(++++) JOY UNSPOOKEN

The Haunted Playground. Words by R.J. Palacio. Pictures by Brett Helquist. Random House. $19.99. 

     A wonderful concept that is delightfully illustrated but slightly marred by some inelegance in the storytelling, The Haunted Playground is a Halloween-themed book worthy of being read not only in the season for which it is intended but also at any other time when kids may feel a bit of a chill and need a touch of enjoyment and reassurance. R.J. Palacio’s foundational idea is packed with potential: what if scary ghosts need respite now and then from being frightening, and need to let their hair down (so to speak) and just have fun? And when better to do that at Halloween – at an ordinary children’s playground turned extraordinary through a powerful spell cast by Rex Magnificus, the king of all ghosts? 

     Brett Helquist does an exceptional job with this concept: the early pages of the book show the translucent grayish ghosts emerging from graves and haunted houses, gathering from all directions, wearing expressions of sadness mixed with scariness, drifting along through a night sky and nighttime scenes that verge on the monochromatic. The only hints of color come from strictly human artifacts – headstones, a house far below – until the ghost brigade gathers above a playground (seen from high above, as if from a drone’s viewpoint), then descends to ground level. And now the ghosts start to smile, donning discarded children’s Halloween costumes and beginning to play with abandon on the kids’ slides, swings, carousel and more. It is a wonderful transformation – but Rex Magnificus stands apart from it all, scowling as he supervises the activities. 

     And then two living kids show up: Joe and Lulu live in a house near the playground and have been awakened by the ghosts’ merrymaking. Their brightly colored pajamas make them fit right in with the colorful costumes the wan ghosts are wearing – but Rex Magnificus will not put up with living children amid his subjects, and in a superlative two-page illustration inflates himself to giant size (taking up almost the entire two facing pages), looming over the youngsters with his empty eye sockets, skeletal hands and frowning mouth: “‘HEY, YOU TWO!’ I fiercely howl / to scare them to the bone. / ‘Leave here NOW! YOU CANNOT STAY! / AWAY!’ I loudly moan.” But the kids are thoroughly unimpressed with Rex Magnificus and with the signs posted at the playground warning that the area is currently closed to children. The kids insist on playing in the playground – and much to Rex Magnificus’ discomfiture, his ghosts join in and everyone plays together, as Helquist shows in a truly wonderful mid-book foldout that spreads his art across the equivalent of three pages of fun and bizarrerie. 

     Eventually, even Rex Magnificus joins in the merriment: “It’s kind of nice for me to take / a break from being frightful.” But when dawn approaches and the party must end, and Joe and Lulu insist they want to go with the ghosts to wherever the ghosts are going, Rex Magnificus kindly but firmly draws the line – promising, however, that at next Halloween, the spirits will return and will be prepared to welcome these particular kids to their get-together. Until then, Rex Magnificus warns readers that he will be “truly petrifying” and that if you cross his path, “I’ll scare you till you’re green.” 

     Carried along by the excellence of the illustrations, the fable is a wonderful one from start to finish. It is unfortunately marred a bit by Palacio’s inattentive writing and her failure, or that of her editor, to catch and correct a number of errors. Twice she refers to “Hallow’s Eve” instead of the correct “Hallows’ Eve.” She writes that “us ghosts are meant to do” scary things instead of “we ghosts.” She opens the tale by saying the ghosts “leave the graveyards where they lay” when she means “where they lie.” She says the ghosts “skip and dance together, / like they did when they were young,” instead of the correct “as they did when they were young.” And she repeatedly loses track of the rhythm and syllabification of the verse in which she is writing, thus making the story more cumbersome and stumbling than it ought to be. One example among quite a few: “I cast the spell that brings to life / this playground of the night. / Here my phantoms come – / but not to spook or fright.” The frustrating thing is how easily the writing could have been better, not only for spelling and grammatical accuracy but also for its cadence: “Here my phantoms come to play – / and not to spook or fright” would have done it. Palacio is an experienced author who can do better than this, and has in her other books, so there is no obvious reason for things falling short stylistically in The Haunted Playground. Despite this issue, though, Palacio’s underlying concept is so appealing, and Helquist’s illustrations so excellent, that the book easily overcomes its author’s self-induced sloppiness and emerges as a genuinely clever take on the imaginative possibilities of Halloween – that is, All Hallows’ Eve.

(+++) MELODIES AND MEANINGS

Schubert: Songs. Clara Osowski, mezzo-soprano; Timothy Lovelace, piano. AVIE. $19.99. 

Cantus: The Secret Letter—songs by Abbie Betinis, Saunder Choi, Mohammed Fairouz, Leoš Janáček, Libby Larsen, Francis Poulenc, Steven Sametz, Mari Esabel Valverde, Consuelito Velázquez, and others. Cantus (Jacob Christopher, Alexander Nishibun, Paul Rudoi and Paul Scholtz, tenors; Rod Kelly Hines and Jeremy Wong, baritones; Samuel Bohlander-Green and Chris Foss, basses). Signum Classics. $20.99. 

     Some songs’ words transcend their times; others’ are firmly bound to them. The 19 by Schubert chosen by mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski and pianist Timothy Lovelace for a new AVIE recording have proven their durability and communicative potential for two centuries – even for audiences that do not know the words and may, even with the assistance of translation, not be familiar with all the poetic references. Part of Schubert’s genius at lieder lies in the way his songs’ tunefulness and emotional clarity sweep listeners along into a world, whether real or imagined, where they can dwell throughout a song’s duration, no matter the time period in which the words are set and no matter the era in which the audience itself hears the music. The songs to which Osowski lends her deeply expressive voice date from various times in Schubert’s short life and are unconnected thematically – the disc is essentially a personal collection of the performers’ favorites, less effective as a totality for being something of a mishmash even though Osowski’s way with individual songs is uniformly impressive. Virtually nothing here will be unfamiliar to listeners already acquainted with Schubert’s songs. Osowski tends to be a bit breathless, emotionally if not physically, in the faster-paced works, really coming into her own in the darker and slower ones such as Nachtstück, Wandrers Nachtlied II, and Nachtviolen. A certain degree of vocal delicacy is occasionally missing, as in Ganymed, in which the piano and voice seem somewhat at odds expressively – unusual in light of how well Osowski and Lovelace intermingle almost everywhere else. Indeed, the emotional balance between voice and piano, so key an element of Schubert’s songs, is very effectively highlighted in nearly all these selections, with the last one on the disc, Im Frühling, being an especially good example. This is a recording for listeners who simply want to have Schubert’s unending tunefulness flow over and around them – there is no foundational unifying principle here, and none is needed for anyone content simply to bask in selected elements of the beauty to which the emotional appeal of Schubert’s tunefulness consistently opens the door. 

     Matters are quite different on the latest Signum Classics release featuring the vocal ensemble Cantus. The 17 tracks on this CD are thoroughly disconnected from each other musically but united through the performers’ insistence that everything here flows from assertions of LGBTQ+ love. That is a somewhat self-limiting assertion, indicating that the recording is only for members of a specific community or non-members deeply in tune (so to speak) with that community’s sociopolitical and personal stances. In fact, the quality of Cantus’ singing is a better unifying factor for this material than any assertion of societal significance: the disc, like that of Schubert’s songs, can be enjoyed simply for the quality of performance, even by listeners who do not understand the multiple languages in which the songs are offered. The eight singers of Cantus (tenor Paul Rudoi now replacing Matthew Shorten) deliver all the disparate musical material with equal fervor, with the result that the interwoven readings of love letters of various types (the letters being the reason the disc bears the title The Secret Letter) seem more intrusive than unifying. Just like the cited letters, the actual music here crosses so many genres and time periods that any sort of aural convergence would be nonexistent were it not for the ensemble’s uniformly smooth, well-sung (and well-spoken) delivery of whatever material they put their minds and voices to. Thus, although a couple of minutes of Poulenc and a dash of Janáček have, objectively speaking, very little in common with the Chris Foss vocal arrangement of We Kiss in a Shadow from The King and I, and just as the connection between a Marcus Aurelius letter and one from Walt Whitman is at best rather strained, Cantus manages to cement a sense of unity of this recording simply by approaching all the material with equal attentiveness, balance and emotional receptivity. It is highly unlikely that any listener will want this recording specifically for the performance of the Lennon/McCartney Blackbird or the world première recording of Saunder Choi’s Light Years to Lebanon (which, at seven-plus minutes, is the longest work on the disc). It is much more likely that Cantus will here succeed in reaching out in part to those who accept the underlying “cause” elements of the disc and, more widely, to listeners enamored of the elegance and sure-voiced delivery of all the material, whatever each work’s foundational reason for being may be and whatever each is intended to convey in this specific context.

(+++) THE MEANINGS OF “MODERN”

Rhythm Nation. PUBLIQuartet (Curtis Stewart and Jannina Norpoth, violins; Nick Revel, viola; Hamilton Berry, cello). AVIE. $19.99. 

Music from SEAMUS, Volume 35. New Focus Recordings. $16.99. 

     The devoted determination to be with-it on the musical scene shows itself nowadays in a variety of mostly predictable ways: extensive electronics, refusal to accept any singular musical genre and insisting that all are equally valid, strange names for performers and compositions alike (which would have been typesetters’ nightmares if they existed when human typesetters did), “tribute” arrangements/rearrangements of various kinds, music that does not stand on its own as music but whose rationale and underpinnings must be thoroughly studied by audiences for the works to have their intended effect, and recitals/recordings that insist they are “inclusive” (however defined) and designed exclusively for the cognoscenti while claiming that they are by definition forms of outreach because they are not limited to the performance of works of any particular type or time period. There are some performers in the with-it space who are really quite good, but their recordings’ insistence on being for the “in crowd” limits their reach instead of expanding it. And that may, in fact, be the intent: it grants a degree of exclusivity. Certainly the members of PUBLIQuartet approach all the material on a new AVIE disc with equal engagement, regardless of how engaging the individual pieces actually are. Four tracks here that are commissions by the quartet (out of 13 tracks total) are quite variegated: Baobab by Jlin (Jerrilynn Patton), Blues for Buddy by Jeff Scott, Cachumbambeando En Clave by Eddie Venegas, and Digging Gold; Deeper Blue (punctuated that way) by Mazz Swift. Listeners need to explore the reasons for the titles to appreciate the music fully, just as they need to be quite familiar with the rationale for the title of the album as a whole: Rhythm Nation refers to a 1989 Janet Jackson album that here is partially rethought into three very short electronically modified interludes scattered among the rest of the pieces. There is exuberance here when a work calls for it: Hip-Hop Studies and Etudes No. 10 by Daniel Bernard Roumain is a particularly good example – and also an example of the determination of many contemporary composers to use instrumental sounds and techniques that go well beyond the norm (or the instruments’ history). There is sensitivity and some degree of emotion, even near-lyricism, here from time to time, as in the string-quartet arrangement of Sunjata’s Time by Fodé Lassana Diabaté. The performers show their improvisational bona fides when those are needed, as in the longest work on the CD, Sixfivetwo by Henry Threadgill, which lurches along for an interminable 13 minutes. And there is even a pleasantly warm nod to Duke Ellington in PUBLIQuartet’s version of Come Sunday. There is versatility aplenty in the performances and variation aplenty in the music at whose service the performers display their eloquence. But there is no underlying theme for this recording, no sense that it exists for any purpose other than to let the players hold forth in varying ways with varying works for a presumed audience that enjoys the sound of a string quartet handling a wide variety of forms from a wide variety of genres. This is a CD for existing fans of PUBLIQuartet and existing believers in the equality – and equal quality – of music from any source, created for any reason. It does not reach out beyond a core group already enamored of variegated productions of this type, but it does present the skill of the performers effectively and give listeners a chance to hear that skill applied to widely differing works drawing on widely differing forms and cultures. 

     Whatever self-imposed audience limitations may exist for determinedly cross-genre recitals and the performers presenting them, they are less exclusionary than those associated with SEAMUS, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music of the United States, whose audience is self-identified as an “in crowd” for people who enjoy a venue in which the avant-garde composers who use SEAMUS as a membership society can test and sometimes extend the limits of acoustic instruments, voices, and electronics of all sorts. The 35^th volume of SEAMUS creations, offered by New Focus Recordings, includes seven works that are, by design, aimed by SEAMUS members (who perform on electronics) at other SEAMUS members – and perhaps also at a small “extended family” already committed to material of this kind. The need to understand where these works come from and how they got their titles is ever-present here. Bang, Crunch, Bounce (2023) by Jon Christopher Nelson is supposed to reflect, electronically, nothing less than a theory of the entire universe, from the Big Bang to an eventual Big Crunch and then repeat. Wordless, yet needing to embody anything (2022) by Connor Scroggins – which adds saxophones, flutes and a violin to the electronics – mixes syllabification with individual electronically altered acoustic notes and in doing so tries to explore focus within overstimulation. Daiyu (2023) by Yao Hsiao is for voice and iPad and has a very elaborate backstory involving Yue opera and the portrayal of a tragic love; there is really no way for someone  not immersed in the piece’s foundation to figure out how to respond to it. CD 40209 (2022) by Alex Christie features untuned percussive sounds resembling those of old-fashioned clocks ticking, juxtaposed in ways that produce some rhythmic variation as the piece goes on. Ancestor (2024) by Simon Hutchinson is loud and defiantly unpleasant to listen to in its mixture of squeaks and squeals and tidbits of altered drum sounds and an overall sonic universe that consists of the sort of noise that is all too easily parodied by those who are not enamored of electronic sound production. Margaret Anne Schedel’s 2023 metatonia (spelled without a capital letter – a common avant-garde affectation) makes sounds inspired by breathing and was “written for Kyle Hutchins on the occasion of retirement of Cort Lippe,” which means only those intimately familiar with both those names and the specific referenced retirement will have any chance of relating the sound world to anything thematically understandable. And Here Come a Candle to Light You to Bed (2022) by Marcin Pączkowski – at 11-and-a-half minutes the longest work on this CD – uses machine learning as a tool to try to produce a work relating to memory and also reflecting George Orwell’s 1984, in which the nursery rhyme from which the piece’s title comes is a plot element. The absolute necessity of understanding the background of all these pieces can readily be shown by imagining an arbitrary swapping of their titles: from a pure sound-generation standpoint, virtually everything here can be given the name of virtually everything else here with no diminution of any of the soundworlds. What distinguishes the pieces is what they draw on and what they are supposed to mean, not how they sound or what specifics are used to produce their aural qualities. The rarefied tastes of members of SEAMUS, and friends of members, represent the entirety of the potential for understanding and enjoyment of everything recorded here – works for a self-defined in-group devoted to a specific form of sound generation carefully shaped in the service of notional storytelling.

(++++) OF DREAMS AND FOLK TALES

Oscar Straus: Der Traum ein Leben; Die Prinzessin von Tragant. Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt conducted by Ernst Theis. CPO. $18.99. 

Music for Cello and Piano by Manuel de Falla, Béla Bartók, Sulkhan Tsintsadze, Nadia Boulanger, Robert Schumann, Pablo de Sarasate, and Gabriel Fauré. Christoph Croisé, cello; Ana Bakradze, piano. AVIE. $19.99. 

     Oscar Straus (1870-1954) is now remembered mostly for his operetta scores and his determination not to be confused with members of the famous Strauss family (his name was in fact Strauss: he dropped the final “s” on purpose in his professional life, to avoid conflation with a dynasty to which he was not related). But nine years before he became internationally known in 1907 through his operetta Ein Walzertraum, he was already making a name for himself in Europe with Der Traum ein Leben, an interestingly conceived symphonic poem that was originally planned as a concert overture but that Straus expanded by adding a prologue and epilogue. The dream of the title is an anti-heroic one with distinct folk-tale elements: the protagonist, who takes credit for saving the life of a king who was actually saved by a mysterious “man from the rock,” then kills the “man from the rock” when that character reappears and demands a reward. Eventually tormented by guilt, the protagonist throws himself from a bridge – and the dreamer awakens. Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), who wrote the story underlying the Straus music, called it a “dramatic fairy tale,” and Straus does a fine job of contrasting the drama with his work’s pastoral introduction and calm, relaxed epilogue. Ernst Theis and the Brandenburgisches Staatsorchester Frankfurt emphasize the contrasts inherent in the music effectively on a new release from CPO – and then offer a Straus work even more deeply fairy-tale-like, his one-act 1912 ballet Die Prinzessin von Tragant. Here Straus’ skill with waltzes is especially apparent: the Liebeswalzer and concluding Jubelwalzer are highlights of music that is distinctly old-fashioned (as unlike the contemporaneous Le Sacre du Printemps as can be imagined) and very well-crafted throughout. The Straus waltzes have a distinctive style that is noticeably different from Strauss waltzes, but they have lilt and captivating rhythms all their own, and are well-complemented by other dances and other forms: menuett, gavotte, march, polka and more. The general story of the ballet involves a princess who rejects three suitors but is eventually captivated by a somewhat overactive young man named Kreisel (“spinning top”). Shorn of details of its scenario, which this recording does not provide, Die Prinzessin von Tragant simply flows as a sequence of pleasant, carefully orchestrated and distinctly balletic movements that could fit a variety of imagined fairy-tale scenarios neatly. Theis leads the music with enthusiasm and contrasts the elements of the stage production quite well, and if the work is not especially distinctive – it is redolent of much earlier ballets – it is filled with tuneful pleasantries that make it enjoyable to hear from start to finish. 

     “Tuneful pleasantries” is a phrase that could also apply to an AVIE recording of music by seven composers chosen by Christoph Croisé and Ana Bakradze because of their supposed engagement with their various countries’ folk music – even though the “folk” elements are often only implied or hinted at rather than genuinely incorporated into the musical fabric. The CD is essentially a collection of encores – both original compositions for cello and piano and arrangements for this combination – that are performed very well and will be attractive to listeners enamored of these specific players and/or this instrumental combination. De Falla’s Suite populaire espagnole, originally written for voice, is heard first on the disc, and two of Fauré’s works are heard last: Après un rêve from Trois Mélodies, and Sicilienne. The de Falla connection with Spanish folklore is apparent throughout, but any such connection in Fauré – and in the other French music here, Nadia Boulanger’s Trois Pièces pour violoncello et piano – is a great deal more tenuous. On balance, the insistence that some sort of “folk” element explains or justifies this combination of music is rather strained, and the CD is best listened to simply for the works’ innate qualities and the skill with which Croisé and Bakradze bring them out. This is not to say that folk elements are entirely absent, though – quite the contrary. Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances are explicitly connected to their country of origin, as are 5 Pieces on Georgian Folk Themes by Sulkhan Tsintsadze (1925-1991). Bakradze, who was born in Tbilisi, seems especially to relish the oversize emotionalism on display in Tsintsadze’s pieces, and Croisé takes to them with equal enthusiasm. Of particular note on this recording are the remaining two works: Schumann’s 5 Stücke im Volkston, whose title accurately reflects folklike elements that are not actually taken directly from folk music, and a rousing cello-and-piano version of Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen. The Schumann is a more substantial and in some ways more serious work than the others on the disc, although its placement midway through the CD somewhat vitiates its comparative significance. And the Sarasate encapsulates both the pluses and the minuses of the whole recording: this piece sounds much more dynamic and dramatic in its original violin-and-orchestra version, but the intensity with which Croisé and Bakradze approach it makes this alternative arrangement a striking one on its own terms. As a whole, this is a (+++) CD that features very fine playing in the service of an attempted thematic connection among the pieces that is not quite convincing – a state of affairs for which the disc almost makes up through the enthusiasm of the performances.