(++++) 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.

(++++) LYRICAL OVERFLOW

Puccini: Orchestral Music. Sinfonia of London conducted by John Wilson. Chandos. $21.99 (SACD). 

     It is an interesting curiosity of Puccini’s oeuvre that even his very modest production of non-operatic music ties consistently to his operas. Seemingly unable to let a good, strongly emotional tune appear solely in instrumental guise, Puccini again and again incorporated non-operatic material into his operas, creating new and stage-centered settings for works originally intended for the concert hall. 

     John Wilson and the Sinfonia of London showcase this characteristic clearly, albeit somewhat confusingly from an organizational perspective, on an excellent Chandos disc that focuses on early Puccini works that were not originally intended for incorporation into stage productions – except for those that were. Hence some of the confusion, which, however, matters less than the gorgeous melodic flow, brimming with emotional intensity, that characterizes nearly everything that Puccini created for any venue. 

     Most of the pieces here tie into Puccini’s first three operas – Le villi, Edgar, and Manon Lescaut – whether or not originally intended for those works. Preludio sinfonico, the first piece on the disc, is an exception, although it does have an operatic tie-in of its own, being largely modeled on the Act I Prelude to Lohengrin. Puccini tends to be thought of as diametrically opposed to Wagner in musical sensibilities, but in fact Wagner was one of his early influences. Preludio sinfonico has a decidedly hymnlike quality in several places, reflecting not only a Lohengrin esthetic but also Puccini’s own predilection for sentimentally lyrical material in quasi-religious guise. 

     Capriccio sinfonico, the second work heard here, was Puccini’s graduation piece at the Milan Conservatory and a source of material for not one but two operas: Edgar and Puccini’s fourth and most-famous stage work, La bohème. Wagner’s influence shows in Capriccio sinfonico to a limited extent, but the expressions of yearning and anguish already have over-the-top elements characteristic of Puccini’s later music and readily associated with his operatic worldview. The piece is followed on this CD by two short works written for and used within Le villi: the work’s Prelude, which is an exercise in serenity with faint echoes of Wagner’s Parsifal, and “Witches’ Sabbath” music called La tregenda that is an effective (and unusual-for-Puccini) tarantella and is certainly dramatic, if not exactly demonic. 

     Wilson and the Sinfonia of London next offer some curiosities completed by hands other than Puccini’s after apparently being abandoned: a Scherzo, a Trio, and an oddly named Adagetto (no, not Adagietto) whose tempo marking is actually Largo. What is mainly intriguing about these small works is how Puccini incorporated parts of them into his operas: a theme from the Scherzo into Le villi, the Adagetto into Edgar, and the melody of the Trio into, of all things, Madama Butterfly. 

     The somewhat scattershot organization of this SACD next leads it to two excerpts from Manon Lescaut rather than, more logically, Edgar. These are the Prelude to the four-act version of the opera – music dropped when Puccini created a three-act revision – and an Intermezzo heard between the second and third act and permeated by passion, yearning and the emotional extremism characteristic not only of this opera but also of most of Puccini’s work. 

     The Manon Lescaut material is followed on the disc by pieces originally written for string quartet and adapted by Wilson for string orchestra. The first of them is Crisantemi, an elegy for Amedeo, Duke of Aosta, written after his death in 1890 and, yes, subsequently incorporated into an opera: it appears in two different places in Manon Lescaut, aptly reflecting the melodramatic tragedy of the stage work. Next on the disc are Tre minuetti, well-balanced 19^th-century ventures into 18^th-century dance that are more emotive than was usual for minuets in their heyday. Music from all three appears in Manon Lescaut, which is set in the 18^th century, and it is the theme of the second piece that actually opens the opera. 

     It is only at the conclusion of the disc that Wilson presents material taken directly from Edgar: the Preludio to the first act, which Puccini discarded when creating the opera’s final version, and the Preludio to the third act, which the composer retained and which effectively mixes sorrow, yearning and lyricism in a combination that was already characteristic of Puccini early in his career and was to become thoroughly identified with him over time. The sequencing of this recording makes it even more of a hodgepodge than does the music itself, but Wilson and the Sinfonia of London deliver such engaging and beautifully played performances of the works here – all in absolutely first-rate sound – that the confusing order of presentation and the oddities of Puccini’s use and reuse of instrumental material in various stage productions are less significant than the enjoyment of immersion in the composer’s consistent warmth and ever-present sentimentality.

(++++) MIXING THEN WITH NOW

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Violin Concerto; Dvořák: Violin Concerto; Curtis Stewart: The Famous People—46.2 F. Harper. Gil Shaham, violin; Virginia Symphony Orchestra conducted by Eric Jacobsen. Canary Classics. $21.99. 

Sarah Genevieve Burghart Rice: 3 Songs; The Hardscrabble; Murmurs from Limbo. Duo Cortona; Nittany Winds conducted by Tonya Mitchell-Spradlin; Thea Lobo, mezzo-soprano; Jordan Rutter-Covatto, countertenor; David Stambler, saxophone; Renée Vogen, horn; Sean Kennedy, tuba; Lee Hinkle, percussion; Taylor Shea, viola; Kathryn Hilton, conductor. Neuma Records. $15. 

     The way composers come to terms with the past, both personal and societal, varies greatly over time and based on each composer’s individual concerns and predilections. But the desire to explore the past and find ways to interpret it in the present – whatever “present” a composer may be living in – is a consistent one. Gil Shaham and Eric Jacobsen intriguingly explore three composers’ approaches to understanding, accepting and integrating past and present on a new CD from Canary Classics, the label that Shaham founded in 2003/2004. The G minor Violin Concerto by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, which dates to 1912, the final year of the composer’s short life (1875-1912), deserves to be far better known than it is; indeed, it would be more than worthwhile if this first-rate recording inspires additional performances. Cast in the usual three movements and packed with Romantic sensibilities and great warmth of orchestration, the concerto is highly virtuosic but subsumes its technical demands within a pervasive aura of expressiveness. It is also a very American concerto: when it was commissioned, Coleridge-Taylor was asked to include Yankee Doodle and the spiritual Keep Me from Sinking Down in it, and he incorporated other spiritual and American-influenced material into the work. Shaham plays the concerto with tremendous engagement and sensitivity, exploring its rhythms and emotional peaks and valleys with care and with first-rate support from the Virginia Symphony Orchestra under Jacobsen. Shaham’s playing is impressive throughout, with his first-movement cadenza and the conclusion of that movement especially noteworthy. The concerto is something of a throwback to the Romantic era in approach and emotional content, but no more so than other works of the early 20^th century – and its undoubted effectiveness transcends its time, making its comparative neglect something of a puzzle. Dvořák’s Violin Concerto exists in much the same communicative space despite its much earlier date (1879-1880). Its half-hour length is about the same as that of the Coleridge-Taylor concerto, but its inspiration comes more from Dvořák’s Bohemian roots than from anything in the “new world,” even though other Dvořák works contain notable American elements. The sumptuousness of the orchestral accompaniment in Dvořák’s concerto is as notable as the beauty of its solo-violin material, and Shaham and Jacobsen effectively balance the solo and tutti material – as does the sound engineering, which is particularly well-handled. The exceptional sweetness of the central Adagio ma non troppo is a highlight of a very well-crafted performance that carefully explores the manifest beauties of the entire concerto. The concertos are followed on the disc by a Dvořák-focused encore of sorts, from a suite called The Famous People by Curtis Stewart (born 1980). Stewart’s piece is a rethinking of Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances with a rather overdone attempt to connect them to African-American leaders – the one on this disc being based on Dvořák’s Op. 46, No. 2, and intended to honor abolitionist Frances Harper. This sort of overt forcing of the past into the present in ways not inherent in the music constitutes more of a political statement than a musical one. It detracts rather than adds to the effectiveness of the music itself – which is interesting on its own and which effectively delves into some expressive violin extremes that Stewart, himself a violinist, creates to good effect, and that Shaham plumbs with skill. The sociopolitical gloss of the music matters a great deal more to Stewart than it will likely matter to audiences hearing the music on its own terms – and indeed, the piece stands well on its own, not needing any force-fed “connectedness” to come across as interesting and engaging. 

     Contemporary composers do not necessarily adopt or adapt the past with intensity and seriousness. Wry humor sometimes supplies a gateway of its own, as in The Hardscrabble by Sarah Genevieve Burghart Rice. This is an odd and amusing five-movement suite whose underlying conceit is that the composer we know as Handel was actually a monumental fraud: he was a “grossly obese bolt-merchant” known as Händel (with the umlaut), who obtained some excellent music from a real composer named Hamdle as the price of releasing Hamdle from indentured servitude. The incompetence and strictly profit-driven orientation of “Händel” then led to a variety of presentation mistakes in the underlying music, resulting in bizarre arrangements and strange sounds and material that in no way made musical or artistic sense but that served the usurper well by bringing him material success. The whole scenario is created with tongue very firmly in cheek, and the Nittany Winds under Tonya Mitchell-Spradlin submit the entirety of the resulting mess to carefully assembled auditory reality on a new Neuma Records CD. A good deal of the material is quite obvious, being less satire and more in the nature of sarcasm; and the 22-minute suite does go on rather too long for the points it has to make. But there is a lot of genuinely amusing material in it, including some unexpected “mishandling” of the real-world Handel (as well as a good deal of the expected sort); and the concluding Non sequitur movement in fact does follow from the preceding four and leads to a suitably overstated and cacophonous conclusion. The Hardscrabble is the high point of this (+++) disc, whose other two works are both vocally focused, both far more serious, and both less creative than is the rather snide suite for winds. 3 Songs groups settings of unsurprising and rather unoriginal words about community, mutual support, the difficulties of marginalized life, and so forth. The verbiage is strictly self-referencing avant-garde material (“you’ve never/ opened a ramshackle triage/ to dress her torn,/ clot-smear brain”), and the vocal settings are unexceptional, although some of the instrumental accompaniment is interestingly conceived. Murmurs from Limbo is more intriguing because, in its own way, it looks to the past and brings it into the future: the words are from Middle English poets who are considering death and its implications for faith and bodily nonexistence. This is in some ways the flip side of the not-to-be-taken-seriously material in The Hardscrabble, and the use of a countertenor as well as a mezzo-soprano gives the material an apt tie-in to the time period in which the words were written. But the overtly and overly avant-garde accompaniment of the verbiage undermines the effectiveness of the writers’ exploration of belief, resurrection, and disappearance from the world of the living: the mixture of old and new here is overdone and aurally formulaic, with the result that Murmurs from Limbo simply sounds like one of innumerable modern compositions asserting its own meaningfulness while never really coming to terms with the foundational thinking upon which it is built. Sarah Genevieve Burghart Rice turns out to have less to say about the end of one’s earthly life and the possibility of something beyond it than did the poets of 800 years ago. The CD as a whole is at its best when it takes itself least seriously – and recognizes that our modern era’s flaws are perhaps not so different from those of Handel’s time. Or Händel’s.