(++++) TREASURY TIME

Liō’s Astonishing Tales from the Haunted Crypt of Unknown Horrors. By Mark Tatulli. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

Pearls Sells Out: A “Pearls Before Swine” Treasury. By Stephan Pastis. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

     There was a time, not so long ago, when the oversize Andrews McMeel “Treasury” volumes presented a real quandary for comics fans. They were simply reprints of strips already issued by the company in smaller-size books – with the Sunday strips offered in color, although cartoonists do not always pick their Sunday colors themselves. This made it tough to decide whether or not to buy the “Treasury” volumes if you already had all the strips in smaller books. Was the color alone worth it? Was the bigger size of the “Treasury” books an advantage (greater heft) or disadvantage (harder to carry around to read while on the go)? Unless your smaller-size collections were falling apart, it was hard to justify buying the “Treasury” books.

     But that was then; this is now. Whether by brilliant planning or by stumbling onto a very good idea, Andrews McMeel now has a genuine value-added proposition in its “Treasury” collections: substantial commentary by the cartoonists. This has been around in hit-or-miss fashion for some time – in many Scott Adams Dilbert “Treasury” books, for example – but as it becomes a more important feature of the “Treasury” collections, it differentiates them significantly from the smaller-size collections of strips and lets readers see those strips in a new light. This may not make the “Treasury” books indispensable, but it’s a big step in that direction. It’s an especially welcome approach in a strip as dark and unusual as Mark Tatulli’s pantomime, Liō, which springs from the same mind that created the far more conventional and cutesy (if slightly offbeat) Heart of the City. Tatulli’s Liō is a boy with an extremely active fantasy life – he would be right at home in the wonderful old E.C. horror comics that were destroyed in the 1950s when the Comics Code was created. And lo and behold, Tatulli’s “Treasury” has a title that is a portmanteau of several E.C. comics – this cartoonist knows whence his work comes. The cover here is enormously clever, looking as weathered and damaged as a 50-plus-year-old comic book would (but don’t expect to pay 12¢ for this volume, no matter what the cover says). The back cover is Tatulli’s update of the old “art school” ads from comics of yore – and the inside front and back covers reproduce actual ads from the old comics, completing a very clever blend of past and present. Tatulli’s discussions of specific strips are revelatory of his thinking process and really do show how carefully Liō is constructed – although we never learn, for example, why the name “Liō” is spelled that way, why Liō has no mother, and why his father almost always has one of his big toes sticking through one of the socks he perpetually wears. Still, when it comes to a strip in which Liō raises a huge reptilian beast that becomes too much for him to handle, and tearfully has to let the creature go to his destiny of destroying a city, Tatulli explains that “for all its horror of the tortured souls in that city, I think this strip is sort of sad. I’m much too wrapped up in the human/animal relationship to care about the burning city.” Tatulli also explains which strips he used to pitch Liō to Universal Press Syndicate, and which ones angered readers and nearly cost the strip newspapers: “Lesson learned! Don’t even think about suggesting cute little puppies get fed to snakes! Very, very bad!” Well, okay – but what makes Liō so special is not only the absence of dialogue but also Tatulli’s willingness to explore the dark depths of a child’s soul, not to mention occasional forays into Lewis Carroll and Charles Dickens. Tatulli tells what strips he thinks worked (and why), which didn’t (and why not), and how his own childhood is reflected in some of the strips – from the hair sported by a girl character to Tatulli’s memory of ripping off a mattress tag and fearing arrest. We also get plenty of insights into what Tatulli finds funny: “I love platypuses. They are goofy and cool at the same time.” All this, plus more than 200 pages of Liō cartoons – what a deal!

     You get a similar deal from Stephan Pastis in the latest “Treasury” volume of Pearls Before Swine, but here the commentary is more snide and sarcastic, as befits the strip and the fact that Pastis has done other “Treasury” volumes, while Tatulli has not. Pastis makes comments on one page and retracts them on a later one – for instance, explaining that he stopped bringing the Danny Donkey character into the strip’s “real” world, then noticing that he didn’t stop, then saying he’s too lazy to go back and correct his erroneous comment. He remarks on the frequency with which he draws caricatures of himself in the strip (at least one hopes they are caricatures); he explains which drawings he likes so much that he made them into covers of calendars (no subtlety to the self-plugging there); and he creates verbal juxtapositions that are as much fun as his drawings. On one page, for instance, after an unusually tender strip about Junior (a young crocodile) saying goodbye to his girlfriend, Joy (a young zebra), Pastis says this sort of work “shows that the strip is not always acerbic or about death.” Then, on the very next page, he writes, “Oops. Spoke too soon. One day after being so touching, I decided to throw a lawyer off a cliff. So much for the touchy-feely stuff.” The recurring theme of Pastis’ commentary is, “It remains impossible for me to predict which [strips] will resonate with people.” He tells us of all sorts of misjudgments – ones he thought would do better than they did and others that he thought ordinary but that readers really liked. Along the way, he offers some insight into how he works on the strips: often while wearing only boxers (maybe too much information there); and, as a general rule, “many months in advance, and when they finally appear in newspapers, they do not appear in the order in which I drew them.” This is highly unusual – few cartoonists get far ahead of their deadlines – but it lets Pastis throw out strips he considers weak (some of which, however, appear in a special section of this book), put others on Saturday (the lowest-circulation day for newspapers), and otherwise try to manage his output and his readership. Does it work? There are more than 260 pages of Pearls Before Swine in this “Treasury,” which should be plenty for anyone to decide whether the strip – and Pastis’ approach to it and to humor – are a breath of fresh air or of fetid gas. Opinion remains divided. Buy the book and feel free to form your own.

(++++) ON BEYOND SEUSS

What Was I Scared Of? A Glow-in-the-Dark Encounter. By Dr. Seuss. Random House. $11.99.

Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! By Dr. Seuss. Random House. $4.99.

The Big Green Book of Beginner Books. By Dr. Seuss. Random House. $15.99.

There’s No Place Like Space! All About Our Solar System. By Tish Rabe. Illustrated by Aristides Ruiz. Random House. $8.99.

Find My Feet! By Salina Yoon. Robin Corey Books. $6.99.

     Theodor Seuss Geisel died in 1991, but young readers would never know it from the continuing flood of his work, which has been packaged, repackaged, altered, reconstituted and otherwise re-released – without ever being improved. The Dr. Seuss books are among the genuine treasures of children’s literature, and they are so good that they can not only survive but also thrive in multiple formats and under many circumstances. Thus, a single one of the tales from The Sneetches and Other Stories has now been turned into a book of its own, What Was I Scared Of? A Glow-in-the-Dark Encounter. This was a strange story from the start, involving the encounter between one of those uniquely human/animal Seuss hybrids and a pair of pants – pants that floated along, unoccupied, yet that were quite capable of rowing a boat or riding a bike. Add in the fact that most of the story takes place at night and you have a recipe for something weird: this is one of the oddest Seuss tales of all. But as with many of his stories, it is about more than what its narrative indicates: it has to do with accepting and then confronting your fears, thus finding out that they are not so scary after all. By the end of the book, when the narrator and the pants breezily wave “hi” to each other (and we are told that both smile, although how pants can smile is a subject for philosophers), the scariness is gone but the oddity remains. We never do learn what the pants are all about or how they came to be wandering, empty, throughout those Seussian landscapes. The new book adds one highly appropriate element to the original tale: a coating that makes both the narrator and the pants glow in the dark after only brief exposure to light. This gives the story an extra level of spookiness that it scarcely needs but that certainly highlights the narrative effectively.

     The new version of Oh, the Thinks You Can Think! does not add anything – in fact, it leaves out some of the original. But that is all right, because while the tale of the spooky pants is for ages 6-9, this book is for the youngest kids of all – up to age two. It is a small board book, just right for barely-there attention spans, filled with a sampling of the original Dr. Seuss illustrations and several pages of the original words – just not all of them. Fun in and of itself, it is also likely to whet a young child’s appetite for more of the same – which adults will be able to provide by reading the complete original book.

     The Big Green Book of Beginner Books contains not one but six complete Seuss works – but not ones that he illustrated. The good doctor wrote them under the name Theo. LeSieg – a pen name that abbreviates his real first name (hence the period) and then spells “Geisel” backwards. This is how he identified books for which he wrote the words but for which others did the drawing – the six in this collection being illustrated by Quentin Blake (Great Day for Up), Roy McKie (Would You Rather Be a Bullfrog?), B. Tobey (I Wish That I Had Duck Feet), George Booth (Wacky Wednesday), Michael J. Smollin (Maybe You Should Fly a Jet! Maybe You Should Be a Vet!), and James Stevenson (I Am NOT Going to Get Up Today!). None of these illustrators can hold a candle to Dr. Seuss himself – and in truth, Dr. Seuss’ words in these books do not flow with the same exuberance as in the books that he both wrote and illustrated. He seems to have been a one-man multimedia factory, most at home when thinking verbally and visually at the same time. Nevertheless, these easy-to-read books are often a lot of fun, and kids ages 5-8 – the target age range for the collection – will likely enjoy them for their mildly amusing narratives. They are not Seuss at his best, but they are pretty darned good as straightforward books for young readers.

     The Seuss connection is more tenuous in There’s No Place Like Space! This book – also for ages 5-8 – prominently features the Cat in the Hat on the cover and throughout the pages; it is part of a series called “The Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library.” If the beloved cat character attracts readers to the book so they learn about the solar system, that is a good thing. But the fact is that anyone expecting anything remotely Seussian here will be disappointed: Dr. Seuss did not conceptualize this series and neither wrote nor illustrated the book. This is actually a revised version of There’s No Place Like Space! – Pluto has been dropped from the list of planets. There is a clever mnemonic for remembering the planets’ names, and it is a highlight of the book; but by and large, the rhymes are nowhere near those of Dr. Seuss. For instance, “There are colors in space./ I will show some to you./ Neptune, planet eight,/ Is a beautiful blue.” This forces the accent in the planet’s name onto the second syllable rather than the first, where it belongs – a Seussian no-no that could easily have been overcome: “The eighth planet, Neptune’s/ a beautiful blue.” The basic information here – presented in part by the Cat and in part by Thing One and Thing Two – is solid, much better than the poetry, which repeatedly requires those incorrect accents to scan properly: “It’s star dot-to-dot/ Use your imaginations,/ and you’ll see big pictures/ we call constellations!” There’s No Place Like Space! gets a (+++) rating, which is perhaps a tad generous; but it’s hard not to like the creative use of the beloved Seuss characters in what is, after all, a good educational cause.

     And Find My Feet! gets a (++++) rating without having any direct connection to Dr. Seuss except the cleverness of its concept. This is another board book, and it is the sort of thing that will make parents realize how much creativity some children’s-book authors can offer even now that Ted Geisel is no longer among us. This is a match-the-feet-to-the-body book: each page has a picture of an animal; the bottom of the book has a cutout in the shape of half an egg; and within that half-egg, there is an easy-to-rotate wheel displaying the feet of a kitten, duck, cow, frog and horse. Salina Yoon’s idea is to have babies – or, at first, their parents – rotate the wheel to match the feet with the rest of each drawing. This is a lot of fun – the drawings are adorable, and are distinguished by color as well as shape. And as kids get a little bit older, they will quickly discover humorous ways to mismatch feet and bodies. That too is part of the fun of this book, making it a worthy successor to the unduplicatable humor of the ever-wonderful Dr. Seuss.

(++++) GHOSTIES AND GHOULIES

43 Old Cemetery Road, Book Two: Over My Dead Body. By Kate Klise. Illustrated by M. Sarah Klise. Harcourt. $15.

Nation. By Terry Pratchett. Harper. $8.99.

The Other Side: A Teen’s Guide to Ghost Hunting and the Paranormal. By Marley Gibson, Patrick Burns, and Dave Schrader. Graphia. $10.99.

Ghost Huntress, Book 2: The Guidance. By Marley Gibson. Graphia. $8.99.

Gifted, Book 3: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow. Kingfisher. $7.99.

     Things don’t merely go bump in the night in the best of these books about the paranormal – they communicate quite clearly, sometimes to humorous effect and sometimes in the service of more serious matters. Humor is paramount in the second book of the Klise sisters’ new series, 43 Old Cemetery Road, and it’s a good thing there is so much amusement here, since the plot has more holes than in the first book, Dying to Meet You. That volume introduced the town of Ghastly, Illinois; the old mansion whose address forms the title of the series; the spirit of Olive C. Spence, builder of the house and, in her day, an unsuccessful writer; Ignatius B. Grumpley, a successful modern author suffering from writer’s block and a bad case of grumpiness; and Seymour Hope, preteen son of the money-grubbing Les and Diane Hope, who abandoned him in Ghastly for travels in Europe to peddle their book debunking ghosts. All those characters reappear in Over My Dead Body, and new ones are thrown into the mix, notably a singularly unpleasant anti-ghost and anti-Halloween crusader named Dick Tater, a librarian named M. Balm, and a sympathetic judge named Claire Voyant. You’ve got to love those punny Klise names, and it’s hard not to love their convoluted plots and wonderful illustrations, too. This book does strain credulity in suggesting that Dick Tater and his organization, IMSPOOKY (International Movement for the Safety & Protection Of Our Kids & Youth), have the power to stop all Halloween celebrations and compel people to burn all books of ghost stories. But the overstatement makes for a good cautionary tale, in which even many self-proclaimed lovers of the stories say they will go ahead and burn the books – a gentle but effective warning about overweening moral authority. Over My Dead Body moves smartly along through the usual Klise mixture of pictures, letters, computer-screen communication (ghost Olive’s favored approach), and newspaper pages, and its eventual triumph of goodness over badness (including, again rather unbelievably, having Seymour taken from his parents and adopted by Grumpley) is a fitting conclusion that guarantees more adventures ahead.

     Nation is a very different sort of adventure, although ghosts – specifically, ancestral spirits – play a large part here, too. Terry Pratchett (now Sir Terry after being knighted earlier this year) has here created one of the best modern versions of a Robinson Crusoe story. Deservedly a bestseller in hardcover, Nation is now available in paperback and will hopefully find its way to many more bookshelves in this less-costly version. Supposedly a book for teenagers (it is recommended for ages 12 and up), Nation tackles very adult themes indeed, including politics, religion, the relationship between men and women, the role of violence in nation-building, and much more. It is an alternative-history tale in which the daughter of the heir apparent to the British throne is shipwrecked by a tsunami that also wipes out an entire group of island people except one: a boy named Mau, who was on another island when the wave hit. It falls to Mau and this girl from another place – Ermintrude, but she prefers to be called Daphne – to reestablish Mau’s nation, with a little help and a lot of interference from its spirits, and using the motley collection of tsunami survivors that washes ashore here and there. The book is filled with subplots, high and low humor, and characters in whom one cannot literally believe but about whom one comes to care deeply. And it has a spectacular conclusion whose daring and sheer sweep are breathtaking even after repeated readings. This is in part, but only in part, a ghost story; it is, above all, a human story, and a brilliantly realized one.

     Back in the real world, there really are ghosts among us, at least according to Marley Gibson, a self-proclaimed ghost huntress who approaches spirits in books written both as fiction and nonfiction. The Other Side is seriously intended as a guide for teenage ghost hunters, explaining the tools of the trade while trying to keep the narrative on the light side: a chapter on electronic voice phenomena is called “What is an EVP, and can it cause embarrassing stains?” – and one on the translucent spheres that sometimes show up in photos is called “What are orbs? (Hint: Not a techno band.)” Gibson devotes some time to phony mediums and well-meaning but mistaken people who believe they have seen and even photographed ghosts; but she is quite convinced that spirits do walk among us, to the point of warning teens to practice “safe hex” when searching for them. (To this end, she includes a lot of Biblical prayers but nothing from, say, Confucianism.) Gibson says skepticism about spirits is justified but cynicism is not, and she defines cynics as people who “believe that if something cannot be reproduced, it must be dismissed.” Not coincidentally, that is the definition of a scientist. Teens who want to believe there are huntable spirits out there will give this book a (+++) rating; scientifically oriented readers will not rate it at all – and that is obviously fine with Gibson and her coauthors.

     Gibson is actually more interesting in the thinly fictionalized Ghost Huntress series, in the first book of which the central character proclaimed, “I am Kendall Moorhead. Psychic. Intuitive. Sensitive. Ghost huntress. No more wigging out.” That book, The Awakening, was about Kendall’s move from Chicago to a small town in Georgia, where she discovered her powers after her father bought a white-noise machine and Kendall heard a voice coming out of it. The second book, The Guidance, is more of the same but with additional, typical teen angst thrown in – in the form of Courtney Langdon, a rival at school who decides to distract attention from Kendall by doing her own dabbling in the supernatural. Bad move. Kendall is not exactly nice to Courtney, at one point arranging for her to become physically ill during a fetal-pig dissection – after which Kendall remarks, “Well, that couldn’t have gone more perfectly. I know it’s not exactly the classiest thing I’ve ever done, but the beeyotch had it coming…” But what Courtney doesn’t deserve is being possessed by the spirit of a Civil War soldier that “uses its powers in a cruel or unjust way, weighing down a human’s body or mind for the spirit’s own enjoyment or purpose.” And then there is Kendall’s guiding spirit: a pretty young girl, about whom Kendall’s mother knows more than she is letting on. There is also some help here from the church, in the person of the singularly poorly named Father Mass. Visitations, broken glass and mirrors, and other sorts of manifestations lead first to a climax involving the soldier and then to some frightening implications for Kendall’s future – to be explored in the next book of the series. The Guidance is well enough written and quickly enough paced to get a (+++) rating for fans of the genre; but Gibson’s final disclaimer, in which she tries to connect the fiction directly with real-world experiences, may best be taken with a dose of skepticism, if not cynicism.

     The Gifted series covers some of the same territory, but it is not strictly ghost-focused and never pretends to be more than light entertainment – a fact that stands in its favor. Here Today, Gone Tomorrow follows Out of Sight, Out of Mind and Better Late Than Never in this saga based on a clever underlying idea: what if “gifted” students weren’t necessarily smart but were actually, you know, gifted with unusual powers? There are nine “gifted” students of this type at Meadowbrook Middle School, making it possible that this series will be going on for some time. It is Emily, who can see into the future, who is the focus of Here Today, Gone Tomorrow. Like all the gifts of the “gifted,” Emily’s is imperfect: she cannot tell when something will happen, just that it will occur. And this spells trouble at Meadowbrook, where Emily’s fellow students are starting to disappear, one by one. Marilyn Kaye does not seem to take these books too seriously, which helps them get a (+++) rating even though much of what goes on is formulaic. In the current volume, video games and basketball turn into distractions (or maybe clues); there is a planned bank robbery in which the talents of the “gifted” are called upon; and certain of the “gifted” end up manipulating others for purposes of their own. There’s dirty work afoot here that goes well beyond the school: Madame, who teaches the “gifted,” says, “I’m worried for the world.” She apparently says this with a straight face, but it is impossible to take the Gifted series entirely seriously. Still, as a venture into escapist paranormality, it can be a lot of fun.

(+++) THE LATEST ODDITIES

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Special Edition 2010. Scholastic. $15.99.

Scholastic 2010 Almanac for Kids: Facts, Figures, & Stats. Scholastic. $13.99.

     Apparently facts need lots of dressing up if they are going to interest young readers. In the case of the latest Ripley’s Believe It or Not! volume, they apparently also need a really weird 3-C cover to get people interested in obtaining information from an old-fashioned book rather than online. In truth, the franchise developed more than 90 years ago by Robert Ripley was always presented with an eye toward the bizarre and outré. The man was quite an entrepreneur, being the force behind a nationwide radio show and a series of museums – there are now 30 of them – called Odditoriums. The Ripley’s franchise has changed quite a bit in recent years, moving from its original focus on odd customs and people – a sort of expansion of what used to be called a freak show – into matters that are simply offbeat. The 2010 book includes a cornflake shaped like the state of Illinois (sold on eBay for $1,350); a house made entirely from empty plastic bottles; a 100-year-old paraglider; a blind teenager who finds his way around using echolocation; an 18-inch-high robot with the vocabulary of a five-year-old child; a piece of art made from the small stickers affixed to supermarket produce; a Mud Day celebration at a town in Michigan; and so on. There is very little here that a modern young reader is likely to find unbelievable – even the Dalmatian that rides a bike and the cart-pulling rooster just seem like the animals readily found on YouTube. And of course Web videos have action that no traditional book can reproduce. There is something a trifle old-fashioned and a little sad in the persistence of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! in a world where so many almost-unbelievable things can be found on the computer with such ease – and for free. This is a nicely put together book, but perhaps the time for this sort of display has passed.

     There is always time for lists, though, and the Scholastic 2010 Almanac for Kids is full of them: the six systems of the human body, the 10 most visited U.S. national parks, the five largest world religions, all 195 independent countries in the world, and more. There are chapters here on animals, the environment, inventors, math, plants, space, sports, weather, world history and more – nothing in depth, but lots of once-over-lightly facts. This is a place to go to see the flag of Bhutan, find out the length of the Mississippi River, learn common words in Egyptian Arabic, discover how many miles are in a light year, learn which countries have the most cell phones per 100 people (the United States is not even in the top 10), and get the names of all U.S. vice presidents. For all the attempted coolness of the book’s presentation – lots of color, lots of pictures, a jazzy layout – it is at bottom a geek’s delight, of greatest interest to people who find facts interesting just because they’re cool. There are some useful tie-ins to the Web – for instance, you can find out which 10 countries produce the most carbon dioxide, then check your local air quality at www.airnow.gov. But the main purpose of the Scholastic 2010 Almanac for Kids is simply to present a series of more-or-less-random facts in an entertaining, easily accessible way. There’s nothing wrong with that – but it does mean that the book will be of interest only to readers who want to know the 10 top-grossing movies of 2008 or the five highest U.S. mountains, and who would rather have the information in book form than look it up on a computer.

(++++) SYMPHONIES THOUGHT AND RETHOUGHT

Michael Daugherty: Metropolis Symphony; Deus ex Machina for Piano and Orchestra. Terrence Wilson, piano; Nashville Symphony conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero. $8.99.

Franz Schmidt: Symphony No. 2; Fuga Solemnis for organ, sixteen wind instruments and percussion. Anders Johnsson, organ; Malmö Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vassily Sinaisky. Naxos. $8.99.

Tchaikovsky: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 6. London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. LPO. $24.99 (2 CDs).

     There have been many obituaries written for the symphony – dating back to the years when Beethoven’s were considered unsurpassable (and his Ninth was deemed virtually unplayable). But the form is so attractive to so many composers that even those for whom Beethoven’s shadow seemed longest (think Brahms) eventually overcame their misgivings and tried their own essays in symphonic form. The pattern continues even today: what more can there possibly be to say in a symphony? Yet the form’s inherent adaptability, added to the thoughtfulness of some composers in redefining and expanding what the term can mean, has led to startlingly varied symphonic productions throughout the 20^th century and into the 21^st. One of the cleverest recent approaches to the symphony is Michael Daugherty’s – although purists will argue, with some justification, that his Metropolis Symphony is really a suite, its movements related in concept but not musically. Indeed, Daugherty himself says the five movements can be played independently. Matters of definition aside, Metropolis Symphony is a work of appealing sound, interesting instrumentation, and cleverly interconnected themes (not musical themes but programmatic ones); and it is great fun to listen to – a statement that cannot always be made about 20^th-century symphonies. The work is a non-meditative meditation on the Superman ethos. Daugherty started composing it in 1988 to mark the 50^th anniversary of the iconic comic-book hero; he completed it in 1993; and it was first performed in 1994. It has received a number of performances since, and it deserves to: this is appealing music that speaks to a peculiarly American cultural icon using a firm grasp of compositional techniques and keeping one eye (or ears) always on pleasing the audience. Quite an accomplishment. The styles of the five movements vary widely: “Lex” (for archvillain Lex Luthor) features perpetuum mobile triplets on a solo violin (well played here by Mary Kathryn Van Osdale) ; “Krypton” (Superman’s home planet) combines eerie glissandi with increasingly ominous fire bells; “MXYZPTLK” (for the fifth-dimensional imp who troubles Superman periodically) includes antiphonally placed flute soloists and an emphasis on all the instruments’ higher registers; “Oh, Lois!” is a virtuosic and very funny tribute to Superman’s many rescues of Lois Lane; and “Red Cape Tango,” inspired by Superman’s death (and later resurrection), sounds like a stylized fight with interpolations of the Medieval Dies irae. Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony really go to town with this music – hearing it is an exhilarating experience. The symphony is paired with a sort-of piano concerto, written in 2007, called Deus ex Machina. This is Daugherty’s three-movement tribute to the world of trains, from the future they once seemed to represent (first movement) to their funereal role (second movement, which recalls the train that carried assassinated President Lincoln’s body home for burial) to the end of the steam-locomotive era (third movement). The sound pictures here are lovingly painted, the piano writing is forthright and clever, and the work as a whole is appealing both as entertainment and as an extended meditation on a once-crucial form of transportation that has largely fallen by the wayside in the United States (although scarcely so in other countries).

     Franz Schmidt had his own ideas about creating something new in symphonic form – less radical than Daugherty’s, but then, Schmidt’s Second Symphony dates to 1911-13, a post-Mahler, pre-World War I era in which musical radicalism was different. Schmidt, a fine but neglected composer, builds the symphony around a single basic theme that is stated by violins and clarinets at the start and subsequently varied, pulled apart, upended and turned inside out and every which way for nearly 50 minutes. Schmidt was fond of large orchestras, and his Symphony No. 2 uses a very big one indeed, including eight horns, a contrabass tuba, four timpani (plus bass drum and side drum), lots of percussion, and winds and strings galore. The work is in three movements – the typical form of a piano sonata, which is what Schmidt originally conceived it to be – and includes a highly impressive set of variations in the middle. This is a big work in every sense, sprawling and intense, thoroughly Romantic in sensibility, and very difficult to play (especially for the strings). The Malmö Symphony Orchestra is perhaps not ideally suited for something quite this large and complicated, but Vassily Sinaisky conducts stylishly and the players sound ardent, if occasionally a bit strained. Also on this CD is one of the works that explains Schmidt’s modern-day neglect. Fuga Solemnis is, on its face, a fascinating piece, requiring very considerable dexterity by the organist (Anders Johnsson does a fine job) and a conductor’s ability to balance a highly unusual array of instruments: six trumpets, six horns, three trombones, tuba, timpani and tam-tam. This was Schmidt’s last organ work, completed in 1937, and shows a sure mastery of form and orchestration. Hearing it in a strictly musical context is a highly involving experience. But many people cannot hear it that way, for Fuga Solemnis was reworked under Nazism into an interlude in a cantata called Deutsche Auferstehung (“German Resurrection”), using words by one of Schmidt’s pupils. The cantata was not performed in Schmidt’s lifetime, but its association with the Third Reich – and, by extension, the association of Schmidt’s music in general with the Nazi era – makes this very talented composer a very tough sell for some audiences, even today.

     In contrast, one of the easiest composers to “sell” to modern audiences is Tchaikovsky, whose six symphonies were thoroughly Romantic but very, very different from each other. The new London Philharmonic set of performances of Nos. 1 and 6 gets a (+++) rating – a low one – despite its excellent playing and very fine sound (the performances were recorded live). The reason it does not rate higher is that Vladimir Jurowski falls into a common trap of conductors performing well-known symphonies: he feels he has to do something with them. In No. 6, the “Pathétique,” this means toning down the heart-on-sleeve emotionalism of the work; taking the last part of the third movement so quickly that even as fine an orchestra as the LPO can barely keep up; and making the gong stroke near the end of the finale much too loud for its context. In No. 1 (“Winter Dreams”), Jurowski tears at the fabric of the music to even more disappointing effect, most unfortunately in the finale, where he speeds up the Andante lugubre introduction tremendously as it ends so he can slow down the opening of the Allegro maestoso main section, and where the speedup toward the very end of the movement (followed by a huge slowdown for the concluding chords) is so breathtakingly wrongheaded that it is hard to remember that Jurowski is Russian by birth. The LPO sound is a little thin for this velvety music, although listeners who want a “clean” sound in Tchaikovsky and are tired of overly lush, overwrought performances will enjoy it. And when Jurowski lets the music flow as the composer intended, there are many lovely moments here. But for most listeners, there will be far too many quirks to make this two-CD set a worthwhile purchase.

(+++) SOUNDS OF THE PAST

Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 4; Gluck: Overture to “Iphigenie in Aulis.” Leon Fleisher, piano; Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester conducted by Hans Rosbaud (Concerto No. 2) and Otto Klemperer (Concerto No. 4; Gluck). Medici Arts. $16.99.

Richard Strauss: Don Quixote; Also Sprach Zarathustra. Alwin Bauer, cello; Paul Schroer, viola; Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester conducted by conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos. Medici Arts. $16.99.

Ireland: A London Overture; Piano Concerto; The Forgotten Rite—Prelude; These Things Shall Be. Eileen Joyce, piano; Redvers Llewellyn, baritone; Luton Choral Society and London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. LPO. $16.99.

     There are many archival recordings now being released in CD form, and fans of particular performers – or particular performances – will be delighted to have them in a modern format. But, for the most part, only such committed fans will be strongly attracted to CDs such as these two, because as good as the remastering and production are, monophonic recordings from 50 to 60 years ago are simply not what most listeners today expect to (or will be pleased to) hear.

     For those who are familiar with Leon Fleisher’s performances before his decades-long absence from the concert stage in works for both hands (because of focal dystonia in his right hand), any recording of Fleisher performing Beethoven or Brahms piano concertos is cause for celebration: he was particularly well known for these works, and always approached them with grace, finesse and extraordinary understanding. Fleisher’s recordings of the Beethoven piano concertos with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra are classics in every sense, near-perfect meldings of pianistic and orchestral sound and style. Next to them, the Medici Arts CD featuring the Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester (now known as WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln) are a touch on the pale side. In No. 2, recorded in 1957, Fleisher is as light and Mozartean as can be, with Hans Rosbaud conducting in workmanlike fashion that supports the pianist but does not seem in full partnership with him. Otto Klemperer’s conducting in No. 4 and the Gluck overture – these performances date to 1956 – is more supple and effective. Later Klemperer recordings often suffered from heavy-handedness and overly slow tempos, but here the accompaniment is finely proportioned and the orchestra really takes part in a dialogue with the soloist (especially important in the give and take of the concerto’s second movement). These are solid if not spectacular performances, well recorded for their time, and certainly worth having for fans of Fleisher in his younger days: he was not yet 30 when these recordings were made.

     Equally solid and equally intriguing are Dimitri Mitropoulos’ Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester performances of two Richard Strauss tone poems, recorded in 1959 – the year before the conductor’s death. Mitropoulos was an early champion of the works of Gustav Mahler, but it was left to his protégé Leonard Bernstein (who took over the New York Philharmonic from Mitropoulos in 1957) to begin the great surge in Mahler’s popularity that has persisted to the present. The Strauss recordings show a conductor fully at home with the same sort of large orchestral forces and complex structures that Mahler championed. These are finely crafted performances that treat the works’ individual sections (13 in Don Quixote, 11 in Also Sprach Zarathustra) as independent but interrelated segments, while also providing the works with dramatic unity through well-chosen tempos and sensitive orchestral balance. That balance does not always come off as well as it might in the recording, though, and the very lush sound that makes Strauss so effective is missing here. The solo cello and viola in Don Quixote do stand out well, but neither of these works has the fullness of the Strauss sound at its most opulent. Still, these are very worthy performances that will be a treat for fans of Mitropoulos, who was a thoughtful and highly skilled conductor.

     The new LPO disc of music by John Ireland dates back even further than the two Medici Arts CDs, to 1949, and it wears its sonic age only moderately well. This is a live recording of a 70^th-birthday concert for Ireland (1879-1962), including his only piano concerto – indeed, his only concerto of any type – as well as his sole work for chorus and orchestra, These Things Shall Be. The concerto, written in 1930, was first recorded by Eileen Joyce in 1942 with the Hallé Orchestra under Leslie Heward. Joyce’s celebratory 1949 performance became her second recording of the work, which she plays with understanding and sensitivity. In fact, she makes a good case for more-frequent hearings of this often-jazzy concerto, with its hints of Prokofiev and Gershwin. These Things Shall Be, for baritone, chorus and orchestra, whose première was conducted by Sir Adrian Boult in 1937, is performed with enthusiasm but seems rather overblown. A London Overture – a 1936 expansion of Ireland’s 1934 A Comedy Overture for brass band – is an effective curtain-raiser; and The Forgotten Rite, a “prelude for orchestra” completed in 1918, is pleasantly atmospheric if not especially distinguished. Ireland’s sensibilities were essentially Impressionist, and much of his music tends to sound dated today, but certainly Boult gave it his all in celebrating the composer’s birthday. The art of live recording was not as advanced as that of studio recording in the 1940s, and the works as heard here seem rather flattened and constricted. The CD is an interesting historical document and will be worthwhile for those with an existing interest in Ireland’s music, but it is scarcely the most effective gateway to this composer’s works for those who are not already familiar with them.

(++++) DELIGHTS FOR PRESCHOOL AND UP

Lights Out, Night’s Out. By William Boniface. Illustrated by Milena Kirkova. Accord Publishing/Andrews McMeel. $17.99.

Dark Night. By Dorothée de Monfried. Random House. $14.99.

Princess and Fairy. By Anna Pignataro. Knopf. $14.99.

Princess Hyacinth: The Surprising Tale of a Girl Who Floated. By Florence Parry Heide. Illustrated by Lane Smith. Schwartz & Wade. $17.99.

The Little Dump Truck. By Margery Cuyler. Illustrated by Bob Kolar. Christy Ottaviano Books. $12.99.

Chief Rhino to the Rescue. By Sam Lloyd. Henry Holt. $14.99.

     Kids ages 3-8 – roughly, preschoolers through first-graders – will have a great time with all these books, each of which is quite different from the others. The illustrations are the most fascinating part of Lights Out, Night’s Out, the third book in a series called AniMotion. This is Accord Publishing’s version of the increasingly popular lenticular animation, which makes still pictures – or, in this case, parts of still pictures – seem to move. The rhymed story here is simple enough: it is about nocturnal creatures, from owl and hedgehog to cricket and firefly. William Boniface gives eight well-rhymed lines to each creature: “The spider spins/ Her silky web,/ As evening breezes/ Flow and ebb./ She flits along/ That silken track,/ Just waiting for/ A midnight snack!” Milena Kirkova creates pictures that partake of cartoon simplification but also highlight real-life elements: a close-up view of a baby raccoon, for instance, or of the head of a wolf. And within each picture, something moves as the reader starts to turn the page. Two bats fly; the lights of fireflies flicker in the night sky; a jaguar’s tail moves from side to side; a hippopotamus’ head rises from the water. Boniface and Kirkova cleverly end the book by moving from the exotic to the mundane: the final scene shows a child’s bedroom with a hamster – a nocturnal pet – running in its wheel. The inside back cover offers additional information on all 12 of the creatures in the book (that hamster may run five miles in a single night!), giving Lights Out, Night’s Out an educational element to complement its very entertaining presentation.

     Another nighttime tale – and one that is especially well-plotted – is Dark Night, in which a little boy named Felix is walking home through some scary woods when he hears a loud sound and runs to hide in a hollow tree. Sure enough, a wolf shows up, builds a fire and sits down to warm his front paws – only to be scared off himself by a tiger – which is frightened away by a huge crocodile. Felix shrinks back in the tree and discovers a doorknob, which opens a door that leads to a stairway that leads to the under-tree home of a friendly rabbit who comes up with a very clever way of helping Felix get home safely. In fact, Felix and the rabbit end up scaring the wolf, tiger and crocodile so much that all three of them come to Felix’s house looking for help – so Felix and the rabbit have to scare them again to get them to run away “as fast as their feet could carry them.” The simple story and amusingly cartoonish illustrations keep Dorothée de Monfried’s book from itself being scary for young children, and in fact make it a wonderful way for parents to help kids overcome their nighttime fears: just imagine being rescued by that helpful bunny.

     Princess and Fairy has a more straightforward story but is put together in a particularly interesting way – and it has not one but two bunnies, namely the ones of the title. Princess and Fairy are best friends who share everything: “Midnight treats and secret wishes,/ Toadstool dancing and fairy swishes,/ Hide-and-seek at Ladybird Bend,/ Best of friends to the fairy end!” They get a letter from the Queen inviting them to a party – and this is where Anna Pignataro’s design gets clever. The envelope, which includes a small piece of paper saying “an invitation from the Queen,” is a three-dimensional element of a left-hand-page illustration, while the list the friends make of things they will need for the party is attached to the facing right-hand page. Then, when Princess and Fairy go shopping, every stall at the Three Wishes Market has its own sign and offerings, from purple pineapples to “Never Burn Pots ‘n’ Pans.” Part of the fun here is trying to find specific objects in Pignataro’s elaborate drawings – a pair of cherries and a yellow rose at the market, a blue purse and more at Three Penny Lane (which features “Trillions of dresses in all the right hues,/ Hats and tiaras and sparkly shoes”), and so on. The friends go to Fairyland Fairground and elsewhere as they search for items on their list, eventually getting so dirty that they show up at the party in “freckled frocks and grubby shoes” – but the Fairy Queen is enchanted by their smiles, and everything ends happily. Little girls will love the outfits and the book’s color scheme, which is largely pink. And Pignataro’s use of glitter makes the illustrations shine particularly brightly.

     There is a princess in Princess Hyacinth as well, but unlike a flying, winged fairy princess, she looks like an ordinary everyday little girl: “She had two eyes, with a nose between them and a mouth under that – you know, the usual things in the usual arrangement.” But Princess Hyacinth is anything but usual. She floats. There’s no particular reason for it – she’s just immune to gravity. Of course, she can’t go outside, because she would float away. And even in the palace, there are dangers – unless she is wearing weights sewn into her clothes and the heaviest crown in the kingdom. Then “she didn’t float at all. In fact, she could hardly move.” Florence Parry Heide makes this delightfully offbeat story into a real page-turner, and Lane Smith’s illustrations – showing the princess looking so small in the huge palace, whether weighed down by her clothing or floating in her royal underwear while asleep – add an additional just-right whimsical touch. And there are neat plot twists, too. First, the Princess almost manages to make friends with a boy named Boy, who flies his kite (adorned with a crown) just outside the palace. Then, the Princess – weighed down and dragging herself through the park – orders a balloon man to tie a string to her, takes off her weighty clothes, and floats happily like a balloon….until a dog startles the man and he lets go of the string. Princess Hyacinth ends up having a simply marvelous time in the air, except that she can’t get down – until Boy comes unwittingly to her rescue. Add the way that happens to what happens next and you have a delightful conclusion to a story that does not quite end the way fairy tales usually do – although there is a sort of happily-ever-after to it.

     The happiness is of a different kind, and is decidedly more boy-oriented, in The Little Dump Truck, in which Margery Cuyler’s rhymes chronicle a day in the life of a helpful truck and its driver, Hard Hat Pete. The first line on each page is the same – for example, “I’m a little dump truck/ hauling stones and rocks,/ bumping, bouncing, thumping,/ crossing city blocks.” Some of Cuyler’s rhymes are especially neatly turned: “I’m a little dump truck/ waiting for debris./ Excavator scoops—/ drops dirt into me!” Bob Kolar’s illustrations are enjoyable, too, showing the construction equipment (and all the other vehicles in the city) with bumpers that look like mouths and with headlight “eyes” that glance around and sometimes reflect personalities: one truck has rectangular rather than round eyes, with a focused expression; a limousine looks intensely ahead as its driver navigates through traffic. The dump truck works in the city, then heads onto the highway “to another state,” stopping for fuel along the way, and finally gets to a new workplace to comment, “I love my job – Hooray!”

     Chief Rhino loves his job, too, but in Chief Rhino to the Rescue he loves it a bit too much. Sam Lloyd’s amusing story of Whoops-a-Daisy World (which Lloyd previously visited in Doctor Meow’s Big Emergency) follows the pattern of well-meaning characters making honest mistakes that turn out just fine in the end. After we meet Chief Rhino and find out how strong and brave he is, we watch him searching the town for fires and spying one – to which he promptly races, saying, “It’s time for me to save the day!” But when the chief and his fellow firefighters get to Number One House Row and determinedly get their gear together so Chief Rhino can spray water on the fire, things turn out to be not quite what they seemed – or not quite what Chief Rhino thought they were, anyway. The misunderstanding turns out to be funny – and there is no harm done even though Chief Rhino says, “Instead of saving the day, I’ve ruined it!” But everything ends happily with a big party and some mighty silly drawings to go with the sort of amusing mistake that lies at the heart of Whoops-a-Daisy World stories.

(++++) AN EDUCATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION

The Best 371 Colleges, 2010 Edition. By Robert Franek, Tom Meltzer, Christopher Maier, Erik Olson, Julie Doherty, and Eric Owens. Princeton Review/Random House. $22.99.

     The silliest thing about this otherwise serious college guide is the implied precision of its title. The number 371 could as easily be, say, 402, or 247, or anything else. Using a number that suggests there is a college No. 372 that somehow didn’t make the grade is as sensible as reading an airline schedule and really believing that a flight will take off at precisely 9:51 and land at exactly 11:13. The precise number is at odds with the Princeton Review’s own statement, “At the end of the day, it’s what YOU think about the schools that matters most.”

     Still, the basic approach of this book makes it an extraordinarily useful guide for high-school students looking for the best match for their individual interests and talents. Yes, the authors provide lists of “great schools for 15 of the most popular undergraduate majors,” and yes, there are lists showing colleges with most-accessible and least-accessible professors, best and worst college libraries, best career services, most-beautiful and least-attractive campuses, and more. But these lists are mere starting points, because the meat of this book is in the form of comments by the schools’ own students – plus a wide variety of statistics that range from the useful (percentage of students admitted from wait list, percentage of professors who teach undergraduates) to the politically correct (“green rating,” which includes such factors as the percentage of food expenditures directed toward “local, organic, or otherwise environmentally preferable food” and whether the school “employs a dedicated full-time [or full-time equivalent] sustainability officer”).

     The best thing to do with The Best 371 Colleges, 2010 Edition, is to use it not as a starting point but as the second step in a college search. That is, after making a preliminary list of colleges that seem attractive because of geography, reputation, majors, cost and whatever other factors you want to consider – using your high school’s college counselor as a primary resource – turn to this book for an excellent overview of each college’s statistics and the opinions of its students. So you will find out that students at Hampshire College (Massachusetts) say they “are normally very good at entertaining” themselves; that “getting involved in the community is second nature” to most students at Ithaca College (New York); that “the party scene at Miami [University of Ohio] is top-notch…[with] tons of bars and off-campus houses devoted solely to us”; that Purdue University (Indiana) is “a place for anyone to completely blend in or stand out”; and so on. And these comments are simply from the section of each listing called “Life.” There are also sections on “Academics” and “Student Body,” plus comments by the Princeton Review on admissions and financial aid, plus remarks by each school’s admissions office. Of particular value is a section called “The Inside Word,” where students attracted by the “Life” description of Purdue, for example, will find out that “the fact that Purdue holds class rank as one of its most important considerations in the admission of candidates is troublesome”; that Rochester (New York) Institute of Technology’s “relatively high acceptance rate is somewhat deceiving because the applicant pool is largely self-selecting”; that “it won’t be long before the academic strength found at Oglethorpe [University in Georgia] attracts wider attention and more applicants.”

     Accompanying the two-page narrative about each school are statistics on selectivity, deadlines, financial aid, academics, most popular majors and more; cost information on tuition, room and board, fees, and books and supplies; the school’s environment; its overall quality of life; and on and on. In fact, the two pages accorded each college in The Best 371 Colleges, 2010 Edition provide far more useful, easier-to-access data – in an easy-to-compare format – than students will find by visiting the schools’ Web sites, whose quality and design diverge widely. Ultimately, of course, no book, including this one, can pick the best school for any individual; Princeton Review in fact strongly advocates campus visits as a way for potential students to get a “feel” for each college in which they think they are interested. There really is a good college match out there for anyone who wants to attend, but the decision on which college that is varies as widely as do students themselves. The Best 371 Colleges, 2010 Edition cannot provide a definitive answer as to which college is best for any individual, but it can and does give everyone plenty of easy-to-understand information to make this highly personal decision as easy (or at least nontraumatic) as it can possibly be.

(+++) KIDS IN THE LIMELIGHT

Slumgirl Dreaming: Rubina’s Journey to the Stars. By Rubina Ali in collaboration with Anne Berthod and Divya Dugar. Delacorte Press. $9.99.

First Kids: The True Stories of All the Presidents’ Children. By Noah McCullough. Scholastic. $7.99.

     It would be unkind to suggest that these books attempt shamelessly to exploit a young star of Slumdog Millionaire and the popularity of President Barack Obama’s children, respectively. Perhaps it would be fairer to say that the books are cashing in on the 15 minutes of fame usually accorded to celebrities – young and old alike. But despite a certain cynicism in the books’ presentations, they contain a lot of interesting information and some material that will make readers really think about their subjects.

     Slumgirl Dreaming, in which the story of Rubina Ali – who at age nine played the youngest version of Latika in the hit film Slumdog Millionaire – is told by French journalist Anne Berthod and Indian journalist Divya Dugar, lets Rubina speak in her own voice in ways that are not typical in biographies of child stars. “I found Nicole Kidman strange but also very charming,” we learn at one point. “Everything was done on the set according to her desires and mood.” We never quite learn what the strangeness was, but the openness of Rubina’s comments shines through. “As for my biological mother, I hate her more than ever,” Rubina says after the woman accuses Rubina’s father of trying to sell Rubina to a sheik from Dubai. Also, “Americans eat different food to [sic] us. There was no dal, no chawal or chicken masala, but odd, strange-tasting things. It was all so tasteless.” This sort of fish-out-of-water comment typifies Slumgirl Dreaming, and can stand for the topic of the book as a whole. The reality is that “life hasn’t changed much for me except that now I’m aware of a world much more beautiful than my slum,” Rubina explains. Despite many offers to relocate the family, Rubina’s father, her beloved aba, refuses to leave the slum, because that is where he works as a carpenter and where he has all his contacts. “I want to become a great actress,” says Rubina. “If not an actress, I would like to be an astronaut.” That juxtaposition is typical of the charming naïveté that permeates Slumgirl Dreaming, in which the stories about stars known to Americans – Kidman, Danny Boyle and others – really are secondary to the tale of a young girl raised to heights of which most people worldwide can barely dream, only to find herself afterwards neither here nor there: living again in the slum where she has always been, but well aware now (as she was not before) of how big a world is out there beyond the boundaries of the poorest parts of Mumbai. Rubina’s world is reflected in her entire outlook on life. For instance, once, on the set, “someone was closing the toilet door and my finger got in the way. But there was a doctor on the set who bandaged it. In the slums, kids keep falling and getting hurt so it didn’t bother me that much.” This, not the glories of an award-winning film, is the reality of Rubina’s life.

     Things are considerably more upbeat for the Obama children, but as First Kids makes clear, many stories of presidential offspring can be as tragic as anything in Rubina Ali’s world. Noah McCullough, a 14-year-old author and political junkie, is entirely matter-of-fact in recounting what happened to some presidential children. “Edward Garfield was born on Christmas Day in 1874. He didn’t get to know his new family very well because he died on October 25, 1876, of whooping cough, just twenty-two months after his birth.” “William Lewis Arthur was born while his dad was in the military on December 10, 1860. He died of convulsions at the age of two, on July 7, 1863.” McCullough includes some interesting trivia in “Fast Facts” sections about each presidential family. “The [Rutherford B.] Hayes family had the very first Siamese cat in America.” “The [Millard] Fillmores were the first White House family to enjoy a bathtub. It was made of mahogany and lined with zinc.” “President Benjamin Harrison once hosted a birthday party for his grandson Baby McKee, who was turning four years old. …The menu was ground-up food (biscuits and bouillon), cake, and ice cream. The Marine band supplied the music.” In fact, the entire book is a trivia feast, simply organized by chronology (Washington through Obama) and with plenty of photos to supplement the text. A more seasoned author could do a great deal more with any number of the stories that McCullough tells in a few words. For example, “Tazewell Tyler…served in the medical corps for the Confederacy. After the war, he practiced medicine in three different states: Virginia, Maryland and California. …He later died of alcoholism at the age of forty-three on January 8, 1874.” But the once-over-lightly approach of this book does have advantages: it lets young readers skim through a lot of presidential family history easily, and avoids going too deeply into matters of politics and policy. Perhaps the book will even inspire some readers to find out more information than McCullough includes. For example, there is surely a story worth exploring in the life of Abraham Lincoln’s son, Robert Todd Lincoln, who “requested not to be buried with his famous first family upon his death” and who was in Washington not only when his father was assassinated but also when Presidents Garfield and McKinley were killed.

(+++) PAPERBACK WRITERS

Magic Pickle and the Creature from the Black Legume. By Scott Morse. Graphix/Scholastic. $5.99.

Shiver Me Letters: A Pirate ABC. By June Sobel. Illustrated by Henry Cole. Sandpiper. $5.99.

Transformers Animated: Clash of the Constructicons; Starscream Flies Again. By Annie Auerbach. HarperFestival. $3.99 each.

     These books are testimony to the versatility of the redoubtable paperback format. One is more or less a graphic novel – fifth in what has the potential to be a never-ending series; one is a short, oversize and amusing alphabet book; and two are picture-heavy, text-light stories based on a television show.

     Scott Morse’s Magic Pickle series continues its punny and often funny ways in Magic Pickle and the Creature from the Black Legume, which actually has an educational element in explaining – repeatedly – that peanuts are not nuts but legumes. The difference even proves important in defeating the evil creature. Like the previous Magic Pickle books, this one has elements of a graphic novel (page after page told in comic-book style), but also has a good deal of straight narrative (to the extent that anything is “straight” in this always skewed series). The main setting this time is a factory called Pete’s Perfect Peanuts, to which Jo Jo (Magic Pickle’s sidekick and helper) is going on a field trip with her class. A black peanut (“black legume,” see?) hatches a dastardly peanut-butter-powered villain, and the rest is history, and sometimes hysterical. There is also a videogame connection here, involving a game called SCHNOZOLA! with the bad-guy Nostrillain and good-guy Handker Chief. It’s almost too silly for words; hence all the pictures. Fans of the series will especially enjoy the post-story story, which brings the conclusion to a real conclusion.

     It’s obvious where Shiver Me Letters will begin and end – at A and Z, respectively. What is not obvious is the clever way author June Sobel and illustrator Henry Cole get from here to there. The pirate animals – led by a hook-handed crocodile captain who repeatedly roars, “R!” – set sail in search of all the letters of the alphabet, and find them in unexpected places: “They dug for doubloons and scooped up a D.” “From out of the jungle, J jumped sky-high.” “A mysterious map with an M soon appeared.” And so it goes throughout the rhymed adventure – until the exhausted crew delivers a Y and the captain says that is not enough: “Be off with ye, mates./ Go rob me a Z.” So the crew members retire to their bunks and, of course, snore “zillions of Z’s.” Originally published in 2006, Shiver Me Letters is as charming in its new paperback incarnation as it was originally.

     And speaking of incarnations: the whole point of Transformers is that they have multiple ones. That is, they can be one thing for a time, then something else (in case that wasn’t obvious from their name and last summer’s big-budget movie). Transformers can in fact be transformed not only from toys into films but also from toys into animated television series, and it is the Transformers of the animated series that star in two paperback adaptations by Annie Auerbach. Clash of the Constructicons, based on a TV episode called Rise of the Constructicons, is about two construction machines called Mixmaster and Scrapper that come into contact with “the AllSpark, the source of life for all Transformers,” and find themselves torn between friendship with the good-guy Autobots and bad-guy Decepticons. Starscream Flies Again, from a TV episode called A Fistful of Energon, features bad-guy Starscream delivering dialogue such as this: “You’re going to regret the day you were protoformed!” None of this material is to be taken the slightest bit seriously, but there is plenty of action to be imagined in looking at the scenes from the TV series, and writing that will appeal to existing fans of the Transformers in their many multimedia guises.

(++++) CONCERTOS IN RARE FORM

Beethoven: Violin Concerto; Romances Nos. 1 and 2; Fragment of Violin Concerto, WoO 5. Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin; Orchestre des Champs-Élysées conducted by Philippe Herreweghe. Naïve. $16.99.

Clara Schumann: Piano Concerto; Piano Trio; Romances for Violin and Piano. Veronica Jochum, piano; Bamberger Symphoniker conducted by Joseph Silverstein (Concerto); Veronica Jochum, piano; Joseph Silverstein, violin; Colin Carr, cello (Trio); Joseph Silverstein, violin; Veronica Jochum, piano (Romances). Tudor. $19.99.

Joaquín Gutiérrez Heras: Fantasia Concertante for Cello and Orchestra; Samuel Zyman: Cello Concerto; Ricardo Castro: Cello Concerto. Carlos Prieto, cello; Orquesta Sinfónica de Xalapa conducted by Miguel Prieto (Heras); Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional conducted by Enrique Diemecke (Zyman); Orquesta Sinfónica de Berlin conducted by Jorge Velazco (Castro). Urtext. $14.99.

     Although Beethoven’s Violin Concerto was not especially successful during the composer’s lifetime, it is impossible nowadays to think of it as a rarity. Nevertheless, the new performance by Patricia Kopatchinskaja and the Orchestre des Champs-Élysées under Philippe Herreweghe makes the work seem particularly fresh, partly because of the tempos chosen (which are intended to approximate the ones Beethoven wanted, to the extent that those are known); partly because of the use of period instruments, whose sonic world is different from that of modern ones; and partly because Kopatchinskaja – using a Giovanni Pressenda violin made in 1834 – not only plays with a light (pre-Romantic) touch but also uses variants of some passages included in Beethoven’s autography score. Add to this the soloist’s use of her own arrangements of Beethoven’s arrangements of cadenzas originally written for the piano version of this concerto – a possibility only in a recording, since overdubbing was needed to reproduce the full piano part on the violin – and you have a very unusual performance that enlivens the music while largely returning it to a version of its original form. And to continue the fascinations of this CD, there is a seven-minute fragment of an early Beethoven Violin Concerto, in C, which itself exhibits some very creative elements, such as the use of divided violas. Only the exposition and start of the development of the work’s first movement survive; hearing them makes for interesting speculation about what might have been, since there is evidence that at least the work’s first movement was completed. This CD is actually entitled “Beethoven: Complete Works for Violin and Orchestra,” and is rounded out with the two Romances, which receive lovely, lyrical but not overdone performances.

     Lyricism is only one element that stands out in Clara Schumann’s sole surviving orchestral work, her Piano Concerto – which remains a rarity, although it is not quite as uncommonly heard today as it as a few decades ago. There is an interesting parallel between this concerto and that of Clara’s husband, Robert Schumann: in each, the longest movement (Robert’s first, Clara’s third) was finished first and originally performed on its own, with the other two movements added later. Clara’s concerto does not sound much like Robert’s, having a style all its own that the composer surely intended to reflect her own considerable virtuosity as a performer. There is, not surprisingly, a sense of youthful liveliness here: the concerto was first performed when its composer was only 16, and was conducted at the time by Mendelssohn – whose friendship with Robert played a significant role in both composers’ works. The other Clara Schumann works on this CD show her compositional skill as well. The four-movement Piano Trio has poise and classical balance but retains a Romantic-era sensibility, while the three short Romances for violin and piano – which make an interesting contrast with Beethoven’s two for violin and orchestra – are warm and pleasant pieces of parlor music, musically attractive if not particularly deep. The performances date to 1988, and the CD itself is a re-release of one from 1992. Both the musicality and the sound have held up very well indeed.

     Even more of a rarity than Clara Schumann’s works are the three for cello and orchestra by Mexican composers, presented on a CD called “Three Centuries.” The title is slightly misleading: Ricardo Castro’s Cello Concerto was first performed in 1903, although apparently written around 1895. It is one of the better-known works by Mexico’s first symphonist and the first composer of a Mexican opera written in Spanish (Atzimba), but it is not particularly Mexican in sound despite the use of some Mexican thematic material. It is an effective, very lyrical work with passages of considerable beauty, showing Castro’s familiarity with European Romantic compositional style rather than moving in a distinctive direction of its own. Its warmth and expressiveness, especially as played by the excellent Carlos Prieto, are immediately appealing. Prieto was personally involved in the creation of the other two works on this CD: Zyman’s, first performed in 1990, was written for him, and Heras’, from 2005, is dedicated to him. Zyman’s is a big work, the longest on this recording, and shows a strong command of the orchestra as well as some influence of Zyman’s teachers, Roger Sessions and David Diamond. It uses 20^th-century compositional techniques effectively, but is not bound or limited by them, and has emotional as well as intellectual impact. Heras’ fantasia, in contrast, is short and somewhat drier than the other pieces here, requiring plenty of virtuosity and good cooperation between soloist and orchestra. Prieto plays very effectively with all three orchestras and all three conductors heard on this disc, the CD as a whole being as much a tribute to his considerable abilities as it is a chance to hear some less-known works of the modern and Romantic cello repertoire.

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Mendelssohn: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2; Symphony No. 5, “Reformation.” Louis Lortie, piano and conducting Orchestre Symphonique de Québec. ATMA Classique. $16.99.

Mendelssohn: String Quartets Nos. 2 and 5; Capriccio in E minor; Fugue in E flat major. New Zealand String Quartet (Helene Pohl and Douglas Beilman, violins; Gillian Ansell, viola; Rolf Gjelsten, cello). Naxos. $8.99.

Spohr: Double Quartets Nos. 1 and 2. Forde Ensemble. Naxos. $8.99.

Schubert: Complete Works for Violin and Piano, Volume 1. Julia Fischer, violin; Martin Helmchen, piano. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

     Canadian pianist Louis Lortie shows himself to be a skilled interpreter of Mendelssohn – both at the keyboard and on the podium – on a new CD with an interestingly varied program. The pairing of Mendelssohn’s two mature piano concertos (from 1831 and 1837, respectively) is nothing new, but adding the “Reformation” symphony gives this disc unexpected depth. The symphony, begun in 1829 with the intention of having it played in 1830 for the 300^th anniversary of Martin Luther’s Augsburg Confession, was not actually heard until 1832 – and was so controversial (because of Mendelssohn’s family’s conversion from Judaism to Protestantism) that Mendelssohn came to hate it. Yet the work has remarkable richness and sobriety, as well as an exuberant finale based on the chorale Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott. When played with warmth and lyrical sensitivity, on the one hand, and with a light touch and lively tempos, on the other – as the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec performs it – the symphony is wonderfully effective. So, in Lortie’s hands, are the concertos. The more outgoing No. 1 sparkles in this bright, fast-paced reading, while the seriousness of No. 2 (especially its first movement) gets its full due here. All this music is familiar, but not in this combination, and Lortie makes a strong case for everything – including his own skill in the dual pianist/conductor role.

     The New Zealand String Quartet also continues to show warmth and skill aplenty in its second volume of Mendelssohn’s String Quartets. The standout here is Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13, a Beethoven-influenced work (drawing on his Op. 95 and Op. 132 quartets) that nevertheless shows Mendelssohn developing his own voice in this medium. The fluidity of the playing, and the ease with which each player hands off material to the next, give the performance fine flow and a strong sense of thematic as well as instrumental unity. In Quartet No. 5 in E flat, Op. 44, No. 3, the scherzo’s fugue and double fugato are well handled, and the energetic finale comes across particularly well. Accompanying the quartets are two movements from a set of four published posthumously as Mendelssohn’s Op. 81: a Capriccio from 1843 and a Fugue from 1827. They are sometimes played as the third and fourth movements of a posthumous quartet, although in fact the work does not hang together particularly well in that form. Here, the New Zealand String Quartet treats them as individual pieces, focusing on the grace and lightness of the Capriccio and the rather staid formality of the Fugue. The top-notch ensemble work on this CD is what makes these performances stand out.

     An equally strong sense of ensemble is an absolute necessity for performing Louis Spohr’s four Double Quartets, the first two of which the Forde Ensemble handles with aplomb. These Spohr works are unique in chamber-music literature: the eight players are treated not as a small string ensemble but as two independent but interconnected groups of four. Thus, the ensemble breaks down into Quartet I (violinists Janice Graham and Helena Wood, violist Andriy Viytovych and cellist Caroline Dale) and Quartet II (violinists Nicole Wilson and Alison Dodds, violist Alexander Zemtsov and cellist Julia Graham). The Double Quartets – No. 1 from 1823 and No. 2 from 1827 – require players to interact both within their respective four-member groups and as members of a larger one. For example, the first work opens with a unison for all eight instruments; then the ensemble splits into two quartets, which enter one bar apart. Spohr was a skilled quartet composer – he wrote 36 regular string quartets in addition to the four double ones – and does a fine job exploiting the sonorities of individual instruments in addition to playing the two quartets against each other. What is less than distinctive, though, especially in the first double quartet, is the musical material itself. The first work pays considerable homage to Mozart, whom Spohr greatly admired and during whose lifetime Spohr was born (in 1784). This double quartet not only follows classical form but also invokes compositional techniques of both Mozart and Haydn, the result being a sonically very pleasing work but one that breaks no new musical ground. The second double quartet is more interesting in this regard. Its second movement, marked Menuetto, is more creative – with its strong contrast between the main section and the Trio – than the corresponding movement of the first double quartet, which is marked Scherzo. The second double quartet’s slow movement also has more heft than the earlier work offers, and the finale is particularly tuneful and catchy. Both these double quartets are in the final analysis of more interest for their form than for their substance, but the Forde Ensemble certainly makes a very good case for them, and this CD provides a fine opportunity to enjoy some little-known and very engaging chamber music. Hopefully a Naxos CD of the Forde Ensemble playing Spohr’s other double quartets is forthcoming.

     Another good case for not-quite-first-class music is made by Julia Fischer and Martin Helmchen in the first volume of a planned two-disc set of all of Schubert’s works for violin and piano. The pieces here are melodiously lyrical, frequently virtuosic and occasionally harmonically adventurous – yet they have understandably been overshadowed by Schubert’s more-innovative accomplishments in other forms, and also by the violin-and-piano sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven. Fischer and Helmchen do not try to make this music larger or more significant than it is, playing it with straightforward beauty and very little grandstanding – an attractive approach to attractive, if minor, Schubertiana. Most of this SACD – whose sound, as usual from PentaTone, is superb – is taken up by the three Sonatas (Sonatinas), Op. 137, Nos. 1-3 (D. 384, 385 and 408). The double designation of these works’ form is in line with their neither-quite-here-nor-quite-there construction: the first, a very Mozartean three-movement piece in D, is lovely but slight; the second, a four-movement A minor work, is the longest and most substantial of the three; the third, also in four movements and in a minor key (G minor), has tinges of melancholy but lacks significant emotional depth. Schubert was 19 when he wrote these works, and they are certainly pleasant and tuneful enough. But the fourth work offered here, the Rondo Brillant in B minor, Op. 70 (D. 895), is of a different order. The composer created this piece 10 years later, only two years before his death, as a virtuoso showpiece for the Bohemian violinist Josef Slavik. This extended rondo – longer than all of D. 384 – has more Romantic sweep and far more display opportunities for the violin than do the earlier works. Fischer and Helmchen make it sing – without, however, overloading it with overbearing technique. This disc’s interest lies in exposing listeners to one of the less-known sides of a composer, many of whose works have become very familiar indeed.