(++++) MARCHING ON

Sousa: Music for Wind Band, Volume 20. Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama Wind Orchestra conducted by Keith Brion. Naxos. $11.99.

Sousa: Music for Wind Band, Volume 21. Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Wind Orchestra conducted by Keith Brion. Naxos. $11.99.

     Nearly two-and-a-quarter hours of rousing John Philip Sousa music, and nary a standalone march to be heard – this would be a major shock to listeners had not Keith Brion’s Naxos recordings been demonstrating, for almost 20 years at this point, just how varied Sousa’s music really is, well beyond the hyper-familiar marches. And in the process of showcasing Sousa’s versatility, Brion has been showing something else: that although Sousa’s music is in many ways quintessentially American – at least in the sense of the America of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – it has now truly become of the entire world. Brion has proven this by having Sousa’s music played excellently and with relish by bands from all over the place, with Royal Welsh and Royal Birmingham examples in the two latest Music for Wind Band releases and with previous bands having come from Britain’s Royal Air Force, the Royal Netherlands Navy, Sweden’s Royal Navy, Norway’s Royal Navy and elsewhere.

     Interestingly, all these bands trace their lineage, to some degree, to Sousa himself: he created the form of band that remains the dominant type after more than a century and a quarter. It is a band with a highly distinctive sound, allied to but not entirely beholden to military traditions, capable of performing music of symphonic complexity – some of which Sousa himself wrote. And that type of music is much of what is on display in the latest releases in the Sousa series. Most directly in Volume 20, A Bouquet of Beloved Inspirations (1921) incorporates band versions of music by Bizet, Mendelssohn, Weber and Rossini – it turns out that the William Tell Overture was as ubiquitous and popular in the 1920s as it was later in the century and remains today. There is also a very clever homage to Haydn here: Good-Bye (1892), which takes a page – actually a number of pages – from Haydn’s Symphony No. 45, “Farewell,” by having band members walk off the stage as the music progresses; unlike Haydn, though, Sousa has them come back at the end of the work.

     Sousa was fond of the pastiche form, and often used it for collections of popular tunes as well as classical ones. An example here is Oh, How I’ve Waited for You (1926), a medley of popular songs with “wait” or “waiting” in their titles. Sousa was also fond of arranging tunes and songs from his 15 operettas for his band. Here Brion offers The Patient Egg from Act II of Chris and the Wonderful Lamp (1899), Girls Who Have Loved from Act II of The Free Lance (1905), and The Snow Baby from Act II of The Bride Elect (1897). Furthermore, Sousa was adept at jazzing up – sometimes literally – popular and show tunes, as in Follow the Swallow (1926), a distinctly jazzy version of a tune from a Broadway show. Also on this CD, rather oddly, is First Fantasia for Wind Band from “El Capitan” (1895), which is a touch strange on two levels. First, it is only half of the fantasia – the second half was included on the previous Sousa-series release in one of the less-comprehensible bits of programming in the sequence. Second, this is a Sousa work only to some extent. Sousa did create an arrangement of music from El Capitan, but this one was made by Vincent Ragone (1859-1929) – apparently Sousa included both this version and his own in his concerts. The arrangement has been further modified by David Stern, who edited it for modern bands – which, despite tracing their lineage to Sousa, differ in some ways. All these matters are mere quibbles, though: Sousa’s music shines through them all, retaining its freshness (to the point of naïveté) and the forthright pleasures that Sousa always intended to offer.

     Volume 21 of Brion’s series includes only three works, all of them arrangements or reconstructions – and for that reason, this disc shows Sousa in a very different light from the short-and-sweet approach usually associated with him. The CD also shows how cleverly Sousa incorporated some of his famous marches, which audiences were as eager to hear in his time as they are today, into works of different types that were written for different purposes. The first piece here is a set of selections from the same Chris and the Wonderful Lamp (1899) that made a brief appearance in Volume 20 and has shown up periodically throughout Brion’s series: Sousa’s retelling of the Aladdin story was very popular in its day. Arranged by Mike Purton, this suite strings together a number of well-made tunes that are thoroughly operetta-ish in design and impact and that collectively show Sousa’s adept handling of material for the stage. Next on the CD is Sisterhood of the States (1915), an occasional piece that Sousa created for the opening of a major theater venue in New York City; here it is reconstructed by Manuel A. Arambola. As in several other works that Brion has presented, Sousa here gathered material from marginally related sources and assembled it into a coherent whole. This time, as the work’s title indicates, the music came from all U.S. states – 48 at the time. In the original presentation, the work was a ballet; Sousa later made this arrangement as a concert work, being careful to incorporate at least a bit of music from every state, to be as inclusive as possible. And for a conclusion, which predictably would need to relate to the nation as a whole rather than any one part of it, Sousa brought in his most famous march, The Stars and Stripes Forever – which, however, is not heard here, since it was an addendum during performances. However, another of the composer’s most-famous marches does make an appearance in the third and longest work in Volume 21, Showing Off Before Company (1919). This is a more-than-half-hour piece (reconstructed and arranged by Kevin R. Tam) with a strong visual component that, of course, cannot be seen on a CD; it is also testimony to Sousa’s cleverness at turning problems into opportunities. Sousa used it at matinee concerts as band members straggled back from lunch – the work is more or less the opposite of Good-Bye, with individual sections appearing from offstage and playing material written for them, after which another section would show up, and so on. There would be no sign of Sousa: the sections performed on their own. However, once the entire band had assembled, Sousa would stride from the wings to the podium and conduct Semper Fidelis – or rather the last part of the march, the full band having handled its opening. A marvelous theatrical touch that showcases Sousa’s sense of humor as well as his compositional abilities, Showing Off Before Company, like everything else on the two latest Sousa-series discs, is a window into a long-vanished time in American music and a chance to hear the “beyond the marches” excellence of Sousa as a composer.

(++++) STILL MAGIC AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Magic Tree House: The Graphic Novel—No. 1, Dinosaurs Before Dark. Adapted by Jenny Laird from the original by Mary Pope Osborne. Illustrated by Kelly & Nichole Matthews. Random House. $16.99.

     The biggest surprise in the new graphic-novel adaptation of the first Magic Tree House book is that it wasn’t created long ago. This is one book sequence that lends itself very readily indeed to graphic-novel format, with its basically simple stories, an underlying touch of the unexplainable/magical, and a dollop of education to go with a series of wholesome adventures. Intended for ages 6-10, Mary Pope Osborne’s stories of eight-and-a-half-year-old Jack and his seven-year-old sister Annie began in 1992 with Dinosaurs Before Dark (also known as Valley of the Dinosaurs), for which there was a companion book, Dinosaurs, that gave more information than the minimal material included in the adventure story itself. The first four Magic Tree House books all had accompanying more-information volumes available; after that, the connection broke down, with some adventure stories having no “more information” volumes and others having them in an order very different from that in which the adventure books were published.

     The publishing history of the Magic Tree House books is on the complex side, but the books themselves are decidedly not. The first 28 of them all involve Jack and Annie in time-travel adventures under the aegis of Morgan Le Fay – who does not appear at all in the first book, the initial reference to her coming through Jack’s discovery in prehistoric times of a medallion with the letter M on it. Dinosaurs Before Dark has the siblings finding a tree house near their home in Frog Creek, Pennsylvania, climbing into it, seeing that it is full of books, and discovering that if they look at a book’s pictures and make a wish to go to the book’s time and place, the tree house magically takes them there (after which it magically returns them to Frog Creek, since there is a Frog Creek book conveniently available in the tree house).

     To make the concept work as a graphic novel, all that is needed are illustrations of a couple of everyday kids, a high-in-the-trees tree house, and suitable pictures of whatever locations Jack and Annie are going to visit – including pictures of the inhabitants of those locations. Thanks to Jenny Laird’s carefully controlled adaptation and the pleasantly apt illustrations by Kelly and Nichole Matthews, Dinosaurs Before Dark has all the required elements seamlessly integrated into a pleasant, nicely paced, unchallenging-to-read, brightly colored, neatly designed presentation. Readers watch Jack and Annie discover the ordinary-looking tree house, climb up a rope ladder into it, examine some of the books scattered all around, and focus on one called Dinosaurs. Jack, seeing a picture of a pteranodon in the book, wishes he and Annie could go to where the flying creature is, and sure enough, they are whisked back to the late Cretaceous period, where they meet the actual pteranodon – promptly named Henry by Annie, that being the name of a friendly neighborhood dog in Frog Creek. And sure enough, pteranodon-Henry is friendly, as are other dinosaurs that Jack and Annie encounter: this is very much a fantasy world, for all the bits of science that Osborne includes in it. The only baddie anywhere is, inevitably, a Tyrannosaurus Rex – which, however, Jack and Annie outsmart, and which turns out to be noisy but not too much of a threat after all (to them or to the peaceful herbivorous dinosaurs). When the T. Rex does get too close for comfort at one point, helpful Henry swoops in and gives Jack a ride on his back, to the base of the tree that has magically come to the Cretaceous with the tree house nestled in it, ready to return Jack and Annie to their home town and home time.

     After his pteranodon ride, Jack tells Annie that “all the books are magic” in the tree house, so they can use the one showing Frog Creek to return home – and when Annie asks how Jack can be so sure about the magic in the books, he says he did not figure it out, not exactly: “It was more like I just knew it.” And that is pretty much what magic, including the magic of The Magic Tree House, is all about: readers just know that everything is all right, everything is interesting, and everything will work out just fine in all Osborne’s books and, by extension, in their graphic-novel adaptations. The books in Osborne’s series were amply illustrated (by Salvatore Murdocca in their U.S. editions) and always had a strong visual component in the storytelling, so they ought to work very well indeed as graphic novels – Dinosaurs Before Dark certainly does. Given the increasing visual orientation in kids’ everyday life today, graphic novels may even prove more suitable than the original books in bringing The Magic Tree House, with its heaping helping of adventure and soupçon of education, to a new generation of visually oriented six-to-10-year-olds.

(++++) ALL OVER THE PLACE

The Way of the Drow, Book 1: Starlight Enclave. By R.A. Salvatore. Harper Voyager. $27.99.

     To see how amazingly multifaceted R.A. Salvatore’s tales of Drizzt Do’Urden have become since The Crystal Shard, Salvatore’s first published novel, in 1988, it is only necessary to read the cover of Starlight Enclave. Above the book’s title appear the words “The Legend of Drizzt.” Below the title are the words “Book 1 of The Way of the Drow.” And at the very bottom of the cover, beneath Salvatore’s name, are the words “Dungeons and Dragons.” So within the world of Dungeons and Dragons, there exists The Legend of Drizzt, and within that, there is a new trilogy, of which this book is the first volume. Thus, this single cover pretty much encapsulates the landscape and realms of some three-dozen predecessors. All that before even opening the book!

     And after opening the book, readers will discover that Salvatore here embarks on an expansion and, to some degree, redefinition of all those earlier realms and landscapes. He does so as part of a dual-focus narrative that moves simultaneously in two very different directions – not always elegantly, but always purposefully. The story starts in an ultra-rare time of peace, two years after a demon uprising has been put down. Peace means rumblings of unease, of course, and that is one story line here: Jarlaxle, the Salvatore character most adept at using words as weapons, has picked up a sense of enough dangerous discontent to know that a civil war among the major houses of the city of Menzobarranzan may be imminent. If that is to occur, Jarlaxle must ensure that his allies are as well-equipped as possible for the conflict. And that means that one ally in particular – Zaknafein, Drizzt’s father – should have access to a notorious magical sword called Khazid’hea. The problem is that the sword, colloquially and aptly referred to as “Cutter,” is nowhere to be found, and the last person to use it, Doum’wielle Armgo, is somewhere in the unexplored, frozen wastes of the north, a region without night where frost giants, polar worms and other dangers abound. This sounds like the recipe for yet another of the many quests that permeate Salvatore’s books – and so it is, with Jarlaxle and Zaknafein joined by adept assassin Artemis Entreri and by Drizzt’s wife, Cattie-brie.

     Cattie-brie’s presence is one thing that ties the conflict-oriented adventure to Drizzt’s own, which is an inward one – the sort of journey on which Drizzt has increasingly been embarking in recent Salvatore books. Cattie-brie and Drizzt now have a young daughter, known as Brienne or (a bit confusingly) Brie, and Drizzt decides that he needs to take the toddler on a spiritual quest to the Monastery of the Yellow Rose, where Drizzt himself long ago overcame the darker side of his nature and learned to transcend pretty much everything, mortality and physicality included. Drizzt’s plan leads to some conflict with Cattie-brie – unfortunately not explored as thoroughly as it could have been – and then to Drizzt and Brienne heading for Drizzt’s spiritual community after Drizzt promises that Cattie-brie will later have her own chance to influence Brienne in Cattie-brie’s preferred direction (presumably in another book). So Starlight Enclave is a book of dual travels, one for external, conflict-ridden and mystery-solving purposes, the other for internal, what-does-it-all-mean reasons. The two tales are only tenuously related, and transitions between them are matter-of-fact and sometimes less than smooth; but because the primary characters here (except for Brienne) are already well-established, the interactions among them are handled very effectively and with Salvatore’s usual sure hand. And this applies whether or not readers have thoroughly immersed themselves in Salvatore’s books – it is even possible, although a bit difficult, to read Starlight Enclave without ever having read any prior Drizzt novels, and still make sense of the story and those within it. Salvatore expertly introduces backstory here, as in many prior novels, and also focuses on a kind of philosophical underpinning to the Drizzt tales that, while scarcely as profound as he (or at least his ardent fans) believe it to be, does raise some interesting questions and even manages to answer a few here and there.

     One thing Salvatore tries to do in Starlight Enclave, with modest if not complete success, is to reposition the drow – the central elven characters of all the Forbidden Realms books – as being multifaceted rather than evil-with-exceptions (Drizzt being the most-notable exception). Salvatore has said he is doing this for racial reasons, because having “dark elves” be essentially bad is no longer societally acceptable. So now he is evolving the drow into three groups: Udadrow, the familiar evil ones, corrupted from what was presumably purity and goodness by the demon Lolth; Lorendrow, jungle dwellers perfectly attuned to earth and the environment and all that stuff; and Aevendrow, whose realm in the far north is the place to which Jarlaxle and his band travel in this novel. The division is clunkier than most of Salvatore’s plot lines, but, thank goodness, he has said he does not intend to rewrite earlier books to make them conform to the small, narrow, ugly, dark, joyless woke world championed by the loudest and dumbest voices on social media. Starlight Enclave is, as a whole, effective on its own terms – although its whet-the-readers’-appetite-for-the-next-installment conclusion is a touch on the irritating side. It has enough action and enough philosophy to keep existing fans of Salvatore’s novels engaged, and enough sense of fantasy-world history to intrigue people who happen upon the novel without previously having met Drizzt and explored the numerous characters and events that revolve around him.

(++++) LIGHT AND CLASSY

Copland: Appalachian Spring—Suite; Clarinet Concerto; Barber: Adagio for Strings; Bernstein: West Side Story—Symphonic Dances. Park Avenue Chamber Symphony conducted by David Bernard. Recursive Classics. $16.99.

Moritz Moszkowski: Piano Music, Volume One. Ian Hobson, piano. Toccata Classics. $18.99.

     There is an entire classical-music subgenre known as “light classics,” a designation that seems driven more by marketing opportunities than by the character of the music. It makes sense sometimes, as in much of the music by Offenbach and Suppé. But at other times the label is at best somewhat forced: Rossini’s William Tell overture opens one of his most-serious and most-dramatic works, for example, while the Dance of the Hours from Ponchielli’s La Gioconda is extracted from a highly melodramatic opera filled with corpses and crumbling ruins. And then there are works that may not be officially or semi-officially labeled “light” but that are nevertheless on the lighter side of the classical-music spectrum – such as the four offered by the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony under David Bernard on a new Recursive Classics CD. The disc’s title is “Sounds of America,” but it is a trifle misleading, or at least imprecise, since it is fair to ask which America these are the “sounds of.” Certainly not 21^st-century America, whose composers have gone off in multiple directions along with the creators of contemporary music in other countries; certainly not 19^th- and early-20^th-century America, with the forthright optimism of Sousa and the experimentation of Ives on display. Basically, what we have here are four mid-20^th-century works reflecting the thinking, or some of the thinking, of three composers. Aaron Copland gets the most play, in two of the “popular” (if not quite “light”) works he wrote during the 1940s – not to be confused with his far-more-experimental music, which to this day is heard considerably less often. Bernard and the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony previously offered the suite from Appalachian Spring in 2019, on a disc that also featured ballet music by Ravel and Stravinsky. Copland’s ballet dates to 1944 and, in its time, was impressive for the way it merged European classicism with a view of the United States’ past that was on the naïve side even then. Played with considerable dash and a sure sense of rhythm, the suite as heard here clearly justifies its longtime popularity. Copland’s Clarinet Concerto (1949) is highly popular, too, although perhaps more with clarinetists than with general audiences. Jon Manasse is a first-rate soloist in this recording, thoroughly comfortable with the work’s jazz heritage as well as its technical complexities – he previously recorded the concerto as long ago as 2004, and his familiarity with all its ins and outs is palpable as well as audible. Bernard and the ensemble not only accompany Manasse with skill but also help the rather diffuse formal structure of the music come across as more cohesive than it does in less-committed performances. Interestingly, Copland was supposed to arrange the concerto’s first movement as a string elegy – although he backed out of the commission before doing so, concerned that such an arrangement might distract from the totality of the work. That is exactly what happened with Samuel Barber’s 1936 String Quartet, Op. 11, after Barber arranged the second movement as Adagio for Strings. The string-orchestra version of the music became one of Barber’s best-known works, and one that often appears – as it does on this CD – with other music of somewhat lighter weight. But Adagio for Strings thoroughly eclipsed the quartet from which it was extracted, and while Bernard leads it with understated elegance here, there is no escaping the reality that this movement long ago became a part that proved greater than the whole from which it came. Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from his 1960 ballet, West Side Story, also have long had a life of their own – far from the stage. They do tell a story, but it is not the story of the ballet, since their sequence in concert-hall form differs significantly from that of their appearance in the stage work. Still, Bernstein’s colorful orchestration, along with his skillful use of the jazz idiom (which is quite different from Copland’s), lends the dance sequence emotional heft that is all the more effective when played as well as the music is here. Nothing on this disc is particularly profound, and the CD’s reflection of “America” (even mid-20^th-century America) is imperfect at best; but these are works that continue to charm and engage audiences looking for material that, if not exactly “light,” is certainly lighter than much of what passes for entertainment in the America of the 21^st century.

     What passed for entertainment 60-some years before the earliest work on Bernard’s disc, the Barber Adagio for Strings, was the kind of salon music of which Moritz Moszkowski (1854-1925) was something of a master. The mastery here is that of being the proverbial “big fish in a small pond,” since by no stretch of the imagination would any of the entertaining trifles on a new Toccata Classics CD featuring pianist Ian Hobson be deemed a significance work. And nothing here was intended to have a high level of significance – in fact, the earliest opus number (attached to Moszkowski’s second-written piano piece) is “½,” clearly indicating that the very slight polka, which dates to 1875, was not to be taken at all seriously (it was written in connection with a satirical poem by Moszkowski’s older brother, Alexander). This CD is intended as the start of a survey of Moszkowski’s complete music for solo piano, and there will definitely be some more-substantial fare to come in future installments. This particular disc, though, is filled with real “period pieces” – intended for salon performance and enjoyment and not pretending to be more than the small but very well-crafted works that they are. The satirical Conservatoristen-Polka was written in the same year as most of the other works on this disc: Albumblatt, Op. 2; Caprice, Op. 4; Fantaisie (Hommage à Schumann), Op. 5; Fantaisie-Impromptu, Op. 6; and Trois Moments Musicaux, Op. 7. The earliest-written work on the CD, dating to 1874, is Scherzo, Op. 1. Also here are Skizzen, Vier kleine Stücke, Op. 10 (1876) and Humoreske, Op. 14 (1877). The neglect to which Moszkowski’s music has been subjected over the years is shown by the fact that except for Opp. 2, 5 and 6, every work on the disc is a world première recording. But maybe, on one level, the obscurity of this music is understandable: it was written as a form of entertainment that has long since fallen from favor, and although all the pieces are well-crafted and show a firm understanding of piano technique (of which Moszkowski, as a performer, was an acknowledged master), there is nothing here that stands up particularly well on close examination or repeated hearings. The pieces do, however, require considerable technical skill, and several show glimmers of the creativity that Moszkowski would later exhibit to a much greater extent – for instance, the mild stylistic experimentation of Op. 6 and the effective contrasting sections of Op. 14. Hobson performs all the works with dedication and engagement, never trying to make them out to be more than they are but never minimizing or trivializing them, either. It is always interesting to trace a composer’s musical development over time, and in Moszkowski’s case, this first solo-piano CD lays a solid foundation for the future exploration of more-challenging pieces that, unlike these, would certainly not be deemed “light music” but would deliver aural pleasure of a different and more-serious kind.