(+++) NOT ALL THAT TRASHY

Trash Animals: The Animal Weirdos We Secretly Love. By Rachel Federman. Illustrated by Clare Faulkner. HarperCollins. $12.99. 

     This looks like one of those little hardcover gift books, and the cute Clare Faulkner cover illustrations of a squirrel, opossum, skunk, fox, pigeon and raccoon – each holding up a numbered placard from 1 to 6 – reinforce the first impression. But what Rachel Federman offers inside the book proves that first impressions can mislead. The gift-book-ish stuff appears at the start on pages labeled “trading cards,” and includes more than the six animals portrayed cartoonishly on the cover; but the rest of the book has a significantly more serious side, acting essentially as an apologia for animals of whom many people apparently have low opinions but really shouldn’t. 

     Actually, the whole Trash Animals enterprise is a trifle difficult to sort out, even when Federman conveys interesting information. Take those “trading card” pages, for example. At the bottom of each is listed a “trash animal superpower,” and ok, that’s fine. But each “superpower” is ranked between one and five stars, and there is no clue as to why. The opossum’s power of playing dead gets one star, the skunk’s potent spray gets three, the beaver’s dam building receives two, and the Norwegian rat gets three because “eyes can go in opposite directions, and they can swim” (presumably “they” refers to the whole rat, not just the eyes). The little brown bat gets four for echolocation and the common crow gets four for intelligence, while garter snakes get two because they “smell through their tongues and grow their whole lives.” Exactly what creates these rankings, and to what end, is never explained. 

     The rest of the trading-card information is basic scientific stuff whose seriousness is somewhat at odds with the amusing illustrations. Scientific name, class, family, geographical range, diet, size, lifespan and other facts are offered here. Then the rest of the book gives still more information, presented in pages whose contents are rather arbitrarily assigned to one chapter rather than another – actually, the single chapter called “Fun Facts” pretty much encompasses the whole book, despite the existence of “History,” “In the News,” and other chapter titles. At the end, the attempted cuteness of the “trading cards” returns with a “Trash Spirit Animal Quiz” that is supposed to help readers determine whether they are raccoons, pigeons, snakes, skunks, or rats. Apparently other animals discussed herein – badgers, crows, squirrels, etc. – do not appear in “spirit” form. 

     It would be easy simply to say that Trash Animals is all in good fun and to let it go at that, forgiving the inelegances of content and presentation because it is, after all, just a little gift book. But the problem is that it really wants to be more than what it looks like. Federman has dug up all sorts of animal trivia that she presents in a hodgepodge. One two-page spread, for instance, includes facts about badgers, Norwegian rats, crows, Norwegian rats again, and squirrels. Another starts with bats, moves to pigeons, then badgers, then beavers, and then extinct badgers. This scattershot approach, with its absence of rhyme or reason, is mixed with short items about “trash animals” on social media (of course), in serious art (Picasso’s nine oil paintings of wild pigeons), in literature (Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin and The Tale of Mr. Tod), on film (Disney’s Enchanted, Hitchcock’s The Birds), and so on. There are also sections intended to “redeem” these animals – the book’s title suggests that people generally think of them as somehow “trashy,” although who other than Federman thinks that way is never explained. The “Planet Protectors” portion of the book explains that bats eat insects and spread seeds, snakes keep mice under control, and squirrels’ seed-burying propensity results in trees such as walnut and hickory, which means “squirrels contribute to our efforts to battle climate change by supporting forest growth.” The points that Federman wants to make are, first, that “trash animals” are not “trashy” at all, and second, even if they are, their “trashiness” makes “these outside animals, routinely cast out from basements and backyards,” pretty neat anyway. The book’s whole trashy-but-not-really stance is emblematic of its rather confused presentation: Federman seems not entirely sure of how serious to be or how much of an advocate to become. Faulkner’s cartoons push Trash Animals toward the light side, but the rather shaky nature of the text’s viewpoint makes it hard to be sure whether this gift-like book would be more appropriate for genuine animal lovers or (more likely) for social-media-obsessed observers who think outlandish online animal scenes and memes are, in Federman’s words, “super cute.”

(++++) ARRANGED AND REARRANGED

Prokofiev: Violin Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2; Five Melodies for Violin and Piano. Bruno Monteiro, violin; João Paulo Santos, piano. Et’cetera Records. $15. 

Gaspard Le Roux: Complete Suites. Daniel-Ben Pienaar, piano. AVIE. $24.99 (2 CDs). 

     Prokofiev wrote only two violin-and-piano sonatas, and their genesis is fraught with complexity. No. 2 in D, Op. 94a, was written first, in 1942 – and was originally the Sonata for Flute and Piano, Op. 94; hence the “a” (or “bis”) in the violin sonata’s published number. Prokofiev arranged this work for violin in 1943. No. 1 in F minor, Op. 80, was started as early as 1938 but not finished until 1946, and has the rather dubious but apt distinction of being used at Prokofiev’s funeral, at which David Oistrakh, the prime mover of both violin sonatas, performed its first and third movements. A very fine new recording of the sonatas by Bruno Monteiro and João Paulo Santos also includes a third violin-and-piano work that originated in different form: the Five Melodies, Op. 35bis, were vocalises, wordless songs, that Prokofiev wrote for soprano Nina Koshetz in 1920 and subsequently, in 1925, arranged in violin-and-piano form (hence the “bis” in the numbering). The oddities of their history notwithstanding, the three works on this Et’cetera CD communicate very strongly, and very differently, when played with the care and sensitivity they receive here. The second sonata is the more popular and more accessible of the pair, written in classical style in four expressive movements that interestingly translate the music’s flute-based origin: the violin part, although highly virtuosic, is also replete with lyricism and elegance in passages that clearly reflect its origin for the wind instrument. Monteiro and Santos take a broad, relaxed and rather expansive view of the piece, although the music never bogs down: it flows, especially in the slower first and third movements, at a rather leisurely pace. But not all is sunlight mixed with occasional bravura here: touches of the Prokofiev astringency do appear from time to time, and the performers give them their due. Still, it is the underlying pleasantness of the music that pervades this performance. And Monteiro and Santos provide as strong a contrast as possible between the second sonata and the first. No. 1 is a dark, restive, disturbing work in four movements of nearly equal length, and contains slithering violin scales in the first and last movement that Prokofiev, according to Oistrakh, likened to “wind passing through a graveyard.” An anecdote from the work’s 1946 première, which Prokofiev supervised, had pianist Lev Oborin playing a forte passage too gently for the composer’s liking, with Prokofiev telling Oborin that the sound should make people jump in their seats and wonder if the composer had lost his mind. The sonata’s effects are less startling some 80 years later, but this is still a work of deep disquiet, and in retrospect the music seems to agonize over the dead of World War II and/or those killed in Stalin’s purges – though Prokofiev never suggested either such interpretation. In any case, Monteiro and Santos approach the work as a study in extremes, starting at the very beginning with growling octaves at the bottom of the piano contrasted with wisps of violin sound. Throughout, these performers find the intensity and conflict on which this sonata is built, exploring the music with polished skill while at the same time allowing it a kind of rough-hewn drama that proves both disturbing and emotionally convincing. Then, after the intensity and expansiveness of the sonatas, the Five Melodies serve as a set of soft and lyrical encores. They are certainly not pervasively quiet: No. 3, Animato ma non allegro, is unsettled and restless throughout after beginning with a stormy fortissimo. But by and large, the mood is one of gentleness and even sweetness, as in the opening Andante – although there is a certain puckishness here and there, notably in the fourth and shortest of the miniatures, Allegretto leggero e scherzando. These little pieces, like the second sonata, may have had their origin outside the violin-and-piano literature, but Monteiro and Santos show convincingly – in these works as well as the challenging first sonata – just how well they fit the realm of distinctive and distinguished 20^th-century chamber music. 

     The arrangements are by the performer, not the composer, on a new two-disc AVIE release featuring the music of the decidedly obscure Gaspard Le Roux. Born around 1670 and living only until sometime in 1706, Le Roux was a French harpsichordist known to posterity for a single publication, Pieces de Clavessin, which appeared in 1705. Le Roux never called his groupings of these works “Suites,” but performers tend to title them that way, as does Daniel-Ben Pienaar in producing versions of the music for the modern piano. This is at best a questionable endeavor – the music of Le Roux fits the harpsichord so intimately that moving the material to the piano makes even less aural sense than doing so with the keyboard works of Bach and others. However, taken at face value, what Pienaar has done here is interesting. The pieces show up in their original publication in multiple guises, some for solo harpsichord, some for harpsichord duet, some as trio sonatas. Many of the works are tiny, lasting less than a minute or just a bit longer, but one, Sarabande en 12 Couplets, runs more than 12 minutes and is masterfully developed and presented as a harpsichord exploration and exercise (Le Roux appears to have used these pieces as teaching materials). Pienaar uses the rather chaotic state of the 1705 publication as carte blanche to produce piano works that borrow liberally from and build substantially upon the original material: sometimes solo and trio versions of the same material are blended for pianistic purposes, sometimes repeats of elements are varied by including within them material from other elements, and so on. This makes for an intriguing intellectual exercise and a near-90-minute presentation that is nothing if not impressive both in structure and in performance. The whole enterprise, though, is somewhat quixotic: the numerous charms that Le Roux wrote into these preludes, menuets, passepieds, courantes, sarabandes, gavottes, allemandes and gigues are all smeared together into pieces that, although undeniably charming, sound simply weird on a modern piano, no matter how skillfully they are played. Pienaar is in fact committed to making considerable use of the piano’s capabilities to produce sounds of varying volume and to sustain a portion of a piece beneath another of its elements. The result is music presented pianistically that sounds like a conflation of eras, not just of instruments. That is, of course, inevitable when performing Baroque keyboard material on a modern piano, but Pienaar is not even the slightest bit apologetic about what he is doing: he is painting a modern musical canvas with 300+-year-old raw materials. There is nothing particularly “right” or “wrong” about handling Le Roux and his time period this way; it is a matter of taste. There is, however, a distinct air of strangeness that hangs over this entire performance: the music that Le Roux created is very much of its era in ways that keyboard works by Bach, at least arguably, are not. Pienaar’s creativity is evident throughout these arrangements and his performances of them, but the creativity of Le Roux himself is largely absent. This (+++) release is a curiosity of modernity built upon a curiosity of much earlier times; for better or worse, it is ultimately neither wholly of now nor wholly of then.

(++++) JUST GRIM ENOUGH

Hansel and Gretel. Retold by Stephen King. Pictures by Maurice Sendak. Harper. $26.99. 

     Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1892 opera, Hansel and Gretel, significantly expands on the original fairy tale collected by the brothers Grimm, giving it a religious gloss and introducing a few oddities, such as a preoccupation with the number 14: there are 14 eggs brought home in one scene, and 14 protective angels in another. Eliminating some supernatural portions of the original story, notably the duck that helps the children escape from the dark forest, the opera brings in some fairy-tale elements of its own, including the Sandman and Dew Fairy. And one crucial plot point of the original tale – the mother’s determination to get rid of the children permanently – is turned around in such a way that both the mother and father are positive characters who try to rescue Hansel and Gretel and eventually celebrate their deliverance with them. 

     For a 1997 production of the opera by Houston Grand Opera, Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) created sets and costume designs – and nearly three decades later, Sendak’s illustrations inspired horror master Stephen King to take a new look at the original Grimm story and produce his own version of it. Suitable for children (the book is recommended for ages six and up), the King/Sendak Hansel and Gretel straddles the original narrative and the opera’s version of it, managing to be mildly dark in tone without being inappropriately scary for children today. 

     The original tale’s evil mother becomes an evil stepmother here – a bow to more-recent expectations of familial strife – and is sent away at the book’s end by the father, although in the original story she is simply dead. Some of the opera’s angels are retained (four, not 14, seen circling the moon in a Sendak illustration of a dream that Gretel has). And – this is where things get interesting – Sendak handles the witch of the forest with considerable aplomb. Her house is not made of candy, as it commonly is in modern retellings of the tale, but is “built of bread and covered with cakes,” as the Grimms’ language translates, although the windows of clear sugar are sweet enough. Sendak also shows rows of gingerbread children outside the house – those being, in the opera, children baked into gingerbread by the witch. 

     What Sendak does especially well, and what King picks up on very neatly, are the themes of transformation and of evil that seems good – two frequent underpinnings of the Grimms’ Märchen and other fairy tales. Sendak produces not one but two dream scenes, the second more intense than the first, in which Hansel sees the not-yet-met witch flying on a broom and carrying a sack of frightened children. And he rings changes very effectively on the witch’s house itself, showing it transformed (after Hansel and Gretel have gone inside) into a leering, toothy, monstrous-looking creature that is bordered by unhappy-looking gingerbread children and has a front path that is actually a long pink tongue. 

     If he were writing for adults, King would surely extend these visual elements into something overwhelmingly creepy. But to his credit, he pushes his prose here to only a moderate degree. He gives the witch a name, Rhea, and writes that when the children turn away from her, they “did not see the kindly face turn into that of an ugly old hag with yellow, half-blind eyes, snaggle teeth, and a wart on her nose.” (In the Grimm tale, witches “have red eyes, and cannot see far, but they have a keen scent like the beasts, and are aware when human beings draw near” – an even scarier notion.) King also explains that once the children are indoors, the house “changed and showed its real face, which was terrible indeed,” including a “rotten banana nose” and candy canes by the door that “sprouted teeth.” Then King pushes matters further than they are taken either by the Grimms or by the opera, saying that after Hansel and Gretel fall asleep in the witch’s house, “the pleasant aromas became the smells of rotting fruits and vegetables [and] the walls started dripping with slime.” 

     What King does so well here is to accept Sendak’s illustrations while enlarging upon the opportunities they offer for bits of extra creepiness. Thus, the witch, after being pushed into the oven, “did shriek as her filthy hair and the wart on her nose caught fire!” And she ends up as gingerbread – shown that way by Sendak although not specifically described that way by King. Unlike the opera, this King retelling does not have the gingerbread children restored to human form through Hansel’s timely use of the witch’s magic wand; but the book does end with Hansel and Gretel stuffing their pockets with the witch’s treasure of gold and precious stones and finding their way home to their loving father. The “happily ever after” ending is inevitable and approximates the original Grimm conclusion, although it is not quite so close to the finale of the opera, which is a proclamation that God brings aid when the need is greatest. No matter: the tale of Hansel and Gretel has gone through many metamorphoses over the centuries, and surely neither the operatic version nor the King/Sendak book will be the last. The book is, however, a thoroughly enjoyable and handsomely produced retelling that will surely appeal to modern children and, just perhaps, will get them interested in exploring some other fairy tales handed down from many years ago – although it will not necessarily entice them into opera.

(++++) LIGHT, LITHE AND LIVELY

Music of the Strauss Family, Robert Stolz, Richard Heuberger, and Johannes Brahms. Philharmonic Concert Orchestra conducted by Iain Sutherland. SOMM. $18.99. 

     Precisely because of its approachability, so-called “light” music gets insufficient respect in the classical-music realm. Surely this is why the bicentennial of Johann Strauss Jr.’s 1825 birth has garnered far less celebratory and “tribute-focused” material than did the Bruckner bicentennial (2024) and the 250^th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth (2020, albeit derailed in so many ways by the COVID-19 pandemic and its depredations). Classical music is itself a niche genre nowadays, so one might think that works that would engage a larger audience would tend to be celebrated, not demeaned; but there remains a whiff of “too much popularity” around pieces that scale no heights and make few if any intense philosophical or interpretative demands of performers and listeners. 

     Yet the comparatively easy-to-come-by pleasures of “light” classical works stand the test of time every bit as well as do the impacts of the towering pieces in the Western canon, and thank goodness there are still conductors and orchestras that address “light” material with the care and attention it deserves. In the case of the music of the Strauss family (Johann Sr. and his three sons, Johann Jr., Josef and Eduard), the redoubtable New Year’s Eve concerts by the Vienna Philharmonic remain a steadfast bastion of Straussiana and of tributes to Old Vienna, the former musical center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and still a European musical destination second to none. 

     But it is not only in Austria that compilations of lighter – but still elegant, well-formed, well-orchestrated and beautifully proportioned – music have advocates. In Great Britain, conductor Iain Sutherland (born 1936), a longtime proponent of “light” music of all sorts, spent decades advocating works by the Strauss family and others of similar propensities, invariably delivering performances with skill, rhythmic sensitivity, and the firm understanding that this music is as deserving of preservation and promulgation as larger and more-complex material, notwithstanding its propensities for being “easier to listen to” than more-challenging works of the same time period. 

     The new SOMM recording in which Sutherland leads the Philharmonic Concert Orchestra is a compilation of live performances from the early-to-mid-1990s, lasting a generous 78 minutes and duplicating the basic approach of Vienna’s New Year’s Eve celebration concerts by including very-well-known music as well as some that is at least a bit less often played. There are 18 works here in all, 15 of them hyper-familiar: six by Johann Strauss Jr., four by Josef Strauss, one by Johann Jr. and Josef (the inevitable Pizzicato Polka), one by Eduard Strauss, and three by Brahms (Hungarian Dances Nos. 1, 5 and 6). The remaining three, although very popular in their own right, are not quite as frequently heard: Richard Heuberger’s overture to Der Opernball and two pieces by Robert Stolz – the march Gruß aus Wien and the waltz Wiener-Café. 

     One of the distinctions of all this music is how well it stands up to repeated hearings – something not always true of more-complex works and ones written on a larger scale. Eduard Strauss’ exuberant Bahn frei! polka, complete with train whistle, never gets old, nor do the four very-well-constructed pieces by the unfortunately short-lived Josef Strauss: Plappermäulchen, Die Libelle, Jokey-Polka and Feuerfest! And the six pieces by Johann Strauss Jr. have graced innumerable concert programs, recordings and non-musical media to which they have been adapted at various times: the majestic Kaiser-Walzer, ebullient polka Éljen a Magyar!, amusing Tritsch-Tratsch Polka, sound-effects-laden Unter Donner und Blitz, the wonderful overture to the wonderful Die Fledermaus, and – capping and concluding this thoroughly delightful recording – Champagner-Polka, which not only will remind operetta fans that Die Fledermaus celebrates “King Champagne the First” but also has just the right bubbly approach (including cork-popping) for a celebratory tipple or two. 

     The key to Sutherland’s fine performances is that he takes the music seriously without ever trying to give it a serious gloss; and the orchestra, in similar vein, plays with care as well as enthusiasm and in no way makes short shrift of the elegant charm that pervades all these works. Old Vienna, as recalled through these pieces, is long, long gone, together with the empire in which it glittered, but the music continues to shine in these performances, and the works convey the joys of classical music in a manner that is not always clear in more-serious, more-somber and more-self-important material.