(++++) DOSES OF REALITY

Votes of Confidence: A Young Person’s Guide to American Elections. By Jeff Fleischer. Zest Books. $13.99.

Future Smart: Managing the Game-Changing Trends That Will Transform Your World. By James Canton. Da Capo. $17.50.

     Timely it certainly is, but Jeff Fleischer’s Votes of Confidence is more than that: it is a first-rate introduction to American elections in the hyper-communicative digital age, designed for readers young enough to remember only one or two presidential election cycles but – for that very reason – extremely useful as well for their parents and for other “old hands” at elections who are trying to figure out what all of today’s currents and countercurrents mean. For the most part refreshingly nonpartisan, Fleischer’s book manages to communicate the basics of the American political system while keeping the civics lessons interesting through abundant use of anecdotes and examples. A discussion of the pluses and minuses of the electoral college, for example, comes with a box highlighting some of the obscurities of the system: Maine and Nebraska divide  their electoral votes proportionally; the District of Columbia gets three electoral votes, but other non-state territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam do not get any; and it is possible to win in the electoral college by succeeding in only 12 states – provided that seven of them are California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, and an eighth is either New Jersey of Michigan. This sort of information really highlights the strangeness of the U.S. political process – but Fleischer chooses to be explanatory about such oddities, rather than either approving or condemnatory. Some of the history here is interesting on its own, such as a list of presidents from five (no, not two) political parties: Republican, Democratic, Democratic Republican, Whig and Federalist (plus the party-less George Washington). What is even more interesting is Fleischer’s observation on the history: “Political parties tend to take turns holding federal power for long stretches, and that includes the presidency. Some of that is a natural ebb and flow between two parties, some is because the parties’ positions evolve, and some has to do with changing voter demographics.” Comments like this are thoughtful; others are thought-provoking, such as the discussion of the bizarre things some people believe (4% in one poll said that “shape-shifting lizard people have a hand in running the government”).

     A section called “Where to Get Your Information” is a helpful guide to technology use and misuse in the political arena, and includes an explanation of the value that newspaper reporting continues to offer even though newspapers themselves are a fading medium. A section called “Getting Past Fake News” is a guide to the use of PolitiFact.com, FactCheck.org, Snopes.com and OpenSecrets.org, explaining what sort of perspective on politics (and in some cases on other things) each site offers. There is a section on “push polls” and the falsehoods they create or perpetuate – sometimes with considerable success – and one on meaningless news stories, such as “ones about who’s winning in the national polls before primaries even start.” These sidelights to the main narrative about how government is organized at local, state and federal levels appear so often that they take over much of the narrative of Votes of Confidence and, in truth, make the political process seem more interesting – and even messier – than it tends to be on a day-to-day basis. Fleischer also tells young readers (and any others) various ways to get involved in politics beyond just voting, including volunteering during a campaign, becoming an activist outside the campaign structure, even running for office oneself. Whether office-seeking will be appealing to readers who absorb all the intricacies, misuse of power and occasional outright malfeasance discussed in Votes of Confidence is by no means certain. But at least they will know that they have the option to get deeply involved in a deeply flawed system that, despite everything, occasionally produces some engaging leaders and even some competent ones.

     The extent to which political leaders – or, for that matter, business leaders or other leaders – can affect people’s everyday lives tends to be vastly overestimated, including by the leaders themselves. The same may be said of so-called “thought leaders,” such as James Canton, who heads a “think tank” that advises political and business leaders on things that are likely to happen in the future and that will affect them and their constituents. There is an inherent flaw in this model, shown by the usual description of what think tanks like Canton’s do: they provide advice on “future trends.” But a trend is an extension of something already in existence, and it is a safe bet that many of the most significant developments affecting everyday life in the future will come from people and events that break with trends rather than extending them. There is an excellent example in science fiction of the 1950s, which correctly predicted vast increases in computer power and the increasing use of computers in everyday work and home life – but which did so on the basis of computers getting bigger and bigger so they could handle more and more of the tasks that they would surely be called upon to do. It was all so right, and so wrong. Today’s predictions for the future are likely to be no better. But it is nevertheless interesting to have some, and to think through the implications if they do come to pass – or, for that matter, if they do not come to pass, but some contrary approach takes hold. And that is why Future Smart is a compelling read: the chances are that a lot of what it contains will never happen, but some of what it contains probably will, even if not exactly as Canton predicts. Thinking of the book as a series of “what ifs,” and trying to follow the implications of its notions, is a fascinating intellectual exercise, although any corporate or government leader who uses Future Smart as a procedural manual has clearly been promoted above his or her level of competence. This is a book that is dense, difficult and debatable, and its subtitle (“…that will transform your world,” emphasis added) is vastly overconfident. But it offers intriguing ideas about subjects with which readers will already be acquainted: globalization, work and jobs, education, climate and more. In discussing robots, for example, Canton writes that “cybernetic enhancement with robotic components will be the norm by 2025,” which seems like a startling statement until you think about exactly what a “robotic component” might be. How about prosthetic limbs? Implanted defibrillators? Replacements for arthritic knees? Where you think we go depends in part on where you think we already are. Canton reasonably anticipates some of the difficulties that will emerge: “We will encounter serious ethical, security, and social issues due to our robotic creations,” he writes. But he is also confident that “we will be working hard to make robots, androids, and virtual bots more like us or the ideal versions of humans.” Well, perhaps – but there is a psychological factor that Canton ignores or is unaware of, in which humans tend to find humanlike creations frightening or just plain creepy to the extent that they approximate human appearance. An almost-human robot would, for most people, be more frightening than one that could genuinely be mistaken for a human being – but how to get to the genuine-seeming one without first developing the approximation?

     These are the sorts of questions that Future Smart raises constantly but never tries to answer. That makes sense: this is a very broad-brush view of where things may be going if current trends in a variety of fields continue without major, unpredicted “black swan” changes disrupting existing patterns. Regarding medicine, for example, Canton foresees a move from reactive medicine (used after a problem develops) to predictive medicine that employs “the tools to predict and prevent disease” using “the new forces of medicine such as stem cell therapy, bio-printing, and genomics.” To show where he believes medicine is heading, Canton helpfully provides a 10-item chart of its “game-changing future,” much of it (like much of what Canton presents elsewhere) involving technology: 3D bio-printing, robotic surgeons, “the coevolution of humans and technology,” “Big Data science,” “digital health,” and so on. Some of these items will likely come to pass, although likely in ways other than the mostly straight-line predictions of Future Smart. But other, even-more-likely developments in medicine are not on Canton’s radar. For example, he states that “access to personal genomic data will forever change society, security, work, crime, education, and health care,” but so grandiose a pronouncement is scarcely necessary when it comes to everyday medicine. The fact is that doctors already know, and have known for many years, that identical medicines in identical doses affect different people differently – and not just because of age-related changes in the way the body processes them. People’s differing genetic predispositions can show, and likely will show in the reasonably near future, just which medicines in just what doses will be most effective for each individual who comes down with a particular disease. This is not as dramatic a development as predictive medicine, to be sure, but anyone desperately trying to decide whether to take acetaminophen or an NSAID for pain will benefit from it. The point is that Canton thinks big and presents ideas entertainingly, notably in “headlines from the future: 2025” throughout the book. One of those says, “Google Predictive-Life Knows Who You Want to Be.” Another says, “Studies Show Consumers Prefer Virtual Doctors.” A projected price list from 2030 lists “Kidney: Free with insurance; Heart: $1,500,” and so on. An imagined 2030 headline about climate says, “Atmospheric Scrubbers Reduce Emissions by 70 Percent.” And so on. A great deal of what Canton says is intriguing, and he predicts so many things that some of them will very likely happen, if not necessarily in the way he expects (remember those presumably increasingly gigantic computers for handling what we now call Big Data). There is no question, however, that much of what Canton writes about will not occur, and that other, unwritten-about things will. That is the nature of the future: unpredictability, no matter how hard we try to predict it and how much think tanks are paid to make reasonable-seeming projections. Future Smart is an overwrought but undeniably intriguing vision of a world that will definitely not come to pass – including some elements that will. When read with that understanding, it is an intellectually exhilarating experience.

(++++) ODDITIES OF THIS AND THAT

The Hole Story of the Doughnut. By Pat Miller. Illustrated by Vincent X. Kirsch. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $17.99.

The Dead Bird. By Margaret Wise Brown. Pictures by Christian Robinson. Harper. $17.99.

     A strange narrative featuring a mixture of serious and amusing facts, Pat Miller’s The Hole Story of the Doughnut is the tale of Hanson Gregory (1831-1921), who went to sea at age 13 as a cabin boy and worked his way up – literally up for a time, in a sailing ship’s rigging – to become a ship’s captain and the heroic rescuer of seven Spanish sailors who had fallen into frigid water and would have drowned without his assistance. Gregory received a medal for that feat – but it has nothing much to do with the book’s main topic. That subject is one of those fascinating origin-of-common-objects stories that are invariably fascinating when well presented, as this one is. It seems that Gregory, who for a time – at age 16 – was a cook’s assistant, had the job of making sinkers: fried dough balls that sailors had for breakfast in the 1840s and that got their name because their centers were raw and so greasy that the pastries sank rapidly into the stomach. One day in 1847, Hanson wondered if something could be done about those raw centers of the fried dough balls, so he punched the centers out with the lid of a pepper can before frying the dough in lard, and thus created a shape that has since become world-famous: the doughnut. Despite skepticism from the cook and crew, Hanson’s odd-looking dough concoctions, originally known as “holey cakes,” delighted sailors and, soon, landlubbers as well, when Hanson told his mother about them and she started making them for sale ashore. The strangeness of this story is not so much in what happened as in what people later said had happened in order to make the discovery of doughnuts seem more dramatic. Miller explains – aided by very effective Vincent X. Kirsch illustrations – that sailors prefer bold stories to simple ones, so they created legends about doughnuts, such as one in which Captain Gregory, wrestling a ship’s wheel during a ferocious storm, speared an old-fashioned sinker on one of the wheel’s spokes and knocked out the cake’s center, thus creating the doughnut while saving the ship. There was no truth to that, nor to a claim – recounted by Miller at the back of the book, opposite a fine photo of Gregory holding a half-eaten doughnut – that the grandmother of a man named Henry Ellis had actually created the doughnut (Ellis later admitted that claim was just a publicity stunt). The Hole Story of the Doughnut is one of those wonderful tales that do not seem to be educational but really are – and, in this case, it is a story that will make young readers look with new knowledge and perhaps greater admiration at a food that is now ubiquitous but that did not exist at all until a little more than a century and a half ago.

     The intent of Margaret Wise Brown’s The Dead Bird also appears to be to give young readers a new perspective on something and to leave them perhaps wiser, perhaps sadder. But that intent is not entirely clear. Originally published in 1938 and now available in a brand-new edition with illustrations by Christian Robinson (replacing earlier ones by Remy Charlip), this (+++) book is certainly well-meaning but is also rather strange, and not in any offbeat or amusing way. The simple story has four children – multiracial and multi-ethnic, as is typical in kids’ books nowadays – walking in a park with their dog and finding a dead bird. “Sorry the bird was dead and could never fly again” but “glad they had found it because now they could dig a grave in the woods and bury it,” the children, not looking sad at all, make a hole in the ground with the help of the dog, and put ferns and flowers in and on the grave as they bury the bird and sing a song about it. Then they cry “because their singing was so beautiful and the ferns smelled so sweetly and the bird was dead” – and here they do indeed look sad, although the dog tries to cheer them up. They mark the bird’s grave with a stone and plant some flowers around it, and then – well, then the book comes to an abrupt and rather peculiar end with the sentence, “And every day, until they forgot, they went and sang to their little dead bird and put fresh flowers on his grave.” And the scene shows happy children running, dancing, flying a kite and playing while, on the opposite page and deep in the woods, the bird’s grave remains visible. The tone of The Dead Bird is uneven and its meaning unclear – is Brown showing how wonderfully caring the children are, or how death is just a natural end to life, or how kids, like adults, eventually forget graves and stop visiting them, or something else? The book lacks empathy for either the children or the bird, which is surprising in a narrative by the author of The Runaway Bunny and Goodnight Moon but perhaps simply shows that even excellent writers of children’s books have their off days. Robinson’s pictures are pretty enough, and the addition of a dog with human expressions (smiles, looks of concern) is an interesting touch. But The Dead Bird ultimately falls flat both as narrative and as teaching tool (if that is what it is supposed to be). Parents fond of Brown’s other books may be drawn to this one, but would do well to read it themselves and think through its mixed and unclear message before sharing it with their children.

(++++) PICTURE IT!

How Do Dinosaurs Write Their ABC’s with Chalk? By Jane Yolen & Mark Teague. Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. $10.99.

The Pirate Jamboree. By Mark Teague. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $17.99.

     The ancient Romans had a proverb for it: Sutor, ne ultra crepidam, usually rendered in English as “Cobbler, stick to thy last,” the “last” being the wooden pattern used to mold a shoe. In other words, when you are an expert at something, stick to it and do not try to be (or claim to be) an expert at something else. Mark Teague might want to think about it. He is a first-rate illustrator, and in the “How Do Dinosaurs…” books written by Jane Yolen, he is one without equal. These books are absolutely wonderful in every way, shape and form, including the brand-new form of How Do Dinosaurs Write Their ABC’s with Chalk? Actually, the form is not entirely new, but is adapted from Klutz Books, now a part of Scholastic. Klutz spent years perfecting the “books-plus” concept, which involves creating crafts projects that include books and revolve around them, but also provide all the items needed to do the crafts projects. Newer Klutz items, the ones offered by Scholastic, are less innovative than the originals from the days of an independent Klutz (which was the sort of company that created an additional line of offerings called “Chicken Socks”). But newer Klutz items are still clever and entertaining. And the latest Yolen/Teague dino-themed book is one with a definite Klutz heritage. The main part of every page is a blackboard displaying a letter of the alphabet, a word that starts with that letter, and a series of dashes and arrows showing how each letter of the word is created. In other words, the book shows kids how to write letters and words. The blackboards really are blackboards of the write-on-them-with-chalk type, and in true Klutz tradition, the chalk is included with the book, neatly encased in a plastic container that is bound into the book’s upper section. And what if kids have trouble writing the words? Nothing to worry about – again in sensitive Klutz style, the blackboard portions of the pages wipe clean, so kids can try again and again. But what really makes this Klutzlike offering special is that it is more than a crafts book – it is another in the Yolen/Teague dino series, with the usual Yolen questions about whether a thoroughly modern dinosaur does this or that wrong thing, and the usual answers that of course he or she does not. “How does a dinosaur write abc’s?/ Does he grab all the chalk and forget to say please?/ No, he uses this book as he learns how to write,/ shares chalk with his friends, never starting a fight.” And so forth. And every page offers not one but two of those great Teague illustrations of authentic-looking dinosaurs doing thoroughly non-dinosaur-like things in utterly charming fashion. There are two letters of the alphabet per page, so there are two dino pictures per page, and each goes with its own poetry. How? Well, in addition to the overall story of the book, given across the tops of the pages, there are Yolen couplets for every single letter of the alphabet, and the Teague dinos illustrate those couplets. “Does a dinosaur shake the goldfish in its bowl?/ No, he takes it outside every day for a stroll.” And sure enough, just above Yolen’s words, Teague shows a dinosaur romping while carefully carrying a goldfish in a bowl; and just beneath the words kids will find the letter “g,” the word “goldfish,” and the blackboard on which to write the word. This is a remarkably well-thought-out book, great fun to read and to look at, clearly instructional in intent and highly entertaining at the same time, and featuring the mixture of clever writing and excellent illustrations that makes all these Yolen/Teague dinosaur collaborations so outstanding.

     Teague does a lot better with Yolen than without her, though. As skilled an illustrator as Teague is – and he is a very, very good one – he leaves something to be desired as a narrator. The Pirate Jamboree shows this clearly. Conceptually it is very clever: a whole neighborhood full of kids transforms during the day, when parents go off to work, into a whole ocean full of scurvy pirates aboard different-looking ships. For instance, the “Miss Jane” is multicolored and sports a row of hearts along the side – a wonderful drawing, much better than the accompanying words: “Right behind them, Sharktooth Jane—/ a clever outlaw, she!/ Her ship is fancy, far from plain,/ all thanks to piracy!” The neighborhood pirates are heading for a ship festooned with balloons as well as a Jolly Roger, where snacks and juice boxes await them – again, a delightful drawing that goes with less-enjoyable words: “And finally, we meet Peg Leg Jones,/ adrift upon the salty sea./ Underneath the skull and bones—/ his turn to host the jamboree!” The forced rhymes, the lines that do not quite scan, are as different as can be from those created by Yolen, which charm even when they exhibit occasional minor metrical imperfections. Teague’s narrative poetry is simply not up to the quality of his drawings, which are marvelously action-packed and use perspective very cleverly: the pirates’ swinging-through-the-air arrival at Peg Leg Pete’s place is just one delight among many. The funniest part of the book is the climactic appearance of the pirates’ dreaded enemy, Mrs. Jones, sailing her own “black-sailed ship of doom” called the “Clean Your Room!”  Yikes!  The pirate jamboree breaks apart in haste and disarray when she turns up, and all the pirates scatter – intending, of course, to return the next day for another jamboree. The whole concept here is a lot of fun, and the illustrations are, too, but the actual storytelling is just not up to the level of the idea and the pictures, making The Pirate Jamboree a (+++) book. There is a lot of pleasure in it, and a lot of enjoyment in looking at it, but as fine a shoemaker as Teague is when it comes to visual storytelling, he would do better to work with Yolen or another highly skilled writer when seeking words that will complement his art rather than diminish it.

(++++) MUSICAL LIFE-JOURNEYS

Wagner: Complete Overtures; Orchestral Music from the Operas; Siegfried Idyll. Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Yuri Simonov; Luxembourg Radio Orchestra and Hamburg Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alois Springer; St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jerzy Semkow; Bamberger Symphoniker conducted by Heinrich Hollreiser. Brilliant Classics. $16.99 (3 CDs).

Weber: Complete Overtures. WDR Sinfonieorchester conducted by Howard Griffiths. CPO. $16.99.

Shostakovich: The Complete String Quartets. Quatuor Danel (Marc Danel and Gilles Millet, violins; Tony Nys, viola; Guy Danel, cello). Alpha. $27.99 (5 CDs).

     The ability to follow a composer’s development over years, even decades, by hearing many works written in the same form or for the same purpose, is one of the great pleasures of comprehensive CD sets like these. If only the companies releasing them understood that and placed the works in chronological order! Here are three excellent, highly expressive sets of performances that take listeners from early in a composer’s musical life to the end of it, all three of them marred by production decisions to release the works as a hodgepodge rather than a sequence from earliest to latest. Of course, it is possible for listeners to rearrange the material – and the disc sequences, in the case of multi-disc sets – but it is irritating to have to do so, and really, what is the point being made by requiring buyers to do that in order to hear the material in the most intriguing and interesting way? To be sure, there is some excuse for this in case of the Brilliant Classics release of Wagner’s overtures, preludes and non-vocal opera music. This is one of those combinatory packages, a mixture of analog and digital recordings made over decades, with two full CDs featuring the Philharmonia Orchestra under Yuri Simonov and a third disc containing four works performed by four different orchestras under three different conductors. Yet the sequencing is odd even within the Simonov CDs, which end with the prelude to Die Meistersinger after starting with that to Parsifal (whose “Good Friday Music” then appears on the third CD). Listeners who can put up with the mishmash sequence will hear some excellent performances here. From Der Ring des Nibelungen there are “The Ride of the Valkyries,” “Forest Murmurs,” “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” and “Siegfried’s Funeral March.” The “Prelude und Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde is here, along with the overtures to Rienzi, Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser, plus the preludes to Act I and Act III of Lohengrin. All these are conducted by Simonov with a sure hand and fine sense of rhythm and drama. On the third CD, in addition to the “Good Friday Music” played by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra led by Jerzy Semkow, there are the overtures to Das Liebesverbot with the Luxembourg Radio Orchestra and Die Feen with the Hamburg Symphony Orchestra, both conducted enthusiastically by Alois Springer, although neither orchestra is really top-notch in this repertoire; and Siegfried Idyll in an old but lovely performance by the Bamberger Symphoniker under Heinrich Hollreiser. There is nothing unfamiliar in this music – even the overtures to Die Feen and Das Liebesverbot have been turning up more recently in concerts and recordings – but there is considerable satisfaction in having all this material in a single, good-if-not-quite-top-quality package, whose modest shortcomings of sound and performance are more than compensated for by Brilliant Classics’ offering it at an excellent price.

     Carl Maria von Weber’s life was much shorter than Wagner’s – Weber died of tuberculosis at age 39 – which makes the extent of his development in the theatrical and operatic field all the more remarkable. Romantic German opera was launched by Weber and, after him, Heinrich Marschner, whose ties to Wagner’s first opera, Die Feen, are quite clear. Surviving overtures from Weber include 10 from theatrical works and a concert piece, the popular Jubelouvertüre. CPO’s new recording includes that plus the nine accessible theatrical pieces (the 10^th, to the early Waldmädchen, is held at the music library of the Mariinsky Theatre and has not been made available for study or performance). Chronologically, these works range from the opening to Peter Schmoll und seine Nachbarn (1801) to that for Oberon (1826), and include, in chronological sequence, the overtures to the operas Der Beherrscher der Geister, Silvana, Abu Hassan, Der Freischütz and Euryanthe. There are also overtures written as part of the incidental music for Turandot and Preciosa. For a recording, there are many logical ways to arrange these pieces: strictly by chronology, certainly, or perhaps with the opera lead-ins chronological and then the non-operatic pieces in their order of composition. There is, however, no apparent logic to the presentation here – Peter Schmoll is placed second on the disc and Oberon fourth, for example. This is really a shame, because Howard Griffiths, a conductor who seems especially well attuned to less-known music and is quite adept in handling stage works, does a very fine job with every piece here, and clearly has a sense of the elements that make each one special: the “Turkish” scoring of Abu Hassan, the intensely atmospheric elements of Der Freischütz, the use of violas and cellos playing above clarinets in their lowest register in Oberon, and so forth. Listeners need to unscramble the sequence of CD tracks to get the best sense of Weber’s compositional mastery and the increasing sophistication of his orchestration. That is too bad, but it is actually worth the effort for a chance to explore some of the fascinating musical innovations Weber made during his all-too-brief life.

     Chronology is also crucial, perhaps even more so than in Weber’s case, for full appreciation of the quartets of Shostakovich. But the new five-CD Alpha release of the Quatuor Danel’s performances – which were originally made available a decade ago and have now been repackaged – is so far out of order as to be bizarre. One CD, for example, sandwiches the autobiographical, near-suicidal No. 8, the most frequently played of the quartets, between the penultimate quartet, No. 14, and the nearly atonal No. 12. It is hard to imagine any conceivable reason for this. The quartets were written between 1938 and 1973, and certainly there are some thematic connections that could be used to organize them – for example, Nos. 4 and 5 make a pair of sorts, as do Nos. 7 and 8; Nos. 5, 8 and 11 are exceptionally dark, while Nos. 6, 9 and 12 seem determined to be brighter (not always successfully). But there is no apparent organizing principle at all in this release, which is a real shame, because the performances are so unusual for this music as to be very much worth hearing and re-hearing. The ne plus ultra for Shostakovich’s quartets has always been the approach of the Borodin Quartet, whose exceptional expressiveness and dyed-in-the-wool pessimism set an unequalled standard among recordings. Quatuor Danel was actually trained by the Borodin Quartet, but in addition to absorbing lessons about balance, phrasing and how to attack sections and individual notes, this foursome clearly decided to proffer a less-agonized version of the music. That means greater lyricism than is usually heard in these works, touches of dry irony rather than (or in addition to) ones of deep despair, and instrumental tone that is lighter than that of the Borodin Quartet and, indeed, lighter than is usual in Russian chamber ensembles. The emotional reach of the quartets as played by Quatuor Danel is greater than that of the Borodin Quartet, but whether that is a good or bad thing will be a matter for each listener to decide. Certainly the tonal beauty of, for example, the second movements of Nos. 8 and 10 is a surprise here, coming as it does without sacrifice of intensity. The warmth and rhythmic flexibility of the ensemble playing is first-rate throughout, and is especially telling in the final three quartets, which emerge here with a greater sense of humanity than usual. These are unusual readings and are not without flaws, a notable extramusical one being the tendency of quartet members to mark entrances with all-too-audible heavy breathing (this is common in chamber groups, but not usually recorded with this level of unwanted clarity). Listeners familiar with the extremely deep and very Russian pessimism of the finest performances of these quartets may well find Quatuor Danel’s versions to be, if not a breath of fresh air, then a somewhat light approach, perhaps one more appropriate for central European music than for that of Russia. But even listeners who decide they do not want this as their first recording of the Shostakovich quartets may well be interested in it as a second (or third) one, because it shines a fresh light on music that is certainly dour but need not always be as darkly depressive and despairing as it frequently is in other readings. Interestingly, Quatuor Danel’s approach makes the most sense when the quartets are heard in chronological sequence, as their increasingly acerbic nature and their responses to events in the world and in Shostakovich’s life emerge more clearly over time. This is yet another reason to be dissatisfied with the order in which the quartets are presented in this recording – but not a reason to be dissuaded from listening to the frequently revelatory readings themselves.

(+++) CELLO MOODS AND MORE

Schubert: Arpeggione Sonata; Falla: Siete Canciones Populares Españolas; David Leisner: Twilight Streams; Gluck: Dance of the Blessed Spirits; Saint-Saëns: The Swan; Villa-Lobos: Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5—Aria; Paganini: Variations on One String, on “Moses” by Rossini. Zuill Bailey, cello; David Leisner, guitar. Azica. $16.99.

Sephardic Journey: Music of Alan Thomas, Joseph V. Williams II, Carlos Rafael Rivera, David Leisner and Clarice Assad. Cavatina Duo (Eugenia Moliner, flute; Denis Azabagic, guitar). Cedille. $16.

Yves Ramette: Cello Sonata; Violin Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2; String Quartet; Poems of Francis Carco. Carmine Miranda, cello; Karolina Rojahn, piano; Vít Mužík and Igor Kopyt, violins; Dominika Mužíková, viola; Petr Nouzovský, cello; Erik Van Heyningen, baritone; Vanessa Holroyd, flute; Nancy Russo, harp; Jonathan Roberts, piano; Shaw Pong Liu, violin; Emily Dahl, viola; Leo Eguchi, cello. Navona. $14.99.

Blurred Boundaries: Music of Libby Larsen, Florence Beatrice Price, Erberk Eryılmaz, Hajime Komatsu and Marty Regan.  Apollo Chamber Players. Navona. $14.99.

ACE Composers: Music by Alan, Christopher, and Eric Schmitz. Ravello. $14.99.

John K. Leupold II: Exasperating Perpetuation; A Slight Angle to the Universe—Waiting for the Barbarians; Charismatic Thaumaturge; Envisaging a Supercluster. Ravello. $14.99.

     The outstanding expressiveness and wide range of the cello are not always enough for performers and composers: some feel they have to push the instrument in new directions and use it in new ways in order to increase its communicative ability and its interactions with other instruments. The results are as variable as the reasons musicians undertake the attempts. Zuill Bailey is a first-rate cellist by any measure, and one who is not content with the standard repertoire for his instrument. Hence it is no surprise to find him paired with guitarist/composer David Leisner on a new Azica CD, presenting mostly well-known music that sounds quite different here from the way it does elsewhere. Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata, for example, has been played on cello and guitar before – there are many instrumental combinations designed to transfer the unusual range of the arpeggione (essentially a bowed, six-stringed guitar for which only one great work, Schubert’s sonata, was ever written) to other instruments. Bailey and Leisner handle the arrangement with flair and broad emotionalism: the performance is slow but not draggy, expansive without being bloated. The sound of the instruments takes some getting used to, even for those used to hearing this sonata on the cello – the piano is the usual accompanying instrument. But the sonic world soon becomes a pleasing one that makes for an interesting and mostly convincing performance. The seven dances by Manuel de Falla provide considerable contrast: these are miniatures with strong and clear rhythms, and both Bailey and Leisner seem to revel in the chance to play them with outgoing flair. The third major work here is the world première recording of Leisner’s Twilight Streams, which resembles Falla’s piece as a sequence of short movements (five of them in this case) while its emotional compass is closer to that of Schubert’s sonata. The work partakes of a repetitious, minimalist approach, although it has more forward momentum than many pieces of that type. Its first two movements are intended to contrast “empty” and “full” dark, its second two “empty” and “full” light, and its finale, “adrift at twilight,” then meanders or strolls to a conclusion. It is not a major piece, but it is an interesting one in the context of those by Falla and Schubert. The remaining four works here are all essentially encores, from the lyrical/placid to the virtuosic, and all are handled nicely enough; the CD as a whole is pleasant, if scarcely gripping.

     What gripped the two members of the Cavatina Duo and led to their Cedille CD called Sephardic Journey was the discovery that both had roots in Old Spain’s Sephardic Jewish community. The discovery of a previously unknown genealogical background is scarcely unusual, but what Eugenia Moliner and Denis Azabagic did with it is. The cello here, played by David Cunliffe, appears in Trio Sefardi by Alan Thomas (born 1967), a work whose title speaks clearly to the concept of the entire recording. The idea was to use Sephardic folk melodies as the basis for new music, something each of the five composers on the CD took to heart in a different way. Thomas produced a three-movement work, the first movement as long as the others put together, that attempts to balance the Spanish idiom with folkloric elements drawn from Sephardic history. The approach is similar to that of Love Dreams of the Exile by David Leisner (born 1953), a meditative work for flute, guitar and string quartet (here, the Avalon String Quartet) whose stylistic resemblance to Twilight Streams on Leisner’s disc with Bailey is readily apparent. Also in a similar vein is Sephardic Suite by Clarice Assad (born 1978), written for the same forces as Leisner’s piece but offering greater contrasts among its movements as it seeks to portray romance and everyday family life. Nearly as long as the three three-movement pieces, but cast as a single movement, Plegaria y Canto (al Bodre de la Mar) by Carlos Rafael Rivera (born 1970) is also a work of contrasts: written for flute, guitar and violin (Desirée Ruhstrat), it evokes alternating images of hope and despair. The shortest piece here, Isabel by Joseph V. Williams (born 1979), is only for flute and guitar and is in some ways the most affecting work on the CD in the way it memorializes one of the many victims of the Spanish Inquisition. Because of this disc’s subject matter, the newness of its music and the unusual instrumentation, this recording will scarcely be to all listeners’ tastes, but it certainly represents an intriguing way to acknowledge and pay tribute to the primary performers’ previously unknown ancestry.

     The works on a new Navona CD of the music of Yves Ramette (1921-2012) are tributes of a different sort: all were written in Paris during World War II, between 1941 and 1944, and all were influenced to a greater or lesser degree by the conflict. That includes the Cello Sonata, a generally meditative work whose three movements are all in similar tempos and whose emotional content seems designed to counter the upheavals in the world through a kind of rather forced-sounding calm. The piano’s interjections in the short finale hint at the difficulty of finding the placidity that the cello seems to be seeking. There is a stop-and-start quality to Violin Sonata No. 1, especially in the first movement; the wistfulness of the second movement leads to an unresolved piano “question” at the end, after which the finale sets the instruments more against each other than in any cooperative form. Violin Sonata No. 2 opens with an uneasiness that it never quite escapes. There is a rather dismal quality to the second movement, especially when it seems to struggle, midway through, to produce dance rhythms. The finale abruptly runs into a slow passage toward its conclusion, as if its Allegro moderato tempo has simply been too much to sustain, with the result that the speedup at the conclusion ends up sounding rather forced. The single-movement String Quartet is, for much of its length, an extended lamentation, although scurrying violin figurations eventually pick up the pace even if they do not dispel a sense of gloom. The work’s concluding fadeout is scarcely a surprise. The three short songs in 3 Poems of Francis Carco lighten the mood to only a limited extent, with “Madrigal” and “Amour” proceeding with suitable lyricism and “Berceuse” being a melodrama – the words spoken through music – rather than a traditional song. The overall mood of all this music is very similar, with the result that the disc seems somewhat mired in the same feelings, but that is perhaps not surprising in light of the years when these pieces were created. Certainly all the performances are well-done and involving.

     The performances by the Apollo Chamber Players on a new Navona release called Blurred Boundaries are quite fine as well. Here the cello, played by Matthew Dudzik, is the anchor instrument of an ensemble that is basically a string quartet (with Matthew J. Detrick and Anabel Ramirez on violins and Whitney Bullock on viola), supplemented as needed by clarinet (Ismail Lumanovski), bass (Timothy Pitts) and percussion (Matthew McClung). The underpinning of this CD is somewhat like that of Sephardic Journey. Here the intent is to commission 20 new works inspired by folk music by the end of this decade – the initiative is called “20x2020.” Three of those pieces are heard here: Sorrow Song and Jubilee (2014) by Libby Larsen, Splash of Indigo (2014) by Marty Regan, and Thracian Airs of Besime Sultan (2015) by Erberk Eryilmaz. The first of these recalls Dvořák’s interest in African-American spirituals; the second rather oddly combines elements of Japanese folk music with French impressionism; the third effectively mixes music of the Roma (gypsies) with Balkan tunes. Also here are three older works, the oldest being Plantation Melodies, Old and New (1901) by Henry Thacker Burleigh, arranged by the Apollo Chamber Players and sounding more emotionally convincing than most of the newer, more-intellectual pieces. The CD also includes Five Folksongs in Counterpoint (1951) by Florence Beatrice Price, whose arrangements are more than enough to show all five of the familiar tunes in a new light: “Calvary,” “Clementine,” “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,” “Shortnin’ Bread” (featuring some fine fiddling) and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” (where the songful cello is a highlight). Finally, there is Four Japanese Folk Songs (Suite No. 2) (1996) by Hajime Komatsu, a work that shows both what is similar in folk music from different parts of the world and what is different. This CD will be of special interest to devotees of folk music in a classical setting – perhaps not a large group, but one that will find much to enjoy here.

     The cello is used in two of the nine works on a Ravello release called ACE Composers, but neither it nor any other individual instrument is the point here. The disc’s title refers to the first names of three composers who are members of the same family: Alan Schmitz and his sons, Christopher and Eric. The release is a gimmick, defiantly so, but there are some parallels among the pieces heard here, since all three Schmitzes draw on popular music for inspiration – much as the Blurred Boundaries CD is essentially an outpouring of reconsiderations of folk tunes from various cultures. In the case of Alan Schmitz, the works here are Brass Trio for trumpet (Randy Grabowski), horn (Yu-Ting Su) and trombone (Anthony Williams); Hexachord Fantasy, in which David Gomper conducts an ensemble of flute (Emily Duncan), clarinet (Thiago Ancelmo de Souza), violin (Leonardo Perez), cello (Matthew Laughlin), piano (Korak Lertpibulchai), and percussion (Andrew Thierauf and Wannapha Yannavut); and Tango Fantasy for viola (Julia Bullard) and guitar (Todd Seelye). Of these, Brass Trio tends to plod, Hexachord Fantasy is most interesting for its instrumentation, and Tango Fantasy is most involving, with nice contrast between the instruments and some particularly effective guitar material. Christopher Schmitz is here represented by Five Miniatures for alto saxophone (Monty Cole) and marimba and vibraphone (Marcus Reddick); Rhapsody for Violin and Piano with Amy Schwartz Moretti and Elizabeth Pridgen; and The Playful Lark for flute (Kelly Via) and piano (Pridgen again). Christopher Schmitz is heavily influenced by (and a composer of) film music, and Five Miniatures, which draws most clearly on that source, is the most interesting of his pieces here; the other two are nicely made but rather straightforward. The works here by Eric Schmitz are Reflections for English horn (Charles Pillow), electric drums (Bob Sneider), bass (Jeff Campbell) and drums (Rich Thompson); Trio for flugelhorn (Brian Shaw), English horn (Andrew Blanke) and cello (Hyugrai Kim); and Big Changes Ahead for tenor and bass trombones (Michael Davis). These three works are the most consistently interesting on the disc, partly because of the unusual instrumentation (flugelhorn plus English horn is especially noteworthy) and partly because the pieces’ jazz inflections lead to rhythmically involving music that reaches out effectively to listeners and draws them into Eric Schmitz’s sound world. Certainly this disc is a specialty item, but there is plenty of enjoyment to be had in it.

     The four works of John K. Leupold II on a new Ravello CD are somewhat harder to absorb. A percussionist, Leupold is concerned largely with instrumental timbre, and while his works are superficially and initially intriguing, they tend to go on too long for their content. Exasperating Perpetuation, for violin (Sarah D’Angelo), clarinet (Evan Solomon), cello (Natalie Spehar) and piano (R. Timothy McReynolds) is all rhythm, tempo and dynamics, and is filled with the usual atonal bleeps and bloops of much contemporary music; it wears thin in a few minutes but goes on for more than 10. A Slight Angle to the Universe—Waiting for the Barbarians is for solo violin, and it requires the violinist (Francis Liu) to be a narrator as well, of text by C.P. Cavafy that runs from “the barbarians are arriving today” to “they are bored by eloquence” and similar vaguely meaningful statements. “Why should this anxiety and confusion suddenly begin?” is one question here – a good one. Charismatic Thaumaturge is played by Noelle Drewes (oboe and English horn) and Zac Hollister (bass trombone). Its contrast of the instruments’ personalities is effective for a time, but again, the work, which lasts 14 minutes, seems longer because it makes and re-makes the same point. Envisaging a Supercluster bring to the fore the cello (Dan Shomper) in a pairing with piano (Grace Eun Kim) whose objective is to reproduce the feelings of beauty and majesty inspired by the constellations Leo, Monoceros and Taurus. The expansiveness here is appropriate but is not communicated in any distinctive or particularly subtle way, and the cello’s expressive abilities, which could be expected to help produce a feeling of wonder and immensity, are instead employed mainly in the service of angular rhythms and musical lines whose beauty is less than that given to the piano. The notion of working against the cello’s natural expressivity and warmth has a distinctly modernistic feeling to it, but it does not lead to a very convincing musical narrative or to one that seems genuinely to explore its professed cosmic subject. The result is that the titles of these four works are, on the whole, more interesting than their musical content.

(++++) CHARACTER COMEDIES

Big Nate: Thunka, Thunka, Thunka. By Lincoln Peirce. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

Shivers! Book II: The Pirate Who’s Back in Bunny Slippers. By Annabeth Bondor-Stone & Connor White. Illustrated by Anthony Holden. Harper. $12.99.

     Many books for preteens are all about adventure, with plot and pacing designed to distract readers from the fact that the characters do not have much, well, character. Some books, though, take the opposite approach, with plot being almost incidental to involvement with the protagonist and those in his or her orbit. These are books kids read to find out how the central characters’ foibles and fears hold up in the face of whatever happens to or around them. The approach works particularly well for cartoonist Lincoln Peirce in his Big Nate comic strips and the books that collect them, such as Thunka, Thunka, Thunka. The title is the sound that an empty plastic bottle makes when Nate hits himself or someone else gently on the head with it as a relaxation tool. That is a perfect example of character-driven rather than plot-driven comedy: it takes someone like Nate to think up the plastic-bottle relaxation in the first place and someone like him to use it not only on himself but also on others, such as his feckless father. Unfortunately, Nate gets a little too enthusiastically rhythmic while trying to de-stress his dad, and ends up needing the plastic-bottle relaxation treatment himself. But that is the whole point of Big Nate: the central character is who he is and remains very much himself through all the everyday adventures and misadventures that Peirce creates for him. Some of those in Thunka, Thunka, Thunka are particularly amusing. Nate’s neighbor’s dog, Spitsy, always wearing an Elizabethan collar as if perpetually recovering from an injury, falls in love with and becomes “engaged” to Pickles the cat, which leads cat-hating Nate to try having “the talk” with Spitsy before realizing, “This might be the stupidest conversation I’ve ever had.” (Spitsy, by the way, learns to speak “cat” and also likes to knit, even making Nate a sweater.) In another sequence, Nate makes a bet with his student nemesis, Gina, that he can go a week without being given detention by his teacher nemesis, Mrs. Godfrey – and things do not go quite as Gina expects them to. Sixth-grader Nate’s first-grade book buddy, Peter, is absent, so Nate is assigned to another first-grader, Miranda, who says, “I want to read the label on the bottom of your sneakers. While you’re lying on your back. After I deck you.” Nate’s class is visited by the local TV station’s chief meteorologist, and Nate tries to trick him into resigning so the previous meteorologist, whom Nate prefers, can get his job back. Nate buys his big sister a comic-strip collection she wants for Christmas, managing to get it torn, soaked in water and chewed by Spitsy before he gives it to her. Nate does his best, which is not very good, to avoid classmate Kim Cressly, who has a crush on him (literally, when she hugs him), who calls him “punkin,” and who says, “You’re cute when you act stupid.” Hint to Kim: that’s not acting. Nate is not really stupid, though – he is just too self-involved and self-important to realize how he comes across to other people, kids and adults alike. And that blissful lack of self-awareness is a big part of Big Nate’s charm, and a big reason the comic strip featuring him comes across so well.

     Anthony Holden’s illustrations of Shivers, the frightened-of-everything boy pirate, are hilariously apt for the stories by Annabeth Bondor-Stone and Connor White, and they would not be out of place in a comic strip or graphic novel. The Shivers series, though, consists of conventional novels-with-illustrations, although neither the books nor the pictures can really be called “conventional.” The first book’s climax had Shivers rescuing his parents and lots of other pirates from the evil clutches of a hot-dog-making French chef who had trapped them all inside the Statue of Liberty – this, despite the fact that Shivers was covered in mustard and snails at the time. That first book also introduced Margo, daughter of Chief Clomp’n’Stomps of the local police force, who is about as different from Shivers as it is possible to be – which of course means the two become fast friends after Shivers discovers, to his own amazement, that he actually isn’t scared of Margo’s overbearing and over-enthusiastic overdoing of just about everything. These two actually make one heck of a team – Margo is nobody’s sidekick, that’s for sure – and they need all their wits and bravery about them for their second adventure, which more or less picks up where the first one ended and goes in some thoroughly bizarre (and always hilarious) directions. This time Lady Liberty’s torch, or rather the Treasure Torch, which is actually the statue’s torch but is also “the most valuable treasure in the Seven Seas, a majestic, towering flame made entirely of gold,” has gone missing, and Shivers is being blamed for the disappearance by none other than Mayor President. That is to say Mayor Sheila B. President, who is so intimidating that for once Shivers, who is afraid of pretty much everything, has every right to be scared of her. Eventually, it turns out that Mayor President is not what she seems to be – she is worse. But before readers learn that, Shivers and Margo have to go on an adventure (Shivers hates adventures) that involves a convention of Franks, not to be confused with the franks (as in hot dogs) of the first book, although there is indeed some overlap when it comes to some of the characters – in fact, Shivers has to win a hot-dog-eating contest so he and Margo can pick up one of the clues needed to locate and recapture the Treasure Torch. Shivers’ terror at just about everything serves him and Margo in good stead again in this book, notably when Margo, to help get everyone out of a desperate situation, informs Shivers that “popcorn is really made from parrot poop,” which means that “if it’s true that you are what you eat, then Shivers was mostly made of parrot poop,” which leads to a sufficiently loud Shivers scream to save the day. Well, actually it only saves the minute, because things quickly get worse again, but the day is eventually saved, thanks mostly to Shivers and Margo but also to Shivers’ first mate, Albee the fish, who thinks a lot but never says anything that anyone else in the book can understand; and to Shivers’ parents, genuinely fearsome pirates Bob and Tilda; and to Shivers’ brother, Brock, who has the approximate intelligence of a brick but has a good heart and a good ship that unfortunately lasts only a few pages. The Pirate Who’s Back in Bunny Slippers is just as wild, weird, wet and wonderful as the first book about Shivers; and although adults may find a bit too many projectile-vomiting-as-a-weapon scenes here, readers ages 8-12 – the book’s target audience – will likely find there to be just enough such occurrences to keep things interesting. The Shivers books are listed as being “based on a really funny idea by Harrison Blanz, age 9,” and if that is true, Harrison deserves a generous percentage of the royalties, because the underlying very funny idea of a landlocked pirate character who is the opposite of brave and bold is amusing enough – and what Bondor-Stone, White and Holden have done with that foundation is flat-out hysterical.

(++++) FAMILY MATTERS; FAMILIES MATTER

So You’re Going to Be a Dad, Revised Edition. By Peter Downey. Da Capo. $14.99.

Casting Lots: Creating a Family in a Beautiful, Broken World. By Susan Silverman. Da Capo. $24.99.

     An ample oozing of sincerity is not enough for a modern book on parenting and families. Yes, the treacle must flow, but even treacle – or molasses, if you prefer – must be appropriately sweetened or combined with other ingredients to be palatable. The choice of those other ingredients, which may range from humor to hyper-sincerity, is what separates family-focused books from each other. The new edition of Peter Downey’s So You’re Going to Be a Dad, revised 20 years after its initial 1994 publication, comes down on the “humor” side of things. When it comes to “buying stuff,” for example, Downey makes it a point to refer to the now-customary online shopping experience that was barely on anyone’s wallet’s radar in the mid-1990s: “A quick stroll through your local baby-equipment store or baby expo or online warehouse will leave your head spinning at the almost infinite number of baby-related products, gizmos and accessories available on the market. (Bet you didn’t even know there was such a thing as ‘Nipple Butter,’ huh?) Don’t be bamboozled by all the stuff you see. There is a lot of junk on the market, and you don’t actually need all the bits ’n’ pieces, so be wary.” This is a pretty good encapsulation of what Downey has done here: there may be new places to buy baby junk, but it is still junk; and if a father is still as clueless as Downey thinks dads (including Downey himself) were 20-some years ago, he still needs to be warned about bamboozlement. It could, however, be argued that today’s dads are more likely than Downey realizes to know exactly what nipple butter is; and there are ways in which Downey’s writing seems almost quaint, for instance in such mundane remarks as “you and your wife will need to make some decisions” – a phrase whose first part might nowadays more frequently appear as “you and your partner.” Nevertheless, Downey manages to make many of his points with humor that remains fresh, as in his comment about a woman who wanted a female obstetrician because having a male one “was like having a vegetarian teach you how to barbecue ribs.”

     Downey neatly intersperses humorous personal stories with his humorous more-general ones; for example, in discussing the likelihood of a sexually active woman becoming pregnant in any given month, he remarks, “Meredith and I turned out to be as fertile as the Nile Delta and only need to drink from the same coffee cup for her to start feeling sick in the morning.” Presumably Downey’s wife, Meredith, is fine with this – they have three children together, after all – and presumably one reason for that is that So You’re Going to Be a Dad is filled with so much useful material that it really can serve as a make-it-through-pregnancy guide for many fathers-to-be (and can give mothers-to-be something they can tell fathers-to-be that they should go read for a while so the mothers-to-be can take it easy, doggone it). Downey deserves credit for trying to come up with male-friendly ways to describe elements of the pregnancy-and-birth process: “Contractions are generally described as intense period pain (a useless description for us guys) or extreme abdominal and back cramps. (Maybe think medicine ball and testicles?)” He deserves additional credit for making even the most stress-provoking elements of the whole process amusing, at least when they are not happening to you. For example, if the baby insists on being born while you are driving to the hospital, “Don’t stop in the middle of an intersection or outside a boys’ high school during their lunchbreak. If you’re in a taxi, make sure the driver turns the meter off.” And he adds that if the baby is actually born in your vehicle, you should remember, after things calm down, to “put your car up for sale for half its market value.” The point of all the humor is to make the genuine information – of which there is plenty – go down more easily for men who have not accompanied their partners through pregnancy and childbirth before or, if they have done so, have forgotten what it was like since the last time it happened. Downey does allow feelings about the wonder of it all to peek through, but he makes sure that readers stay focused more on the amusing aspects of the whole situation, as when he recommends that fathers “invest in a diaper-changing outfit. A wetsuit, oxygen tank, welding mask, blacksmith’s gloves and a wooden spoon will do you nicely.” Or when he discusses which pets are more or less risky to have around babies, remarking, “Turtles are aggressive, but they move so slowly that you’ve got about four days to head off a direct attack.” It is impossible to tell from this book what kind of father Downey himself is, or how he prepared himself for fatherhood back in the 1990s, but he does say that “becoming a dad redefined me,” which seems like a pretty good summation of the experience. What the new edition of So You’re Going to Be a Dad offers is an updated version of what the original one provided: the sense that it is, indeed, possible to get through the whole experience of becoming a father by simply laughing about it to the greatest extent possible.

     There is humor as well in Susan Silverman’s Casting Lots, but it is calculated humor, deliberately designed to balance the considerable intensity of the book’s message and its foundational save-the-world-or-at-least-a-little-piece-of-it morality. This is a book about adoption, but not just any adoption: it is about international adoption, and the circumstances that led Silverman to become the founder of a nonprofit group called JustAdopt. It is about interracial adoption, about the notion (mistaken, Silverman strongly argues) that adoption in Western countries is a new form of colonialism, about the concept (also mistaken, also strongly argued) that children “belong” to their birth parents. It is, in other words, a book about heavy subjects, and Silverman obviously realizes this and tries to lighten things up with occasional wry humor. This does not work very well – the amusing elements almost always feel forced, a diversion from the real material to which Silverman cannot wait to return – and the lightening never lasts long. Silverman’s Jewish faith is a big driver of what she does – she is a rabbi as well as an activist – but she tries to broaden the appeal of what she writes by describing the tribulations of her own birth family, in religious matters as well as secular ones: “My parents were do disdainful of religion that they once jokingly threatened to punish me when I confessed to believing in God, but our new house was so Americana perfect that one Christmas, we even had Christmas. …But there was no Christmas miracle for this bunch of Jews.” No, there was not: Silverman’s parents divorced, and it was only later that they remarried and came into themselves as parents after finding new life partners. Silverman connects the elements of her background to her own adult life and her experiences with international adoptions. And certainly there is emotion here, but there is a studied feeling to it in Silverman’s writing: “The red tones of his brown skin deepened against the stark white cotton with hand stitching. His little bare feet were heart-burstingly soft against the bumpy blue embroidery at the hem of the pant legs, and the large four-petal blue and black flower embroidered on the shirt seemed to reflect the expansiveness in his huge dark eyes.”

     Readers of this (+++) book will have to decide for themselves whether it is primarily a call to action, a celebration of love that knows no boundaries, or an explanation of real-world boundaries that really do exist and need to be overcome if one wishes to adopt internationally; whether it is heartwarming or overstated, funny or assertively comic, wise or merely clever. It is a book with a mission, to be sure, but whether it is convincing in furthering that mission is another matter. Its most involving elements are those in which Silverman’s self-assurance and righteousness reveal self-doubt underneath, as when she finds out that Adar, adopted from Ethiopia, has been asking God – referred to in this family as She, not He – to turn his skin white: “When he called God a She, as I had taught him, I felt a surge of guilt. Not only was Adar different from his family, he was different from God. Was I making him as alienated from his spiritual source as he was from his biological source? My control in the creation of Adar’s world was all too apparent. It usually went under the radar of our daily lives, but when you rewrite God, it’s hard to miss.” It is certainly hard to miss Silverman’s sincerity, but it is also hard to fathom everything she is getting at in this combination memoir and advocacy pamphlet. She has indeed created a family that works for her and a way to focus on a cause in which she believes, but the story here is so individualized, so one-of-a-kind, that Casting Lots is not the sort of book that seems likely to bring many others to the societal barricades with her.

(+++) GRANDLY ADVENTURING

Seven Wonders No. 5: The Legend of the Rift. By Peter Lerangis. Harper. $17.99.

Seven Wonders No. 4: The Curse of the King. By Peter Lerangis. Harper. $6.99.

Seven Wonders Journals: The Promise. By Peter Lerangis. Harper. $2.99.

Wing & Claw #1: Forest of Wonders. By Linda Sue Park. Harper. $12.99.

     Preteen heroes are everywhere. Whenever one world-spanning fantastic adventure comes to an end, there is another there, reliably, to replace it. And whenever one group of good guys (they always come in a group) wins its way to success after surmounting insurmountable odds, it is time to form a new group and send that one on its way per aspera ad astra. So Peter Lerangis’ completion of Seven Wonders not only gives readers of the series the satisfaction of having seen young people of their own age accomplish great things, but also clears the way for a chance to read new series cut from the same cloth, such as Linda Sue Park’s Wing & Claw. But first, a look at what happens in Seven Wonders. Readers can be forgiven for having expected a seven-book series here. Seven wonders, you know? And although the series takes place entirely in modern times, its whole premise involves the long-ago days of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – of which the Colossus of Rhodes, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and the Mausoleum at Helicarnassus were the focus of the first three entries: one ancient wonder per book. The fourth book, The Curse of the King, first published last year and now available in paperback, also focuses on a single ancient wonder: the statue of Zeus at Olympia. But although the setting is new, the basic plot here is identical to that of the earlier novels. Friends Jack, Cass and Aly are searching for “seven magic Atlantean orbs hidden in the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – six of which don’t exist anymore.” They are also trying to figure out why the fourth member of their group, Marco, has switched sides, working with the evil Massa organization that seeks the same orbs (called Loculi) for its own nefarious purposes. Oh – and the searchers are going to die soon. At least that is the underlying concept here: they all have mutant genes that give them superpowers but will kill them by age 14, and their only hope for a cure is to gather the Loculi and discover the objects’ secrets, saving the world into the bargain.

     The Curse of the King is the weakest book in the whole series, in large part because Lerangis decides to have the statue of Zeus come alive and go on a rampage early in the narrative – while talking entirely in phrases drawn from TV shows and ads. Thus, we have the most powerful of the old Greek gods, the conqueror of the Titans, the wielder of thunderbolts, saying, in capital letters: “TO THE MOOOON, ALIIICE!” “COWABUNGAAAA!” “I THINK THIS IS THE BEGINNING OF A BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP.” “I’LL GET YOU, YOU SKWEWY WABBIT!” This is so over-the-top as to be embarrassing, but perhaps not to the intended audience of Seven Wonders, which may know little, if anything, about The Honeymooners, the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the film Casablanca, or the Bugs Bunny cartoons. Still, it seems that the newly animated (or reanimated) statue of Zeus would collapse from humiliation under the weight of this sort of dialogue. Anyway, the friends get the Loculus of Strength from the statue, but soon find themselves in the hands of the Massa, whose dialogue is about at the level of that given to Zeus: “Massa strong. …No more froufrou Harvard-bricky college-la-la-la heads in clouds.” But enough of this: by the end of this book, reliable Aly has been kidnapped by King Uhla’ar and taken to Atlantis; he has also made off with the Loculus of Strength. Aly must be rescued! But first a word from – well, not a sponsor, but the latest and last of the Seven Wonders Journals. Promoted as book 4.5, this very thin volume goes back in time to explain, in novella form, just what happened to Atlantis all those ages ago because of the battles between brother princes Karai and Massarym, who are – what a surprise – 14 years old. It is their entirely typical rivalry (Karai wants to protect the magic of Atlantis while Massarym wants it all for himself) that leads to the entirely typical result of Atlantis’ destruction, except that it is not really destroyed, because then where would the modern Seven Wonders be? In any case, like the previous Seven Wonders Journals, this is an unnecessary expansion of the basic story that will be of interest to readers who just cannot get enough of the heroic exploits of Jack, Cass and Aly.

     And to return to those exploits: in The Legend of the Rift, the heroic preteens have to visit the remaining ancient wonders  and hence avoid the necessity of a seven-book series – although it is a bit surprising that Lerangis, who is highly prolific, chose not to milk this sequence even further. In this book there is this rift, see, guarded by the usual monstrous creature, which the noble-but-doomed friends cannot defeat unless they can recover the remaining Loculi. So they must first battle Artemis’ army at the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, then outsmart (or outthink, or just escape from) a beast at the Lighthouse of Alexandria, and then – well, suffice it to say that there is, as there must be, a final confrontation in Atlantis itself, and since there must be a satisfactory resolution of all the points of this far-flung fable, Lerangis pulls out of his capacious hat one of the oldest tricks in the book, or rather two of them: time travel and the “it was all a dream, or was it?” trope. Lerangis tries to keep up some slapstick even at the climax of the whole series, as when Marco, who is back to being one of the good guys, plans to use his belt to, it seems, strangle Uhla’ar, but unfortunately, when Marco takes the belt off to weaponize it, his pants fall down. Ha, ha. More amusingly, Lerangis picks up another trope, the self-referential one, and has Jack’s father tell him that he makes up wonderful stories: “‘You will do this for a living someday. I know it. An author of a children’s adventure series!’” Ha, ha, again. Actually, that particular bit of humor is pretty neat, but it comes so close to the end of The Legend of the Rift that it goes nowhere – unless you count where it goes in Lerangis’ mind, which is, undoubtedly, already marching onward into some other set of unbelievabilities about heroic preteens.

     Young readers unwilling to wait for the next Lerangis offering can move immediately into something analogous from Linda Sue Park. Park is not quite as prolific as Lerangis, but she is, like him, a reliable producer of preteen adventure material; in fact, both contributed to the ubiquitous The 39 Clues series (Park has written one novel for it and Lerangis has written three, plus a novella). Park is a more stylish writer than Lerangis and more inclined to look beyond action scenes to some degree of personality development, although not too much – after all, these books are about quests that lead to finding oneself, not about introspection. Park uses less humor than Lerangis does and is inclined to offer a greater sense of seriousness, a quality that Lerangis’ books, for all their derring-do, tend to lack. These are generalizations, of course, but the differences between the authors, as well as their similarities, are quite apparent in the contrast between Lerangis’ Seven Wonders and Park’s new series, Wing & Claw. Park’s first Wing & Claw book introduces a family of potion makers and healers living in the forest of the book’s title. The central character is Raffa; he and his cousin, Garith, both work in their parents’ apothecaries. The two cousins go into the forest together – the place is considered dangerous – in search of a vine to use for a healing potion for an injured bat. Raffa makes the potion and cures the bat, Echo – and discovers that a side effect of the medicine is that the bat can now talk to him. His parents do not believe this, though, and in any case, they are more worried about having been asked to move closer to the center of power of the realm to help the government. They turn the request down – but Garith and his father agree, and relocate. The separation of the cousins sets up one thread of the book and the series. Another is set up when Raffa makes a second potion from the same vine and discovers just how dangerous the plant is. He decides, not terribly logically but fairly understandably, to run away from home and go to the larger settlement to warn Garith. As he travels, Raffa meets the friends who will become this book’s preteen hero group: bear-tamer Kuma and kitchen worker Trixen. The three eventually get to see the ruling Chancellor, and she tells them about plans she has to train animals by using the communication potion Raffa has created. But of course there is much more than that going on – all this is only the setup portion of the first book of a planned trilogy – and it soon turns out that there is evil afoot, and Raffa will have to learn how deep it runs and what he can do to counter it. Forest of Wonders gives more background on the characters than on the land they inhabit, Obsidia: there is a map in the book, but most places on it do not figure in this story – presumably they will gain importance later. There are some thoughtful elements here involving the rights of humans and animals and the definition of good and evil in both (Echo is clearly good, but crows and owls are not). The pacing, while not slow, is deliberate, and there is an expansiveness about the story that will please young readers looking for something broadly conceived and involving rather than something cinematic and page-turningly paced in the Lerangis mode. Both off these authors have a firm grasp on the sort of multi-character quest of discovery that is de rigueur in novels for ages 8-12; thus, their books are very similar at the core, even though they are quite different in their world-creation and the speed with which their heroes chase their destinies.

(++++) MUSIC BEYOND THE EXPECTED

Vivaldi: Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione, Op. 8. Federico Guglielmo, violin and conducting L’Arte dell’Arco; Pier Luigi Fabretti, oboe. Brilliant Classics. $11.99 (2 CDs).

Schumann: Manfred. Dennis Laubenthal, Regine Andratschke, Julia Stefanie Möller, Claudia Hübschmann, Aurel Bereuter; Konzertchor Münster, Philharmonischer Chor Münster and Sinfonieorchester Münster conducted by Fabrizio Ventura. Ars Produktion. $19.99 (SACD).

Bach: St. John Passion. Julian Prégardien, Tareq Nazmi, Christina Landshamer, Ulrike Malotta, Tilman Lichdi, Krešimir Stražanac; Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks and Concerto Köln conducted by Peter Dijkstra. BR Klassik. $37.99 (3 CDs).

Ken Russell’s View of “The Planets.” ArtHaus Musik DVD. $29.99.

     In the “everybody knows” category of classical-music listening, there are a few near certainties. Everybody knows Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Everybody knows Schuman’s Manfred Overture. Everybody knows Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. And everybody knows Gustav Holst’s The Planets. But not everybody knows everything about these staples of the classical repertoire, as is clear from some fascinating new recordings that provide context and, not coincidentally, some wonderfully expansive views that go well beyond what “everybody knows.”

     The Four Seasons, for example, are the first four of the 12 concertos of Vivaldi’s Op. 8 collection, which bears the charming title, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione (“The contest between harmony and invention”). This is a good-natured contest to the extent that it is one at all – it is more of an exploration of the inventive possibilities of Baroque concertos for violin (and in two cases for violin or oboe). The first four concertos, the famous seasonal ones, are among the best-known pieces in all of classical music, and it may seem there is very little new that can be done with them – but the wonderful Brilliant Classics recording featuring Federico Guglielmo proves that not to be the case. Guglielmo is an absolutely marvelous interpreter of Vivaldi, and the Baroque instrument he uses – a rather difficult one to control properly – fits the music so well that Vivaldi’s unusual structures, harmonies and tone-painting come through with amazing freshness, brightness and clarity. Guglielmo’s very small string-ensemble backup, L’Arte dell’Arco, provides wonderful balance for his solos and contributes equal verve and enthusiasm. The Four Seasons have never sounded better. But there is a great deal more to Vivaldi’s Op. 8, and Guglielmo’s handling of the rest of the concertos is revelatory. The greatest virtuosity in the set lies not in the first four concertos but in Nos. 7 in D minor, 8 in G minor, and 11 in D, and hearing Guglielmo in these three works is simply thrilling. The decision to use the oboe versions of Nos. 9 in D minor and 12 in C is a happy one, giving Pier Luigi Fabretti his own chance to shine and providing fresh perspective on Vivaldi’s writing throughout this set of a dozen works. And there are small delights everywhere here: the depth of feeling in the central movement of No. 10 in B-flat, “La caccia”; the attempt to portray the emotion of pleasure in No. 6 in C, “Il piacere”; the wonderful display of nature’s anger in No. 5 in E-flat, “La tempesta di mare”; and much more. This excellent two-CD set – offered at a remarkable price – is a joy in itself, and doubly so for putting The Four Seasons into the context in which Vivaldi himself placed them.

     Schumann’s Manfred is more than an overture and less than a symphony: it was Tchaikovsky who created a symphony based on Lord Byron’s poem, which was written in a now-obsolete form as a play intended to be read but not acted. The story of Manfred is that of a powerful but tormented magician who can control supernatural forces but not his own human desires and yearnings; who has committed a never-specified crime and suffers from unending guilt; and who takes to the mountains to confront the spirits that live there and eventually to find surcease in death – which he welcomes on his own terms. It is a quintessentially Romantic tale, and it is scarcely surprising that it inspired such striking Romantic music. But although Schumann called his setting a “dramatic poem with music in three parts,” and intended the words (abridged and in German translation) to be interspersed with the music (often in the form of melodrama), it is only the highly dramatic overture that most listeners have ever heard. The new Ars Produktion SACD, offering a full hour-plus of the music and much of the verbiage (although the text is abridged from Schumann’s abridgment), is quite wonderful, not only because some of the music is of very high quality but also because this release, like Guglielmo’s of Vivaldi’s Op. 8, provides context that is almost entirely missing in the realm of what “everybody knows.” The overture remains the most impressive element here, being self-contained and doing a good job – like Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No. 3 – of encapsulating the whole drama. But just as Beethoven’s overture is no substitute for the entirety of Fidelio, so Schumann’s Manfred Overture does not, in and of itself, provide the same impact as the whole set of incidental music. In addition to dialogue and melodramas, Schumann offers tone-paintings of Alpine scenes, music associated with the various spirits called up and rejected by Manfred, choral pieces, a final hymn after Manfred declares that “it is not so difficult to die,” and more. Byron’s poem is certainly overwrought and difficult to relate to from a contemporary perspective, but what remains is the effectiveness of the portrayal of the internal limitations faced even by a man far stronger and more learned than other men, a sort of Nietzschean Superman (Nietzsche admired Manfred and himself wrote some music inspired by it). It is easy to deem Manfred simply a Faustian tale, and indeed Byron’s poem and Goethe’s have some elements in common. But Faust is eventually saved in a stunning peroration that Mahler set brilliantly in the second part of his Symphony No. 8. Manfred does not find salvation, for the simple reason that he does not seek it. But neither will he accept damnation: he will die to escape his inner torment, but only when he is ready and only as he chooses. Schumann’s Manfred music, taken as a whole, elucidates Byron’s poem to a far greater extent than does the familiar overture on its own. The chance to hear the overture in context in this very fine, very well-paced performance directed by Fabrizio Ventura, and to explore Manfred as Schumann saw the poem and the character, is not to be missed.

     Matters are a bit different when it comes to the St. Matthew Passion and its earlier cousin, the St. John Passion. A lot has been written about the St. John Passion, which exists in multiple versions and which Bach repeatedly changed in ways that he never did with the St. Matthew Passion. But the earlier work is not performed nearly as often as the later one, and when it is, there remain uncertainties about which version of it to use and how many singers and instrumentalists to include. These are some reasons that “everybody knows” the St. Matthew Passion, while the St. John Passion is far less familiar. On the basis of the excellent BR Klassik release led by Peter Dijkstra with meticulous attention to period performance practice and a sure sense of pacing and balance, the St. John Passion certainly has come into its own. In this particular case, it has come into its own specifically for German speakers: the text is given in German only, and the third disc in this three-CD set is an extended (hour-and-a-quarter) discussion and analysis of the work, with musical illustrations, entirely in German. For those not fluent in German, that makes this release in some ways a real disappointment. What saves it, though, is the exceptional quality of the performance itself – which is, after all, the reason most people will buy a recording or decide not to do so. Julian Prégardien handles the very demanding role of the Evangelist with musical skill and emotional impact, Tareq Nazmi gives warmth and personality to the role of Jesus, and the small-scale vocal and instrumental ensembles produce sound that is at once light and serious, clear and (when necessary) impressively massed. Dijkstra chooses tempos well, and the narrative of the St. John Passion moves smartly along from event to event with suitable inevitability. The “commenting arias” in the first part expand upon the action without slowing it down, and the second, longer part of the work builds effectively from piece to piece with a finely honed balance between the liturgical and dramatic elements. Dijkstra has clearly studied the score with care, and the precision of singing and playing here makes this a first-class reading even though only speakers of German will be able to benefit from the third, explanatory CD (thankfully, English translations of the work’s text itself are readily available online).

     “Explanatory” is not exactly the word for Ken Russell’s 1983 film of The Planets, made for London Weekend Television and built around a performance of Holst’s suite by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. The film runs just 50 minutes – the length of Holst’s music – but what it offers will stay with many viewers well beyond that time frame. It is simply a collage, but not a simple collage. The Mars, the Bringer of War movement includes the expected missiles and military maneuvers; Venus, the Bringer of Peace scenes range from female nudity to breast-feeding and some atmospheric desert scenes; Mercury, the Winged Messenger mostly contains images of speed, some aloft and some in the water; Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity showcases expressions of joy in various forms and various cultures; Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age is unusually atmospheric in its use of crowd scenes – crowds of vehicles, not just of people – and pollution; Uranus, the Magician is less about sleight-of-hand than about puzzlement and a “how do they do that?” sensibility; and Neptune, the Mystic is a montage of cosmic scenes, yoga poses, extreme close-ups and difficult-to-fathom visuals. The film surely seemed more original in 1983 than it does today – now it is a (+++) work, given the decades of music videos that have done much the same thing and, indeed, often done it to death. But even if the specifics of the structure have not held up particularly well, the actual performance of The Planets is quite good, and  even if “everybody knows” the music (in truth, “everybody knows” only some of it, not really the entire suite), there remains enough originality in Russell’s film to make it worthwhile viewing and to help revive jaded listeners’ interest in the Holst music itself – notably the overplayed Mars and Jupiter sections. Russell’s film was made for The South Bank Show, the weekly arts program of Britain’s ITV network, and was screened only once on that show – after which it disappeared until this ArtHaus Musik DVD release. The availability of this recording is therefore something to celebrate, even if elements of the film itself now seem less unusual and creative than they did when Russell first made it.