appearance here of a relationship that is scarcely at arm’s length. Solin says directly that he “has no association with Mint.com, other than obtaining its agreement to use its logo in this book and to reference its website where appropriate,” but the many appearances of the site here – in boxes decorated with a sprig of mint and bearing the “Mint Hint” title – may well make some readers look askance at what Solin is saying. In fact, both Solin and Mint.com offer a great deal of value, not only within this book but also outside it. Readers should not, however, make money decisions based solely on this book or solely on the material at Mint.com – its subtitle to the contrary, Solin’s book does not provide “everything you need to know” about money. Further research, which may include Mint.com but should not be limited to it, is strongly advised.

(+++) STRICTLY FOR FANS

2012-01-05T08:41:00.002-05:00

This Is a Call: The Life and Times of Dave Grohl. By Paul Brannigan. Da Capo. $26.99.

PacMan: Behind the Scenes with Manny Pacquiao—the Greatest Pound-for-Pound Fighter in the World. By Gary Andrew Poole. Da Capo. $15.

Some books start out with limitations. They are not intended to reach a wide audience or to attract people unfamiliar with their subject matter. Pretty much all books on minor celebrities fit this category – they are strictly for readers who already know and care about the people being profiled, and are looking for some sort of “behind-the-scenes story” on people the readers will never meet, and know about only through their performances and public personas. So Paul Brannigan’s This Is a Call will be of no interest whatsoever to readers uninterested in the punk scene where Grohl has had his career. Brannigan – former editor of a magazine called Kerrang! – preaches to the converted throughout, assuming that anyone picking up the book will not only know about and be fascinated by Grohl’s stint as drummer for the band Nirvana and singer/songwriter for the Foo Fighters, but also want to know all the ins and outs of Grohl’s personal life. As it happens, some of Grohl’s ups and downs would be interesting, or at least a cautionary tale, even to those not fully immersed in the punk scene: his troubles keeping a band together, the difficulties of his personal life, and his eventual descent into homelessness have resonance far beyond his music. But they are not the focus of the book. Brannigan knows what his audience wants: “It was Metallica who altered the playing field. Formed in Los Angeles in 1981 by vocalist/guitarist James Hetfield and drummer Lars Ulrich, and influenced by Motörhead, the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, the Misfits and nihilistic West Coast punk, the quartet began life as front-runner of the violent, chaotic Thrash Metal scene.” And, of course, “When Dave Grohl talks about Kurt Cobain’s last days his body language and speech patterns change. The bounce disappears from his voice, and his recollections are delivered haltingly. …‘It’s hard for me to even talk about it,’ he said finally. ‘It was just so nuts, I don’t even know how to explain it.’” Fans of Grohl’s work, up to and including his appearances with Them Crooked Vultures, will get plenty of name-dropping and behind-the-scenes insights from a writer who has known Grohl since 1997 and does a good job of pulling together many sorts of musical and personal minutiae. But Brannigan never digs too deeply into Grohl’s mind or heart, which is a shame, since there are fascinating tidbits there. For example, Grohl’s freshman and sophomore years in high school were at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a highly selective school generally considered the best high school in the United States; his family then pulled him out because his marijuana use was affecting his grades. But getting into the school in the first place – which requires taking a difficult entrance exam – indicates that Grohl had considerable aptitude in fields with which one would scarcely associate him. Where did that come from, and where did it go? There are no answers here to questions of that sort; indeed, there are no questions of that sort at all. Brannigan delivers a nicely written biographical sketch of Grohl that will interest Grohl’s existing fan base and readers of Kerrang! and similar magazines. That is all. For the target audience, it will be enough.

Similarly, the primary target readership of Gary Andrew Poole’s PacMan is boxing fans – although this book may reach a bit beyond the core, simply because Manny Pacquiao sometimes shows up in general-news headlines as well as boxing stories. For example, the third fight between Pacquaio and Juan Manuel Marquez, which Pacquaio won by a controversial majority decision last November 12, provoked commentary even beyond the boxing world. But that fight is not included in PacMan, and cannot be – it takes too much time to produce a book for it to include up-to-the-minute information, and besides, PacMan originally came out in 2010; the new paperback edition is updated only with an afterword by Poole. The focus of the book is not the boxing ring, although of course that is a prominent venue, but the background from which Pacquaio rose to pugilistic prominence. A Philippine Congressman using his political position to fight the sort of poverty into which he himself was born, Pacquaio is a fascinating character in many ways, not the least of which is financial: “Pacquaio sends his children to an international school outside of Manila. He sponsors nine-ball billiard games in which the Philippines’ best players compete, which has [sic] a pot of one million pesos. …Pacquaio spends hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money for tickets. He has to maintain a fleet of vehicles, a handful of condos, apartments, and houses, and pay the freeloaders, and give his money to the poor. Pacquaio’s spending habits, it is argued, have been good for [boxing promotion company] Top Rank because Pacquaio must continue boxing to earn even more money.” Readers not especially enamored of Pacquaio or of boxing may wonder why the fighter “has to” maintain so many vehicles, “pay the freeloaders” and so on, and Poole does not explain – this biography is interesting in many ways but is short on analysis, much less criticism, of its subject. Poole’s style is often wanting, too: “Training in the Philippines was obviously a mistake because there were like 2 billion distractions there.” Or: “[Oscar] De La Hoya didn’t punch back. His left eye was closed. He hit De La Hoya with fifty power punches.” Yet the book’s underlying theme – actually stated by De La Hoya, once known as the Golden Boy but no match for Pacquaio when the two welterweights fought in 2008 – comes through clearly: “‘The word I get is that Pacquaio means so much not just because of the excitement of his boxing but what he is as a man.’” Those looking for confirmation that Pacquaio is an important man as well as an important boxer will find it in PacMan. Those who disdain boxing and might have preferred a more objective and more carefully assembled book (this one does not even have an index) will likely avoid Poole’s work altogether.

(++++) PIANO AND OTHER FOCUSES

2012-01-05T08:38:00.000-05:00

Debussy: Orchestral Works, Volume 7—Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra; Première Rapsodie for Orchestra with Principal Clarinet; Rapsodie for Saxophone and Orchestra; Deux Danses for Harp and Strings. Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano; Paul Meyer, clarinet; Alexandre Doisy, saxophone; Emmanuel Ceysson, harp; Orchestre National de Lyon conducted by Jun Märkl. Naxos. $9.99.

Wilhelm Stenhammar: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2. Niklas Sivelöv, piano; Malmö Symphony Orchestra conducted by Mario Venzago. Naxos. $9.99.

Vivaldi: Bassoon Concertos, Volume II—RV 499, 472, 490, 496, 504, 483 and 470. Sergio Azzolini, bassoon; L’Aura Soave Cremona conducted by Diego Cantalupi. Naïve. $16.99.

Johann Friedrich Fasch: Orchestral Works, Volume 2—Concertos in D and G; Ouverture in A minor; Sinfonia in G minor. Tempesta di Mare—Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra. Chandos. $18.99.

The seventh volume in Naxos’ excellent Debussy series with Orchestre National de Lyon under Jun Märkl moves into territory not often associated with this composer: concertos or concerto-like works. True, nothing here is as long or flamboyant as were typical concertos of Debussy’s time; and true, all these pieces have Debussy’s sensitive feel and flair for color rather than display. It is nevertheless interesting to have several of the composer’s pieces for soloist and orchestra on a single CD – all of them receiving excellent performances. Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra is an early work, dating to 1889-90, although Debussy continued changing It throughout his life and it was not published until after his death; indeed, the version performed here was published only in 1968, incorporating changes that did not show up in the first (1920) publication. Whatever the work’s provenance, it is a well-proportioned piece in which the piano and orchestra remain nicely balanced throughout, playing with rather than (as so often in Romantic concertos) against one another. The same is true of Première Rapsodie, which is notably titled as being for orchestra with principal clarinet. Written in 1910 for clarinet and piano and orchestrated the following year, this is a competition piece, designed to allow students to show their abilities in contrasting tempos and moods. Yet it is not a mere competition piece, having a prevailing dreamlike mood that is quite in keeping with Debussy’s usual manner. The saxophone rhapsody is evocative, too, even though Debussy was not very comfortable with the instrument – and even though he only sketched the work’s orchestration, which was completed after his death by Jean Robert-Ducasse. The CD concludes with two short dances from 1904 that focus on the harp – originally written for the chromatic harp, but nowadays played on the conventional instrument. These are works firmly embedded in their era and in the sensibility of such turn-of-the-century composers as Erik Satie, but they also carry faint suggestions of ancient times and require both sensitivity and virtuosity in interpretation – and receive both qualities here.

The virtuosity needed for Wilhelm Stenhammar’s two piano concertos is of a more traditional Romantic type. Stenhammar (1871-1927) was considered the finest Swedish pianist of his time, and had a career more as a soloist and conductor than as a composer. He also took some time to find his own compositional voice: his first concerto (written in 1893 and first performed in 1894) is distinctly Brahmsian, not only in its four-movement structure with the scherzo placed second, but also in its vast scope and broad themes. There are hints in this work of an attempt to reach for a more individual style, especially in the writing for the keyboard, but the piece – although undoubtedly effective – leaves an overall impression of being more imitative than original. It is, however, well scored and impressive in its expectations of the soloist. The second concerto (1908) is more original: its four movements are played continuously, and the sound world here is no longer that of Brahms, nor even that of Liszt, although there are hints of the earlier composers here and there. Stenhammar had at this point moved from immersion in the works of Wagner and Bruckner to influence by Nielsen and Sibelius, although there is nothing especially Nordic about this concerto’s themes or approach. The things that are different here, in comparison with the first concerto, are a tighter and better-integrated design and a use of recurrent thematic material that makes the work as a whole sound more completely thought-through and less expansive than the earlier concerto. Niklas Sivelöv plays both concertos with mastery and a fine sense of style, and the accompaniment by the Malmö Symphony Orchestra under Mario Venzago is sure-handed, idiomatic and convincing throughout.

It is not keyboard concertos but ones for the violin for which Vivaldi is known – but listeners are often surprised to discover that the Red Priest also wrote more than three dozen concertos for the bassoon. No one quite knows why. The concertos are all in Vivaldi’s standard three-movement form, and all require a fair degree of virtuosity, treating the bassoon not as the comic instrument it was to become in later times but as a full-fledged soloist to be set against a complement of strings. The second volume in Naïve’s survey of the bassoon concertos includes RV 499 (A minor), 472 (C major), 490 (F major), 496 (G minor), 504 (B-flat major), 483 (E-flat major), and 470 (C major). There is little except detail to distinguish among the concertos, although the two in minor keys do have some additional wistfulness (if not depth) when compared with the brighter and more common major-key ones. Sergio Azzolini plays all the concertos stylishly, overcoming their usually modest difficulties without any apparent strain, and the period-instrument ensemble L’Aura Soave Cremona provides excellent accompaniment, producing sound that is both warm and vivid – and melds quite well with that of Azzolini’s solo bassoon.

Vivaldi’s dates were 1678-1741, while those of Johann Friedrich Fasch were 1688-1758, but the musical directions of these two contemporaries were quite different, as the second volume in Chandos’ series devoted to Fasch’s orchestral works makes clear. Two of the four pieces here are called concertos, but they – as well as the works labeled “ouverture” and “sinfonia” – more closely resemble Classical-era symphonies (early ones) than they do Vivaldi-style concertos. Fasch was highly respected in his time – notably by Bach, who owned copies of six Fasch orchestral suites and arranged a Fasch piano trio for organ. But Fasch’s music is quite unlike that of Bach – or Vivaldi. Those Baroque composers favored a certain austerity in style and a general coolness in themes and organization, exemplified above all by the fugue, of which Bach was such a master. Fasch’s music starts to move away from the Baroque model toward the Classical, with greater thematic development and frequently more interesting orchestral color than is generally found in the Baroque. The four works played by the rather awkwardly named Tempesta di Mare—Philadelphia Baroque Orchestra are all world première recordings, and all are solid, well-constructed and filled with lovely flow. The Ouverture in A minor is the most impressive of the pieces, being fully symphonic in scope (it lasts nearly half an hour) and offering multiple mood and orchestration changes. Despite his popularity in his own time, Fasch was overshadowed by Baroque giants – Telemann as well as Bach and Vivaldi – and his early progress toward Classical style led to his later being passed over, much as proto-Romantic composers such as Hummel and Field were later to be largely ignored after their own lifetimes, despite their once-innovative approaches. Hearing Fasch’s works today opens a window on a very interesting transitional time in music – besides which, these compositions are elegant and well-crafted statements in their own right.

(++++) HIS WORLD AND OURS

2011-12-29T08:46:00.000-05:00

Red Rascal’s War: A “Doonesbury” Book. By G.B. Trudeau. Andrews McMeel. $19.99.

The superlatives for Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury keep on coming, mounting into a crescendo of absurdity as writers for highly respected publications compare the cartoonist to Tolstoy, Dickens and Trollope – all of which comparisons are included, hopefully tongue-in-cheek, in the latest Doonesbury collection. There is no doubt that Trudeau has elevated the comic-strip medium in some ways, extended it in others, and refined it in still others. But there is also no doubt, as Red Rascal’s War shows clearly, that Trudeau is not an especially deep or original thinker and does not create, or intend to create, characters indicative of the human condition and to whom readers are supposed to respond strongly and with deep emotion. Some readers do respond that way nevertheless, when Trudeau tugs the heartstrings a certain way or sets up situations that parallel those of a given group of real-world readers; but the reality is that Trudeau is a “cause” cartoonist who happens to have so many causes that he needs an exceptionally wide canvas on which to portray all of them – especially within the limitations of a daily strip that, by its nature, can explore only one snippet of one part of one element of the world on any given day.

Doonesbury reads better in book form than as a daily strip, where things are generally in medias res and the uninitiated can easily be confused about who is doing what to whom, when and why. Red Rascal’s War is a particularly attractive presentation of the strip: every entry is in color, and the hardcover book is hefty, handsome and very well produced. The content, though, for better or worse, is the same that Trudeau has produced reliably for four decades: lots of commentary on the politics of the day (in ways that quickly become dated), interspersed with thoughts about war in general, human relationships in general, and the interconnection of the characters in the strip’s many threads in general. Red Rascal, for example, is the make-believe, super-heroic alter ego and wish fulfillment of Jeff Redfern, 27-year-old perpetual screwup who has ended up with the CIA in Afghanistan (along with Havoc, a recurring character from way back); Jeff’s dad, Rick Redfern, longtime Washington Post reporter, is now out of work and blogging. Jeff crosses paths with Melissa, who has re-upped after working through the severe psychological fallout of being raped while in service; Melissa has gone through treatment at the same place where BD, onetime football hero and an original Doonesbury cast member, is still trying to cope with the return to civilian life, where his loss of a leg in combat is the least of his issues. BD, football coach at Walden College, discusses the school with Toggle, who has a traumatic brain injury from his service and is also the highly improbable boyfriend of Alex Doonesbury, daughter of the strip’s nominal title character, Mike Doonesbury – while Mike’s mom worries about where the grandchildren are (or rather, why there aren’t any) and whether she would be better off dying as the nonexistent “death panels” would prefer.

And so on, and on, and on. History often moves too fast for the topicality of Doonesbury – the whole “death panels” sequence, for one, seems quite outdated, and in general the overtly political strips (such as a number of them that assume former Alaska governor Sarah Palin is front-and-center in public consciousness) do not wear well at all. A few direct political barbs still seem to have currency, such as suggestions that President Obama is an unintentional master of cognitive dissonance (Trudeau is often accused of attacking only the political right wing, and while that is certainly his primary target, it is not his only one). But it is the interpersonal strips that stand up best, such as ones in which Alex runs into conflicts with Toggle’s mother and also with her own neuroses and sense of how high-maintenance she is. Trudeau’s art has become one of the best things about the strip, and it looks exceptionally good in Red Rascal’s War, with the individuation of characters handled with tremendous skill. But with Trudeau, it is never really the characters that matter, and this is why all the comparisons between him and great novelists of the past are so misguided. Trudeau designs, selects and modifies characters in order to make specific points, usually about issues of the day. Anything he reveals about the intricacies of the human spirit and human relationships is a sidelight, not the primary reason for his strip’s existence. Doonesbury is an extraordinary production in many ways, and the sheer overwhelming complexity of its world sets it well apart from any other comic strip ever produced. But it is scarcely a profound strip – and it does not have to be one. Trudeau is limning elements of the real world through creation of an alternative one that touches on reality so closely and so often that it is almost possible to confuse the two. Almost. But as Trudeau manipulates his characters on the vast chessboard he has designed, it is clear that he keeps the real world and the Doonesbury world just separate enough so he can use one to comment on the other. At his best, he does so pointedly and with considerable skill; and as Red Rascal’s War shows, he is at his best quite often these days.

(++++) MAGIC AND MISCHANCE

2011-12-29T08:43:00.003-05:00

Liesl & Po. By Lauren Oliver. Illustrated by Kei Acedera. Harper. $16.99.

The Magic Cake Shop. By Meika Hashimoto. Illustrations by Josée Masse. Random House. $15.99.

Hell Is for Real, Too. By “Skip Shmuley.” Illustrations by Leif Parsons. Plume. $13.

By turns gentle, amusing, involving, comforting and scary, Lauren Oliver’s Liesl & Po is a wonderful story of magic, mystery and wonder. It starts with perhaps a few too many threads, but Oliver quickly pulls them together and shows their interrelationships, which then become the movers of the plot. There is Liesl, who desperately misses her father, who has just died – she was unable to say goodbye to him in the hospital because her stepmother would not allow her to go there. There is Po, a ghost who has noticed Liesl’s drawings from the Other Side and has also noticed that she has not done any for three days (since her father’s death); and who, when wondering why not, suddenly turns up in Liesl’s room – not to haunt her but to find out what is wrong. Po is accompanied by Bundle, a “shaggy thing [that] made a noise somewhere between a bark and a meow,” because on the Other Side, things blur, and Bundle is not quite a cat and not quite a dog…just as Po is not quite a girl and not quite a boy. There is also Will, who has seen Liesl at her window and, like Po, has been concerned about and interested in her – and who is an alchemist’s apprentice, charged with delivering an important box of magic that he manages to misplace in the midst of his errand, ending up instead with a box containing the ashes of Liesl’s recently deceased father. The improbability of the characters, the events affecting them, and the coincidences through which they meet and interact is substantial – but not at all relevant to the delights of the story. Liesl asks Po to search for her father on the Other Side so Liesl can say a proper goodbye, and Po thinks of all the reasons that is impossible: “People lost shapes quickly on the Other Side, and memories, too: They became blurry.” But he agrees to try to help, in return for a drawing, which Liesl makes him; and eventually, after Po does succeed in locating Mr. Morbower, Po learns – and helps Liesl learn – that something is very wrong with Liesl’s stepmother, Augusta. Indeed, as in many fairy tales, Augusta fits the “evil stepmother” role quite neatly; but here too, Oliver tells the story in a way that transcends cliché – helped by very fine illustrations by Kei Acedera, which make characters and settings alike come alive. Eventually Liesl finds herself shut in a room, all alone, without food, “trapped, with no possibility of escape,” until she comes up with the impossible idea of having Po take her out through the Other Side – in a scary scene that, in context, makes perfect sense. The eventual climax, in which multiple characters are shown to be other than what they seem, while others are reunited and some are separated and the whole mixture is stirred to perfection and served piping hot, is truly wonderful – and wonder-filled. Liesl & Po is one of those stories that, although written for eight-to-12-year-olds, can stay with young readers long after it is finished, gaining in meaning and impact over time.

The Magic Cake Shop is far more straightforward, but this (+++) book has many charms of its own. Meika Hashimoto’s debut novel, whose cartoonish illustrations by Josée Masse fit the story very well indeed, is about Emma Burblee, would-be baker, who is the child of the rich, highly attractive, spoiled and extremely self-centered Mr. and Mrs. Burblee. Experts at using their beauty to make even more money than they already have, the Burblees are just the sort of caricatures to whom adults as well as the book’s preteen audience will want to say “yuck.” Mr. Burblee, for instance, comments on the way he makes even more money through his Chic-Chic hat store than he already has: “The trick…is to make women feel rotten about themselves. Once you make them feel ugly, they’ll be desperate to buy anything that seems to make them instantly beautiful.” This is perhaps a little too close to home for the diet, lingerie and perfume industries, but here it is used to show just how different Emma is from her odious parents. Emma’s appearance is far too ordinary for the adult Burblees’ taste, and she refuses to “improve” her looks at beauty salons or through ear piercing, eyebrow plucking, teeth straightening or extensive makeup use. Emma also is developing a social conscience, a major no-no for her self-involved parents – and worst of all, she has “endless curiosity about food.” The Burblees have a cook, a really nasty piece of business named Mrs. Piffle, who makes sure everyone eats only low-calorie foods and forbids Emma to eat anything at all outside the home. Clearly this Cinderella tale is ripe for the intervention of someone magical, and that is just what it gets. After Emma rescues a beautiful dessert cookbook that her mother receives as a gift and promptly throws away, she starts baking, to the utter horror of her parents, to whom she proudly shows her first attempt – only to be told to get rid of “that hideous thing” and be prepared to eat only radishes when Mrs. Piffle is not around. The Burblees then send Emma to stay with highly unpleasant Uncle Simon for the summer, and while she is there, being called a “brat,” an “ignorant twit,” a “little pipsqueak” and a “detestable slug,” she meets Mr. Crackle, baker extraordinaire, and also makes some friends – Mrs. Dimple and Albie. The rest of the book involves nefarious plans by Uncle Simon, who is in cahoots with the equally evil Maximus Beedy in a scheme that would ruin Mr. Crackle; Emma’s determination to foil the scheme; and her discovery of just how magical Mr. Crackle’s shop is. This leads to amusing warnings, such as one about separating “the biddle hegs from the wibbly cobbleseed,” because “if they touch each other, they form a vapor that turns your head into a pumpkin.” And one about not using too much aurora borealis dust in a chocolate soufflé – one man who ate an over-dusted one “shrank to the size of a gingerbread man and floated out of the shop,” although feeding him rock candy eventually anchored him back on the ground. Food-based transformations turn out to be quite useful for undoing the nefarious plots of the nefarious plotters, and Emma ends up happily baking at Mr. Crackle’s shop – although Hashimoto seems to have forgotten that Emma’s parents will at some point return for her and make her life miserable again. Or perhaps the author has a sequel in mind….

Hell Is for Real, Too is not a sequel but a parody – specifically of Heaven Is for Real, a million-selling book in which an evangelical pastor claims his son fell into a coma, went to Heaven and returned. Despite the “child” connection, this bit of sophomoric writing, a very thin paperback that costs about 10 cents a page, is intended for adults. Ones who enjoy silliness and/or have read Heaven Is for Real and wished someone would take the opposite tack will give the book a (++) rating, but others will find even that modest ranking to be generous. The pseudonymous Skip Shmuley, who is supposedly a TV comedy writer (which would explain the preponderance of the book’s humor, which focuses on sex, excrement and minor celebrities), dies after a botched vasectomy performed by “illegal immigrants from Canada,” is sent to Hell by Jesus (who talks to him in Spanish), and soon finds himself in a place where “the room temperature was approaching sixteen thousand degrees,” asking for “some SPF 6000.” Skip describes the various “rooms” of Hell, where reside child stars, parents who used “my child is student of the month” bumper stickers, bloggers, midlevel city officials, and so on. The quality of the writing and humor may be judged from the comment about “the special room for people with OCD. This room is unlocked, with a doorway that leads directly to a back stairway out of hell that goes straight into heaven. You’re free to leave at any time. Unfortunately no one is willing to touch the doorknob, nor can they get their feet positioned just right on the tiles in the foyer.” Occasional illustrations by Leif Parsons are in the same spirit. One, for example, illustrates the author’s discussion with Satan about passing gas in an elevator – showing one person standing upright and four others in various stages of collapse. Satan eventually decides to send Skip back to Earth to do three tasks: file an extension on Satan’s taxes; attend a theological debate about whether there is a Hell and tell the theologians that yes, there is; and “reveal to humanity the coming apocalypse.” The book lumbers on through all this (you wouldn’t think so short a book could lumber, but this one does), and eventually Skip explains “little-known facts about Hell,” such as the fact that not even Satan can get a steak cooked rare there; “things to do in Hell,” such as visiting a sports bar to watch “Asian amateur jai alai and major league soccer”; and the “most interesting people you’ll meet in Hell,” such as the Kardashian sisters (“well, just the ugly ones”) and “anyone who’s ever played Angry Birds.” If this sort of humor is your thing, you will enjoy this “middle-aged accountant’s astounding story of his trip to Hell and back.” If not, you may find the book to be Hell on Earth…well, no. It’s not bad enough to be worthy of such a lofty condemnation. Heck on Earth, perhaps.

(+++) RE-RELEASED ENJOYMENT

2011-12-29T08:40:00.002-05:00

User Unfriendly. By Vivian Vande Velde. Magic Carpet/Harcourt. $6.95.

Heir Apparent. By Vivian Vande Velde. Magic Carpet/Harcourt. $6.95.

Framed. By Gordon Korman. Scholastic. $6.99.

Even when they do not wear particularly well, Vivian Vande Velde’s novels about role-playing games gone wrong make enjoyable pastimes. The gaming universe has changed dramatically since User Unfriendly was published in 1991 and Heir Apparent in 2002, but new paperback editions of the books are enjoyable nonetheless, now reading as if they mix a certain amount of nostalgia with intricate plotting and some clever twists. User Unfriendly features eighth-grade hacker Arvin Ruzalli and six other teenagers in a fantasy-role-playing game that plugs directly into their brains – no computer interface required. One of the interesting angles here is that Arvin’s mom is in the game, too – not a very imaginable circumstance, perhaps, but one that produces a lot of the game’s twists, turns and humor. The humor helps, since there is darkness here as well: Arvin finds glitches in the game and issues involving his mom that seem to interfere with her ability to play. The book is all about the real and imaginary worlds intersecting in potentially deadly ways – just how deadly is not revealed until the last couple of pages – but it is not about character development or clear motivation, any more than video games themselves are. Readers willing just to accept Arvin and his friends at face value, or at their face value as game characters, will enjoy a roller-coaster ride filled with trolls, werewolves, giant rats and the other typical denizens of gaming circa 1991. In much the same way, readers who do not expect too much from Heir Apparent will have a good time with it. Here the protagonist is female: 14-year-old Giannine Bellisario. She is no hacker, but she is a determined game player – and a good thing, too. The company that makes the game here is the same one responsible for User Unfriendly: the fictitious Rasmussem Enterprises. This time, too, there is confluence and conflict involving the real and gaming worlds, but this time the setup is cleverer: when Giannine shows up to play the game, an anti-gaming group called Citizens to Protect Our Children is protesting the “satanism” of video games – and while Giannine plays, members of the group vandalize Rasmussem’s equipment. The result is that Giannine may die of “brain overload” in the real world if she is not successful at completing her quest in the virtual one. Never mind the fact that this is nonsense – the premise is a good one (and Vande Velde’s dislike of holier-than-thou anti-video-game crusaders is quite clear). Giannine is a gaming novice and repeatedly dies in the game, but of course not for real. In fact, she learns from her mistakes, as gamers are supposed to do, and eventually wins through to become the fantasy world’s new ruler, that being the game’s objective. As in her earlier book, Vande Velde creates some intriguing situations here, from a statue that is prone to chopping off people’s heads to a centipede-eating wizard. Heir Apparent is a better-written book than User Unfriendly, with a more interesting (if somewhat overly complex) story line and a better-developed central character. Giannine’s sarcastic sense of humor is a big plus. Neither of these gaming books is more than escapism, but both are escapism of a highly entertaining sort, even if details of the gaming worlds they portray are a decade or two old and not in line with today’s versions of virtual reality.

Framed, also now available in paperback, is written almost purely for amusement, its supposedly serious elements taking a decided back seat to its funny ones. Originally published in 2010, Gordon Korman’s book is part of a series that also includes Swindle, Zoobreak and (most recently) Showoff. It helps to know the first two books, since they provide the background for this one, and Korman never really explains what happened before Framed to put Griffin Bing, the book’s protagonist, in the jam he is in almost from the first page. Griffin, a 12-year-old known as the Man with a Plan, is here accused of stealing a valuable Super Bowl ring from his school. The evidence against him is his retainer, found in the locked display case from which the ring was taken. Readers, of course, know that Griffin didn’t do it – he lost the retainer a few days before the theft. Nevertheless, he and his mom must appear before a judge, who puts Griffin under house arrest and orders him to attend an alternative-education center named after John F. Kennedy, which means its initials are JFK, which stand (in Griffin’s mind) for “Jail for Kids.” Griffin must therefore rely, as he did not to the same degree in the earlier books (and as the reader is supposed to know), on his friends: Savannah, Ben, Pitch and Melissa. The kids are characterized by what they do rather than as fully formed individuals: Melissa is shy and great with computers, for example, while Ben has narcolepsy and always carries a pet ferret that is trained to nip him if he starts to nod off. Griffin makes a new friend here – Shank – and the ferret is not the only important animal: Luthor, Savannah’s dog, plays a big role, and another animal proves to be the key to the mystery. The juvenile-delinquency theme is present but is handled rather lightly, the emphasis being more on friendship, enthusiasm and working together to help each other out. The last line of the book, “It was having the right friends,” sums up the message neatly. That is scarcely an unusual conclusion in a book for preteens, and Framed is scarcely a highly original novel. But it is pleasant and, in its way, uplifting – easy to read and enjoyable for what it is, as long as readers do not expect too much from it.

(++++) THE VARIED POWERS OF THE VOICE

2011-12-29T08:37:00.000-05:00

Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde. Jane Henschel, mezzo-soprano; Gregory Kunde, tenor; Houston Symphony conducted by Hans Graf. Naxos. $9.99.

Jack Prelutsky and Lucas Richman: Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant; Jack Prelutsky and Camille Saint-Saëns: Carnival of the Animals. Jack Prelutsky, narrator; San Diego Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jahja Ling. San Diego Symphony. $16.99.

Berlioz: Harold in Italy; Les Nuits d’Été; Le Roi de Thulé. Antoine Tamestit, viola; Anne Sofie von Otter, mezzo-soprano; Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble conducted by Marc Minkowski. Naïve. $16.99.

Shostakovich: New Babylon. Basel Sinfonietta conducted by Mark Fitz-Gerald. Naxos. $19.99 (2 CDs).

So many are the musical uses of the human voice that the sheer variety of vocal works is a wonder to behold – or rather to hear. Few pieces in music are as serious and intense as Das Lied von der Erde, which Mahler gave that title to avoid calling it his Symphony No. 9 – the superstitious composer worrying that a Ninth would be his final completed symphony, as it had been for Beethoven (and, ironically, as it turned out to be for Mahler after all, when he finally did give a symphony that number). Mahler called Das Lied von der Erde a “symphony for tenor and alto (or baritone) and orchestra,” although the very dark version with two male voices is rarely heard and the alto part is often taken by a mezzo-soprano – as it is in the new Naxos recording conducted by Hans Graf. The Houston Symphony is not one of the world’s top orchestras, but it plays quite well here, with rich tone and impressive sonority in all sections. This is clearly a work that Graf has studied and whose depths he has plumbed. Jane Henschel has a strong voice that fits this music well, despite Mahler’s intention of writing it for a deeper-voiced female soloist; and she is expressive and understanding, especially in the final, extended Der Abschied. Gregory Kunde is not quite as well attuned to this music – he does not seem to delve fully into its depths – but his voice is a good one, and he offers considerable enthusiasm if not always complete understanding of the darkness that pervades even the lighter songs. As a whole, this is an admirable performance, in which singers and orchestra alike generally rise above themselves to deliver what is mostly an impassioned reading.

On the flip side of Das Lied von der Erde is Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant, which treats vocal matters as casually as the Mahler work handles them portentously. Here the vocalizing is in the form of narration, with Jack Prelutsky reading all 17 poems from the children’s anthology that gives this piece its title, plus a concluding quatrain created especially for the music. The piece is a close collaboration between Prelutsky and composer Lucas Richman, with both clearly understanding the short attention span of children – at whom this work is aimed, just as surely as Mahler’s is intended for the most adult of audiences. Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant mixes accompanied poetry with extremely brief musical interludes (the shortest run just eight seconds and the longest runs 21). The music nicely supports the poetry, although it is really Prelutsky’s wordplay, including numerous portmanteau words, that shines in such snippets as “Here Comes a Panthermometer,” “The Eggbeaturkey” and “The Trumpetoos and Tubaboons.” This piece is created and presented entirely for fun, and seems to last a lot less than its half-hour duration – there is just so much going on, both verbally and in the music. The work is paired, perhaps inevitably, with Saint-Saëns’ ever-wonderful Carnival of the Animals, modified to accommodate Prelutsky’s way with words. Saint-Saëns’ piece, originally for a chamber group, was an amusing parody of and for musicians, but here it becomes a children’s delight akin to Prelutsky’s collaboration with Richman. Instead of flowing from one brief portrayal to another, the work becomes a series of musical illustrations of Prelutsky poems written especially to be heard in this context. The wordplay is nearly as prominent here as in Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant, and if the addition of the poetry to the music seems almost sacrilegious at times, that is purely an adult perspective – from the viewpoint of a child, especially one encountering Carnival of the Animals for the first time, the Prelutsky poetry makes the entry easy and highly enjoyable. An ebullient time is had by all the performers on this CD – conductor Jahja Ling, pianists Jon Kimura Parker and Orli Shaham, and the members of the San Diego Symphony Orchestra – with Prelutsky himself clearly relishing his role as master, or ringmaster, of the poetic ceremonies.

Poetic in a much more serious and adult way, Berlioz’ Les Nuits d’Été gets a beautifully controlled and warm performance from Anne Sofie von Otter and Les Musiciens du Louvre-Grenoble under Marc Minkowski. A sensitive conductor with a special interest in French music, Minkowski emphasizes the differing musical and emotional character of each of these summer-night songs by Théophile Gautier, while von Otter shows their common elements of love, loss and longing. This is a moving and highly effective rendition from start to finish. Harold in Italy is outstanding, too, as Minkowski takes every opportunity to bring out Berlioz’ coloristic orchestral effects while pacing each of the four movements carefully and shaping the work as a whole with considerable understanding. Violist Antoine Tamestit fits wonderfully into Minkowski’s approach, offering virtuosity when called for but generally allowing himself to be treated as “first among equals” in the orchestra rather than as a towering soloist. The result is a modest viola performance that fits carefully into a well-thought-out conception of Harold in Italy as a whole – and one with an exceptionally dramatic finale. The disc concludes a touch oddly with Le Roi de Thulé, Marguerite’s rather peculiar entrance song from La Damnation de Faust. The song’s Gothic elements fit the overall world of Faust but seem a trifle strange in the mouth of Marguerite, especially as an entrance song. The underlying melancholy comes through clearly as von Otter sings, and Minkowski again provides just the right kind of nuanced accompaniment.

Nuance is largely absent from Shostakovich’s film music, including that for New Babylon, a 1929 film about the love between a shopgirl and a soldier, set against the backdrop of the radical Paris Commune of 1871 – a congenial subject for Soviet authorities. Here the human voice is notable by its absence: this is a silent movie, its emotions communicated through the visuals and through Shostakovich’s music. Or at least that was the plan. In reality, Soviet censors made several cuts in the film just a few weeks before its opening, and Shostakovich’s score was jettisoned – either because it no longer matched the film or because it was perhaps a bit too musically radical for the authorities. In either case, the result is that the mixture of marches, carnival music, can-cans and surging rhythmic passages had to wait until now to be reassembled in reasonably complete form for this world première recording. Mark Fitz-Gerald presents the full hour-and-a-half of music on two CDs, and there are certainly enough elements of wit and dissonance here to worry the good grey bureaucrats of early Soviet times. But there is also plenty of connective tissue and a lot of less-than-inspired musical “fill.” Without visual images – which, after all, this music was designed to supplement, not replace – the New Babylon music seems to go on too long and often at too uninspired a level. This release gets a (+++) rating: it is very well played by the Basel Sinfonietta, and the music is certainly worth hearing as a Shostakovich rarity, but the whole thing is a bit too much of music that is a bit too far below the composer’s best works to be considered more than a curiosity.

(+++) CHAMBER AND CHOIR

2011-12-29T08:34:00.000-05:00

Copland: Sextet for Clarinet, Piano and String Quartet; Peter Schickele: Quartet for Clarinet, Violin, Cello and Piano; Libby Larsen: Rodeo Queen of Heaven; Peter Lieuwen: Gulfstream. enhaké (Wonkak Kim, clarinet; M. Brent Williams, violin; Jayoung Kim, cello; Eun-Hee Park, piano); Corinne Stillwell, violin; Pamela Ryan, viola. Naxos. $9.99.

Mohammed Fairouz: Chamber Music. Katie Reimer, James Orleans, Jonathan Engle, Maarten Stragier, Vasko Dukovski, Ra Young Ahn, Michael Couper, Claire Cutting, Thomas Fleming, Lydian String Quartet. Sono Luminus. $16.99.

Thierry Lancino: Requiem. Heidi Grant Murphy, soprano; Nora Gubisch, mezzo-soprano; Stuart Skelton, tenor; Nicolas Courjal, bass; Chœur de Radio France and Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France conducted by Eliahu Inbal. Naxos. $9.99.

Rautavaara: Works for Children’s Choir. Tapiola Choir and Tapiola Youth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pasi Hyökki. Ondine. $16.99.

Modern composers’ treatment of small-ensemble and choral writing often builds on the past differently from moderns’ handling of orchestral works. A new recording by the ensemble called enhaké (which spells its name with a small first letter) is in effect a 55-minute survey of different chamber-music approaches during three-quarters of a century. Copland’s Sextet, which started out as his Symphony No. 2, dates to 1937 and is a fine example of his forays into “serious” music (as opposed to the more “popular” works for which he is better known). In three well-contrasted movements, the piece is filled with effective melodies and Copland’s usual sure-handed writing, which partakes of 20^th-century extensions of classical approaches but never abandons older harmonic and rhythmic elements entirely. Peter Schickele also has a strong sense of classical proportion and structure, and his 1982 quartet – for the unusual combination of clarinet, violin, cello and piano – is well assembled and clearly shows influences from jazz and folk music. But it does not have quite the wit and spirit that Schickele displays in his parodistic compositions by “PDQ Bach,” as if the composer is deliberately trying to keep his entertainment life and his serious classical-music works separate. The quartet’s finale, marked “quite fast, dancing,” is its most engaging movement. The other works on this CD are shorter and from the 21^st century. Libby Larsen’s Rodeo Queen of Heaven (2010), inspired by a painting of a Madonna with a gun, is rhythmically attractive, while Peter Lieuwen’s Gulfstream (2007) is more graceful and flowing, as seems appropriate in a nature-focused work. All the composers are comfortable with chamber-music writing, although only Copland’s Sextet seems worthy of frequent rehearings.

Arab-American composer Mohammed Fairouz is skilled in chamber music, too, as evidenced by a highly varied disc containing six of his works for various instrumental combinations. The most interesting thing about this music is the way Fairouz (born 1985) handles very different instruments with apparent ease – although his works lie more easily on some than on others. Litany for solo double bass with wind quartet is an intriguing experiment in sonority; Four Critical Models for alto saxophone and violin presents a dialogue with philosophical overtones, perhaps biting off a bit more than it can musically chew; Piano Miniatures 1-6 are very short solo-piano works of varying moods; Lamentation and Satire for string quartet offers a fairly straightforward contrast between its two movements; Three Novelettes for piano and alto saxophone have an experimental feeling to them, as shown by movements marked “Cadenzas,” “Serenade” and “Dance Montage”; and Airs for guitar, perhaps the work most closely attuned to classical models, concludes with a toccata that clearly shows Fairouz’ understanding of traditional forms – and his way of bending them. In a number of places, Fairouz pays homage to Eastern music and contrasts it with Western classical forms, harmonies and designs, with the result that there is a certain element of exoticism to these works as well as a sense that they use their instrumental complements effectively.

Modern composers for chorus generally seem to have absorbed the lessons of the past equally well, and they too put old forms at the service of new types of expression and expressiveness. The 2009 Requiem by Thierry Lancino (born 1954) is a very large-scale work, lasting an hour and a quarter, and it incorporates four soloists as well as a chorus and full orchestra. It is certainly recognizable as having the elements of a traditional Requiem, but it contains additional ones as well, and it puts all its segments at the service of emotions that go beyond the traditionally sacred. From its lengthy opening Prologue – a movement not found in traditional requiem masses – to its final “Dona eis requiem,” which fits more comfortably with the religious tradition of a mass for the dead, Lancino’s work incorporates traditional Christian elements as well as ones that Christians would consider pagan. Rather than being a work in which the performers aid the audience in mourning for the dead, and provide reassurance through standardized religious formulations, this is a ceremonial study of human mortality in general, an exploration of life, death and time, a work that is willing to pose eternal questions without claiming to have all the answers – even though requiem masses traditionally claim just that. The complex libretto by Pascal Quignard (born 1948) is in three languages – French, Latin and Greek – and although it is not included with the CD, Naxos makes it available online. And a good thing, too, because the words here are not mere recitations of well-known phrases, repeated again and again in various guises so as to provide comfort to those who have lost dear ones. Instead, the words are a story of sorts, a tale of what it means to be human. Partaking of several religious traditions, they ask the audience to consider what it means to know that all of us will die someday and not be sure what comfort, if any, we will find afterwards. Lancino’s Requiem is a powerful work and a difficult one on several levels – not especially easy to listen to or to think about. It is a piece that challenges rather than reassures the audience, and in so doing shows the power of modern choral composition within a more-or-less traditional form.

Less emotionally challenging but vocally just as musically interesting – indeed, in some ways more so – the pieces for children’s choir on a new CD of works by Einojuhani Rautavaara were written over a quarter of a century and draw on a wide variety of texts and ideas. Indeed, there is a mass here, not a requiem but a Children’s Mass for children’s choir and string orchestra (1973); and this is a much shorter and more straightforward work than the expansive creation of the much younger Lancino. In fact, Rautavaara (born 1928) continues to mix the rhapsodic with the overtly modern in many of his pieces, but these works for children’s voices are more declamatory and less experimental than some of his other music. The composer draws upon a biblical text for Love Never Dies (1983), on traditional words for Lorulei (1979), and on the works of Federico García Lorca for the Suite de Lorca (1973). These are all short pieces, as are The Carpenter’s Son (1975) and Waltz of the Innocents (1973/1982). But Rautavaara also creates longer and more substantial choral music for children to sing, including not only the Mass but also the two other works on this CD, which are deeper than the shorter pieces and on the dark side. The philosophical Wenn sich die Welt auftut (“When the World Opens”) dates to 1996, while Marjatta the Lowly Maiden was written in 1977 and is nothing less than a one-act mystery play: the title character becomes pregnant after eating a lingonberry and gives birth to a son – and thus this story from the Kalevala reflects a different view of a Christ-like birth from the traditional one, and stands in contrast to the Mass heard elsewhere on the CD. Rautavaara’s music is not for all tastes, but he is certainly a master of choral composition, and for those who appreciate his style, this CD’s mixture of topics and moods – from the humorous nursery rhymes to the solemn religious works to the philosophical pieces – will prove highly attractive.

(++++) FROM TWO OF THE GREATS

2011-12-22T08:54:00.000-05:00

Bumble-Ardy. By Maurice Sendak. Michael di Capua/HarperCollins. $17.95.

Every Thing On It. By Shel Silverstein. Harper. $19.99.

The sheer joy of watching a master at work, of seeing and reading something created with apparent effortlessness by someone so thoroughly versed in his craft that words and pictures seem almost to flow in and of themselves, is one of the great pleasures of books like these. They may not be masterworks, but they are clearly works by two masters – and masterfully done. Bumble-Ardy is a sort of Where the Wild Things Are with pigs, and is the first book written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak since 1981. Sendak, who is now 83, has lost none of his way with words – or, more importantly here, with pictures. The story is about the pig of the book’s title, who went through eight birthdays with no parties because “his immediate family frowned on fun.” Then things changed: “But when Bumble was eight/ (Oh, pig knuckled fate!)/ His immediate family gorged and gained weight./ And got ate.” So Bumble is adopted by Aunt Adeline, who has no problem at all with a birthday party for Bumble, age nine. But Aunt Adeline’s sweetness is not enough for Bumble, who decides to ask “some grubby swine/ To come for birthday cake and brine” while his aunt is out of the house. And the swine – looking as bizarre in their way as the Wild Things – come in costumes, with masks and bonnets and multilingual good wishes and banners and strange gifts and a huge thirst for Aunt Adeline’s “home-brewed brine.” The party quickly gets odder and odder, with few or no words on the pages showing all the strange goings-on – the whole thing looks like an Alice in Wonderland scene, or rather several scenes. But then Aunt Adeline comes home and finds “a mob of swilling swine,” and she begins “to shriek and shake and whine,” and throws all the miscreants out. “Okay Smarty you’ve had your party! But never again!” says the furious aunt. And the tearful Bumble replies, “I promise! I swear! I won’t ever turn ten!” But who could stay mad at birthday-deprived Bumble? Not Aunt Adeline, at least not for long; and everything ends happily in a book whose words will be absorbed quickly by young readers, but whose wonderful illustrations will have them returning again and again to pick out more and more of Sendak’s amazing detail and offbeat humor.

Offbeat humor was also the stock in trade of Shel Silverstein (1930-1999), but Silverstein’s words and illustrations were generally equal attractions in his work. Every Thing On It is a collection of never-before-published Silverstein gems, including an illustrated title poem explaining and showing what could happen if you were to order a hot dog “with everything on it.” The sly Silverstein humor is everywhere here, as in “The Lovetobutcants,” which starts: “I have a disease called/ The ‘lovetobutcants’ –/ I think it’s time I told it./ I’d love to help with that garbage can/ But my fingers just can’t hold it./ Hand me a bag of groceries and/ My wrists just turn to jelly./ Cuttin’ grass and hedges/ Gives me flutters of the belly.” There are also several appearances of pelicans. In “The Ball Game,” we meet one who “yawned/ And swallowed the ball by mistake.” In “The Romance,” one marries an elephant. In “Love Is Grand But…” Miz’ Pelican carries the narrator everywhere, but drops him when she spies a fish, because “‘Love is grand,/ But lunch, my dear, is lunch.’” There are plenty of other animals here, too. One of the most amusing illustrations is for “The Scientist and the Hippopotamus,” in which the former is attempting to swallow the latter – whole. Animals tend to get the better of people in these poems. For example, in “A Mouse in the House,” Uncle Ben manages to destroy his entire house while searching for the small rodent; and in “How Hungry Is Polly?” the little girl says she could eat a horse, leading “Ol’ Dobbin, grazin’ nearby” to explain all the things he has done for people and to remark that he is so hungry, he could eat a child. An occasional poem hits genuinely serious and thoughtful themes, such as “The Clock Man,” which is worth quoting in full: “‘How much will you pay for an extra day?’/ The clock man asked the child./ ‘Not one penny,’ the answer came,/ ‘For my days are as many as smiles.’/ ‘How much will you pay for an extra day?’/ He asked when the child was grown./ ‘Maybe a dollar or maybe less,/ For I’ve plenty of days of my own.’/ ‘How much will you pay for an extra day?’/ He asked when the time came to die./ ‘All of the pearls in all of the seas,/ And all of the stars in the sky.’” This is one of the remarkable things about Silverstein: he inserts nuggets of genuine wisdom into poetry whose simplicity belies its substance. Of course, he does not do this too often – he is equally adept at making fun of scientific research, in a poem called “Investigating” in which Professor Shore is described (and seen in the accompanying illustration) looking up toward an elephant’s rear while trying to figure out how its tail is attached. The result is predictable, but left to the reader’s imagination. And that – imagination – is what Silverstein had to such a wonderful degree, and what Sendak still has; and that is why these books deserve more than praise – they deserve to become much-loved, much-read parts of family libraries, now and for years to come.

(++++) THE ARTISTS HAVE THEIR SAY

2011-12-22T08:51:00.000-05:00

The Really Awful Musicians. By John Manders. Clarion. $16.99.

I’ll Be Dead by the Time You Read This: The Existential Life of Animals. By Romeo Alaeff. Plume. $10.

Heart and Soul: The Story of America and African Americans. By Kadir Nelson. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $19.99.

There are words aplenty in these three books, but it is their pictures that are their main draw: all three authors are primarily artists, and all build their books upon visualizations that are designed not only to pull readers in but also to leave a lasting impression in a way that goes well beyond the texts. The most amusing of the books is The Really Awful Musicians, which takes its cues partly from “The Bremen Town Musicians” of the Brothers Grimm and partly from the development of musical notation in the eighth century, at the court of Charlemagne. John Manders unites these disparate themes through vibrant and often hilarious art: he was the first president of the Pittsburgh Society of Illustrators and has illustrated more than 30 children’s books. The story is thin, but the pictures make it a rollicking one. The tale is about a king who becomes so fed up with the awful sounds of the royal musicians that he feeds them to the royal crocodiles, which look a lot like Captain Hook’s nemesis in the Disney version of Peter Pan. The king decides to have mimes at his court instead – and keep the crocodiles well fed on any other musicians in the kingdom. This poses a quandary for Piffaro the piper, Espresso the lutenist, Serena the tiny and quiet harpist, Fortissimo the sackbut player and Lugubrio of the contrabass recorder. Meeting along the road and riding on a cart pulled by a horse called – what else? – Charlemagne, the musicians create an infernal din until the horse can stand it no longer and invents musical notation to help everyone play harmoniously. The king overhears the musicians playing elegantly together (the horse is the conductor), changes his mind about music, and everyone lives happily ever after – except the mimes, who get fed to the crocodiles (offstage). A tale filled with charm and a certain amount of historical accuracy to go with its fairy-tale elements, The Really Awful Musicians is enlivened throughout by wonderfully cartoony drawings that nevertheless portray the old musical instruments accurately. Manders’ artistry extends to the text, too: the sound of each instrument is shown in a different type style and assigned different words, from the “deedlediddledoodle” of the mandolin (which comes out in a long string of “notes” and wraps around the pages) to the “woompoompoomp” of the sackbut (with the words getting larger and bolder as Fortissimo blasts away). The whole book is a visual treat.

“Treat” may be pushing it when it comes to describing I’ll Be Dead by the Time You Read This, but this book too combines human and animal elements in a work with serious overtones that are decidedly art-focused. Romeo Alaeff studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and has worked in animation for children’s TV shows; he also studied math and biomechanical engineering. He works in photography and other media as well as drawing, and many of the drawings in this book are based on his own animal photographs. What I’ll Be Dead by the Time You Read This does is juxtapose the carefully rendered animal pictures with comments made by humans, which Alaeff has jotted down over the years. The words are in themselves clichéd and generally about relationships: “You don’t love me as much as I love you,” “I don’t know how to let go,” “I just read your mind.” What makes the book interesting is Alaeff’s choice of particular creatures to go with particular words. A dodo says, “Life goes on.” An egg says, “I don’t want to wind up alone.” A goldfish remarks, “I’m afraid of dying.” A butterfly says, “I enjoy being the victim.” A scorpion comments, “No one thinks I’m funny.” The animals are not anthropomorphized in appearance: the text simply appears above or next to the realistic pictures. The results are often surprising, often amusing and sometimes puzzling. For example, a rhinoceros says, “I’ve really let myself go,” while on the next page, a spider comments, “I regret following my heart,” and a few pages later, a crab remarks, “I need to get out of my own way.” All the pictures are beautifully done and worth looking at again and again; the choice of texts is less successful, sometimes working very well but sometimes seeming merely capricious. I’ll Be Dead by the Time You Read This is of course not, despite its subtitle, about “the existential life of animals,” but about the generally superficial self-awareness of humans – to which Alaeff draws attention, often to very good effect, through his animal art.

The art-focused subject is at least equally serious in Kadir Nelson’s Heart and Soul. An oversize, beautifully produced work packed with photography-like oil paintings, the book encapsulates the African-American experience through short chapters such as “Abolition,” “Cowboys and Indians,” “Black Innovation” and “Jim Crow’s A-Dying.” The stories told here are familiar ones; it is the paintings that are special: Nelson has won Caldecott and Coretta Scott King awards, been exhibited internationally, and is the cover artist for the posthumous Michael Jackson album, Michael. The narration, by an invented grandmother-like figure, has a singsong quality that some will find authentic and others cloying, as in this discussion of the bus boycott, led by Martin Luther King Jr., that followed the jailing of Rosa Parks: “Dr. King knew that if black folks held to the boycott and did not fight back with violence but with a peaceful protest, they would be victorious. …Without any shouting, shooting, fighting, or fussing, black folks had won a major battle for equality through nonviolent demonstrations. Glory, hallelujah! Oh, how we celebrated all over the country! It was a sweet and wonderful victory. There would be setbacks and victories to come in the very near future, but we savored this one for quite some time, honey.” Whatever readers may think of the prose, they will be captivated, and drawn into the story, by the art. The palpably atmospheric picture of a young woman teaching her father to read at the start of the chapter called “Reconstruction,” the hagiographic portraits of Booker T. Washington and Joe Louis Barrow, the two-page spreads of a Big Band and of strikers – these and Nelson’s other portrayals of events in the lives of African-Americans make this history come alive in ways that the words themselves do not. Heart and Soul is a book into which Nelson has clearly poured his heart and soul, which shine through his portrayals of events of the distant and not-so-distant past.

(+++) RETURNS AND EXTENSIONS

2011-12-22T08:48:00.000-05:00

Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls. By Wendelin Van Draanen. Knopf. $15.99.

The Poisons of Caux, Book Three: The Shepherd of Weeds. By Susannah Applebaum. Knopf. $16.99.

Rumors from the Boys’ Room: A Blogtastic! Novel. By Rose Cooper. Delacorte Press. $12.99.

The Lily Pond. By Annika Thor. Delacorte Press. $16.99.

The Sammy Keyes mysteries are by now so well-established – the new novel is the 14^th in the series – that Sammy’s name on the cover is all readers will need to see in order to develop an instant attachment to the latest book. Sammy Keyes and the Night of Skulls is not one of the best entries in the sequence, being both overdone and rather obvious, but that will not prevent fans from enjoying it. And Wendelin Van Draanen is, as usual, adept at pacing things well and covering any plot holes with cleverness and surprises. This is a Halloween-focused tale, which is one of the reasons its plot is rather obvious: Sammy and her friends are dressed as zombies, and they cut through a graveyard, and of course something bad happens there (they get chased by a shovel-equipped man), and after some other unpleasant events, they all decide to head home and gorge on candy. But something ominous turns up along with their treats. So Sammy – with friends helping, or at least tagging along – soon becomes involved with gravediggers, embalmers, undertakers and other Halloween-ish types. “This was not good. Not good at all.” Well, of course not, especially with such characters as Dusty Mike around: “He’s definitely strange. And more than a little creepy.” And speaking of strange, here Sammy finds out about the Day of Skulls, information on which comes with a computer animation of a skull “wearing a little red and blue knit cap that has side flaps” and having “a burning cigarette clamped between the teeth.” The point here is that everything is creepy, which is a pretty unsurprising thing for everything to be in a story centered on Halloween; hence the comparative obviousness of the plot. It does have twists, though. “What also kept scrambling through my head was how often I had misjudged people,” Sammy thinks at one point; and she and her friends have been misjudged, too. There is, thank goodness, some of the trademark humor of this series from time to time, as when one of Sammy’s friends tries to alert the 911 operator to a serious problem by saying, “There’s crazy people burying people at the graveyard.” And of course Sammy eventually discovers that cemeteries need not be frightening and can even be places “where I appreciate life.” So the ending, at least, is not scary at all.

There are plenty of scares in The Poisons of Caux, the trilogy by Susannah Applebaum whose conclusion, The Shepherd of Weeds, finally brings together Caux and its sisterland, Pimcaux. Following The Hollow Bettle and The Tasters Guild, this conclusion involves fulfillment of the prophecy that has driven the trilogy from the beginning. It is Ivy, the Noble Child, who here must defeat her father and the Guild – with the help of an army of scarecrows and some of the birds of Caux. If all this sounds both complex and rather hackneyed (every protagonist in adventure novels seems to have some sort of prophecy to fulfill), that is a pretty fair summation of the book. Applebaum, though, tells the story well, with a good sense of pacing and enough of a feeling of danger to keep readers involved throughout. The book’s sections are introduced by elements of the prophecy – Sparrowhawk fragment, Corvid fragment and Chimney Swift fragment, for example. And each fragment comes to make sense in the pages that follow it. For example, the Moorhen fragment reads, “Long lament, take wing/ Whosoever speaks to the Trees/ Speaks to the King,” and leads to an important chapter in which one character comments that “the true nature of plants is awakening,” and to a section where readers learn that “in the hierarchy of birds, it is the crow who wears the crown.” As usual in fantasies, this one includes loss and death and turmoil through to the end – but at the end, as Ivy stands hand in hand with Rowan, it is clear that all the trouble and hardship has paved the way for a much better future. This is scarcely an unexpected ending, but it is quite a satisfying one despite its predictability.

Rumors from the Boys’ Room is not a part of a series or a trilogy – at least, not exactly. It is a second book done in the style of Rose Cooper’s Gossip from the Girls’ Room, which means it looks like a notebook (lined pages) filled with cartoony drawings by narrator Sofia Becker, a sixth-grader who fully intends to post some of her “innermost private thoughts” on her soon-to-be-popular blog. The whole thing seems quite a bit like Jim Benton’s Dear Dumb Diary series, which in many ways it resembles – for instance, when Sofia objects to the existence of Mia St. Claire, “the most annoying girl in all of Middlebrooke Middle School,” whose “hair smells like fresh strawberries” and who “has the ability to cast spells on boys and make them like her.” Sofia has a BFF, Nona Bows, who in turn has pet issues, as when she says sadly that her dog died and Sofia comments, “Nona doesn’t HAVE a dog. I tell her this since she seems to have forgotten.” Sofia herself has issues with school projects and parents and all the usual stuff sixth-graders have issues with, and she shares her thoughts on these things (well, some of these things) on “The best blog in the world. Ever.” Which she signs “The Blogtastic Blogger.” And which gets her comments such as, “Hey, knucklehead! Don’t you know anything?” Which lead to comments from adult advisors such as, “Tone it down. Watch it with the name-calling and yelling.” The fun here is not so much in the plot and the ins and outs of middle-school relationships – all those are pretty straightforward. Some of the drawings, though, are fun – such as the “milk hose” that Sofia imagines after her mother, who is pregnant and has heartburn, says milk helps but water makes it worse. And the ups and downs of the blog are amusing enough to keep middle-schoolers interested: the book is easy to read, mildly amusing throughout, and will be followed by Secrets from the Sleeping Bag in the not-too-distant future.

A much more serious “companion book” – actually the second in a four-book sequence – The Lily Pond is set during World War II, and continues the story of Stephie Steiner that began in A Faraway Island. Annika Thor draws on some of her own experiences for this story of a girl who, with her younger sister, Nellie, has escaped from Nazi-occupied Vienna and is living on a rugged Swedish island. The first book was about adjustment; this second one is about education, friendship and young love. Stephie’s foster parents will allow her to leave the island to go to school on the mainland, in Göteborg (where Thor was born and raised). Stephie looks forward both to the greater cultural possibilities of the city and to living there in proximity to a boy named Sven, son of lodgers who had rented her foster parents’ island home during the summer. Stephie is smitten with Sven, who is five years older and does not hesitate to express anti-Hitler sentiments – at a time when Nazi ideology is spreading, even in Sweden. Stephie also remains worried about her parents, who have stayed behind in Vienna; Nellie misses them too, saying, “‘I’m going to pray to God to arrange for them to come here.’” But things are not that simple – certainly not for Jewish families like Stephie’s and Nellie’s. In one letter from her father, Stephie reads that “life has become more and more unbearable, and everyone who has a way is trying to get out of Vienna,” but her parents do not have a way – at least not yet. Then a way opens up – then it closes – and Stephie, at a distance and totally unable to do anything, is emotionally tugged back and forth by family issues while also trying to navigate her newfound attraction to a boy. That too goes wrong; and so does something significant in school; and Sophie finds she needs friends and others on whom she can rely more than ever. Then it turns out that she has them – so even though the situation is bleak in many ways, with winter weather reflecting Sophie’s own internal worries, there are glimmers of hope here and there. The Lily Pond is not a standalone book – it is really a continuation of A Faraway Island – and its subject matter may not be congenial for young readers today unless they have an interest in semi-autobiographical historical novels. But the book is well and sensitively written, and those already gripped by what happened to Sophie in the earlier novel will be equally intrigued by the developments in her life that are detailed in this one.

(+++) THEMATIC RECORDINGS

2011-12-22T08:45:00.000-05:00

Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Concertino for Violin and String Orchestra; Julius Conus: Violin Concerto; Anton Arensky: Violin Concerto. Sergey Ostrovsky, violin; Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Thomas Sanderling. Naxos. $9.99.

Stravinsky: Violin Concerto; Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6. Peter Rybar, violin; Winterthur Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Sternberg. Pierian. $18.99.

Music for a Time of War: Ives—The Unanswered Question; John Adams—The Wound-Dresser; Britten—Sinfonia da Requiem; Vaughan Williams—Symphony No. 4. The Oregon Symphony conducted by Carlos Kalmar. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

John Neumeier and Lera Auerbach: The Little Mermaid. San Francisco Ballet conducted by Martin West. C Major. $29.99 (2 DVDs).

The pervasive influence of Tchaikovsky, even many decades after his death, comes through clearly in a new Naxos CD that features violinist Sergey Ostrovsky in his first solo recording. Ostrovsky, concertmaster of L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, offers three works from Tchaikovsky’s own time (Arensky’s concerto dates to 1891) and thereafter (the Conus concerto dates to 1898, the Weinberg concertino to 1948). Only Weinberg’s work, which here receives its world première recording, shows elements of modernity, but they are muted in a piece cast in traditional three-movement form and filled with yearning and wistfulness. Weinberg (1919-1996) is sometimes referred to as the third great Soviet composer of his time, after Shostakovich (to whom he was close) and Prokofiev; but this concertino, although well-made and filled with grace, is not highly distinctive. Ostrovsky nevertheless plumbs what depths it has, showing it to be a primarily expressive work with occasional outbursts of fervor. The Bournemouth Symphony under Thomas Sanderling sounds rather thin in the accompaniment: lusher strings and more forceful conducting would have made for a more-distinguished performance. The concertos by Arensky (1861-1906) and Conus (1869-1942) are also pleasant enough, if scarcely dramatic – once again, they preponderantly come across as pleasant, moody pieces with warm but not highly original themes. Both these concertos are single-movement works in multiple sections, along the well-established lines of Liszt’s piano concertos, and both show skill in orchestration and thematic creation – notably in the Tempo di valse section of the Arensky, which has genuinely lovely flow. As in the Weinberg concerto, Ostrovsky’s playing is top-notch and highly committed to the music; also as there, the orchestral backing is a trifle pale. It is nevertheless a pleasure to hear these works, which are now seldom performed, and to have a fine violinist’s first solo recording that includes only unfamiliar material.

An earlier concertmaster of L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, Peter Rybar (1913-2002), is featured on a new recording from the nonprofit Pierian label, giving an absolutely wonderful performance of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto. This CD is the first in a series called “The Sternberg Collection,” which will feature performances by the now-92-year-old maestro. Sternberg is a fine conductor who never attained “superstar” status but whose musicianship and skill both as orchestra director and teacher have long been known and appreciated. He stepped in at the last minute to conduct the concert where the Stravinsky concerto was recorded live: Stravinsky himself was supposed to direct, but became ill. This was in 1954 – and therein lies a dilemma for potential purchasers of this CD. Rybar’s playing is excellent, his handling of Stravinsky’s angular rhythms and the constant flux of the concerto being top-notch from start to finish. And Sternberg provides first-class accompaniment with the very good if not quite first-class Winterthur Symphony Orchestra. The sound, however, is 57 years old – and shows it. There is no fullness and little sense of presence, and the squashing that was inevitable in monophonic recordings is pronounced here. Therefore, despite the high quality of the performance, this is a CD for the enthusiast rather than the general listener. It is even more so because of the other work on the concert and therefore on the disc: Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” symphony, which gets a perfectly adequate but scarcely inspired reading. Well played and well paced – but lacking in rhythmic lilt in the second movement and sufficient drama in the third – the symphony sounds all right but not nearly as moving as it can. Given all the fine performances of this symphony that are available, there is really no reason to opt for this one – unless a listener intends to become a collector of Sternberg memorabilia.

The target audience for an eclectic SACD called Music for a Time of War is also likely to be limited – and not only because the title is a mischaracterization of half the works on the disc. Only two pieces here, John Adams’ The Wound-Dresser and Benjamin Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem, speak clearly, distinctly and movingly of wartime. The Adams is particularly well performed, with baritone Sanford Sylvan intoning Walt Whitman’s words with just the right blend of forthright and withheld emotion, and Jun Iwasaki contributing fine solo-violin elements. Adams’ setting is strongly reminiscent of some of the songs of Charles Ives, not in an obviously imitative way but in its use of quintessentially American poetry with an accompaniment that adds to the words’ effect in ways that are more subtle than dramatic. The piece on this disc that is actually by Ives, though, fares less well than the Adams. The Unanswered Question has become perhaps Ives’ most-performed work, and it remains a splendid existential miniature with some remarkable sound painting (the “background of the universe” created by the strings has been imitated countless times). Jeffrey Work’s solo trumpet, though, is somewhat too quiescent here, and the snide commentary to which the woodwinds eventually descend is altogether too smooth. And this 1906 piece is scarcely “for a time of war” except in some very general sense. Britten’s Sinfonia da Requiem is also less dramatic than it can be – even the explosive opening on timpani seems overly subdued. Carlos Kalmar seems to have a rather urbane view of this work, taking away from it some of the obvious tone-painting (for example, by downplaying the radio signals in the second movement) while emphasizing the eventual triumph of the finale. This is a justifiable approach to the music, but not a very involving one. Nor does Kalmar seem particularly involved in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 4 – another non-war-related piece, despite its forcefulness. This symphony, which dates mostly to 1931 (although it was not completely finished until 1935), is, in the best performances, craggy and menacing and snarling with power. Here it is simply too tame. The Oregon Symphony plays it well, but not very idiomatically – in fact, the orchestra plays Britten and Vaughan Williams as if they wrote music in the same style, which they decidedly did not. There is nothing really wrong with Music for a Time of War, except for the misleading title, but it is not ultimately a very successful disc either in terms of the performances or on the basis of uncovering some sort of relationship among the four pieces recorded here.

The thematic underpinning of choreographer John Neumeier’s reinterpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid is, on the other hand, very clear indeed. The new two-DVD release of the San Francisco Ballet’s performance of Neumeier’s visualization – which includes unsettling, frequently dissonant music by Russian composer Lera Auerbach – is entirely concerned with the notion of being a “fish out of water.” Literally, in the case of the title character; figuratively, by extension, in the case of everyone in the audience who has ever felt that he or she somehow does not “fit in” in some way. Ballets are usually identified by their composers, but this one is Neumeier’s show more than Auerbach’s: Neumeier created the sets and costumes as well as the choreography, and the music is only part of a whole that is more theatrical than most ballets and more imbued with spectacle. It is easy to forget that Andersen’s original story was at most bittersweet, eventually providing the mermaid with release only through the comfort of organized religion (a frequent theme in Andersen) and promising her a better post-life future through her adherence to God’s precepts. Later versions of the story, certainly including Disney’s film but not limited to it, excised the religious elements and downplayed the pain and fear that the unnamed mermaid experiences when giving up her watery home in a vain attempt to obtain love from a human who does not love her in return. It is the pain and fear that Neumeier restores and emphasizes, even over-emphasizes, in this production. For example, there is nothing pretty about the transformation scene: the orchestra plays violent chords as the sea witch (Davit Karapetyan) yanks off the fluid blue costume of the mermaid (Yuan Yuan Tan) and leaves her almost naked, shivering and contorted. Angular movements and stark lighting, mostly in blue and white, keep the production unsettling. So does the introduction of a new character, the Poet (Lloyd Riggins), inspired by Andersen himself. This is not a particularly happy idea – it confuses the story and creates layers that obscure rather than emphasize its points. But it is an integral part of Neumeier’s overall conception – which also includes choreography with Japanese and Balinese influences that quite deliberately look strange to an audience accustomed to traditional Western ballet. The sets are dramatic, to the point of sometimes distracting the audience from the dancers; and there are elements in the production that seem to make little sense and have little bearing on the story, such as a group of dancers at the back of the stage. The roles of the prince (Tiit Helimets) and princess (Sara Van Patten) are well performed but not especially compelling. Emphatically not for children and equally emphatically not for all ballet lovers (or Andersen lovers), Neumeier’s The Little Mermaid is visually exciting, choreographically somewhat muddled, and thematically even more depressing than Andersen’s original tale: what little buoyancy Neumeier offers at the end seems scarcely sufficient for all that the mermaid has endured. The two-DVD set of the San Francisco performance is well made, and viewers interested in behind-the-scenes looks at the production and the people involved in it will enjoy the bonus material, which lasts more than half an hour. However, lovers of Andersen’s rather dour, straitlaced but ultimately uplifting original will be better served by rereading it than by wallowing in Neumeier’s very dark reinterpretation.

(+++) THE MODERN PIANO – AND MORE

2011-12-22T08:42:00.000-05:00

Michael Matthews: 14 Preludes; Bagatelles Nos. 1, 2, 3, 6, 7 and 10; Postlude. Daan Vandewalle, piano. Ravello. $12.99.

Allen Bonde: Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra; Three Elizabethan Songs; Three Elizabethan Songs Revisited; Symphony No. 1; Rose Window; Sonus; Four Shakespeare Songs; You Were the One; Encore Blues. Allen Bonde, piano; Mara Bonde, soprano; Maria Bonde, piano; Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Toshiyuki Shimada. Navona. $16.99.

The Oscuro Quintet: Music for Tango Ensemble. Alban Bailly, guitar; Thomas Lee, piano; Shinjoo Cho, accordion; June Bender, violin; Ben Blazer, bass. Big Round Records. $12.99.

Benjamin Yusupov: Viola Tango Rock Concerto. Anibal Dos Santos, viola and electric viola; Venanzio Cipolliti, accordion; Carlos Posada, guitar; Orquesta Filarmónica de Bogotá. Navona DVD. $18.99.

A piano need not be “prepared” (as pianos famously were by John Cage and less famously by many others) to accommodate the needs of today’s composers – certainly not the needs of Canada’s Michael Matthews (born 1950), whose output extends into tape and other forms beloved of moderns but also includes a number of pieces written for traditional ensembles and expressing comparatively traditional feelings and emotions. Under the hands of Belgian pianist Daan Vandewalle, Matthews’ 14 Preludes come across as an impressive set of varied emotions and techniques, not in the more typically flashy way of etudes but with greater expressiveness – although still requiring considerable virtuosity. Ranging in length from one minute to almost eight and written between 1994 and 2006, the pieces explore emotional nooks and crannies and also give the pianist a workout in terms of both versatility and musicality. Vandewalle also includes half a dozen of Matthews’ Bagatelles, which date from 1997 to 2006 and on the whole are lighter and somewhat more readily accessible than the Preludes. The final work on this CD, Postlude, was originally going to be one of the Bagatelles, but outgrew that role and turned into a standalone piece. Vague, unsettling and without definitive opening or closing, it makes an interesting conclusion to a well-played CD that shows both Matthews’ skill in piano composition and Vandewalle’s interpretative ability.

The piano is also a major presence on a new CD featuring music of Allen Bonde – in fact, the composer is the primary pianist here, although in one piece, the impressionistic Rose Window, he shares pianistic duties with his wife, Maria. Actually, this whole CD is a family affair, since the vocal portions are sung by the composer’s daughter, soprano Mara Bonde. It would be impossible not to consider this disc definitive – but what does it actually define? This is a better overview of Bonde’s music than is the Matthews CD, which focuses on only one element of that composer’s oeuvre. Bonde tries on and discards styles as some people try on and discard clothes – the well-wrought Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra is a short and harmonically quite traditional work, for example, while Bonde’s Symphony No. 1 (which is also short, for a symphony) is more coloristic than concerned with structural niceties. The remaining pieces here are more intimate. The most interesting are Three Elizabethan Songs and Three Elizabethan Songs Revisited, which are settings of the same three songs in two intriguingly different ways. Four Shakespeare Songs is cut from much the same cloth, although with a 1920s overlay; but You Were the One (which sets poetry by Mary Jo Salter) has a more modern feeling and one of greater intimacy. The solo piano works interspersed among the vocal ones provide effective contrasts for music whose many styles are all, in their own ways, stylish.

The piano is but one of the five instruments played by members of the Oscuro Quintet on their first, eponymous CD. Promoted as “Philadelphia’s First Tango Ensemble,” which sounds a bit like damning with faint praise, the quintet offers instrumental skill and passionate involvement in music that is not always worthy of this level of intensity. It seems that no CD focusing on the modern tango can be without works by Astor Piazzolla; but the ones here, Rio Sena and Escualo, last only three and two-and-a-half minutes, respectively – more Piazzolla would have served the overall CD better. The longest and most recent work here, Five Procrastinations (2010) by Alban Bailly, is less interesting, but several other pieces have some snap, rhythmic bite or good flow to them – notably A fuego lento by Horacio Salgán, which opens the disc, and Recuerdo by Osvaldo Pugliese, which closes it. Only listeners who enjoy the unusual instrumental combination offered by the Oscuro Quintet – and also enjoy the tango as an art form – will likely find this CD congenial: however well-played it may be, this is scarcely a mass-market product.

The tango is front and center in Benjamin Yusupov’s Viola Tango Rock Concerto, too; and although this work has been issued as a DVD that runs just 52 minutes rather than as a CD, it is a rare example of a piece that really gains by being presented in video form. Yusupov’s concerto is very much a matter of taste; indeed, the combination of viola and electric viola will scarcely be to all listeners’ liking, and the multiple rock passages that continually appear in the concerto may well come across as intrusive rather than integral. The video elements here are a major point of interest, though, not so much because of the chance to watch Anibal Dos Santos (although his performance is certainly impressive) but because of Gina Medina, a fine tango dancer whose performance – which includes dancing with Dos Santos – is at least as engrossing as Yusupov’s music. It has become commonplace for modern composers to mix rock, heavy metal and other musical forms with recognizably classical structure and instrumentation, as Yusupov does here. Whether the combination works or not will be very much a matter of individual opinion: it is easy to appreciate what Yusupov, Dos Santos, Medina and the others involved in this production are doing without necessarily being captivated by the whole thing. Interesting and unusual this work certainly is, but memorable it really is not – except for Medina’s involvement, which creates visual vibrancy that outdistances the purely musical parts of the overall performance.

(+++) ALMOST WHOLLY HOLY

2011-12-22T08:39:00.000-05:00

Noël. Westminster Choir conducted by Joe Miller. Westminster Choir College. $16.99.

Honegger: Une Cantate de Noël; Symphony No. 4, “Deliciae Basilienses”; Pastorale d’été. Christopher Maltman, baritone; New London Children’s Choir and London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. LPO. $16.99.

Chanticleer: Our Heart’s Joy; The Boy Whose Father Was God; Ludus Paschalis—The Resurrection Play of Tours; Out of This World!; Between Two Wars—The Art of the Comedian Harmonists. Chanticleer conducted by Matthew Oltman. Chanticleer Records. $16.99 each.

Mahler: Symphony No. 2. Dorothea Röschmann, soprano; Michelle DeYoung, mezzo-soprano; New York Choral Artists and New York Philharmonic conducted by Alan Gilbert. Accentus DVD. $24.99.

Although Christmas was taken over from the Roman Saturnalia, which in turn grew out of a long history of death-and-rebirth myths involving gods or their works dying off in winter and returning or being reincarnated in spring, the holiday became over the centuries the doctrinal birthday of Jesus and therefore, for Christians, one of the two holiest days of the year (the other being Easter, taken over from earlier spring festivals). Each year, the Christmas season produces an outpouring of well-intentioned, generally reverent and usually well-performed seasonal recordings of music written for the season or related to it in some way. The lovely Westminster Choir CD entitled simply Noël is a perfect example: 14 tracks, five of them traditional and the balance by such composers as Charpentier, Poulenc, Fauré and Gounod, all sung with beauty and heartfelt involvement and released on the choir’s own label. Latin and French are the languages here, with – among the highlights – lovely renditions of Josquin’s Ave Maria, Poulenc’s O Magnum Mysterium and the Sanctus from Fauré’s Requiem. This is a beautifully sung disc that, because of its focus, may not be played very often in other seasons; but it should bring a sense of warmth and comfort whenever it is heard.

There is music for and also beyond the Christmas season on a new LPO recording of works by Arthur Honegger (1892-1955). Honegger’s final composition was a contemplative one, entirely worthy of its seasonal theme: Une Cantate de Noël. From its opening De profundis clamavi to its concluding Laudate Dominum, this is a work that speaks directly and movingly to the religious underpinnings of the modern Christmas holiday. Yet it is interestingly non-modern in several ways, not only in language but also in expressiveness – a characteristic sometimes thought to have been given short shrift by Honegger and other members of the Parisian “Les Six” of the 1920s. Heartfelt and warm, this Christmas contemplation shows a lyrical side of Honegger that may surprise, and delight, listeners who know only some of his more experimental and acerbic music. Indeed, this entire CD, recorded live at London Philharmonic concerts in 2007 and 2009, shows a rather unfamiliar side of Honegger. The Symphony No. 4, “Delights of Basel,” is nostalgic and warm, a tribute to the sanctuary that the Swiss-born Honegger found Basel to be during World War I. And the best-known piece here, Pastorale d’été (“Summer Pastoral”), takes the wintertime Christmas spirit to the opposite time of year with lyricism and dreamlike expression. Vladimir Jurowski conducts with clarity and understanding, the choruses and baritone Christopher Maltman sing with sensitivity and fine expressiveness, and the disc as a whole is attractive both for its seasonal elements and for those that transcend the time of year and show a less-known side of a significant 20^th-century composer.

Five new CDs from the highly versatile Chanticleer “orchestra of voices” (as the group sometimes calls itself) go even further into seasonal depth – and beyond it. Our Heart’s Joy is close to the Westminster Choir CD in approach and sensibility. Its 21 tracks include anonymous Basque, Spanish and English songs, plus works by Praetorius, Britten, and Andrea Gabrieli – as well as a medley of Christmas spirituals, and a final, very moving version of Silent Night. Chanticleer’s voices always blend beautifully, and the soloists are equally good no matter who they are. The group is smooth, accomplished and elegant in its presentation, even if the structure of this CD is nothing very special. The Boy Whose Father Was God, though, is special, being presented as “a musical re-telling of the life of one of the most influential figures in history, Jesus of Nazareth.” That is an interesting description for an unusually intriguing disc, which does not simply assume that listeners are the Christian faithful, seeking familiar and reassuringly uplifting music. In fact, all the works on this CD are relatively modern: the oldest composer heard here is Kodály, while other pieces are by Henryk Górecki and Arvo Pärt and still others – three of them – were commissioned by Chanticleer as recently as 2010. The story moves, both in narrative and in music, from “The boy is born” to “A faith is created,” with intermediate sections called “The man calls his followers,” “The Jew rebels,” “Beliefs collide,” and “The followers mourn.” These are scarcely standard biblical titles or typical references to the life of Jesus and the founding of the Catholic Church. Chanticleer’s sweet singing and effective emoting are here placed at the service of storytelling, and the unfamiliarity of the music helps pulls listeners into an often-told tale in a new and attractive way. The disc may be too untraditional for institutionally committed Christians and too traditional in Christian outlook for others, but it is a most interesting experiment in telling the story of Jesus in a way that has not been attempted before.

A much, much older version of the story of Jesus, dating to the 10^th century, Ludus Paschalis: The Resurrection Play of Tours is an Easter story rather than a Christmas one, but Christmas and Easter, like the winter and spring festivals on which they are based, are two parts of a single whole, and it is actually fascinating to hear this CD immediately after listening to The Boy Whose Father Was God. Chanticleer brings the same devotion and intensity to both CDs, and is as much at home in the thousand-year-old work as in the contemporary one – testimony to the amazing versatility of this group. Ludus Paschalis is truly a play, using non-biblical texts as well as music to tell its story. The work is incomplete – this version was put together by Frederick Renz, who is Chanticleer’s guest director for the occasion. The music drama will be of greatest interest to committed Christians and listeners who enjoy very early music indeed; certainly it helps put Christmas celebrations in a larger context. The context expands in a different way in a disc called Out of This World! Here Chanticleer starts with strictly Christian music by Palestrina, Andrea Gabrieli, Monteverdi and Britten, then moves into works that combine a more secular attitude with a certain otherworldly bent – including the title song, which is by Harold Arlen, Observer in the Magellanic Cloud by Mason Bates, and Mahler’s Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. This is an odd agglomeration of material, the juxtapositions somewhat on the weird side, the overall purpose or approach of the CD not entirely clear. Everything, though, is sung with Chanticleer’s usual clarity, poise and style – as indeed is the much lighter CD (for Christmas season or any season) called Between Two Wars. This too is something of an oddball collection of music, and not everything here dates to the era between World War I and World War II: there is a setting of the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, for example, and even versions of Boccherini’s famous Menuett and Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5. This CD is mostly a celebration of vocalizing for its own sake, with a kind of devil-may-care willingness to toss out Tea for Two, Cole Porter’s Night and Day, Duke Ellington’s Creole Love Call and Harold Arlen’s Stormy Weather amid tracks sung in German. The CD is something of a romp and, as such, far more upbeat than most Christmas releases; indeed, despite its appearance at this time of year, it is not a Christmas disc at all, having been recorded live in August 2002. For those looking for something less serious this season – but still very well sung and celebratory of the quality of Chanticleer’s skilled vocalists – Between Two Wars may be just the thing.

There are, of course, wars going on right now; and Christmas can be a time to wish for peace and remember the many barriers to it. It can therefore be an especially appropriate time to listen, or re-listen, to the New York Philharmonic’s performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony, performed for the 10^th anniversary of the terrorist murders of September 2001 and now available on DVD. Recorded live at Avery Fisher Hall on the evening of September 10, with visuals sensitively directed by Michael Beyer, the DVD is a monument to remembrance and to the difficult and still-in-progress resurrection of the area where the World Trade Center towers once stood. The DVD includes interviews with conductor Alan Gilbert, New York Philharmonic President Zarin Mehta, and members of the audience, making the whole thing a communal experience. This is one of those performances whose occasion clearly lent grandeur and intensity to the musicians: the famously fractious New York Philharmonic plays glowingly, and the soloists and chorus sing with warmth and intensity in a reading that perhaps places overmuch emphasis on the choral portions of the finale but that does so in a very worthy cause. Mahler had unconventional views of resurrection, altering the Friedrich Klopstock text he selected for this symphony and writing quite a few of the words himself; and somehow that makes the work all the more appropriate for a 10^th-anniversary memorial concert, whether heard at the time of the performance or during the Christmas season’s promise, at least for some, of resurrection on a different basis. Scarcely a Christmas recording, yet oddly right for the season, Gilbert’s performance of Mahler’s Second is quite worthy in itself, and even more so in the context of a season that bears within it…as winter always does with relation to spring…the promise of new life to come.

(++++) SPREADING CHRISTMAS CHEER

2011-12-15T08:50:00.001-05:00

Fancy Nancy: Splendiferous Christmas. By Jane O’Connor. Illustrated by Robin Preiss Glasser. Harper. $17.99.

The Happy Elf. By Harry Connick, Jr. Illustrated by Dan Andreasen. Harper. $17.99.

A Christmas Goodnight. By Nola Buck. Illustrated by Sarah Jane Wright. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins. $12.99.

Pinkalicious: The Princess of Pink Treasury. By Victoria Kann. Harper. $19.99.

Old or new, secular or religious, books that bask in the spirit of Christmas – which is to say, the spirit of good will, whether within or outside religious traditions – are always welcome. And they can be a genuine delight, as is Fancy Nancy: Splendiferous Christmas, originally published in 2009 and now available in a new, fancier-than-ever edition. Jane O’Connor’s Christmastime story of the perky little girl who loves big words, French phrases and tremendously overdone clothing and decorations is just wonderful, and Robin Preiss Glasser’s illustrations are as near-perfect as any illustrations can be. From the opening contrast between the ordinary, non-fancy everyday house and the overdone-but-wonderful Christmas-decorated house, through the story of waiting for Grandpa in order to decorate the tree, to the book’s crisis of a broken tree-topper and its solution through creation of a handmade someday-to-be-heirloom, this is a book brimming with Christmas spirit and, equally important, with Fancy Nancy’s spirit – which, in any season, is indomitable (that’s fancy for “can’t keep her down”).

There are warmth and humor of a different sort in The Happy Elf, a brand-new book based on a holiday song that is included, sung by Harry Connick, Jr., on a CD. For those who don’t know the song, it is about Eubie, the happiest of all elves, who finds when checking the naughty-or-nice list that there is an entire town where not a single person has been nice. Determined to find out what is wrong and fix it, Eubie breaks “the most important rule” by using magic away from the North Pole. He discovers the problem, but is caught by Santa – who takes away his magic hat. But thanks to his friend Gilda, Eubie is able to return to the town of Bluesville, bringing a hearty dose of Christmas cheer, and this time when he is caught, he finds out that “there is one rule…that is even more important than the most important rule” – the result being a happy ending for all. Yes, this is a somewhat soupily sentimental story, maybe even a bit overdone, but being overly sentimental is one part of what Christmas is all about.

Another part – the biggest one for some families – is celebrating the holiday through the Nativity, and that is what A Christmas Goodnight does. Simple, mildly poetic text by Nola Buck is combined with sensitive and tender illustrations by Sarah Jane Wright to produce a story that starts with the biblical tale of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus, with angels above and “weary Wise Men” visiting the manger – then switches midway to a modern country scene, with a bright and starry night and a full moon illuminating a farm as a mother and little boy look through the window at gently falling snow. The repeated “goodnight” lines of the first half of the book (to “the tired donkey,” “the smallest sparrow” and so on) now return in the context of the family’s crèche, as the little boy puts baby Jesus to sleep on the dresser by the window, then falls quietly and peacefully asleep himself. The result is a sweet bedtime story for Christmas Eve, or anytime in the Christmas season.

Now, pink is not a Christmas color – it is, if anything, more closely associated with Easter – but Pinkalicious is a colorful delight in any season, and if The Princess of Pink Treasury is not about Christmas, it would certainly make a wonderful Christmas gift for pink-loving girls. Intended for “ages 1-Pinkfinity,” the book includes five complete Pinkalicious stories by Victoria Kann, a CD in which all the tales are read by Eliana Shaskan, and a whole slew of bonuses and special activities. There are jump-rope rhymes, tips on making new friends, find-the-differences pages, indoor winter activities, “jokes to tickle you pink” (with hints on how to tell them), rebuses and more. The full-length stories, originally published between 2006 and 2010, are School Rules, Pinkalicious and the Pink Drink, Pink around the Rink, Tickled Pink and Pinkie Promise, and it is certainly possible that families containing a Pinkalicious fan already have all of them. But Christmas can be, among other things, a time to splurge a bit, and since the CD and bonus items here are completely new, The Princess of Pink Treasury could be just the thing for a bright and happy Christmas morning – especially if the original books have become a bit worn through many enthusiastic readings. Christmas may be more about the colors red and green, but this is one book that is sure to have fans of Kann’s charming character in the pink.

(++++) A GENUINE CLASSIC AND A PRETENDER

2011-12-15T08:47:00.001-05:00

The Phantom Tollbooth: The 50^th Anniversary Edition. By Norton Juster. Illustrations by Jules Feiffer. Knopf. $24.

The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth. By Norton Juster. Illustrations by Jules Feiffer. Annotations by Leonard S. Marcus. Knopf. $29.99.

Inheritance, Book IV: Inheritance. By Christopher Paolini. Knopf. $27.99.

Anyone looking for a last-minute Christmas gift that has the potential to keep giving pleasure for years, even decades, to come, has a real treat in store this year. For 2011 is the 50^th anniversary of The Phantom Tollbooth, an elegant and charming allegorical story – and how many allegories have ever, in any age, been both elegant and charming? Norton Juster’s scrumptious tale of young Milo’s quest for Rhyme and Reason, filled with wonderful wordplay and packed to the gills with some of the best and most appropriate illustrations ever created by the ever-creative Jules Feiffer, does not just wear well. It wears better as time goes on, showing that even in a thoroughly digitized age, in which abbreviations stand in for words and tweets stand in for communication, real words and real thoughts and real searches for meaning still have power – and are, if anything, more necessary than ever. The wonders here are unending: Tock, the watchdog, who ticks (and whose picture adorns the book’s cover); Faintly Macabre, the not-so-wicked Which; the car without a motor that “goes without saying” (“and, sure enough, as soon as they were all quite still, it began to move quickly through the streets”); the Island of Conclusions, which you get to by jumping – there is so much absolutely logical illogical absurdity here that The Phantom Tollbooth is a complete joy to discover, or rediscover, five decades after its debut. The 50^th Anniversary Edition boats a wraparound plastic cover and a series of back-of-the-book “Celebrations” by nine authors, including Philip Pullman, Jeanne Birdsall, Mo Willems and others – each of whom has something to say about the book that everyday readers will likely think they would have said if they were equally talented wordsmiths. The Phantom Tollbooth is one of those books whose superficial oddities conceal (barely) some genuinely deep thinking – it is more like Through the Looking Glass, with its complex plot based on chess, than like Alice in Wonderland. The Juster/Feiffer collaboration continues to delight not only through plot, playfulness and a thoroughly marvelous use (or misuse, or abuse) of literalism in language, but also through observations that seem far too up-to-date to have been penned half a century ago, such as this one from the Soundkeeper: “‘Why, did you know that there are almost as many kinds of stillness as there are sounds? But, sadly enough, no one pays any attention to them these days.’”

Fans of the book who want to do more than read and reread it – who want to dig and delve and probe its foundations and the meanings behind and beyond its meanings – will have a great time with The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, in which Leonard S. Marcus presents the book’s entire text in the center of each two-page spread, with annotations at far left and far right. Like delightfully annotated editions produced in the past – The Annotated Mother Goose, The Annotated Alice and The Annotated Flatland come immediately to mind – The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth adds a lot of explanatory and analytical material without in any way endangering the delights of the original story. It is perhaps not quite as successful as those other annotated volumes, which dealt with works of earlier times that were in greater need of elucidation for modern readers. This book is more of a delight for nitpickers and trivia lovers. For example, Juster’s use of the expression “visible to the naked eye” comes with a footnote explaining that the phrase dates to 1664, when it was used in the book Experimental Philosophy by Henry Power. Interesting, but not really of much importance to The Phantom Tollbooth, there being no indication that Juster knew this bit of history. Juster’s section about “an enormous symphony orchestra” comes with a long footnote whose first half is about real-world orchestras (not really a germane discussion) and whose second explains why the “symphony” section differs from the rest of the book and “functions…as an interlude during which the hero gains a larger perspective” (very germane indeed). The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth is fun for fanciers of the original book, even when the annotations are a bit beside the point. But if you are looking for a gift for the sort of person who likes this sort of thing, you certainly won’t go wrong with Marcus’ meanderings.

But you will, alas, invite disappointment if you choose to make someone a gift of Inheritance, the fourth and final book in the Inheritance cycle by Christopher Paolini. Coming in at more than 850 pages, this is a tome that pretends to weightiness but ends up, in its final hundred-or-so pages, feeling rushed, scattered and altogether lightweight. Destined from before its conception to be a bestseller, the book is the only way for fans of the first three volumes – Eragon, Eldest and Brisingr – to learn what eventually happens to Eragon and his dragon, Saphira. But giving it to anyone who has not already gotten it on his own would be a mistake. It is not really a bad book, but it is one that could have used much tighter editing of its first 700-or-so pages in order to allow more space at the end to tie things up more satisfactorily and without so great a feeling of anticlimax. Paolini’s writing style has matured somewhat through the four books, although Eragon had a certain immature power that made it endearing despite its extremely derivative plotting and use of Tolkien-derived language. Eldest was too talky until its stirring climax, the Battle of Burning Plains (another of many, many elements in this series lifted from Tolkien). Brisingr felt like a buildup to Inheritance, with many effective elements (and some less-effective ones) being slowly assembled as if a grand climax were just ahead. And in Inheritance, readers get – well, what? A fascinating unnamed character from Brisingr reappears here and says all of four words, then walks off. Huh? The intriguing Angela shows up again, far more powerful than readers could have suspected and perhaps (it seems) with abilities even beyond Eragon’s, but just who she is and what she is doing in the story is never made clear. A romantic element that seemed to have real emotional-connection possibilities evaporates. A deus ex machina weapon appears to save the day. And so on, and on, and on (more than 850 pages, remember). Inheritance is simply sloppy, losing track of multiple plots and subplots and bringing the main story of Eragon to a conclusion that is as unsatisfactory as it is expected. In his acknowledgments at the end, Paolini promises to return to Alagaësia (which still sounds like “analgesia”) in the future; and perhaps he will revisit the various loose ends then and knit them together, separately or as part of a larger tapestry. All well and good if he does so. But readers who have stuck with this cycle for the nine years since Eragon was published were entitled to a wrapup that would not require them to look into the future and hope that the deficiencies of the final volume would be corrected by the author at a later time. What Inheritance delivers is great promise of a rousing conclusion for 700 pages or so – and then a tremendous letdown for all Paolini’s fans. This book earnestly wants to become a classic, but it gets a (++) rating, even though it is quite obviously a must-read for anyone who wants to know how Eragon’s story turns out. Or tries to turn out.

(++++) FOOD FOR THOUGHT AND VEGANS

2011-12-15T08:44:00.000-05:00

Eat, Cry, Poop: “Baby Blues” Scrapbook 28. By Rick Kirkman & Jerry Scott. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

How’s That Underling Thing Working Out for You? A “Dilbert” Book. By Scott Adams. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

The Tipsy Vegan: 75 Boozy Recipes to Turn Every Bite into Happy Hour. By John Schlimm. Da Capo. $17.

Vegan Pie in the Sky: 75 Out-of-This-World Recipes for Pies, Tarts, Cobblers, and More. By Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero. Da Capo. $17.

Let’s get almost-real, OK? Baby Blues remains so close to real life that readers can be forgiven for believing that Rick Kirkman (art) and Jerry Scott (words) have cameras hidden in homes throughout the country. Actually, they have their own experiences to draw upon – and if that isn’t enough, they have an apparently inexhaustible supply of not-quite-true-but-almost stories about raising kids. Take the Sunday strip in which bleary-eyed parents Darryl and Wanda shuffle into the kitchen where bright-and-perky Zoe, Hammie and Wren are waiting for breakfast…Wanda pours cereal onto the counter…Darryl dumps unpeeled bananas on top…and Wanda sloshes milk over everything…and then the parents collapse. “I think they were up late finishing our Halloween costumes,” opines Zoe. Now, did this really happen to Kirkman or Scott – or anyone? Who knows? It could happen; or something a lot like it could. This is the great thing about Baby Blues: even when you know it is exaggerated, you can look back at the strips a second time and think maybe they’re not as far beyond the pale as you thought in the first place. In Eat, Cry, Poop, for example, Hammie splashes like crazy while trying to swim, but fails to move forward, because, he says, “This must be really thick water.” He also asks Zoe to read his essay – and she tells him “you can’t do better than this,” explaining to him that it isn’t good, but he can’t do better. Wren is so fussy that Wanda barely gets any sleep, and when Darryl tries to sympathize while dressing for the office, saying “at least you don’t have to go to work,” Wanda answers, “Yeah. Raising kids is just my hobby.” Darryl shops for a gift for Wanda, knowing that what she really wants is “to be appreciated for being the good woman, wife and mother she is,” but when the saleslady says “we don’t carry that,” he opts for a push-up bra. None of these almost-reality scenes need ever have happened exactly the way Kirkman and Scott portrays it, especially in light of Kirkman’s skill with the characters’ expressions and his own artistic license: a Sunday “apologies to Milton Glaser” strip is simply wonderful, as is one in which Hammie pulls Wanda’s arm so much while his mom talks to a friend that the arm stretches halfway along the sidewalk by the time Wanda and Hammie continue walking. But even if these scenes have never happened quite this way, they could, more or less, and thinking about that provides a huge part of their charm. The Thanksgiving panel in which Darryl, Wanda, Zoe and (in her own way) Wren are all bowing their heads in thanks for their family, while Hammie is wondering if a cranberry would fit in his nose, is an absolute classic. One of many.

No one puts cranberries in anyone’s nose in the latest Dilbert collection (the 37^th, but who’s counting?). But it’s a fair bet that Dilbert and his cohorts fantasize about such insertions – probably of a somewhat more scurrilous type – as they navigate the pointless but, alas, almost-real world they inhabit. There may not really be giant slugs in any offices – well, in most offices – but when Dilbert sits next to one and notes that “my success depends on you doing your role in a timely and energetic manner,” white-collar workers will know exactly what he means. When a traveling Dilbert says it is “refreshingly honest” to be told at the car-rental counter that the company does not care about his reservation because “we’re in the business of selling insurance and overpriced gas,” business travelers everywhere will nod their heads in understanding. When “Dogbert the Empire Builder Consultant” advises the Pointy-Haired Boss that he should always “be in the general vicinity when something good happens,” far too many employees are likely to remember bosses with just that habit. When the PHB pulls rank to evict Dilbert and his co-workers from a conference room even though Dilbert has spent months setting up a meeting, then announces at his meeting that he and the other bosses need “to figure out why nothing ever gets done around here,” employees will not know whether to laugh or cry. And so it goes throughout How’s That Underling Thing Working Out for You? – too much that is offbeat and amusing to regard the collection as serious commentary, but too strong a foundation in reality to consider it merely funny. Dilbert continues its consistent walk along the tightrope between the real and the unreal.

Like parents and corporate workers, vegans tend to take themselves very seriously most of the time, so it is nice to encounter the occasional vegan-focused book that handles things from a lighter-than-usual perspective. Two new (+++) books, The Tipsy Vegan and Vegan Pie in the Sky, do just that, especially so in the case of John Schlimm’s work. Schlimm, whose author photo shows him drinking beer while cooking, has developed such recipes as “sweet-and-sour Oktoberfest cabbage” (which includes light beer), “lentils in the fast lane” (made with vermouth or dry white wine), “sunburst salad” (with Cointreau), “hotta frittata” (with dark rum), and “hot toddy tofu with shiitakes” (made with rice wine or dry sherry). He even includes a “hangover tofu omelet” that contains a tablespoon of Marsala. All right, these recipes are not for everyone (even more “not for everyone” than is usually the case with food for vegans); and in truth, even if you enjoy cooking with alcoholic beverages, some of these may be a bit much – that omelet, for example, requires use of a blender and two separate skillets. Still, Schlimm’s recipes are off the beaten vegan-cooking track, and his amusing comments on them make reading this small-size book enjoyable. Vegan Pie in the Sky is the same size (6½ inches wide, 7 inches high) and has amusing writing of its own: “We understand the siren song of frozen premade pie crusts: no rolling pin, no flour all over the kitchen (and the cat), no need to pinch dough edges into little shapes.” And the focus of Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero is in many ways like Schlimm’s: coming up with interesting recipes that vegans will enjoy and maybe even be able to serve to non-vegans without getting deprecating or overly polite comments. Among the attractions here are ginger peach pandowdy (“pandowdy isn’t dowdy at all!”), banana toffee pudding pie, figgy apple hand pies (“reminiscent of a big old Fig Newton!”), curried macaroon pie and sweet potato Brazil nut crunch pie. Most of the recipes are for cooks who have some time to prepare the foods: these are not, by and large, quick-and-easy desserts. But vegans who love the taste of unusual pies and also want recipes for vegan versions of some old standards (coconut cream pie, pumpkin cheesecake, chocolate mousse tart and others) will enjoy trying out Vegan Pie in the Sky, coming up with their own favorites, and maybe, just maybe, showing some non-vegan friends that vegan desserts can be just as delicious as traditional non-vegan ones.

(++++) STANDARD REPERTOIRE AND BEYOND

2011-12-15T08:41:00.000-05:00

Sibelius: Symphony No. 5; Pohjola’s Daughter; Lutosławski: Concerto for Orchestra. London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jukka-Pekka Saraste. LPO. $16.99.

Dvořák: Symphony No.9; Czech Suite; Slavonic Dances Op. 46, No. 1 and Op. 72, No. 2. Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by José Serebrier. Warner. $18.99.

Bruckner: Symphony No. 4. Orchestre Métropolitain conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. ATMA Classique. $16.99.

Ireland: Piano Concerto; Legend for Piano and Orchestra; First Rhapsody; Pastoral; Indian Summer; A Sea Idyll; Three Dances. John Lenehan, piano; Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by John Wilson. Naxos. $9.99.

Liszt: A Faust Symphony; Wagner: A Faust Overture. Endrik Wottrich, tenor; Sächsischer Staatsopernchor Dresden and Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by Christian Thielemann. Unitel Classica DVD. $24.99.

Some conductors and recording producers have recently been coming up with very creative ways to present very familiar music. The live recording from October 2008 of Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5 and Pohjola’s Daughter is impressive enough: Jukka-Pekka Saraste leads the works with fine pacing, a sure hand, good attention to rhythm and orchestration, and overall attentiveness to what Sibelius is trying to accomplish in the symphony and tone poem. The beautiful horn sections in the symphony’s finale are perhaps a little less magisterial than they could be, but all in all, these are very worthy performances that showcase the skill of both the conductor and the orchestra. What makes the CD really special, though, is the pairing of the Sibelius works with Witold Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra (1950-54), recorded live in February 2008. This work is not particularly representative of Lutosławski’s style, being more conventional in both harmony and orchestral texture; and it does not benefit from the inevitable comparison with Bartók’s identically titled and far more brilliant work. Nevertheless, the Lutosławski is an interesting and well-constructed piece that deserves to be heard more often, and the inclusion of it on a CD that will most likely attract listeners because of the more-conventional repertoire is a fine way to bring it to the attention of people who might well be less interested in picking up, say, an all-Lutosławski recording.

There is no unconventional music at all on the first CD of a planned Dvořák cycle by José Serebrier and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra – but the method of presentation is interesting here, too. The ever-familiar “New World” symphony is the centerpiece of the disc, of course, and Serebrier handles it with tremendous feeling and warmth – although a touch too much rubato here and there, especially in the first movement, where the broadening of the pace is subtle, but still interferes with the work’s forward momentum. Serebrier is a particularly thoughtful conductor – he is even careful here to minimize the pauses between the first and second movements, and between the third and fourth, as part of the emotional effect he is seeking. And the arrangement of the CD shows equal thought. The symphony is preceded by the ebullient Slavonic Dance, Op. 46, No. 1, which makes a very fine curtain-raiser indeed. It is followed by the Czech Suite, whose five short and unconnected movements, which Serebrier handles with poise and delicacy, stand in pleasant contrast to the carefully integrated whole of the symphony. And then the disc concludes with the warm, slow-paced Slavonic Dance, Op. 72, No. 1, which turns the CD as a whole into an exploration of multiple facets of Dvořák, not just those shown in his Symphony No. 9.

Bruckner’s symphonies tend to show all the aspects of the composer within the individual works, nothing additional being needed – and Yannick Nézet-Séguin again shows his understanding of and sensitivity to the nuances of Bruckner in a new recording of the “Romantic” symphony. Nézet-Séguin’s approach here is as thoughtful as Serebrier’s on his CD: Nézet-Séguin shapes the music lovingly and urges Orchestre Métropolitain (which he has directed since 2000) to explore all the subtleties of Bruckner’s design and all the emotion of his themes. The pacing here is careful without being cautious, with the first movement and finale growing to very substantial stature, the Andante (quasi Allegretto) paced particularly well (that is, not too slowly), and the scherzo bursting forth brightly and producing an effect mixing peasant dance with hunting scene. For those interested in which conductors choose which of the many available editions of the Bruckner symphonies, it is interesting to note that Nézet-Séguin uses the 1936 Haas edition, not the 1953 Nowak version that is nowadays more often performed and is considered by many musicologists – although not all – to be superior. Nézet-Séguin’s fine and sensitive performance certainly makes a strong case for the Haas version, and for the symphony itself – whose title “Romantic,” it should be noted, was given by Bruckner himself not to refer to syrupy romances but to recall the romances of Medieval times, such as Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Lohengrin.

There is Romanticism of the emotional kind in John Ireland’s Piano Concerto, even though it was written long after the Romantic era, in 1930. Expressive and filled with passages of longing that contrast well with high-spirited ones, it is the major work on a new Ireland CD on which pianist John Lenehan offers very well-played performances of both solo piano works and ones with orchestra. The other pieces here are not at the level of the concerto, so the CD as a whole gets a (+++) rating; but those who enjoy the music of Ireland (1879-1962) will find the CD fascinating, not least because it contains the world première recordings of the short solo pieces Pastoral (1896) and Indian Summer (1932), both of them charming and portraying rural character. The rest of the disc is a bit of a hodgepodge. Legend for Piano and Orchestra (1933) is a dark work, intended to evoke the feeling of the ancient landscape of a hill on the Sussex Downs. A Sea Idyll (1900) is expressive, if not highly original, while Three Dances (1913) offers well-orchestrated treatment of short folk dances – “Gipsy Dance,” “Country Dance” and “Reapers’ Dance.” Both those works are for piano solo. So is First Rhapsody (1906), which Lenehan plays with particular fire and which comes across very effectively in a Lisztian mode – not wholly original, perhaps, but quite well done nevertheless.

But no one does Liszt better than Liszt, and Christian Thielemann delivers a dramatic and impassioned performance of A Faust Symphony that goes beyond the ordinary through a pairing with Wagner’s A Faust Overture, written at almost the same time (Wagner: 1855; Liszt: 1857 – although both works exist in other versions as well). Tenor Endrik Wottrich does a fine job with the vocal solos in the Liszt, and the Sächsischer Staatsopernchor Dresden gives the sort of intense and idiomatic performance that it seems to deliver all the time. Staatskapelle Dresden plays with brilliance and sensitivity, with the result that even the Wagner overture – which is not generally reckoned among his most effective works – comes through with striking power. Thielemann clearly has strong feelings for this music, and his conducting is carefully controlled with an eye toward eliciting just the right expressive and monumental effects. This is a very impressive DVD – but it is a DVD, with all the pluses and minuses that implies. Those who want to see the conductor and musicians performing – as interpreted by the director, who may or may not choose the most effective camera angles and shot durations – will find this a (++++) production. Others will find it worth a (+++) rating for the high quality of the music-making, but could perhaps do without the visual elements, which can be intriguing at times but are just as often distractions from involvement in the music.

(++++) FROM RUSSIA AND ENVIRONS

2011-12-15T08:38:00.000-05:00

Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 3; Symphonic Dances. Garrick Ohlsson, piano; Atlanta Symphony Orchestra conducted by Robert Spano. ASO Media. $18.99.

Azerbaijani Piano Concertos: Works by Fikret Amirov and Elmira Nazirova, Vasif Adigezalov, Tofig Guliyev, and Farhad Badalbeyli. Farhad Badalbeyli and Murad Adigezalzade, piano; Joan Rodgers, soprano; Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Dmitry Yablonsky. Naxos. $9.99.

Sofia Gubaidulina: Fachwerk for Bayan, Percussion and String Orchestra; Silenzio for Bayan, Violin and Cello. Geir Draugsvoll, bayan; Anders Loguin, percussion; Geir Inge Lotsberg, violin; Øyvind Gimse, cello; Trondheim Symphony Orchestra Strings conducted by Øyvind Gimse. Naxos. $9.99.

Baltic Portraits: Music by Erkki-Sven Tüür, Aulis Sallinen, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Arvo Pärt and Lepo Sumera. Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paavo Järvi. CSO Media. $16.99.

The Soviet Union has been gone for 20 years now, but it is still possible to hear its influence – that is, the influence of Russia, which lay at its center – on the music of composers who live or lived in the USSR’s so-called “sphere of influence.” That notably includes Sergei Rachmaninoff, who had long since left the Soviet Union behind when he composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 but who never abandoned the essential Russian Romanticism of his musical sensibility. Garrick Ohlsson gives a tremendously exciting and beautifully balanced performance of this concerto, moving without seeming effort from its grand and sometimes overdone gestures to its elements of tenderness and even delicacy. A prodigiously difficult work to play, this concerto sounds understated, if scarcely easy, under Ohlsson’s fingers: he manages to subsume the needed technical prowess within a wholly appropriate degree of expressiveness that stops short of the swooning that far too many pianists believe is necessary in Rachmaninoff. Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony provide excellent support for Spano: like him, they offer a big sound that fits the gestures of the music without overdoing them or making them seem merely vulgar. Spano is, however, less successful in the Symphonic Dances, Rachmaninoff’s last work. The issue here is the first movement, in which the dancing is, or should be, ungainly and even grotesque. Spano makes it too smooth, never bringing out the full snarls of the brass and rhythmic intensity of the movement. The second movement, Andante con moto, is considerably more effective, though, and the final one has all the verve and spirit that a listener could wish – a conclusion that is significantly more persuasive than the piece’s beginning.

The effectiveness of the piano works on a new CD called Azerbaijani Piano Concertos is mixed as well. None of these composers will be a household name for most listeners; and their compositions are somewhat difficult to distinguish from each other, sharing similar-sounding thematic material (often derived from Azerbaijani tradition) presented within Western musical forms that generally exhibit significant Soviet or Russian influence. This is by no means a bad thing: the result is colorful and frequently interesting music. But it does make it a little hard to know whether one is enjoying the specific style of Fikret Amirov (1922-1984) and Elmira Nazirova (born 1928), whose Concerto for Piano and Orchestra after Arabian Themes (1957) opens the CD, or that of their influences. This concerto is in the traditional three movements and proportioned like a traditional piano concerto, with some exoticism to its themes. In contrast, Piano Concerto No. 4 by Vasif Adigezalov (1935-2006), written in 1994 and also in three movements, has a more symphonic and broader stature, and is conceived on a larger scale – and pays some attention to more-modern compositional techniques as well. Both these concertos are impressive in parts and would be interesting to hear occasionally, but neither is highly distinctive stylistically. The remaining works on this (+++) CD are considerably shorter. Gaytagi—Dance for Piano and Orchestra by Tofig Guliyev (1917-2000) originally dates to 1958 and was revised in 1980; it is jazzy, bouncy and brief. The Sea (1977, for piano and orchestra) and Shusha (a 2003 vocalise) are by Farhad Badalbeyli (born 1947), and each is atmospheric in its own way, the former being expansive and the latter mournful: Shusha, a popular mountain resort in Soviet times, is now officially part of Azerbaijan but remains under dispute because it is in the South Caucasian region of Nagorno-Karabakh. In this way the geopolitics of Soviet times persists today just as some of its musical influences do.

Sofia Gubaidulina (born 1931), half Russian and half Tatar by birth, has spent years forging her own musical esthetic and sound. She especially enjoys using unusual instruments or unexpected instrumental combinations, and one of her favored instruments is the bayan, an accordion-like instrument whose design and keyboard are sufficiently distinct from those of the standard accordion to give it a very different sound and different virtuosic capabilities. Its sound may well not be to all tastes – it can be grating and persistent – but there is no doubt that in the hands of a masterful player such as Geir Draugsvoll, the bayan holds its own as an impressive solo instrument. It was Draugsvoll for whom Gubaidulina wrote Fachwerk, which was composed from 2009 to 2011 and receives its world première recording on a new Naxos CD. This is a complex and rather long work (well over half an hour), in which the extensive use of percussion is as typical of Gubaidulina as is the writing for the bayan. The intermingling of bayan, percussion and strings is well handled, and the piece is certainly impressive, although not immediately or consistently gripping. It is well paced and conducted by Øyvind Gimse, who assumes the role of cellist for Silenzio, the other work on the CD and a significantly earlier one (1991). This five-movement piece requires balance among three instruments that do not naturally have it, with the bayan all too easily overshadowing the strings; but the performers here have figured out how to be sure everyone has a say in the conversation, and the result is an impressive performance of a work whose sound is somewhat more interesting than its musical ideas. The CD gets a (+++) rating for most listeners, but those who already know and love Gubaidulina’s music will surely want to have it.

Which listeners would want to have the Cincinnati Symphony’s (+++) Baltic Portals is more of an open question. The five works here, all by composers from regions strongly influenced by Russian or Soviet hegemony, are very well-played and conducted with sensitivity by Paavo Järvi. All the pieces have some sort of connection with the Cincinnati Symphony, which explains why they appear on the orchestra’s own label; but their musical connections are thin at best. There are two symphonies here: No. 8 (“Autumnal Fragments”) by Aulis Sallinen (born 1935), written in 2001 and being most interesting for a scherzo-like section of running scales; and No. 6 by Lepo Sumera (1950-2000), which dates to the last year of the composer’s life and has some intriguingly handled (if rather conventional) tone-painting of an eerie atmosphere, with some intense segments and occasional hints of Mahler as leavening. The other pieces on the CD are shorter. Fireflower (2011) by Erkki-Sven Tüür (born 1959) is a curtain-raiser of sorts, although it takes a while to turn into anything approaching a fanfare. Gambit (2005) by composer/conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen (born 1958) is a slow-building, rather static piece with some well-proportioned if not highly original rhythmic and shimmering effects. And Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1977) by Arvo Pärt (born 1935) is a simply designed, slow-building work that is deliberately rather repetitious but wears out its welcome a bit sooner than the composer may have intended. Each of these pieces has worthwhile elements, and the Russian or Soviet influence even peeks through here and there in the two symphonies; but the CD is one of those offerings that seems more like a souvenir of a concert (or several concerts) than a thoughtfully considered program of works that relate to each other in any integral way.

(+++) MUSIC, PICTURED

2011-12-15T08:35:00.000-05:00

Kinshasa Symphony: A Film by Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer. C Major DVD. $24.99.

Luciano Pavarotti: A Film by Esther Schapira. EuroArts DVD. $24.99.

George London: Between Gods and Demons – A Film by Marita Stocker. Arthaus Musik DVD. $24.99.

It is arguable – always has been – whether it makes much sense to release concerts on DVD rather than CD or SACD. The sound is no better; the director of the filming or taping decides what viewers will see, which may or may not be what they would like to look at; and the focus tends to be more on the performers and less than on the music than in an audio recording. However, we live in a highly visual age, where many people are accustomed to pictorial views of just about everything; and there is no doubt that a well-produced, well-shot concert DVD can have considerable dynamism. Still, DVDs of standard concerts remain mostly a niche item, their value uncertain. Not so the value of DVDs about musical subjects. These use music as a jumping-off point for biography, social commentary or analysis, and even though they too are niche products (classical music itself is not of infinite appeal; films about classical-music issues are of even narrower interest), they can be quite worthwhile for people looking for something pictorial that is more than a recording of an ordinary concert.

Certainly there is nothing ordinary about the concerts in Kinshasa Symphony. This is a fascinating film about attempts to establish and maintain the only symphony orchestra in the Congo – a group that has had to endure war, political repression and an apparently unending series of crises. A 95-minute documentary with 10 minutes of bonus material, Kinshasa Symphony has at its heart an event so emblematic that it is hard to believe it actually happened: just before the final, choral movement of Beethoven’s Ninth, the power goes out. This quickly becomes a metaphor for the power of music and the staying power of the musicians, who are determined to perform despite long, long odds. Claus Wischmann and Martin Baer balance the musical lives of the orchestra’s players with their worse-than-humdrum everyday existence, which is often a struggle nearly unimaginable to concertgoers and to musicians elsewhere in the world. Watching these musicians (some of whom are quite good) practice outdoors amid slums, play on street corners while indifferent pedestrians pass them by, and attempt to assemble a semblance of elegance for a full-scale performance, viewers will be rooting for them all the way. And what better music to stand for joy and uplift in human existence than Beethoven’s Ninth? The filmmakers actually lay on the appropriateness of Beethoven a bit thickly at times, but the film as a whole works wonderfully well, showing how a combination of hope and musical focus is allowing these hard-pressed musicians to survive, if not exactly thrive, in a remarkably harsh and unforgiving social and political environment.

Two films about better-known musicians are more straightforward, although they will be quite appealing to fans of the singers on whom they focus. Luciano Pavarotti is a well-done if fairly straightforward one-hour documentary (with 35 minutes of bonus material) on the life and art of the famed Italian tenor (1935-2007). Esther Schapira sees Pavarotti as a popularizer, a man whose enthusiasm for his art communicated itself to audiences worldwide. The proposition is arguable – Pavarotti, both individually and as one of the “Three Tenors,” certainly appealed to people beyond standard opera audiences, but whether this in some way brought more people into contact with and enjoyment of the great classical repertoire is by no means certain. Still, Pavarotti was one of those larger-than-life Italian tenors whose life, both personal and in the world’s opera houses, seems to invite a big, splashy display. That is most of what it gets in this film, which is not entirely hagiographic but which certainly does nothing to dispel the Pavarotti mystique or suggest anything significantly negative in his personality or art. In fact, the bonus interviews – with Bono, José Carreras, Herbert Breslin and Joseph Volpe – serve to make the singer an even bigger and more emphatic presence on the opera scene.

Fewer people today are fans of George London, partly because he was not a tenor (bass-baritones tend to be less popular) and partly because his vocal career was ended in 1967 by a paralyzed vocal cord. London (1920-1985) was an important singer from the late 1940s until his forced retirement, but today does not retain the aura of fascination of some of those with whom he sang, such as Maria Callas and Renata Tebaldi. Marita Stocker’s one-hour film will not likely bring London many new fans – but, interestingly enough, the bonus material, which runs a generous 95 minutes, may. It contains previously unreleased archival footage from concerts and opera performances, showing just how versatile London was: he not only sang Figaro, Don Giovanni, Scarpia and Wotan but also performed in musicals and sang spirituals. His voice is rich, his stage presence large – he had considerable charisma, whether as hero or villain – and the range of his interests impressive. Stocker’s film includes informative interviews with London’s widow, Nora London, and with several former colleagues and current opera stars influenced by him – showing that his legacy endures. But that is de rigueur in a visual biography like this one. There is nothing especially surprising in George London: Between Gods and Demons, but there are many appealing elements for fans of the singer and those who would like to learn more about a fine, if somewhat under-appreciated, voice of the middle of the last century.

(++++) TEACHING AND PLAYING

2011-12-08T08:52:00.000-05:00

Coral Reefs. By Jason Chin. Neal Porter Books/Roaring Brook Press. $16.99.

Jane & Mizmow. By Matthew S. Armstrong. Harper. $16.99.

If You Give a Dog a Donut. By Laura Numeroff. Illustrated by Felicia Bond. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $16.99.

Visual instruction can be a remarkably effective way of giving information to young readers, and Jason Chin is a master of it. The author of Redwoods has now turned his attention to Coral Reefs, a book whose factual content is unassailable but would be rather, ahem, dry – if it were not for the remarkable illustrative way Chin presents it. The text alone would require young readers (the book is intended for ages 5-9) to wade through straightforward verbiage: “Hard corals are able to build their skeletons because of a remarkable partnership that they have with a type of algae. The algae live inside the polyp and, working together, the polyp and algae build the coral’s skeleton.” But there is nothing straightforward about the context in which Chin places this information. He shows a young girl at a library, reading a book – the very book Coral Reefs, in fact – and as she reads, elements of a reef begin to grow throughout the library and surround her. Library tables, bookshelves and walls become covered with brightly colored coral, and then water comes through in a rush, along with sea creatures, carrying the girl along on the flood. Chin’s drawings make it clear that there is nothing scary about any of this – every picture conveys the sense of wonder that the girl feels as she continues her reading, floating under water while getting close views of a sea turtle, parrot fish, sharks, squirrelfish, moray eels and many other reef dwellers. The book – both Coral Reefs and the version of Coral Reefs in the girl’s hands – becomes a true voyage of discovery, taking the girl and real-world readers alike through a complex ecosystem filled with such amazing creatures as the well-camouflaged scorpion fish, the color-changing frogfish, the enormous whale shark, and many more. There is humor in the illustrations, too, when Chin explains that reefs are like cities and then shows the girl floating along and looking at reef scenes with a cityscape behind her – including such signage as “Bubbles Car Wash” and “Kiku Sushi.” Eventually the girl gets to the end of the book and emerges, dripping, from the library, to the fascination of three other children – who pick up the book to start their own adventure. Back-of-the-book information on threats to coral reefs and on Chin’s research nicely complement and enhance a fascinating story that is remarkably well told.

Even younger readers, ages 3-5, will learn from Matthew Armstrong’s Jane & Mizmow while being entertained by it. Jane is a little girl; Mizmow, a big something-or-other – a sort of plush monster with a leathery face. After a nonverbal series of pages in which Mizmow licks Jane and then tries to swallow her – deciding that she doesn’t taste good at all – the two become best friends, and the book shows how they are the same (sharing books and the seesaw) and how they differ (Jane rakes fallen leaves and runs toward the pile, but Mizmow eats them before she can land in it). Then the two quarrel and stop being friends – only to discover that they miss each other (Jane’s feet are cold without Mizmow lying on them at night, and Mizmow doesn’t enjoy eating books as much without Jane around). So the two try to think of ways to rekindle their friendship, which they eventually manage to do, and everything ends happily. The lessons here are just right for the target age range: the value of friendship even when you and your friend are very, very different in some ways; the possibility of having an argument; the importance of finding a way to be friends again. A simple, charming story, simply charmingly told, Jane & Mizmow is a treat from start to finish.

The latest “If You Give…” book is all about a treat, too, and if it is not quite at the level of the best books in this series, it is still a (+++) work that Laura Numeroff’s numerous fans will enjoy. If You Give a Dog a Donut follows the now-well-established sequence used in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, If You Give a Moose a Muffin, and their successors: the dog gets the donut and wants apple juice; gets the juice and drinks it; asks for more, but there isn’t any, so he decides to make his own; goes outside to pick apples; and one thing leads to another and another and another until, at the end, the dog gets apple juice and asks for a donut to go with it. Felicia Bond contributes her usual attractive and upbeat illustrations, but the book is not quite as funny as some earlier entries in the series – although the dog’s “happy dance,” which covers two pages, is a delight. The boy who is at the dog’s beck and call seems more bemused than amused by everything that is going on, and some of the connections (or non-connections) between events seem a little more forced and a little less entertainingly absurd here than in earlier books. Those are adult perceptions, though – kids who love this series, which is created for ages 3-7, will surely have fun with the latest entry in it…and look forward to the next.

(++++) SAD BUT UPLIFTING

2011-12-08T08:49:00.000-05:00

Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London. By Andrea Warren. Houghton Mifflin. $18.99.

A Month of Sundays. By Ruth White. Farrar Straus Giroux. $16.99.

The Birthmark Trilogy, Book Two: Prized. By Caragh M. O’Brien. Roaring Brook Press. $16.99.

Unhappy and even unpleasant stories, whether real or fictional, are often used to provide young readers with positive feelings – and perhaps make them think. Charles Dickens and the Street Children of London is about as sad a tale as will be found anywhere. It is far more meaningful for those who already know Dickens’ work, which may not be the case for all readers of this book; but Andrea Warren explains enough about Dickens’ writing to help even those unfamiliar with it understand what he did. And because she eventually works around to A Christmas Carol, the Dickens work that young readers are most likely to know, she makes a strong connection with her intended audience. By telling Dickens’ story in modern language, quoting from him judiciously but not including long passages of his rather overworked (by modern standards) prose, Warren shows that Dickens was a crusader with a pen – someone who suffered severe privation in his own youth, never forgot it, and used his early connections with the poor of London to produce a series of novels that not only told stories but also shone a bright light into the dim recesses of Victorian England, where hunger and abuse were rampant. It will be very difficult for readers, at least in the beginning, to accept just how awful conditions were for so many children in Dickens’ time, but as Warren piles example upon example, story upon story, it will quickly become clear that the undoubted splendor of the Victorian age was built in part on the backs and bodies of Britain’s youngest and most vulnerable people. The pictures in Warren’s book do a great deal to bring the story home, showing the poor trying to earn a living or simply stay alive, Dickens’ involvement with them, the occasional major benefactor (such as composer George Frideric Handel and Foundling Hospital founder Captain Thomas Coram), and some of the works that slowly, slowly improved the plight of the poverty-stricken – such as William Hogarth’s painting Gin Lane, a depiction of drunkenness that helped lead to laws to limit alcohol sales. Dickens’ personal connection with those he championed is emphasized and re-emphasized: “He had painful memories of his mother being faced with the choice of moving herself and the younger children into the workhouse or into John Dickens’ small prison cell – and choosing prison because the workhouses were so much worse.” “As a schoolboy Dickens had seen plenty of mistreatment of students. …He wrote that his own headmaster at the last school he attended ‘was by far the most ignorant man I have ever had the pleasure to encounter and one of the worst-tempered men perhaps who ever lived.’” This is a book about Dickens as crusader – and his method of crusading, through writing, would have given him the title of “muckraker” at a later time. In his own time, though, there was no author quite like him: immensely popular, attuned to what masses of readers (and non-readers, to whom others read Dickens’ books) would enjoy and appreciate, and having a laser-like focus on the ills of his time and possible methods of correcting them. Dickens did not believe later ages would read his books, which dealt so closely with contemporary issues; but his work survives – despite its frequently overdone prose and a strong tendency to repetitiveness, caused by the fact that much of it was published in serialized form. It is the underlying humanity of Dickens’ writing that has kept people reading it – a fact that comes clearly through in Warren’s well-researched and well-written book.

A Month of Sundays is fiction, but here too the intention is for lessons to be learned through considerable sadness. Ruth White’s book is about 14-year-old April Garnet Rose (always called Garnet), who lives with her mother (her father has left them) and is left with her Aunt June in Black Rock, Virginia, while her mom goes to Florida to look for work. The time is the late 1950s, and a great deal of the focus is on religion: Aunt June believes everything happens for a reason, so Sunday after Sunday, she takes Garnet to different religious services. There is a highly personal reason for Aunt June’s quest: she has cancer. For her part, Garnet does not like being dragged along, but accepts the necessity, and soon encounters true believers of various sorts – and a miraculous healing. But then things get complicated, as Garnet learns that the story of her father’s abandonment of her mother may not be true after all; and Garnet also finds herself with strong feelings for a boy named Silver. Complexity leads inexorably to tragedy, and Garnet finds herself questioning all she has heard and been told about religion and God. At the end, she has no definitive answers, and realizes that there aren’t any. Garnet is left in the same state as Coleridge’s “a sadder and a wiser man” in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner: she has learned how much she does not know, how much is not knowable, and how important it is to make human connections with the full understanding that they may not last and that God’s ways may never be clear to human beings. A Month of Sundays is filled with heavy subject matter and is, in truth, somewhat heavy-handed in presenting it. Its sensitivity and willingness to tackle difficult subjects earn it a (+++) rating, but this is less a book to enjoy than one from which to absorb lessons.

Prized, which follows Birthmarked in Caragh O’Brien’s dystopian trilogy, does less overt teaching and preaching and offers more adventure – but it too makes an attempt to handle difficult material, in this case by placing moral and ethical quandaries in an alternative-world setting. Sixteen-year-old midwife Gaia Stone, on the run with her baby sister from the Enclave, is captured in this novel by the people of Sylum (think “asylum,” with irony) – a society in which men outnumber women, but women rule; and the leader, Matrarc Olivia, sets down and enforces very strict laws (a kiss is a crime, for example). As often happens in trilogies, this second book complicates the story without really advancing it very much. Perhaps the most significant happening here is the reappearance of Leon from the Enclave, whose “expression was openly hostile” when Gaia has a chance to talk with him. “‘You’re a girl in a place where the girls rule,’” he tells her, adding that he is “‘sure you’ll find it very convenient.’” And at that point, “Their positions were reversed, she realized, as neatly and completely as a flip of a card. In the Enclave, he’d been a person of privilege and power, while she’d been a poor midwife from outside the wall, entering it only to become a prisoner of Q cell, and finally a fugitive.” Even readers who do not understand all those references to the first book – and really, Prized is not highly understandable except as a sequel to Birthmarked – will note from this passage that the role reversal is a lot of what is going on here, with Gaia trading one sort of dystopian society for another. That is one major issue explored in the novel. Another is violence and its justification, if any, as in the case of Malachai, who has killed his wife but whose situation is not as straightforward as Gaia originally thinks: “‘She’d abused him for years, and then he found her hurting their nine-year-old son. He couldn’t let that start.’” Later, when Gaia (likely to the surprise of few readers) is kissed, many things begin to come to a head: “‘Whether you agree with it or not, it’s the law here that a man can’t touch you until you’ve made a choice to marry him.’” The unfairness of the societal structures, highly evident from the start of the book, becomes clearer and clearer to Gaia as the story progresses, and as Gaia’s situation becomes more contorted, she has to face a frightening decision involving the Matrarc herself. The book is about choices, law, obedience, rules: “Her relationship with the Matrarc had been a labyrinth of submission and rebellion, coercion and pleading.” By the end of Prized, Gaia has learned what she prizes and who prizes her, has grown in some new ways, and is ready to face the next stage of life. The outcome is scarcely surprising, and there is enough conventional plotting and dialogue in the book to keep it at a (+++) rating. But readers who enjoyed Birthmarked will certainly want to read Prized to find out where things have gone, and where they are likely to go in the upcoming conclusion of O’Brien’s trilogy.