(+++) GHOULS, GORE, GRIEF, GOBBLEDYGOOK

Stuff of Nightmares: The Monster Makers. By R.L. Stine. Illustrated by A.L. Kaplan. Colored by Roman Titov with Gonçalo Lopes. BOOM! Studios. $16.99.

Stuff of Nightmares: No Holiday for Murder. By R.L. Stine. Illustrated by Adam Gorman and Pius Bak. Colored by Francesco Segala with assistance by Gloria Martinelli. BOOM! Studios. $16.99.

     The thing about tributes is that it really helps to know what they are tributes to – even if knowing leads to some disappointment in comparing the tribute to its inspiration. There is no question that R.L. (Robert Lawrence) Stine (born 1943) greatly admires and has long loved the horror comics of the old EC Publishing empire under William M. Gaines (1922-1992) – comics that were destroyed by government attacks and the ensuing censorship during the McCarthy era, when Stine was still a preteen. Indeed, Stine’s introduction to Stuff of Nightmares: The Monster Makers makes his love of The Crypt of Terror and The Vault of Horror explicit, and Stuff of Nightmares follows the old comics’ clever framing approach by having the stories introduced by a suitably weird figure – not the Crypt Keeper or the Old Witch but, here, the Nightmare Keeper. There is even an attempt, now and again, to duplicate the offhanded grim humor that was an EC trademark in the framing characters’ introductions and postmortems (ha!) to the chilling and suitably (often gruesomely) illustrated stories.

     The problem is that Stine, whose career is built on his skill at evoking chills for young readers, does not have the frightening adeptness of the old EC writers and artists for producing scary scenarios that appealed to readers beyond the preteen years. EC Publishing was destroyed in large part because of the supposed influence of its horror comics on adults, with the charge led by Fredric Wertham through his book Seduction of the Innocent – in which (and in other venues) Wertham argued that all sorts of criminals, juvenile delinquents and societal misfits inevitably said, when he asked them, that they read lots and lots of horror comics; thus, the comics clearly inspired the evil people’s later depredations. This seems a ridiculous and illogical stretch nowadays and was ridiculous to saner voices even in the 1950s, ignoring the simple fact that far, far, far more people read these comics and did not turn into evildoers (not to mention that Wertham’s leading questions, when his research was not altogether fabricated, invited bad guys to blame what Wertham wanted them to blame). But it is certainly true that EC aimed at readers beyond the preteen/teenage years, delving into largely taboo topics such as domestic abuse (which did not even have that name yet). For instance, one notable story of a woman constantly abused by a perfectionist husband demanding everything at home be perfectly arranged, perfectly lined up, perfectly labeled and perfectly positioned ended with a scene of the numerous perfectly labeled and symmetrically arranged jars and other containers into which she put all the parts of his body, from internal organs to fingernails.

     That was grisly, to be sure, and over-the-top, but even in our age – which is so much more tolerant of writing and illustration of horrible things – nothing in Stuff of Nightmares matches that sort of tale, however much of a tribute Stine intended. What readers get in these two comic-book-size collections – illustrated throughout in dark colors, unlike the deliberately garish ones used in the old comics – are stories with lots of chopping and slashing and such but without any chills beyond those offered by Stine in his hyper-popular Goosebumps books.

     Of course, that may well be enough for many readers. The Monster Makers is the latest of innumerable retellings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, thoroughly lacking (as do most of these reimaginings) in the original’s philosophical/theological underpinnings and doing its best to seem up-to-date through elements such as the livestreaming of a double murder. A mediocre attempt to make Frankenstein’s monster a sympathetic character, as Shelley did, here involves making the primary monster a childlike and child-sized being, complete with diaper, that is given to asking everyone for help and repeatedly saying “I a monster.” The thoroughly evil human creator of this pathetic little creature is given to proclamations such as, “I am quivering, electrified by my own excitement” – reflecting the role of electricity as a force for revival in Shelley’s novel and a force for whatever is going on in Stine’s story. Readers with little knowledge of Shelley and less of EC Comics may find this tale at last mildly thrilling, if scarcely cautionary (unlike Shelley’s: that was its whole point).

     No Holiday for Murder includes two stories, one involving a killer in the “Murderverse” who becomes a hero to legions of fans (a scenario with notable and obvious real-world parallels) and one focusing on a demented mall Santa Claus who goes on a violent crime spree in which he, among other things, delivers voracious rats to adults and children alike. In the setup pages surrounding the stories, Stine takes a stab (ha!) at some of the wryly ghoulish humor of the old EC comics, but his attempts are scarcely, um, cutting-edge – for instance, he has the Nightmare Keeper’s “manservant Reggie” bring dinner and say, “I prepared blood sausages, sir. Or is that joke too obvious?” To which the Nightmare Keeper, breaking the proverbial fourth wall of the theater, replies, “No jokes are too obvious in a horror comic, Reggie.” Oh, please.

     The Nightmare Keeper himself, with his trenchcoat and goggles, looks more like a pervert-in-training than a creature from the id such as the Crypt Keeper and the Old Witch. This too is a modernization of old comic-book tropes, and this too is a cheapening of them. Stuff of Nightmares is nowhere near as nightmarish as the models on which Stine draws (so to speak: he is the writer; the drawings are by various adequate illustrators). But perhaps the 21^st century has enough ongoing real-world horrors so that these comparatively formulaic tales will be a breath of desirably fetid air for those seeking escape of a sort into stories that, if nothing else, have definitive beginnings, middles and endings.

(+++) CONTEXTS FOR THE CONTEMPORARY

Gershwin: An American in Paris; Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 14 (“Moonlight”); David Biedenbender: Refraction; Grieg: Holberg Suite—Air. Sonus Quintett (Linda Gulyas, clarinet; Viviana Rieke, bass clarinet; Lena Iris Brendel, saxophone; Eloi Enrique Hernández, oboe; Annika Baum, bassoon). Genuin. $18.99.

Poulenc: Violin Sonata; Prokofiev: Violin Sonata No. 1; Arvo Pärt: Spiegel im Spiegel. Paul Huang, violin; Helen Huang, piano. Naïve. $16.99.

Kenneth Fuchs: Point of Tranquility; Russell Platt: Symphony in Three Movements (for Clyfford Still); Randall Svane: Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra; Wang Jie: The Winter that United Us. Henry Ward, oboe; Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Beau Fleuve. $15.

Philip Glass: Aguas da Amazonia. Third Coast Percussion (Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin and David Skidmore); Constance Volk, flute. Rockwell Records. $19.99.

Stockhausen: MANTRA; John Liberatore: Sedgeflowers; Yi-wei Angus Lee: Rage Over Lost Time; Dante de Silva: Too Sedated to Rage; Aida Shirazi: RAGE—Screamed, RAGE—Stolen, RAGE—Silenced; LJ White: Rage Is the Bodyguard of Sadness; Andrew Zhou: Con variazioni; Christopher Castro: Beethausenstro-Castockhoven; Laura Cetilia: sense of missing; Christopher Stark: Foreword. Ryan MacEvoy McCullough and Andrew Zhou, pianos and percussion. False Azure Records. $25 (2 CDs).

     It is a truism for contemporary composers that it is much harder to get a second performance of a new work than to get a first one: plenty of ensembles are willing to try out a recent composition, but it is only if the piece resonates with an audience that it has a chance of being picked up for additional hearings elsewhere and by different performers. It is also true that much contemporary classical music is self-limited in its appeal: its sounds and structures are off-putting to many self-professed classical-music lovers, and indeed it is arguable whether “classical music” as a descriptor still retains the meaning that it has had for many years – music is now so intermingled and interbred that many modern works are very difficult to label (a state of affairs that is fine from many composers’ perspective but less so from that of many audiences). What has evolved in recent years have been various ways of introducing new musical experiences to audiences that may not be receptive simply to hearing something new for its own sake: there will always be devotees of whatever may be contemporary at any time, but they are a small group and often ill-suited to helping new compositions reach a wider listenership – assuming composers want a bigger audience, which not all do.

     One approach to contemporary music involves presenting it along with more-familiar material – and if the more-well-known works can be given an unusual twist, so much the better. The Sonus Quintett is an unusual assemblage of wind instruments, and its debut recording, on the Genuin label, makes some often-heard works sound new while including a piece from 2015 whose sound contrasts significantly with that of everything else on the CD. Orchestrations of Gershwin often give his music a particular affinity for winds – the clarinet in Rhapsody in Blue, for example – so an arrangement of An American in Paris for wind quintet is not quite as outlandish as it might seem. This performance is fun to hear, the music’s many mild outbursts possessing a kind of bright amusement while its meandering-about-town setting comes through well in (for example) the contrasts between bassoon and oboe. The arrangement is a curiosity – enjoyable as an occasional contrast to the original but ultimately likely to encourage listeners to go back to the work’s more-familiar form. It is, however, salutary to hear how well the music fits this arrangement, which is very well played indeed. Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata is even more curious and not really as successful. The delicacy of the opening movement actually seems overdone in this arrangement, as if the work had been reimagined by Ravel. The second movement flows well enough, but the third just sounds silly in its chordal outbursts and the underlining of the lower winds. The Beethoven is followed by Refractions by David Biedenbender (born 1984), a three-movement, 10-minute mixture of styles and rhythms and sounds of all sorts that contrasts in every way with Beethoven’s three much-smoother movements and seems designed mainly to show off the virtuosity of the performers. They do indeed play it with considerable skill, but that serves only to highlight the sorts of deliberately overdone dissonances and exclamatory elements that seem to be more enjoyable to play than they are to hear. Interestingly, after this work the Sonus Quintett offers a Grieg encore that is quiet, slow-paced, pretty rather than profound, and focused on the warmth and lyricism of which the group proves itself more than capable. In all, this is a CD certainly worth an occasional hearing, if not one to which most listeners will likely turn frequently.

     The Air from Grieg’s Holberg Suite is scarcely minimalist music, but it has a somewhat similar effect in the Sonus Quintett arrangement – and a minimalist piece, a modern one, is also a significant element of a new Naïve recording featuring violinist Paul Huang and pianist Helen Huang. The work, Spiegel im Spiegel (1978) by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, is placed on the disc between sonatas by Poulenc and Prokofiev – making this CD another one in which a modern work is offered within a program of older and better-known pieces. Interestingly, although Spiegel im Spiegel has been arranged many ways, in this case it is played as originally written, for violin and piano. It is a somewhat soporific piece, as is usual in minimal music, but it certainly provides a sense of relaxation that contrasts with the mood of the Poulenc and Prokofiev sonatas, which both date to World War II and reflect the war to a considerable extent. Poulenc’s sonata is heartfelt, dramatic and tragic (the finale is marked Presto tragico), and the performance by Paul Huang and Helen Huang (who are unrelated to each other) delivers considerable emotional impact in its outer movements. The central Intermezzo, on the other hand, provides a degree of respite despite some underlying acerbity – and its modest sense of relaxation proves particularly welcome when the finale starts, since the concluding movement is a nonstop study in intensity. After this, the Pärt work is a welcome island of calm before the Prokofiev sonata, whose four movements often proceed at a moderate pace (three of the four have Andante tempo indications) but whose harmonic language is dark and disturbed throughout. If there is something hectic in the Poulenc, there is a great deal that is funereal in the Prokofiev, although the second movement (Allegro brusco) partakes of some of the same sensibilities that pervade the Poulenc sonata. This performance is especially effective in the unsettled delicacy of the third movement and the way the finale first complements and later contrasts with the mood of its predecessor. All the playing here is sensitive and convincing, and the inclusion of the newer, shorter Pärt work does help elucidate the communicative power of the lengthier pieces by the earlier composers.

     Some presentations of modern works seek audience approval not by including better-known material but by offering multiple differing (but hopefully complementary) pieces by contemporary composers. That is the approach on a Beau Fleuve CD featuring the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under JoAnn Falletta. All four pieces on the disc certainly have modern sensibilities, but none has the sort of avant-garde sound that many potential listeners might find off-putting. Point of Tranquility (2020) by Kenneth Fuchs (born 1956) is something of a throwback to the sound of Copland in his more-popular music. Inspired by a painting by Morris Louis (1912-1962) and originally written for wind band, the 11-minute tone poem sounds in its orchestral version like a work exploring forms of inwardness, using muted brass and sectional balance to convey a feeling of meditative calm. It goes on a bit too long after making its basic point, but remains lyrical and expressive throughout. Symphony in Three Movements (for Clyfford Still) was written in 2019-2020 by Russell Platt (born 1965) and is even more directly connected with a painter, as its title indicates: Still (1904-1980) was an important figure in abstract expressionism. Platt dates the three movements to specific years (1957, 1955, 1954/1962) and ties the music directly to four Still paintings from those years – which means that listeners unfamiliar with those works or with the artist himself will not get the level of connection to the music that Platt is seeking. Without that connection, the symphony sounds much like other symphonies written in recent times: it makes full use of the orchestra’s capabilities and offers a variety of sounds and forms of expression, flitting here and there without apparent order and without the connection among themes and their development that is usually considered a hallmark of symphonic style. It is well-made music but requires audiences to bring a bit more advance knowledge to it than is really reasonable. In contrast, the Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra (2023) by Randall Svane (born 1972), an orchestral version of a work originally for oboe and piano, requires no familiarity with any particular inspiration. It is a rather pleasantly old-fashioned concerto in some ways, bringing the oboe’s expressive potential to the fore throughout the first two movements, both of which are slow-paced and lyrical. The finale is brighter but retains a sense of warm expressiveness and gentle flow, and the language throughout the work is mostly tonal: this is an easy concerto to listen to, and it is in some ways a throwback harmonically. It is rather monochromatic, exploring the oboe almost entirely from the standpoint of lyricism, which means that although soloist Henry Ward handles the music well – and although Falletta brings the same level of commitment and understanding to this work that she brings to all the pieces on this CD – the net effect of Svane’s music is underwhelming. The disc ends with The Winter that United Us (2022) by Wang Jie (born 1980), which opens with a decidedly Coplandesque fanfare but quickly moves into more-dissonant realms and a thorough exploration of the percussive capabilities of the orchestra – and not just the percussion section. The work is kaleidoscopic both in scoring and in pacing, and its multiple moods contrast strongly with the single (albeit multifaceted) one explored by Fuchs. The result is a CD presentation bookended by tone poems of very different sensibilities that share some commonalities in the use of orchestral color but that otherwise come at audience engagement from very different directions. This disc as a whole is not very unified thematically, but it does a good job of giving listeners the chance to hear how some skilled contemporary composers approach writing for a full orchestra in ways designed to reach out to a broader audience than many modern composers seek.

     None of the works conducted by Falletta is likely to be well-known even to committed followers of contemporary music, but the Philip Glass ballet score Aguas da Amazonia (1993-1999) has attracted some attention over the years – perhaps enough to draw in new listeners by putting this very new work in an even newer context. That seems to be the thinking behind a very short CD (36 minutes) on which Third Coast Percussion offers its own orchestration and sequencing of the Glass dance work, which was originally a set of piano sketches. Although the music is associated with nine rivers in the Amazon Basin, the piece is given as 10 movements on this disc, with the Madeira River section split into two parts. As is typical of Glass, the music relies on repetitive sounds and structures throughout, and its movements bear no aural relationship to any of the rivers. That relationship would be communicated in performance by dancers: the work was conceived as a ballet and is still often performed that way. The Third Coast Percussion arrangement is quite a good one, within the confines of the repetitious nature of the music: the players shift the sound world with considerable subtlety among their instruments, and they do a good job of varying the segments in terms of playing by the full ensemble or by individual or paired members of the group. The use of flute is a big plus here: Constance Volk does a fine job of blending her sound with that of the percussionists when appropriate while standing out from the ensemble when that approach is more apt. It is nevertheless undeniable and inevitable that the entire work, without the visuals that would be provided by dancers, tends to sound like background music: it is frequently soporific and, unlike the rivers after which its sections are named, never seems to be going anywhere – although, like many of those rivers, it certainly does meander with a rather calm and lazy flow. Listeners already enamored of the music of Glass in general, and of Aguas da Amazonia in particular, will enjoy the way Third Coast Percussion handles the material, but it is hard to imagine this brief Rockwell Records CD drawing in any new audience for this work – except perhaps for listeners who enjoy hearing the quiet meandering of percussion instruments while they engage in life in ways other than active listening.

     If the Glass CD is somewhat on the abstruse side, the two-CD Stockhausen-focused release from False Azure Records is even more so. Like Aguas da Amazonia, Stockhausen’s MANTRA has a reputation that has grown over time, in its case since Stockhausen composed it in 1970. But while an interest in reaching out to potentially wider audiences is evident in the Glass work through its intended use as a ballet score, Stockhausen’s interest was far more intellectual (as with a great deal of his work) and far more concerned with the mechanics of musical creation than with its eventual reception by anyone outside a kind of inner circle of cognoscenti. MANTRA in fact represented a new direction for the composer: he had gone through an extended period of creating indeterminate/aleatoric works, a time that ended with MANTRA because here the score is fully written down. MANTRA was also Stockhausen’s first creation to use what he called “formula technique” for the development of paired melodies that he did not want to refer to as themes or subjects. The piece is not and never was intended to be easy to listen to – not so much because of any extreme sound but because its compositional method is as much the point as is the composition resulting from use of that method. The scoring is for two electronically modified pianos, plus crotales and wood block; one of the two performers also produces Morse code with a short-wave radio or from a recording. The whole setup is abstruse in the extreme and can easily be parodied, but the underlying musical concept is quite serious, and Ryan MacEvoy McCullough and Andrew Zhou certainly approach it with the exploratory intensity it deserves. What is particularly intriguing about this recording, though, is not only the performance of MANTRA but also the juxtaposition of the Stockhausen work with two brand-new ones intended as MANTRA companion pieces, plus a series of short items that do not relate directly to MANTRA but that occupy the same musical thought space, or an analogous one. The pieces intended to accompany and comment on MANTRA are Sedgeflowers (2017-2018) by John Liberatore and Foreword (2017) by Christopher Stark. Both inhabit a sound world noticeably connected to Stockhausen’s, although both composers use the instruments and their enhancements differently from the way Stockhausen does. Liberatore is more concerned with pianistic percussion in his piece, Stark with electronic modification in his. The remaining pieces in this highly intriguing but very rarefied release are short (two-and-a-half to five minutes) and very different in sound not only from MANTRA but also from each other: Chris Castro’s, for example, punctuates delicate runs along the entire piano keyboard with strong crotale interpolations, while Dante de Silva’s has an Impressionistic air about it combined with strong, amplified dissonances. This is a release for the “in” crowd of Stockhausen admirers, for people who already know and appreciate MANTRA and want not only to hear a very fine performance of it but also to experience an additional set of pieces that are, in effect, commentaries on or supplements to Stockhausen’s work. The recording will certainly not reach a large audience, but it will be of very considerable interest to a highly committed group of enthusiasts who have a strong attachment to this composer and this specific example of his creative process.

(++++) THE FRUITS OF CURIOSITY

The Next Scientist: The Unexpected Beginnings and Unwritten Future of the World’s Great Scientists. By Kate Messner. Illustrated by Julia Kuo. Chronicle Books. $19.99.

     Weightier and more detailed than one would expect a 56-page picture book to be, Kate Messner’s The Next Scientist is one of those works intended to encourage today’s young readers to become whatever they wish to be as adults by exploring and delving deeply into their childhood passions. Messner cites an unusually large number of exemplars to make the point that pretty much anyone from pretty much anywhere can aspire to work in science – and can be successful at it. To emphasize the point, she uses a sort of diversity-equity-and-inclusion approach to science and scientists, one in which “the world’s great scientists” include, in juxtaposition and therefore apparent equivalence, Isaac Newton, Lonnie Johnson and Valerie Thomas; Johannes Kepler, Maria Mitchell and Adriana Ocampo; Jane Goodall, Farouk El-Baz, David de Santana and Karletta Chief; and so on. That is, she scatters a very few names of scientists who are generally recognized as towering figures among a plethora of names of scientists, most of them still living, who come from all sorts of places and backgrounds and are likely to be entirely unknown to the vast majority of adults who encounter The Next Scientist.

     Adults are not the target audience here, however. Messner does not include or mention Albert Einstein, or Niels Bohr, or Antony van Leeuwenhoek (despite sourcing her book in part to a book about him), or Marie Curie, or Galileo, or many others who might be expected to make at least a brief appearance here. She does fit Charles Darwin in, but her real interest is in telling young readers who do not already know of the great scientific thinkers of the past that there is important science being done now and that they can do scientific work in the future if they are so inclined. The result is a narrative sequence that, for example, first mentions NASA’s Adriana Ocampo (born 1955); then turns to Maria Mitchell (1818-1889), “the first female astronomer in the United States”; and then notes rather blandly that “Johannes Kepler also grew up to be an astronomer.”

     This sort of equivalence of accomplishments and rewriting of history – or re-evaluating it, if you prefer – will matter more to knowledgeable adults than to the young readers at whom The Next Scientist is aimed. The point of Messner’s writing – and of the illustrations by Julia Kuo, which homogenize the scientists and their eras so as to make everyone in the book closely resemble its target contemporary readership – is to find ways to connect today’s young people with “great scientists” who look and behave just like them. So Messner and Kuo present Ayah Bdeir (born 1982), a Lebanese girl who became a computer engineer; zoologist Joan Procter (1897-1931), shown in a wheelchair with a reference to her “chronic ill-health”; animal behaviorist Temple Grandin (born 1947), “who is autistic”; Japan’s Hiroshi Amano (born 1960), who helped develop LEDs; Ellen Ochoa (born 1958), “the first Hispanic woman in space”; and so forth. The clear if unstated message is that people from anywhere and everywhere, with any childhood interests, of any race and color and national origin, can and have become “great scientists,” especially in the modern era.

     This is an admirably upbeat message for young people driven by an intense interest in the world around them – the one thing that all the people mentioned in this book share. If the equivalences and evaluations-of-importance in The Next Scientist are oversimplified and not entirely accurate, that is a function of the book’s intent to showcase the potential of a career in science for any child with an inclination toward it. And there is an unusual bonus on the book’s inside back cover, not long after an imaginary scene showing scientists of many places and time periods reading in a modern library: Messner provides a list of some of the favorite books of some scientists she has mentioned. Unlike traditional “further reading” suggestions (Messner offers some of those as well), the list of scientists’ own favorites really might encourage young readers who are interested in pursuing specific fields to do some additional reading. Biologist Rosemary Grant (born 1936), for example, likes Adventures with Rosalind by Charlotte Austen, while roboticist Vijay Kumar (born 1962) favors the Hercule Poirot series by Agatha Christie. If nothing else in this book serves to connect its youthful readers with the scientists briefly profiled within its pages, a similar taste in literature just might do it.

(++++) BACK TO BASICS

Handel: Messiah, 1741 original version. Kara McBain, soprano; Dianna Grabowski, alto; Dann Coakwell, tenor; David Grogan, bass; Dallas Bach Society Chorus and Orchestra conducted by James Richman. Onyx. $16.99 (2 CDs).

Beethoven: The Early String Quartets—Op. 18, Nos. 1-6. Calidore String Quartet (Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan, violins; Jeremy Barry, viola; Estelle Choi, cello). Signum Classics. $37.99 (3 CDs).

     There is only one Messiah in Christian theology, but there are many Messiahs. Indeed, Handel himself is known to have performed 10 different versions after the work’s première in Dublin in 1742. Oddly enough, none of those versions was the one that Handel initially created: after setting down the overall structure of the work, its sequences and vocal assignments and pacing and (to some extent) instrumentation, the composer – as was his consistent practice – modified the music, especially the vocal elements, according to each performance venue and the availability and varying skill levels of different singers and instrumental ensembles. After Baron Gottfried van Swieten commissioned Mozart to update four Handel oratorios, including Messiah, to later tastes, the première of the Mozart-modified version in 1789 led to a further proliferation of versions that has continued to the present day – which brings us to the very first Messiah of all, which Handel never performed or heard. James Richman and the Dallas Bach Society Chorus and Orchestra deliver a surpassingly beautiful and wonderfully proportioned performance of this carefully rediscovered/re-created Messiah, including four highly sensitive and fine-sounding soloists plus, where appropriate (and in conformity with Handel’s own practice), contributions by a boy soprano, 13-year-old Hayden Smith. Nothing on this two-CD Onyx release will shock or even very much surprise listeners familiar with any of the innumerable other authentic (in one way or another) recordings of Messiah. The chorus numbers 25, as does the orchestra – which tunes to Baroque standards and includes both harpsichord (played by Richman) and organ, as well as violone and theorbo. The use of repeats and ornamentation is in accord with the practice of Handel’s time and the composer’s usual approach to opera: Messiah is an oratorio that partakes of a great deal of Handel’s operatic expertise, which is one reason it is so effective. Unsurprisingly, many of the details that differ in this version from those in other forms of Messiah are mostly of scholarly interest, but even casual listeners will likely notice some matters that differ here from what is heard elsewhere, including the use of soprano rather than chorus in How beautiful are the feet, the full repeat in The Trumpet shall sound, and the lengthened alto-tenor O Death, where is thy Sting? More accurately, this last duet is not lengthened here but shortened in later versions of Messiah – and that is really the point, or one of the points, of this splendid recording: every Messiah with which listeners are already acquainted is derived from this 1741 template, including the many modified versions made by Handel himself, the Mozart modification that became the basis for so much that came forth in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, and the other versions intended to recapture the flavor of Handel’s masterpiece and present it to contemporary audiences using the instruments, tuning and vocal techniques of the composer’s time. If it is truer of Messiah than of much other great music that there is no “best” version available, it is also true that now, thanks to Richman and his uniformly excellent singers and instrumentalists, there is at last a way to hear the fount from which many, many renditions of Messiah flowed over the centuries, so that a listener’s cup runneth over with beauty and meaning.

     The time reversal of Beethoven’s string quartets by the Calidore Quartet involves not the discovery or rediscovery of original versions but the ensemble’s decision to present the music in reverse order: the group’s first Signum Classics release was of the late quartets, after which the middle quartets were presented, and now at last there is a three-CD set of the six early quartets, published in 1801 as Beethoven’s Op. 18. There is no particular reason for the Calidore players to have released their sequence this way, but it is certainly interesting to hear – after becoming familiar with the ensemble’s meticulous playing and convincing (if sometimes unusual) tempo choices in the late and middle works – how the players handle the comparative simplicity and frequent delicacy of the Mozart-and-Haydn-influenced Op. 18 works. These quartets were composed in the sequence 3, 1, 2, 5, 4 and 6, and it can be intriguing – in a tribute of sorts to the order of presentation of the Calidore Quartet’s Beethoven cycle – to listen to the group’s performances that way. No. 3 in D is gentle and lyrical throughout, with the performers keeping the interplay of themes and instrumental focus effective. No. 1 in F contains themes closely resembling ones used in a Haydn quartet and Mozart violin sonata, and here the players rightly focus on the emotional centrality of the slow movement (Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato, actually a revision by Beethoven of the original Adagio molto). No. 2 in G is the most Haydnesque of these quartets, and the Calidore Quartet plays it with all the grace and slight tinge of formality appropriate to a work that fairly closely resembles one by Beethoven’s teacher – although here too the Adagio cantabile slow movement (which, as with No. 1, is actually Beethoven’s replacement of an earlier version) has extra weight and is actually the work’s longest component. No. 5 in A is the strongest Mozart tribute in Beethoven’s Op. 18, being actually modeled on Mozart’s A major quartet, K. 464. Here too the Calidore players are sensitive to the longest movement, a theme-and-variations that stands in for the slow movement and is marked Andante cantabile. In the C minor No. 4, Beethoven is even less concerned with creating a strongly emotive slow movement, marking the second movement Andante scherzoso quasi Allegretto and giving it a fugal structure. This quartet is monothematic, a fact that puts extra pressure on performers to highlight resemblances among movements as well as to differentiate the forms in which the basic theme reappears. The C minor key (as in Symphony No. 5 and the Pathétique piano sonata, No. 8) also invites intensity and urgency in performance, which are appropriate in due measure but can easily be overdone – and sometimes are. To the credit of the Calidore players, they recognize that this quartet remains within the overall boundaries of Haydn and Mozart, albeit intensified, and they avoid the temptation to overplay or over-emotionalize the music even though they allow its frequently stormy character to come through clearly – resulting, ultimately, in a genuinely thrilling prestissimo coda in the finale. No. 6 in B-flat has important minor-key elements as well, despite its official home key; and it is in some ways the opposite of the quartets that downplay slow-movement emotionalism, containing not only an Adagio non troppo slow movement but also an Adagio introduction to the La Malinconia finale – a movement that Beethoven insisted be played “with the greatest delicacy.” The Calidore Quartet rises to this particular challenge as well as it rises to most of the challenges and complexities of the Beethoven quartets, producing a finale whose considerable contrasts of mood (melancholy elements, yes, but also a quick and light dancelike section) come through with both clarity and style. Whatever the merits of producing a Beethoven quartet cycle in reverse order may be – and whatever the rationale may have been for doing so – this conclusion of the Calidore Quartet’s sequence proves every bit as intelligently conceived and stylishly executed as the group’s handling of the middle and late quartets. The performances do not really show the early quartets as foundational to the later ones: the six of Op. 18 stand on their own more than they look forward to Beethoven’s later works in this form. These readings do, however, do a fine job of exploring the ways in which the Op. 18 quartets draw on earlier compositional models while nudging the quartet concept itself in new directions. The result is an impressive final entry in the Calidore Quartet’s Beethoven sequence, which takes its place among the most-thoughtful and best-played versions of this music available.