(+++) UN-COMICS

Everything Is OK. By Debbie Tung. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

One Cup at a Time: A “Cat’s Café” Collection. By Matt Tarpley. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

     Although “comic” means “amusing,” and comic strips and comic books have a longstanding history of amusement as their main (although not sole) reason for being, cartoonists in recent times – and especially since the pervasiveness of the Internet – have increasingly begun creating works that look like “comics” but are very far from funny. And this does not just happen in graphic novels, which are a sort of hybrid form specifically intended to go beyond more-traditional comic-strip sequences: there is now a whole subgenre of highly serious “comics” intended to discuss matters of considerable import, presumably using the illustrative format as a way to be more approachable than would be the case in a traditional book (even one with drawings). Certainly we live in a highly visual age, in which more and more people have an expectation of pictures to go with whatever words may appear between covers (or online); but whether these decidedly non-comic comics actually reach out more effectively than more-standard books on the same subjects is certainly an open question.

     In some cases, the effectiveness of a highly serious story told in comic-strip form will depend on how closely readers/viewers identify with the protagonist – which is to say the cartoonist, since full-book-length comics of this type are almost invariably autobiographical. Everything Is OK is a good example of the approach. Debbie Tung uses the book to describe her experience with clinical depression – how she realized she had it, how she believes she developed it, how she came to seek help, how she came to start coping with and recovering from the diagnosis and illness, and how she now foresees a brighter future even as she continues to emerge from some very dark depths. The book’s target audience would seem to be people who have or fear that they may have depression. Both the words and the well-drawn illustrations are highly serious throughout – indeed, the black-and-white art has a generally depressive quality that may make it hard for readers concerned about their own mental health to go through the 200-or-so pages in one sitting. Tung does know how to pace her dour commentary, as in her use of four panels – starting with a facial closeup and ending with a portrait of herself walking into the distance – for the words, “Even when I’ve done everything right I can’t help feeling like it’s not enough.” The descent into full-scale depression is discussed in considerable detail: “Even the thought of leaving the house to buy basic things was paralyzing.” “Sometimes it feels like nobody understands me. Heck, even I don’t understand me.” “If you hide something inside yourself for too long, you break.” “I pushed myself to the limit until I couldn’t handle it anymore and there was nothing left of me.” And so on, and on and on: there is a lot of this. Then there is a panic attack, and Tung, in one of her few concessions to an actual graphic presentation (as opposed to a near-literal rendering of herself and other people), shows a gigantic and scary black misshapen thing hovering over her and influencing everything she thinks, says and does – this being the dark cloud of depression that remains with her throughout Everything Is OK. Tung finally sees a doctor at the National Health Service (she is British), explains that “I hate everything about myself” and “I feel like I’m a failure and that I’ve let everyone down,” and is referred for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy – the progress of which is detailed in the middle portion of the book. Blessed with an apparently perfect husband (he appears on occasional pages, always being 100% helpful and supportive) and a perfectly empathetic therapist, Tung slowly learns “there is no right way to do life,” so “Don’t forget to be kind to yourself” as well as to others, because “Joy comes in little and ordinary moments.” Yes, the verbiage is quite ordinary, to the point of being simplistic; and yes, the art is by and large illustrative of real life, not using the comic-style medium to any great advantage. This is why it can be difficult to decide just who is supposed to benefit from (if not “enjoy”) Everything Is OK. Tung certainly has artistic ability, shown in occasional flashes of inspiration and periodic use of touches of color. The single best page in the book is entirely nonverbal: its four panels start with Tung sitting beneath a dark cloud, after which she picks up an artist’s palette and a brush, starts to use the paints on the cloud, and in the fourth panel has turned the cloud rainbow-colored as she wears a small smile of satisfaction. That is communicating in a strikingly “comic” (although scarcely funny) way. The book as a whole, though, is so self-involved and ultimately so preachy that its appeal will most likely be confined to people who check out the early pages and identify very strongly with Tung as the main character – not really a “character” at all, but someone using art to chronicle her personal journey to better mental health.

     Matt Tarpley’s Cat’s Café collection, One Cup at a Time, is even preachier than Tung’s book, but looks on the surface much more like a “comic” confection. The art here is simpler and far less sophisticated than Tung’s, and the characters are all anthropomorphic animals named according to their species: Penguin, Kiwi, Snake, Owl, Otter, Hyena, Platy (for platypus), Hedgie (for hedgehog), and so on. The idea of a food-focused gathering place for nonhumans is scarcely new – Paul Gilligan’s Pooch Café is a clear example, and creations such as Georgia Dunn’s Breaking Cat News extend the get-together-spot concept to other venues (a TV station in Dunn’s case). In Tarpley’s work, though, the gathering place is nothing but a venue in which characters encourage each other and exchange sentiments that are intended to be supportive and heartwarming. In a version of Dungeons and Dragons, for example, Snake decides to ask a Slime “to join usss for coffee or tea” and is told, “You overwhelmed the slime with kindness! It joins your party!” On another page, Cat is feeling a bit down, and Rabbit tells him how great he is, so Cat says, “I’m so proud of you! You really helped me feel better!” On yet another page, Rabbit assumes a meditative pose while saying to “look for the little things around you and find your way to the present.” A huge shark, apparently a Great White from a panel showing a lot of teeth in an open mouth (in a pose reminiscent of Jaws), turns out only to offer “lub hugs” and befriends a tiny shrimp. Also, Unicorn gives away a few sparkles to cheer up Hammy. And a page called “Self-Love Is…” is cut from the same cloth as Tung’s book, its four panels concluding with one saying “…asking for help” and showing Opossum heading into the office of “Dr. Pigeon, therapist.” Just about everything here is positive, uplifting, gentle, sweet and, in truth, saccharine, such as “reasons to get up every day” including “to be there for those who depend on you,” and Octopus, at a computer, unleashing a “DDOH attack” – whose acronym turns out to refer to “distributed doses of happiness.” An occasional strip is slightly more pointed, such as one suggesting “digital social distancing” that ends with tossing a cellphone into boiling lava. And Tarpley occasionally goes beyond a single page and even varies the style of art a bit, as in a noir detective sendup called “A Brew to Remember,” a four-page investigation of a broken coffee mug that is actually “comic” in the traditional sense. But even the longer stories here tend to become treacly, as in the meeting and traveling together of Rat and Noot (newt), in which the latter offers to “play ye a tune to empower ye on yer journey” before deciding to go along while Rat searches “for a place where I feel happy and safe” (of course, the two eventually show up together at Cat’s Café). Even Goose, who invariably starts talking with a supposedly evil laugh (“mwehehehehe”), instantly becomes helpful and supportive immediately afterwards. The sole character with some personality turns out to be Kiwi, whose dialogue almost all the time is simply the word “kiwi” and who carries around a small but wicked-looking knife that, of course, he never actually uses in any harmful way (but he looks as if he enjoys the blade just a bit too much, which is what makes Kiwi a bit more interesting than the other characters here). Existing fans of Cat’s Café online are the natural audience for One Cup at a Time, which ends with a section called “Thoughts and Feelings” that is simply seven blank, lined pages to be used to express, well, thoughts and feelings. Warm, empathetic ones are very strongly encouraged, implicitly if not explicitly – comic ones are of far less significance, importance or meaningfulness.

(++++) THE NEWFOUND AND THE NEW

William Grant Still: Music for Orchestra. Zina Schiff, violin; Royal Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Avlana Eisenberg. Naxos. $13.99.

Music for Alto and Soprano Saxophones by Glen Gillis, Richard Gillis, Barbara York, David Kaplan, James Cunningham, and Paul Suchan. Glen Gillis, alto and soprano saxophone; James Cunningham, didgeridoos, conch trumpet and percussion; Garry Gable, baritone voice; Wayne Giesbrecht, electro-acoustics; Richard Gillis, trumpet and flugelhorn; Bonnie Nicholson, piano; Satnam Ramgotra, tabla and drum kit. MSR Classics. $19.95 (2 CDs).

Ledah Finck: In the Brink; Tania León: Esencia; Paul Wiancko: Ode on a Broken Loom; Suzanne Farrin: Undecim. Bergamot Quartet (Ledah Finck and Sarah Thomas, violins; Amy Tan, viola; Irène Han, cello). New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     No matter how many works are discovered or rediscovered, there seems always to be a plethora of new ones to be explored and recorded, many for the first time ever – as is the case with three new releases that consist entirely of world première recordings. The orchestral music of William Grant Still (1895-1978) on a new Naxos CD is particularly appealing and particularly welcome, having been written by Still during a period of almost 50 years. It turns out that this is a time span in which, although Still’s style did not change very much, his solidity of orchestration and accomplished way with melodies and rhythms cemented a mixture of neo-Romantic and jazz-derived elements that proves highly recognizable as the disc progresses. It could be wished that it progressed a bit more – it runs just 60 minutes and consists entirely of short works, even though Still wrote five symphonies, nine operas, and other longer pieces. But listeners willing to settle for pleasantries rather than profundity will find a great deal to enjoy here and may even be moved to seek out other items by Still elsewhere. The disc opens with Can’tcha Line ’Em (a title smoothed out on the CD’s enclosure to “Can’t You Line ’Em”). Dating to 1940, the work immediately offers a fair sample of Still’s ability to incorporate African-American spiritual sounds into well-proportioned orchestral works. The piece has something of the aspects of a fanfare, comparing interestingly with another work placed later on the disc, Fanfare for the 99^th Fighter Squadron (1945) – which runs less than a minute and makes its point well in that time span. Also here is the second of Still’s Three Visions (1936). It is called Summerland and, in the violin-and-orchestra form heard here, has a pleasantly languorous lyricism. Next on the disc is Quit Dat Fool’nish (1935), a bouncy piece (heard here in a violin-and-orchestra arrangement by D.P. Perna) that has an attractive dancelike lilt reminiscent of a hoedown. Then there is Pastorela (1946), at 12 minutes the most extended single-movement piece on the CD, and again a work heard in violin-and-orchestra guise. The piece is perhaps somewhat overextended, being effective enough at establishing a sylvan setting but dwelling there at somewhat too great a length. It is, however, nicely orchestrated, as are all these works – all of which receive engaging and genuinely idiomatic presentations by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra under Avlana Eisenberg, thus showing that Still, like other American composers including Ives, Copland and Bernstein, can be an effective international musical ambassador. The earliest work on this disc, dating to about 1918, is the three-movement American Suite, which includes a somewhat over-sweet “Indian Love Song,” a very nicely proportioned and thematically attractive “Danse,” and a concluding “Lament” that speaks more of pathos than of tragedy. The fighter-squadron fanfare follows this suite on the disc, and then comes Serenade (1957), a single-movement nocturne-like work that would be wholly appropriate as film music – as indeed would several of Still’s more-lyrical pieces. After this is the Suite for Violin and Piano (1943), arranged for violin and orchestra – which opens with a more rhythmically angular “African Dancer” than might be expected of Still, continues with still another pleasantly warm and heartfelt (if somewhat overlong) movement called “Mother and Child,” and concludes with a movement called “Gamin” that gives soloist Zina Schiff a few chances for some violin pyrotechnics – Schiff does a very fine job with each piece in which she has a chance to participate as soloist. The disc concludes with the latest work offered here, Threnody: In Memory of Jean Sibelius (1965) – a piece that might seem curious on the face of it, since Sibelius’ music has very little in common with Still’s. For this work, though, Still seems to have absorbed some of Sibelius’ musical gestures and mixed them with his own: the work has a feeling of pastiche (although it is not one) through its sensitive mixture of grander and quieter elements, which recall elements of Sibelius’ music without actually drawing from any of it. There is a great deal more to Still than this release of shorter, previously unrecorded pieces indicates, but the CD can serve as a useful gateway to Still’s music and perhaps result in it becoming more widely known.

     The main thing that listeners will come to know from the third SaxSpectrum recording on MSR Classics is that this two-CD set – like SaxSpectrum 1 of 2009 and Sax Spectrum 2 of 2014 – is a kind of ensemble offering, focusing primarily on saxophonist/composer Glen Gillis (born 1956) while including compositions by a number of people with whom Gillis clearly finds it congenial to work. Two of the composers have died since the second SaxSpectrum was released, so further entries in the series – if there are any – will have to differ from the first three, in which all the works not written by Gillis were written for him or commissioned by him. In any case, with the aim of SaxSpectrum being to showcase the saxophone as a worthy solo instrument for contemporary music, including music incorporating exotic sounds and electronics, this (+++) release will appeal to saxophone players and enthusiasts, if perhaps not to a more-general audience. The works come across as exploratory ventures into the saxophone’s capabilities and the manners in which it can be mingled with other instruments, but few of them are highly attractive in their own right or seem as if they are pieces to which audiences will want to return again and again. Gillis himself wrote most of the music: Divergence (2018), Homage (2021), Cartoon Duo (2021), Suite (2020), Lament (2020), and Capriccio (2020). The first and earliest of these is an extended work that essentially encapsulates all the techniques and approaches that Gillis offers in the rest of the music heard here. It is an impressive piece that clearly shows the capabilities of both Gillis and his instrument, but it has something of the feeling of an academic advocacy work, designed as a showcase for saxophone and saxophonist rather than as music whose primary purpose is audience communication. The Suite of seven short movements is actually more interesting to hear, thanks to its multiple moods. Indeed, the other short pieces by Gillis himself are all comparatively appealing – and so are three works written by Gillis with James Cunningham (born 1954): Fanfare (2019), Walkabout (2019), and the eight-movement Cosmic Suite (2021). Cunningham performs on didgeridoos and conch trumpet (as well as percussion), and the unexpected and often exotic sounds of these pieces often seem to be their main reason for being. That makes them intriguing to hear once (although the Cosmic Suite, at 32-plus minutes, is too much of a muchness); it does not, however, turn the works into more than curiosities, which show the neat ways in which instruments such as saxophone and didgeridoo can be mixed and matched, but having shown that, turn out not to have much more to say. The remaining pieces by Gillis’ colleagues are all nicely constructed, with Three Odd Dances (2020) by Barbara York (1949-2020) being the most interesting. The shortest work here, Proverb (2014) by David Kaplan (1923-2015), has staying power beyond its two-minute duration. Bells of the Hours (2020) by Paul Suchan (born 1983) and Forever & Ever (2013/2020) by Richard Gillis (born 1955) also have appealing elements. There is quite a lot of saxophone music here, nearly two hours of it in all, and it is really a bit much to sit through from start to finish. Clearly Glen Gillis is an effective advocate for the saxophone in contemporary guise, and other performers on the instrument may here find pieces (or movements of pieces) that they would enjoy including in their own recitals. From the viewpoint (hearpoint?) of a general audience, however, SaxSpectrum 3, like its two predecessors, is somewhat too rarefied and specialized to be fully convincing.

     The four world première recordings by the Bergamot Quartet on a New Focus Recordings CD are also likely to appeal only to a specialized audience, even though three of the four use the highly familiar instrumental ensemble of a string quartet. Ledah Finck’s four-movement In the Brink goes a step beyond strings by including a drum set (played by Terry Sweeney) and a variety of vocalizations – elements often employed in contemporary music, especially in works that, like this one, are intended to reflect societal troubles and fragmentation. The second movement, “Flood of Ashes,” takes the societal commentary furthest and uses the drum set most intensely, while the third, “Human Nature,” opens with the sound of eructations and squeaking doors and is exactly the sort of presentation that seeks to draw attention to how up-to-date its sensibilities are. The other pieces on the disc have their own avant-garde approaches. Paul Wiancko’s Ode on a Broken Loom has some effective string writing and a comprehensible form (the initial intensity returns at the end), although it seems more an exercise in performance technique than a communicative piece. The three-movement Esencia by Tania León includes “Agua de Florida,” which mixes intense and laid-back elements; “Agua de Rosas,” which contrasts higher and lower string sounds, pizzicato and legato elements; and “Agua de Manantial,” which tosses out various melodic fragments and allows some brief expressiveness in the middle of the proceedings. Exactly what all this is the “essence” of is never quite clear, but the rhythms and textures are often interestingly interwoven. The shortest work on the disc, Suzanne Farrin’s Undecim, is mostly gestural, contrasting high and low notes, runs and static notes, chords and single notes – it explores string capabilities but does not really take the audience anywhere. This (+++) CD is quite well-played by the ensemble, but like many discs consisting entirely of newly composed music (often with an advocacy component), this one seems designed for a small group of committed cognoscenti who will embrace the sound and approach without expecting a wider set of listeners to become engaged with the music – and without much caring whether other people do or not.

(+++) INCONCLUSION

Escape from a Video Game 3: The Endgame. By Dustin Brady. Illustrations by Jesse Brady. Andrews McMeel. $11.99.

     No one really expects a pick-your-path book series such as Escape from a Video Game to present any profundity or even any profoundly involving mysteries. And that is a good thing, since Dustin Brady’s books do not present much of anything that is thought-provoking or mysterious. What they do offer, though, is some on-paper enjoyment that provides a somewhat different experience from the video games (actual video games) to which the books are related.

     The finale of the Brady Escape trilogy (not to be confused with the Brady Trapped in a Video Game series) comes on the heels of The Secret of Phantom Island, the first book, and Mystery on the Starship Crusader, the second. The Endgame takes place on Grim Island, a place that – as a front-of-book map helpfully shows – contains areas labeled “Creepy Country,” “Museum of Villainous Excellence,” “Dreadful Dump” and, most intriguingly, “???” The story starts in a shopping mall – a throwback for sure, with at least some likely readers of the story wondering, two-plus years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, just what a shopping mall is. Anyway, the characters here are all supervillains, or supervillain-wannabes; are drawn by Jesse Brady in suitably sort-of-video-game style; and are called Alpha, Bonzai, Chaz, Miss Eleanor, and Dark Pulse (a purple fox). Alpha is the reader…err, protagonist…err, you, if you are the one reading the book. Alpha gets to choose to participate, or not, in this latest version of a game created by “Bionosoft, the company that figured out how to put people into video games [and] almost destroyed the world.” Oh, goody. There is an opt-out, but it simply takes you to the end of the book and an invitation to reshelve the volume in a suitable section of a library. Nobody wants that.

     Once the reader opts in, there are all sorts of puzzles to solve and places to go and things to do and threats to handle and betrayals to negotiate and scary and monstrous occurrences to manage and all that sort of stuff. There are also passing references to really playing video games: “You’ve never figured out a cheat code in your life. That’s what YouTube is for.” And “Every time you pass up a weapon in search of an exploit, you get killed.”

     Well, it’s all only a game, right? Of course it’s an ominous game that, at the same time, is never to be taken too seriously. And that is the point of the whole Escape from a Video Game franchise: it’s silly fun that is, well, fun and silly. Most pages give you options of answers to give, and consequences depending on which you choose. Other pages provide maps, overhead views of terrain, even – near the back of the book – a view of the face of the builder of the whole thing (provided you can adjust your vision in time-honored “Magic Eye” fashion). As in the other entries in this series, there is a mildly snarky sense of humor at work, or at play, in the writing: “‘For the tenth time, this is a video game!’ You’re lying. This isn’t the tenth time you’ve had this conversation on the plane. It’s at least the hundredth.” Also as in the earlier books, there are some rather neatly named “achievements” to unlock: “Galaxy Brain,” “World-Class Clingers,” “No-Good Varmints,” “Horseflies on a Hound,” “Never Trust a Bomb,” and so forth. These help keep the story amusing, if scarcely mystifying – the underlying mystery is nothing much.

     The point of the Escape from a Video Game series is basically to be as pointless as video video games, but to do so in print form. There is no video here, no motion, no interactivity, no weird creatures morphing into other weird creatures through pixel magic (although that sort of thing is described in words). The series is just about as surface-level an entertainment experience as are video games themselves, but without the dopamine “hits” engendered by video success, and without the “time running out” elements, and without the various pulse-pounding parts that can make non-book video games so addictive. For kids who like video games, this series retains enough of the milder sort of gaming experience to be enjoyable, but it certainly does not take the place of the real (that is, unreal) thing.

(++++) INDIVIDUALISM

Bruckner: Symphony No. 3, transcribed for organ by Erwin Horn; Symphonic Prelude in C Minor, transcribed for organ by Erwin Horn; Johanna Doderer: Bruckner Window IV. Hansjörg Albrecht, organ. Oehms. $14.99.

Bach: Goldberg Variations. Burkard Schliessmann, piano. Divine Art. $25.99 (2 CDs).

Prokofiev: Romeo and Juliet—Ten Pieces for Piano; Liadov: Biryul’ki; Prelude in B Minor; Nicolai Medtner: Piano Sonata “Reminiscenza”; Scriabin: Piano Sonata No. 4. Violetta Fialko, piano. Divine Art. $18.99.

     The delightful, if quirky to the point of being somewhat wacky, project to transcribe Bruckner’s symphonies into organ works, and have Hansjörg Albrecht perform them on various instruments for Oehms recordings, continues its wholly unjustifiable but unarguably engaging way with Symphony No. 3 – whose Erwin Horn transcription proves as involving and frequently fascinating as have Horn’s other organ versions of Bruckner’s symphonies. One thing this series shows incontrovertibly is that it really is possible to think of Bruckner’s symphonies as reflecting the composer’s fascination with the organ – on which he was a much-admired extemporizer, although he actually wrote almost nothing for the instrument. The version of the Third Symphony used by Horn is not really the best – it is the 1888/1889 one, which brings in this monumental symphony at well under an hour – but certainly the sonorousness of the work comes through fully fledged in Horn’s transcription; and certainly Albrecht, whose playing is expert throughout this whole series and at times approaches the miraculous, brings out the symphony’s many nuances and complexities with tremendous skill. It is almost irrelevant to speak of this as an “interpretation,” since the real point here is to showcase the sheer sound of the symphony and the remarkable extent to which the piece actually works on the organ, even though playing it on organ is certainly nothing that Bruckner ever did, ever intended, or would likely ever have wished to have happen. This is a performance to be experienced rather than analyzed: just as it is possible to let the “Bruckner sound” wash over an audience in waves, so this organ version of the Third gets to the heart of the music and highlights the rhythms and harmonies with unerring expertise, offering an experience as exhilarating as it is objectively wrong-headed. The added items on this CD are particularly well-chosen to go with the symphony. The Symphonic Prelude in C Minor dates to 1871-1876, the time period of the first version (1873) of Symphony No. 3; and here Horn gives the work a high level of grandeur that actually makes it sound as if it could have been composed for the organ – it has the right monumentality and processional feeling about it. And then there is the fourth of the 10 newly created contemporary compositions collectively called “Bruckner Windows,” each by a different 21^st-century composer and each planned to accompany the symphony with which it is paired. This one, called PINUS, is by Johanna Doderer (born 1969) and is more reflective of Bruckner – and more of a reflection on his music – than has been the case with the other “Windows.” It is a 10-minute piece that has a 21^st-century version of the “Bruckner sound,” using the mass of the organ in much the same way that Horn uses it in his transcriptions. There is discord in Doderer’s work, but that is not its major point, nor is it pervasive. In fact, PINUS sounds a bit like an extension of Bruckner’s own tonal experimentation in his Symphony No. 9: it is not exactly a work that Bruckner himself might have written, but it is one that pays a clear tribute to him and that possesses some genuinely thoughtful musical elements.

     Burkard Schliessmann is very thoughtful too in his performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, but his recording, originally dating to 2007, is a highly polarizing experience, and the very fine re-release on the Divine Art label only confirms the difficulty of knowing just how to react to it. This work remains a litmus test, or perhaps a Rorschach test, for keyboard players – and often for listeners as well. The issue with Schliessmann’s interpretation is not just a matter of his use of a piano – a historically inappropriate decision, to be sure, but one made by many performers and sure to continue being made by plenty more – nor even his willingness to employ the very Romantic and post-Romantic piano sound and capabilities to emphasize various elements of the music. In fact, Schliessmann actually does use period practices here and there, as in runs of short-value notes; but when he does so, the attentiveness seems grafted onto a very different sort of performance and does not come across as a genuine attempt to be somewhat historically informed. For example, one reason Schliessmann may adopt that particular short-note-value element – in Bach’s time, notes in such runs were played somewhat unevenly – is that the performance as a whole has a rhythmic freedom, a willingness to stretch and compress elements in the service of emotional communication, that goes well beyond what is usually incorporated into the Goldberg Variations. To give Schliessmann his due, it seems that he wants, above all, to make contemporary listeners comfortable with Bach’s music, to have them hear this piece not as a museum piece and not as a doorway to an earlier time, but as a work with as much to say in the 21^st century as in Bach’s own time. The difficulty, though, is that Schliessmann’s is scarcely the only way to make this sort of connection with modern listeners. The rhythmic freedom that Schliessmann adopts deliberately is so pervasive that it seems, after a while, to become a mannerism. Tempo changes are another issue: Schliessmann does not really employ rubato, which would involve speeding up an element and then slowing down another to compensate – instead, his tempo choices often seem rather arbitrary, interfering with the sense of flow and forward motion of the music in an attempt to make it more expressive and involving. Also, there is an unevenness to Schliessmann’s handling of ornamentation, so that it seems crucial in some variations and an afterthought elsewhere. What the performance lacks, then, is consistency. This is clearly music about which Schliessmann has thought carefully, and which he wants to present in a way that today’s audiences will find congenial, meaningful, and salutary. To Schliessmann, that turns out to mean handling it sometimes with neo-Romantic (or proto-Romantic) flair, sometimes with a kind of diffidence that downplays the elegance of the work’s construction. Certainly this (+++) recording shines some new and different light on a very-well-known piece, a cornerstone of the keyboard repertoire. And listeners looking for something unexpected from the Goldberg Variations should find at least occasional elements of Schliessmann’s performance intriguing. But taken as a whole, it is hard to take as a whole: it is a collection of individual elements that often engage, sometimes misfire, but rarely connect effectively as parts of a total experience.

     A new (++++) Divine Art recording featuring Violetta Fialko offers personalized pianism of a very different sort – devoted to music that, although far less significant and meaningful than Bach’s, nevertheless has many pleasures of its own to offer. Nearly half of the 70-minute disc is devoted to Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet—Ten Pieces for Piano, a work that proves just about perfect to highlight the variegated sounds and expressions that Fialko elicits from the piano. She manages, for example, to maintain the old-style underlying rhythm of Minuet: Arrival of the Guests, while overlaying the material with 20^th-century expressiveness; there is naïve enjoyment aplenty in Juliet as a Young Girl; the inherent drama of the well-known Montagues and Capulets comes through strongly and contrasts interestingly with Friar Laurence; and so on. Fialko is quite comfortable with this music’s essentially down-to-earth elements – but she is also well-attuned to the far more evanescent, near-mystical beauties  of Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 4, and handles the almost-jazzy rhythmic elements of the second movement to fine effect. The other works on this CD, which are less familiar than the Prokofiev and Scriabin, receive equally fine readings. The Piano Sonata “Reminiscenza” by Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951) has delicacy and an inwardness of expression quite different from those of Scriabin’s No. 4. And the Op. 2 miniatures by Anatoly Liadov (1855-1914), collected as Biryul’ki and sounding like a series of 14 études, are snippets of enjoyment from start to finish – less elaborate and portentous than the Prokofiev movements, but filled with little touches of delight of a salon-music sort. Fialko does especially well with the somewhat-more-intense movements, including the fourth (Allegro con fuoco), the fifth (Vivace), and the sixth (Allegro), but without giving short shrift to the delicate ninth (Allegretto tranquillo) and sweet 11^th (Tempo di valse). Fialko also offers Liadov’s Prelude in B Minor, the first of his Trois Morceaux, Op. 11, with warmth and sensitivity. Indeed, everything on this disc has a feeling of being warm and sensitively interpreted, displaying Fialko’s considerable talents to very good effect in music that may be of no great consequence but that produces very considerable feelings of pleasurable enjoyment.