(++++) CHILDREN (AND ADULTS) OF THE NIGHT

Mr. Chow’s Night Market. By Emily Sun Li. Illustrated by Yu Ting Cheng. Penguin Workshop. $19.99. 

     It is difficult to convey just how clever the many clevernesses are in Mr. Chow’s Night Market. You have to see them to believe them – which is the point, or part of it. Emily Sun Li beautifully designs a story that rests on the notion of “day people” vs. “night people” and only at the end turns out to rest as well on a fascinating real-world element of life in Taiwan. Yu Ting Cheng delightfully illustrates the narrative in a way that not only brings the basic story to life but also enhances it by expanding characters and character traits to which the author never refers but that, once seen, appear absolutely integral to the book and indicate that the whole thing would be a significantly lesser experience without them. The result is a truly outstanding collaboration and a tale that carries surprises far from its underlying, fairly mundane day-vs.-night underpinning – right to a final page revealing that even the characters’ names are carefully created to become an expanded element of enjoyment. 

     It all starts with Mr. Chow – whose name, it is revealed at the back of the book, derives from the Mandarin Chinese word for “supermarket.” He runs a store called “Trader Chow’s,” an amusing play on “Trader Joe’s” in addition to an apt designation in and of itself. Being a night owl, Mr. Chow has to drag himself to work every morning, and the first part of the book shows him struggling to manage the expected and necessary elements of shopkeeping, getting into tiredness-related trouble and largely ignoring his grandchildren, who really want to help him. The middle section of the book has Mr. Chow talking with his neighbors (all of whose names also derive from suitable Mandarin Chinese words) about his difficulty getting going in the morning and his troubles keeping the supermarket running smoothly. The selection of neighbors is one of the many carefully crafted and clever elements of Mr. Chow’s Night Market: they are a baker who works super-early, a nurse whose services may be needed anytime during the day or night, and a movie-theater usher whose job requires availability whenever showings of films occur. 

     Clearly Mr. Chow can learn a lesson from these variously time-sensitive people and jobs; and he does, beginning a frenzy of nighttime activity – when he is at his best – that transforms his supermarket into one that will open after dark. And now his grandchildren, always eager to help, are welcome to do so – and they do, cementing the neighborhood-and-family focus of the entire book. 

     Changes complete – including the setup of food stalls outside the main supermarket building – Mr. Chow and his grandchildren wait to see what will happen when people discover the “night market.” They do not have to wait long: a trickle of curiosity turns into a river and, soon enough, “an ocean of children and families,” as the supermarket and its surrounding area become a gathering place for the entire community – not only a place to buy things but also a nighttime communal experience to be enjoyed by everyone. 

     One of the many delights of the book is the author’s end note explaining the foundation of the story: a real “first night market in Taiwan” that dates to 1899, still operates today, and is now just one of many such establishments. But that is not all: real Taiwanese night markets do not feature adorably sleepy pomelos, dozing turnips, happy and bright-eyed crabs, or the other characters scattered about Mr. Chow’s Night Market and lending every page, every bit of verbiage, an element of delight and gentle fantasy. Indeed, the only two-page spread in the book with no words is one of its highlights: early on, Mr. Chow’s tiredness and attempts to get everything done himself while struggling to stay alert result in a tremendously chaotic and very funny mess that is exceptionally amusing in part because the fresh produce, the prepared snacks, the shopping carts, the food containers, even the overhead lightbulb are drawn with big eyes and expressive faces that clearly reflect the alarm they all feel as Mr. Chow’s unfortunate experience reverberates throughout the store. The detail of the illustrations, which were done with pencil and paper as well as software, is simply delightful: even the anthropomorphically personified sun and moon, unsurprising background characters in books such as this one, have wonderfully rendered, individualized personas that contribute to the overall atmosphere. Mr. Chow’s Night Market succeeds on all levels: story, illustrations, real-world tie-ins, and enough detail both in narrative and in pictures so that children will discover new forms of enjoyment on every reading of the book, including the many re-readings it will deservedly receive.

(++++) MAJORLY MINOR

Carl Czerny: Piano Music, Volume One—L’Écho des Alpes Suisses, Livre 2 No. 1; Impromptu brillant sur un thème national Suisse; Impromptu sentimental sur le thème ‘O nume benefico’ de l’opera La Gazza ladra, de Rossini; Hommage aux Dames—No. 2; Fantaisie sur des Mélodies de Beethoven. Jingshu Zhao, piano. Toccata Classics. $20.99. 

Carl Czerny: Piano Music, Volume Two—Grandes Variations brillantes et concertantes pour deux Pianofortes sur un Thème favori de l’Opéra Montecchi e Capuleti; Rondo Brillant for piano duet, Op. 321; Duo Brillant et Concertant pour Deux Pianos, Op. 358; Fantaisie et Variations à Quatre Mains sur l’Opéra de Bellini “I Puritani.” Jingshu Zhao and Haoyue Liang, piano. Toccata Classics. $20.99. 

     Among mostly forgotten composers, Carl Czerny (1791-1857) remains ironically well-remembered – not for his very extensive production of music of all sorts for salons and concert halls but for his specifically pedagogical creations, which piano students still use to this day. Ironically, those learning exercises have led to dismissal of any claim that Czerny might otherwise have had to being a composer of some stature, reducing him to a skilled but limited teacher creating mostly forgettable music designed to help budding pianists flower more fully. 

     Liszt and Beethoven knew better. Liszt was one of Czerny’s students, as Czerny himself was taught by Beethoven. And when Liszt produced the remarkable tour de force called Hexameron, consisting of variations on the march from Bellini’s I Puritani by six great pianists including Liszt himself, Czerny was one of the other five chosen (the remaining ones being Thalberg, Pixis, Herz, and Chopin). 

     On the face of it, it is hard to believe that a composer with more than a thousand works to his credit – 861 with opus numbers plus many unpublished, and with many of the numbered works containing multiple unrelated pieces that could easily have opus numbers of their own – could have produced little beyond repetitive and trivial, if well-meaning, practice material. But that is the underlying assumption about Czerny, to such an extent that Jingshu Zhao’s two Toccata Classics volumes of Czerny’s works for solo and dual pianos and piano four hands contain nine items of which not a single one has ever been recorded before. Among composers ripe for rediscovery, Czerny is riper than most. 

     This is not to say, on the basis of these very-well-played CDs, that Czerny comes across as an unaccountably neglected pianistic giant such as Alkan, who was in that unenviable position until he was “rediscovered” in the last few decades. The Czerny pieces on these discs can reasonably be thought of as, by and large, salon pleasantries – performative selections from the composer’s near-inexhaustible supply. The first two solo works in Volume One, both based on themes from or associated with Switzerland, show this clearly. The first is labeled Introduction & Variations brillantes sur l’air Suisse Alles liebt/Tout aime, the word brillant being one that occurs again and again in Czerny’s virtuoso piano music – and is a key to both his intent and his style in these pieces. Within this specific work, which includes an introduction, statement of the theme, five variations, and a finale, the word brillante appears in two tempo markings for elements of the piece in addition to being used in the overall title. There is no attempt at profundity anywhere: two sections labeled Andante sostenuto have that marking for tempo contrast, not anything approaching seriousness, while the Molto agitato variation is bouncy, not agitated in any negative sense or, indeed, in any emotional way at all. The second Swiss-focused item offered here features brief forays into more-distant keys, with pleasant tempo and dynamic contrasts throughout – everything in its place and everything designed for listeners’ pleasure. Arpeggios and other note cascades abound, and delicacy contrasts with drama in the context of a sure command of the entire keyboard. 

     The Czerny impromptu on an aria from La Gazza ladra is sentimental for sure, as its title indicates, and sustains a pleasantly rocking motion almost throughout. The excerpt from Hommage aux Dames is labeled Élegantine ou Rondeau brillant and is not so much elegant as it is a display piece that is indeed filled with pianistic brilliance – which flows nicely into gentler passages. The conclusion is “tossed off” virtuosically to a particularly high degree. And then, last on this disc, Zhao offers one Czerny work with pretensions to somewhat more-serious consideration – although quite without pretentiousness. The Beethoven fantasy opens with more seriousness than the other works on the CD, retaining a darker coloration and some drama almost throughout. It is filled with extended slower passages – unusual for these works – and the decorations and virtuoso material arise from the more-majestic thematic elements instead of sounding tacked-on or created purely for display purposes. In this fantasy, Czerny uses the piano’s lower register to a greater extent than in the other pieces Zhao plays – most of the time, he favors the sounds of higher notes for their lighter weight and aspirations to delicacy. Although not exactly a tribute to his onetime teacher, this Beethoven-focused Czerny work is evidence both of the warm regard that the mature Czerny retained for his tutor and of Czerny’s ability to wear a somewhat more-substantial stylistic cloak than usual on suitable occasions. 

     For the second volume of these world première recordings, Zhao is joined by Haoyue Liang for some interesting demonstrations of the similarities and differences between music for piano four hands, on the one hand (so to speak), and for two pianos. Czerny wrote a considerable amount in both forms, with the two-piano music tending to be grander in scale and more oriented toward public performance, while the four-hands-on-one-keyboard works are inclined to less drama and a smaller scale. Thus, Czerny’s variations on a theme from Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi (the names of the opera’s title are reversed in the title of the piano piece) runs a substantial 25 minutes, and the Op. 358 Duo Brillant (that word again!) lasts even longer, nearly half an hour. The two piano-four-hands pieces on the disc run only about seven minutes and a bit less than 15, respectively. 

     What is intriguing about all four of these offerings is the skill with which Czerny spreads pianistic duties between the two performers and the care with which he designates tempo and emotional indications. The word calando (“calming down,” meaning reducing both tempo and volume) appears frequently; unsurprisingly, so do words including brillante (or brillant), dolce, vivacità, leggiermente, delicatezza, espressivo, and so forth. Czerny had clear (and clearly communicated) ideas about the way these pieces should sound, but he also left plenty of interpretative room for the two performers to showcase their respective virtuosic abilities. Zhao and Liang do just that, operating as an efficient performing duo while trading off or mutually engaging in the works’ virtuosic complementarity and their moments of emotional communicativeness (surface-level but effectively transmitted). These performers are not as tight-knit as the best duo pianists can be – there is no sense that each is almost intuitively tuned into the other’s thinking or that both can meld their respective parts effortlessly. Instead, there is something a bit studied in these performances, a sense more of knowing the music than of feeling it. To be sure, though, there is no great depth of feeling to be had in these works, and there is nothing wrong with letting Czerny’s propensity for teaching pianism in his other works carry across, to some extent, to these more-substantial pieces. Hopefully there will be more volumes of Czerny’s concert and salon pieces to come, from these pianists and others – because these discs show clearly that there is a treasure trove of Czerny piano music just waiting to be rediscovered and used for its primary purpose, which is a mix of pleasurable listening and challenging performance requirements. And if the gems mined from Czerny’s oeuvre turn out to be only semi-precious, as is the case for all the pieces on these discs, it is worth remembering that semi-precious stones have beauties all their own, and tend to be more readily accessible than more-rarefied jewels.

(++++) PAGING AMUSEMENTS

Bookie & Cookie Turn the Page. By Blanca Gómez. Rocky Pond Books. $18.99. 

     Optimist/pessimist. Glass half full/glass half empty. Upbeat/downbeat. Positive/negative. There are all sorts of ways to formulate the eternal back-and-forth between “always look on the bright side of life” and “but what about the dark side?” But few of those formulations are as amusingly nonjudgmental – and educational – as the ones Blanca Gómez creates in her stories about Bookie and Cookie. 

     Bookie & Cookie Turn the Page is the second of these, and like the original Bookie & Cookie, it builds on the clever premise that the characters are aware that they are in a book – and behave accordingly. This time, the two huge-circle-headed best friends start out on a completely blank page of the book, and are fully aware of how dull their environment is. Time to turn the page! That is the premise – one that starts ever-optimistic Bookie anticipating all the neat things that could show up on the next page, while always-pessimistic Cookie considers all the difficulties that might lurk just one page ahead. 

     What Gómez does extremely cleverly is to imagine how these cartoon characters might themselves draw the scenes that they imagine as the book goes on. Bookie anticipates turning the page to find “a bright sunny day,” and lo and behold, there is a two-page spread as Bookie might draw it, with a smiling sun (wearing Bookie-style eyeglasses), birds flying and happily singing, colorful flowers all about, and Bookie playing badminton with Cookie. The difference between Bookie drawn by Gómez and Bookie “drawn by Bookie” is especially clever and amusing. 

     And then readers turn the page to see what Cookie is imagining and “drawing,” in the form of “an awful stormy day,” with rain pouring so hard that a wall poster indicates that the planned “Cookie Picnic at the Park” has had to be canceled. Dark clouds, lightning, scowling faces, inside-out umbrellas, leaves blowing everywhere – oh, what a mess if Bookie and Cookie turn the page and Cookie turns out to be right! 

     The whole book proceeds along these lines. Bookie’s response to Cookie’s worries about a stormy day is to imagine meeting a new friend in the storm – one with a brightly colored umbrella that is big enough for all three kids. But, worries Cookie, what if she isn’t really a friend but turns out to be “someone naughty who wants to splash us?” Bookie refuses to take the bait – optimists will not be turned negative – and says maybe the newly discovered friend will know where all three kids can shelter from the storm in a bakery “and eat lots of cookies!” Cookie does not buy it – pessimists will not be turned positive – and says that even if the imagined new friend takes them to a cookie bakery, she may grab all the cookies for herself and refuse to share. 

     The “what if” scenarios continue page after page, and the blurring of Bookie’s and Cookie’s “reality” with their imagination continues as the imagined new friend becomes more and more real – that is, as real as Bookie and Cookie themselves are. Bookie & Cookie Turn the Page is unceasingly inventive at bringing kids into the Bookie-and-Cookie world while expanding that world’s dimensions, and the increasingly fantastical pages “drawn” by the title characters become more and more complex and amusing as the story goes on. An imagined circus parade “drawn” by Bookie, with all three friends marching in it (Bookie carrying a pennant that says “READ”), leads to a Cookie-imagined-and-drawn traffic jam that is upsetting to drivers including a giraffe, a hat-wearing fish, a peach, a penguin, a frowning emoji wearing a birthday-party hat, and more. Later there are imagined outdoor scenes packed with butterflies or mosquitoes, depending on which character is thinking them up. There is even a wonderful secret library that may, however, contain a book-gobbling monster. 

     The ultimate imagining here has Bookie thinking of a potential “page full of magic and wonder,” while Cookie worries about “a dull blank page full of nothing” – which, readers will recall even before Bookie reminds them, is where this whole story started. And that “reality” makes Cookie ready, at last, to turn the page – to a final scene packed with snippets of previously imagined locations and characters, all now drawn in the Gómez style rather than the imagined-by-the-characters one. This final two-page illustration, complete with the “library monster” happily reading a book to a circle of attentive kids and some of the “traffic-jam” drivers as the new-found friend brings Bookie and Cookie a piled-high platter of cookies, is an absolutely perfect ending for Bookie & Cookie Turn the Page – except that it is not the end. Not quite. Gómez reserves the very, very last page of the book for one showing the friends – three of them now – walking along, holding hands, and considering turning another page. That is an invitation to future adventures that will be enormously attractive not only to Bookie and Cookie and their new friend but also to every child (and probably every adult) lucky enough to have gone on this more-or-less imaginary journey through the bright and not-so-bright realms of the land of what-if.

(++++) ROADS LESS TRAVELED

Charles-Valentin Alkan: Complete Organ Works, Volume 1—11 Grand Préludes and Transcription of Handel’s Messiah; Messiah Recitative and Arioso; Petits préludes sur les huit gammes du plainchant; Impromptu on Luther’s “Un Fort Rempart Est Notre Dieu.” Joseph Nolan, organ. Signum Classics. $19.99. 

Rameau: Le Berger fidèle; Handel: Mi palpita il cor; Albinoni: Sonata in C for Oboe and Continuo; Thomas-Louis Bourgeois: Diane et Endimion; D. Scarlatti: Sonata in D minor; Louis-Antoine Lefebvre: Le Lever de l’Aurore. Hannah De Priest, soprano; Les Délices (Debra Nagy, baroque oboe and director; Shelby Yamin and Kako Boga, violins; Rebecca Landell, cello and viola da gamba; Mark Edwards, harpsichord). AVIE. $19.99. 

Poptimism. Vesna Duo (Liana Pailodze Harron, piano; Ksenija Komljenović, percussion). UNCSA Media. $7.99. 

     Like his contemporary and musical if not geographical compatriot, Franz Liszt, Charles-Valentin Alkan was renowned for his prodigious, seemingly almost supernatural pianistic virtuosity and for composing music whose complexity defied the capabilities of pretty much every performer except himself. Also like Liszt, Alkan was a keyboard virtuoso, not a pianist alone, performing extensively not only on piano but also on organ, and, yet again like Liszt, composing a significant body of work for that instrument. Indeed, Alkan in one sense went beyond Liszt, for he was also strongly involved in and acclaimed for his playing on and composing for the pedal piano, a now-obsolete instrument equipped with an organ-like pedalboard on which the performer plays lower notes, much as is done on the organ. Alkan’s piano music has been moving into mainstream performance by modern virtuosi for several decades now, but his works for organ and/or pedal piano (sometimes designated by him as being for one instrument or the other) remain almost wholly unknown. So the start of a planned sequence of Alkan’s complete organ music on the Signum Classics label, featuring Joseph Nolan, is a genuine rarity and would be at least a fascinating curiosity if the music were straightforward. But nothing in Alkan is ordinary, and the first Nolan volume clearly showcases compositions of considerable musical interest, exceptional (and unsurprising) difficulty, and a preoccupation with the religious themes that recur throughout Alkan’s oeuvre (the fact that his 30-year labor-of-love translation of the entire Bible from its original languages into French appears to have been permanently lost is a real tragedy, one of several involving Alkan). All the works performed on this first disc by Nolan – all handled by him with skill and what appears to be intuitive understanding of Alkan’s style – have religious tie-ins. The 11 Grand Préludes and Transcription of Handel’s Messiah are expansive and contemplative pieces, not simple transcriptions of music from the oratorio (notwithstanding the title of this work). Conflating and inflating Handel’s original material, Alkan turns elements of Messiah into grand studies of harmony and counterpoint that pull additional meaning and emotion from a work already packed with both. The fourth piece, marked Moderatamente, is especially intense and dramatic; the ninth and longest, Langsam, is wonderfully expressive and emotive; and the final two, Scherzando and Lento, provide exceptionally well-thought-out contrast between some lighter (but still foundationally serious) material and some that is conclusively thoughtful and contemplative. Alkan’s transcription of Thy rebuke hath broken His heart and Behold, and see, given the title Messiah Recitative and Arioso, is separate from the 11 Grand Préludes but clearly partakes of their sensibilities, further showing the extent to which Alkan – who was Jewish and said he believed that only a Jew could adequately translate the New Testament – absorbed and understood Handel’s music and its underpinnings. Interestingly, all the Handel items were designated by Alkan as being written for organ, pedal piano, or piano three hands, with a second pianist’s hand needed to fill in some of the material. Not so the Petits préludes sur les huit gammes du plainchant, however. The sonorous complexity of the Handel-based material contrasts interestingly with this spare, for-manuals-only set of études that demonstrate the eight modes of Gregorian plainchant. These show Alkan’s music in its most stripped-down form and, in the context of this CD, provide a welcome respite from the density and harmonic complexity of the pieces based on Messiah. Nolan caps this remarkable first exploration of Alkan’s organ music with Alkan’s intriguing, extended Impromptu on Luther’s “Un Fort Rempart Est Notre Dieu,” in which the famous Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott is displayed in a combination of variation and sonata form, becoming both a meditation on the well-known music and a thoroughgoing exploration of its depth of feeling and potential for polyphonic development. An exceptional work on all levels, this Impromptu builds to what seems to be a towering climax sufficient to shake the ecclesiastical rafters – until Alkan, never one to produce what is expected, eventually has the music fade away into quiet chords whose effect lingers long after their actual notes fade. All the music here sounds splendid under Nolan’s thoughtful virtuosity and through the richness of the Stahlhuth-Jann Organ of St. Martin’s Church in Dudelange, Luxembourg – an instrument with a checkered history whose 21^st-century restoration has resulted in an aural setting that fits Alkan well even though the organ dates to after the composer’s lifetime. This CD most definitely whets the appetite for additional Alkan organ recordings that are still to come. 

     Audiences with an appetite for some less-often-explored Baroque music sequenced in a somewhat quirky manner and performed with panache will enjoy a (+++) AVIE recording featuring soprano Hannah De Priest and the five-member ensemble Les Délices. The group’s name means “the delights,” and certainly there are a number of those in this mixture of secular cantatas and instrumental works by composers both well-known and unfamiliar. The disc opens with Rameau’s Le Berger fidèle, a sequence of three recitative-and-aria pairs whose intended impressions Rameau makes abundantly clear, labeling the first aria plaintif, the second gai, and the third vif et gracieux. De Priest captures the rather modest emotional compass of the music fetchingly, not overdoing the feelings but presenting them in a kind of statuesque form, reflecting their existence within the idealized, much-mythologized realm of Arcady of which many Baroque composers were fond (indeed, the CD as a whole bears the title “Arcadian Dreams”). The French expressiveness of Rameau contrasts with the Italianate approach of Handel in the second offering on the disc, Mi palpita il cor. This too is a set of three recitatives and arias, but Rameau’s near-equivalent length of arias gives way in Handel to significant differences both in duration and in emotional intensity. Indeed, the less-than-one-minute first aria, Agitata è l’alma mia, requires some vocal gymnastics that almost derail De Priest. She is far more comfortable in the extended, delicate second aria, Ho tanti affanni in petto, and the pleasant third, S’un dì m’adora, although this concluding item does bring her a touch of strain in its acrobatics. The cantatas are followed by a work that serves as an instrumental palate cleanser, an Albinoni oboe concerto, and here the delights of Les Délices come through clearly and cleanly in more than a supporting role: rhythms, balance and harmonies are handled with elegance, and the ensemble’s sound is simply lovely. The CD continues with Diane et Endimion by Thomas-Louis Bourgeois (1676-1750), who offers two rather than three paired recitatives and arias. The second aria, Une frayeur mortelle, with its minor-key intensity, is the most impressive element here, and is suitably emotive (if scarcely frightening) within the imagined Arcadian context. A slow-paced D minor harpsichord sonata by Domenico Scarlatti is offered next, showcasing both the composer’s always-adept writing for the instrument and harpsichordist Mark Edwards’ skill with the work’s moody expressiveness. The CD then concludes with Le Lever de l’Aurore by Louis-Antoine Lefebvre (c. 1700-1763), in which dawn’s rising is conflated with the emergence of love. Delicate both in its verbal elements and its instrumental accompaniment, this work is pleasantly inconsequential, fitting well into its time period and the theme of this recording without being particularly distinctive. Still, it is very well-performed, as are all the pieces on this disc, which seems designed for a limited and rather fey audience that will delight in its modest pleasures. 

     The pleasures are equally modest, if quite different, on a short (29-minute) and very up-to-date recording bearing the rather oblique title Poptimism and featuring piano and percussion (or, more accurately, piano and other percussion). The six tracks here are reinterpretations and expansions of various pop-and-rock-music songs with which listeners need to be highly familiar for this (+++) UNCSA Media disc to have any suitable impact. Modern popular music is so strongly tied to specific performers (so-called “covers” notwithstanding) that the CD will be of greatest interest only to an audience enamored of all six of the underlying works. However, there is something to be said for the impressive melding and contrasting of Liana Pailodze Harron’s pianism with the precise and knowing percussion work of Ksenija Komljenović: to some extent, the disc is enjoyable simply for the skill with which its material is presented. It opens with riffs on Rihanna’s Diamonds and then proceeds to With You by Dean Lewis, Sting’s Shape of My Heart, Hozier’s Take Me to Church, Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun, and finally Run the World (Girls) by Beyoncé. This is scarcely great music, indeed not being intended to outlast the various performers’ careers except perhaps coincidentally if others eventually pick up some of it. But the Vesna Duo’s arrangements do have some high points: With You is especially winning in its deliberate absorption of piano-as-percussion-instrument into the wider percussive complement, and the rhythmic bounce of Take Me to Church is engaging. There is something charming here in what is essentially an old-fashioned jam session – it seems somehow suitable that the front cover of the CD case is filled by a picture of a now virtually obsolete audiocassette. Despite the comparatively limited interest of the material underlying this two-person presentation, the disc does show that there is considerable talent for musical performance at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.