(++++) NATURALLY CONNECTED

The Magnificent Banyan and the Green Tong Lau. By Stephanie Ellen Sy. Illustrated by Ishita Jain. Kokila. $18.99. 

     Understanding starts with the title: exotic-sounding to Western children, clear and straightforward to those from (or familiar with) Hong Kong. A tong lau is essentially a tenement building, a mixed-use structure with shops at the bottom and living quarters above – a common enough arrangement worldwide, but not one known everywhere by this name. This tong lau just happens to be green – a nod to the “nature” focus of the book. And the everyday activities of the residents of the tong lau are, like the structure itself, common in country after country. But again, the specifics differ: different games are played indoors and outside, different prayers are offered, different groups are gathered for different purposes. The gatherings and games of children, however, are much the same everywhere. And so is the determined resilience of nature, especially when given a small boost from small humans. 

     Banyan trees are an example of determination as well – certainly the one in Stephanie Ellen Sy’s book is – but they are also an example of the uncaring nature of Nature. They are a form of strangler fig, which means they generally root and grow by slowly and inexorably destroying a host tree: they are, in effect if not in a formal biological sense, parasites. However, banyans themselves are so impressive in appearance that their life cycle tends to be ignored. Certainly it is in Sy’s book, where the banyan of the title begins life not by invading an existing tree but as a seed dropped by a bird into a crevice in the tong lau. Nobody notices; indeed, parenthetical comments along the lines of (“Nobody noticed”) are an important element of Sy’s narrative. The early part of the book depicts the banyan growing along and beside and in a sense within the tong lau, while the human inhabitants go about their daily lives – including, for three specific humans named Nick, Leon and Kitty, “running and sliding on the rooftop,” where the building has a combination playground, clothes-drying area and place for potted plants. 

     The banyan goes about its ever-quiet growth in text charmingly laid out to reflect the action – for example, the phrase “Down, down, down crept a spindly root” moves down the page on which it appears. And speaking of charm, Ishita Jain’s illustrations practically ooze it: they are beautiful watercolors that manage to give the book a fairy-tale atmosphere while also doing a wonderful job of depicting, realistically, the birds and squirrels and other wildlife that interact with the banyan. Humans interact with it, too, but that relationship is a more troubled one – and provides what conflict there is in this essentially conflict-free celebration of the intersection of the natural world with that of human life. What happens is that the banyan tree grows to a huge size – a truly lovely Jain illustration, so large that readers must rotate the book 90° to see it, shows it even taller than the entire tong lau. However, what was formerly unobtrusive has now become intrusive for many of the adults in the building, blocking the sky and muffling residents’ songs and generally interfering with the small routines and pleasantries of daily life. The grown-ups – identified only as “the Grandpa,” “the Uncles” and so forth, thus having less individuation than the three children – decide that the tree must come down so everything can return to its prior placidity. The children, however, have become used to playing in and around the tree, and each time the grown-ups appear with implements to cut the banyan, the kids give them a reason not to do so. It provides shade on a hot day, the children point out, and the hot and uncomfortable adults see that that is true, so everyone sits under the tree and has a picnic. Again and again the kids point out the good things the banyan does, until one night the area is hit by a typhoon that “howled like a hungry ghost” and seemed bent on destroying the entire tong lau. But Sy writes that the banyan wrapped its branches around the building – Jain’s illustration makes it seem to do so almost intentionally – and “tamed the typhoon’s fury,” winning over the Aunties, Grandma, Grandpa, and Uncles and giving adults, kids and tree the recipe for continuing coexistence amid mutual admiration and appreciation. 

     Sy’s story is based on an actual banyan tree in the heart of Hong Kong, but nothing here is presented as fact or history lesson or even almost-reality, except for the underlying truth – never stated explicitly – that human coexistence with nature is better for humans and nature alike than any attempt by people to direct, control and take power from the natural world. Yes, the message is simplistic, but after all, this is a picture book for young children, and what Sy teaches so delicately and Jain illustrates so winningly is that a cooperative mindset, a willingness to see the good in natural processes and not just the occasional inconvenience, is a positive attitude throughout life – and very definitely something worth cultivating.

(++++) TRIALS OF AN INNOVATOR

Field: Piano Concertos Nos. 1-7; Nocturnes Nos. 1-18; Sonatas Nos. 1-4; Rondo on Del Caro’s Hornpipe; Yearning Waltz; Variations on a Russian Folksong; Andante inédit. Paolo Restani, piano, with Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice conducted by Marco Guidarini; Tyler Hay, piano. Brilliant Classics. $43.99 (7 CDs). 

     John Field (1782-1837) was a man of multiple misfortunes, many of them self-inflicted. Musically, he had the misfortune to be born either too early or too late, depending on how one regards his style, which was more-or-less “proto-Romantic” and has led to his music sharing much the same neglect as that of Hummel (whom Field knew and with whom he performed in 1822). Field also had the misfortune to be highly influential, most famously through his development (sometimes wrongly considered the origination) of the piano nocturne, which Chopin raised to a level that quickly eclipsed Field’s. Chopin and other successors who drew on Field’s innovations tended to develop them to greater heights and thus to leave Field himself in their shadow. 

     Field also seems not to have been a particularly engaging or attractive human being, biographically speaking. Indolent, sloppy with record-keeping and inclined to avoid fulfilling agreements if he was not in the mood, he had the added misfortune of turning his back on the rising Germanic influence in music (especially disdaining most of Beethoven) and himself being a composer best described as Russo-Gaelic – an awkward combination of Field’s country of origin, Ireland, with the place in which he had his greatest successes that, for a time, made him quite well-to-do (a situation that did not last). 

     Field got to Russia through the not-so-good offices of Muzio Clementi (1752-1832), another musically transitional figure, whose main interest was not composition but the manufacture and sale of pianos – with Field being his student and later, for a time, through his performances, an effective salesman of the instruments. The notoriously miserly Clementi, considered a skinflint both in his own time and subsequently, almost abandoned Field before the two travelers reached Russia, but relented enough to get Field set up there, albeit in something close to abject poverty. The men nevertheless retained a rather uneasy alliance over time, with Field dedicating his Piano Concerto No. 3 to Clementi and eventually serving as a pallbearer at Clementi’s funeral. 

     The extent to which Field’s music deserves to be rescued from obscurity has been debatable for years, and it is a real pleasure for listeners to have a chance to judge it for themselves through a very fine Brilliant Classics release of all the Field piano concertos and nocturnes, plus some solo-piano miscellany. The concertos are handled very ably indeed by Paolo Restani and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice under Marco Guidarini, in performances dating to the 2007-2008 time frame. It should be noted at the outset that these are not historically informed readings: in particular, the use of a Steinway Model D, the model most favored by so many contemporary pianists, is a poor choice for Field’s concertos – a six-octave Clementi instrument would serve the music much better in terms of the balance between soloist and ensemble, which is distinctly overweighted toward the piano in these performances. The actual playing here, though, is very effective even if it is not idiomatic. Field’s concertos manage to sound post-Mozartean without being fully in the Romantic (much less Beethovenian) idiom, and they are all very noticeably front-weighted. In Nos. 1 and 3 (the second to be written), the first movement is almost as long as the second and third put together; in Nos. 2 and 4, the first movement is longer than the other two together; and in Nos. 5 and 6, the first movement is almost twice as long as the others combined. (No. 7 is in only two movements; and No. 3, originally also written in two, has for many years – including in this recording – had a version of Field’s Nocturne No. 2 interpolated as a slow movement.) There is more a sense of musical extension than of genuine grandeur in the very long, frequently discursive opening movements, portions of which tend to meander here and there; but the piano writing is very effective throughout, and the concertos have decidedly different characters. Most are comparatively upbeat except for well-planned but generally short lyrical sections and brief slow movements. Only No. 7 is in a minor key (C minor). Nos. 1, 3 and 4 are in E-flat; Nos. 5 and 6 are in C; and No. 2 (written third) is in A-flat. The oddest is No. 5, written by Field as a can-you-top-this response to a very popular 1799 concerto by Daniel Gottlieb Steibelt (1765-1823), with whom Field had a rather friendly rivalry. Steibelt’s concerto, his third, featured a movement called L’orage (“The Storm”), whose tone-painting Field decided to outdo: his No. 5, L’Incendie par l’Orage (“The Fire Caused by the Storm”) goes well beyond Steibelt. All three movements of Field’s concerto are in C; the first features thunder (possibly influenced by Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6) and then highly melodramatic sound effects that climax with a crash on the tam-tam – an instrument never before used in a piano concerto and not to reappear until the time of Ravel and Gershwin. 

     Field’s concertos are best heard one at a time rather than in a group: Restani’s generally light touch helps make up for the over-sonorous piano, but the works’ effect comes through better when each is listened to on its own. And there are some occasions, such as the piano’s first entry in No. 3, when Restani cannot resist the impulse to make full use of the Steinway’s power – to the music’s detriment. This release does provide a pleasant way to immerse oneself in Field without feeling the need to listen to concerto after concerto: indulge in between the piano-and-orchestra works in some listening to ones for piano solo. These are played by Tyler Hay and were recorded more recently: the Nocturnes in 2023 and the remaining solo-piano works in 2025. Heard on their own and without invidious comparisons with Chopin’s, Field’s Nocturnes are very enjoyable character pieces, a bit beyond “salon music” and laced with delicacy, expressive lyricism and captivating charm. Ranging in length from two minutes to 11, they are harmonically refined, thoroughly expressive, and captivating in their individual focuses on drifting dreams and mild melancholy. Hay plays them without fussiness and without overdoing their mostly surface-level (if sincere) emotive communication, producing a sense of soothing sound that makes it easy to see why these works so attracted not only Chopin but also Liszt and many others. 

     The seventh CD in this collection is best regarded as miscellany or an appendix. Field’s four piano sonatas, three written for his then-teacher Clementi and the fourth a decade later but with essentially the same approach, are two-movement works that come across as being études or sonatinas rather than larger, full-scale sonatas. Four small musical palate cleansers are scattered among the sonatas here. Rondo on Del Caro’s Hornpipe is an unusual-for-Field engagement with Irish music and a suitable encore for any Field recital. Variations on a Russian Folksong brings in the other side of Field’s musical personality, transforming a melancholic tune into something genuinely poetic. And the Yearning Waltz and Andante inédit are unashamed salon pieces: pleasant, short (the waltz lasts barely 90 seconds), enjoyable miniatures of no great consequence. As for whether or not Field himself was or was not a consequential composer: this very extensive collation of his major works, and some minor ones, provides ample opportunity for listeners to engage with his musical worldview and make up their own minds about an apt place for him in the compositional firmament.

(+++) JUST BE CAUSE

Music by Ukrainian Composers. Solomiya Ivakhiv, violin; INSO-Lviv (Symphony Orchestra of Lviv National Philharmonic) conducted by Roman Kreslenko; Lviv National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serhii Khorovets. Naxos. $19.99. 

Juhi Bansal: Love, Loss, and Exile; Cecilia Livingston: Salt Air; Jens Ibsen: Why won’t you let me look right at you?; Jodi Goble: Night-time in the Fourth Trimester; Jasmine Arielle Barnes: The Original Rebellion. Laura Strickling, soprano; Joy Schreier, piano; Carrie Bean Stute, cello. Sono Luminus. $15.99. 

     There is nothing new about music being used to underline a cause (bagpipes were classified as a weapon of war in 1746); to be created specifically to forward one (La Marseillaise by Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle was commissioned in 1792 by the mayor of Strasbourg [not Marseille] after France declared war on Austria); or to celebrate a specific occasion (Beethoven’s Der glorreiche Augenblick for the Congress of Vienna in 1814). Nor is there anything recent in the notion of repurposing existing music for a new cause of some sort (The Star-Spangled Banner from John Stafford Smith’s drinking song, To Anacreon in Heaven). But nowadays there is an increasing tendency to take music that was never intended as “cause” material and enlist it in the service of one or another sociopolitical viewpoint. Whatever the sincerity of the artists who do this, the value of the approach tends to undermine the purely musical qualities of the pieces by putting the works at the service of a purpose for which they were never intended. And recordings of those works are self-limited in audience reach, since they are designed for people who already support the underlying cause or may be recruited to it – or at least to solidarity with it – by the simple and possibly but not necessarily sincere expedient of spending money on a cause-focused recording. So a new Naxos CD featuring violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv and consisting entirely of world première recordings is intended not so much to explicate Ukrainian classical music as to focus listeners’ attention on the nation’s circumstances since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. Hence the disc’s title, Music of Resilience. But resilience is not the actual purpose of all the works here: some were indeed written in 2022 or since then, but others long predate the Russian invasion, and their connection to the “resilience” concept is at best forced. Ukrainian history is complex: Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2, which is packed with Ukrainian folk themes, is traditionally called the “Little Russian” because of the historical name of Ukraine; but nowadays some commentators insist on calling it the “Ukrainian” even though in 1872, when Tchaikovsky wrote most of the symphony, Kamianka (the town where he vacationed and composed, called Kamenka at that time) was within the Russian Empire. So matters are less straightforward than advocates of all sorts want them to be. It is therefore fair and, one could argue, desirable to evaluate discs such as Ivakhiv’s from a strictly musical standpoint – on which basis the CD contains some interesting if not entirely compelling material, notably works that are folk-inflected rather than cause-driven. Autumn Song is the shortest and oldest work here, dating to 1916 and composed by Osyp Zalesky (1892-1984) – played here in a 2024 violin-and-orchestra version by Bohdana Froylak (born 1968). It is sweet, charming and unpretentious. Another older work on the disc is Ukrainian Rhapsody No. 1 (1956) by Roman Prydatkevych (1895-1980), also arranged by Froylak, whose three movements reflect pervasive melancholy – even in the concluding Dance, whose peppy tempo contrasts with its mostly doleful melodic environment. Froylak’s own Nocturne of 2008 – in yet another violin-and-orchestra arrangement – appears here as well, sounding more mournful than restful in Ivakhiv’s elegant but rather dour performance. In general, the music here is on the monochromatic side emotionally, pensive when not overtly mournful, likely selected on just that basis to support the “cause” focus of the CD. Bucha.Lacrimosa (2022) by Victoria Vita Pohlevá (born 1962) is interestingly orchestrated and more dramatic than most of these works, but emotionally overstated and over-obvious in the differentiation between its quiet opening and closing and its intense middle. Ex Libris (1993) by Hanna Havrylets (1958-2022) consists of four short movements for solo violin that effectively explore the instrument’s range and emotional capabilities, coming across as essentially a set of études. There are two works here by Bohdan Kryvopust (born 1975): On the River (2024), featuring gentle melodic flow, and the four-movement Ukrainian Suite (2024/2025), an impressionistic/illustrative work that connects explicitly with the Russian invasion (its hesitant, uncertain third movement is called When I Got My Draft Notice) and concludes with a virtuosic but far from upbeat movement simply called Dance. The CD itself ends with a 2014 work by Yuriy Shevchenko (1953-2022) called We Do Exist! (We Are!). Although it significantly predates the Russian invasion, its pervasive melancholy and mournful character, emphasized (perhaps even over-emphasized) in Ivakhiv’s playing, seems reflective of a depressive mood that speaks less of resilience than of endurance through hardship. The work’s quiet fade-out ending seems intended to question how much more resilience is called for in Ukraine – or at least that is the intent of the performers, if not of the composer. The disc is very well played – the fact that it is idiomatic and sensitive to nuance almost goes without saying – but it is unlikely to reach out to music lovers as music. Its entire aim is solidarity with a nation undergoing massive depredations, and it is a recording for people fully in tune (so to speak) with the performers’ commitment to endurance through tremendous hardship. 

     The first work on a new Sono Luminus CD featuring soprano Laura Strickling is also a piece with a specific geopolitical focus: Juhi Bansal’s Love, Loss, and Exile sets poems by anonymous girls from Afghanistan and is intended to reflect the conditions there since the chaotic American withdrawal in 2021 and the resumption of rule by the Taliban. Uniformly bleak, verging on the hopeless, the songs evoke an inner landscape of despair that makes the five-song cycle difficult to listen to from start to finish despite (or because of) the sensitivity of Strickling’s vocal delivery and the spare and careful backup of pianist Joy Schreier and cellist Carrie Bean Stute. The overt dissonances within the songs are less effective than the portions possessing a degree of lyricism that contrasts tellingly with the emotions being expressed. The title of this “cause” CD is Legends: Rebellion, and it is offered as a focus not on a specific place – its initial foray into Afghanistan notwithstanding – but as a sociopolitical commentary on women’s roles and women’s concerns. This is scarcely a groundbreaking focus, and it is fair to ask whether the disc brings anything new to it. The fair answer is “not much” philosophically or argumentatively – so the followup question is whether the music as music will attract audiences beyond those who either know the composers represented here or are predisposed by the CD’s foundational reason for being to listen to it uncritically. Aside from Bansal’s work, everything here is only for voice and piano; and each piece has a different orientation as well as a different composer. Cecilia Livingston’s Salt Air explores the thoughts of three mythic female characters: Kalypso, Circe, and Penelope. The focus is always on the women as positive characters: Circe, for instance, is not a villain transforming men into beasts but a captive of the system within which she lives – and which she, in her own way, defies. Jens Ibsen approaches not Homer but Schubert in Why won’t you let me look right at you? Again this is about power, in this case the maiden from Death and the Maiden asserting hers in the face of the ultimate conqueror of all. Jodi Goble’s five-song cycle Night-time in the Fourth Trimester is a reconsideration of motherhood, seen through the lens of exhaustion. More effective in its mixture of styles and vocal forms than the other works on the CD – all of which are at pains to straddle “art song” and other milieux – Goble’s cycle is considerably more prosaic verbally than musically (“Feeding this fragile creature. / While I scroll and refresh.”) The intent appears to be a correction of idealized concepts of motherhood; the actuality that comes through is one of resentment of the fact that being a mother is not easy – a kind of “well, duh” discovery. The CD ends with Jasmine Arielle Barnes’ The Original Rebellion, using words from a social-media poem that is mostly about what “they say” about hate and how wrong those comments are, since “Love is the original rebellion.” The tendency to believe that everything proclaimed on social media is a grand discovery rather than a new and often thoroughly mundane iteration of long-held feelings or beliefs looms large here, with Strickling delivering, with intended intensity, lines such as “I have seen light bust the darkness” and “even wolves raise their young.” Obviousness and sentimentality aside, the work is simply not convincing musically – but that is neither its point nor, in the main, the point of the other music here. The underlying cause is what matters: belief in and adherence to it, not efforts at convincing non-adherents, will attract what audience this disc will engage. Like contemporary “cause” recordings in general, this one is intended not to reach out but to reaffirm the rightness of the already formed thoughts, feelings and beliefs of a particular “in crowd.”

(++++) HARDY PERENNIALS

Olive Editions, 2026: Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank; Island by Aldous Huxley; The Princess Bride by William Goldman; Guard! Guards! By Terry Pratchett; Changing Planes by Ursula K. Le Guin; Highfire by Eoin Colfer; The Hidden Palace by Helene Wecker; The World Wasn’t Ready for You by Justin C. Key. Harper Perennial. $12 each. 

     The mass-market paperback may be dying – unit sales fell from 131 million in 2004 to 21 million in 2024 – and the original 1939 Pocket Books concept of manufacturing books in a smaller size, gluing the spines instead of stitching them, and selling them through nontraditional channels such as drugstores and supermarket racks has been subsumed within a digital culture that has people interested in less-pricey reading (when they read at all) using their phone screens or e-readers (or simply turning to audiobooks). But publishing creativity has not, thank goodness, disappeared, and if pocket-sized books are on the way out, the somewhat larger trade paperbacks (including many that are not graphic novels) remain a substantial force. And not just ones ghostwritten by the celebrity-of-the-day and intended for parasocial consumption. There are some genuine works of literature being offered in creatively packaged and marketed ways, a particularly good example being the long-running Olive Editions series from HarperCollins. 

     This grouping of releases has been around in various forms since 2008, and in its current form of eight books per year since 2014 (except for 2023). The books, re-releases all, are newly packaged with lookalike spines featuring multiple horizontal lines as a design element, newly produced covers (designed for 2026 by Milan Bozic and illustrated by Ibrahim Rayintakath) that are more-or-less parallel in appearance while maintaining some distinctive elements from volume to volume, an easy-to-read interior font, and a wraparound color scheme that gives each book a well-finished look. This has the interesting effect of uniting works that are very disparate indeed, differing in time period, topics, authorial familiarity and length (the 2026 books range from 238 to 518 pages). 

     The Olive Editions line seems to feel its way anew every year toward intriguing mixtures. One year, 2018, brought nothing but classics: Little Women, Frankenstein, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights and Gulliver’s Travels. Other years have brought works by authors with something in common – Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy in 2016. Some years have presented books that were subsequently repeated: Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon in 2015 and again this year. Some authors have appeared multiple times: Ursula K. Le Guin in 2015, 2022 and again this year, Helene Wecker in 2020 and again this year, Aldous Huxley in 2010, 2022, 2025 and now in 2026. Other creators are just showing up: Terry Pratchett among the 2026 books. There is probably both rhyme and reason to all this, but the overall feeling is one of pleasant experimentation, and if the mixture does not really necessitate buying all eight books in each year’s issuance (although HarperCollins would be delighted if you did so), it does invite readers to think about what, if anything, the books chosen in a particular year have in common that may have led to their being selected together. 

     In truth, the only commonality among the books may be that they exist in the HarperCollins backlist and someone thinks they have a shot at carving out an audience of new readers – or ones seeking to re-explore a book they used to know – if they are nicely packaged and priced at a reasonable-for-today $12 apiece (the days of 25¢ Pocket Books are long, long gone). The 2026 crop of releases is particularly well diversified by topics and original publication dates: Alas, Babylon dates to 1959, Island to 1962, The Princess Bride to 1973, Guards! Guards! to 1989, Changing Planes to 2003, Highfire to 2020, The Hidden Palace to 2021, and The World Wasn’t Ready for You to 2023. A predisposition to the fantastic unites the books, but their styles and methods of presentation (such as novel vs. story collection) differ, and so does their placement within authors’ sequences: The Hidden Palace is a sequel to The Golem and the Jinni, offered as one of the 2020 Olive Editions, and this year’s Pratchett book is actually the eighth in his Discworld series – a sequence that, as readers familiar with it know, is best read in consecutive order except when it is best read in a completely arbitrary arrangement. 

     Each of these Harper Perennial books includes a list of other works by the same author, a useful feature for anyone who may encounter a writer for the first time in one of the Olive Editions and become curious about what else the same person produced (the Pratchett list runs to two pages plus a footnote saying a complete list may be found online). There remains something distinct and distinctly enjoyable about engaging with the thoughts of someone you will never know (the original, pre-social-media version of being parasocial) using ink-and-paper mode rather than yet another screen to scroll. The Olive Editions consistently offer books that, whatever else they may do, induce the reader to think, to visit another world (or a variant on this one, which amounts to much the same thing) for a certain period of time, engaging one’s mind, thoughts and feelings in sometimes-unsurprising, sometimes-unexpected ways. Books remain remarkable gateways to what could be but is not, and the Olive Editions are, consistently and collectively, a gentle and understanding gatekeeper.