(++++) MAHLER MASTERY AND MYSTERY

Mahler: Symphony No. 9. Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR conducted by Sir Roger Norrington. Hänssler Classic. $18.99.

Mahler: Symphony No. 4. Maureen Mackay, soprano; Royal Liverpool Philharmonic conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Artek. $16.99.

Mahler: Symphony No. 1; Rückert-Lieder. Christine Schäfer, soprano; Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Christoph Eschenbach. Capriccio. $16.99.

     The tempos that today’s conductors select for Mahler are, in a word, all over the place (all right, that’s four words). Their choice of emphasis within the symphonies, and within individual movements, is all over the place, too. Mahler’s famous prediction that his time would yet come needed some 50 years after his death in 1911 to turn into reality; today, another 50 years onward, his times seem to have come: there are many Mahlers, all of common heritage but tremendously different in sound and approach from each other – and from the pioneering performances of Bruno Walter and Leonard Bernstein.

     Roger Norrington’s Mahler both harks back to the original Mahler tradition and breaks from it in important ways. Norrington is a noted proponent of original playing styles, even when using modern instruments and a modern orchestral complement. For the live recording of Mahler’s Ninth that Hänssler Classic has just released, Norrington had the orchestra’s strings return to the playing style of Mahler’s own time, in which vibrato was minimal or absent except when called for as a special effect. This puts a heavy burden on players trained in modern performance style, in which vibrato is integral to all playing and (not incidentally) can be helpful when one does not hit a note with perfect precision. The Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR – which, after all, is one of Europe’s top ensembles – rises to the challenge and produces clear, clean, transparent sound that is quite unlike the massed (and unfortunately sometimes muddy) sonority often associated with modern-times Mahler. The effect in Mahler’s last completed symphony is quite wonderful: far from being dense and doom-laden, it emerges as a work of surprising optimism despite a sense of Abschied throughout (not just in the last movement). The first movement – which, as Norrington points out in his booklet notes, repeatedly makes references to a Johann Strauss Jr. waltz whose title, in English, is “Enjoy Life” – becomes a tone poem in which death may be inevitable but is scarcely demonic. The middle movements, which do often sound demonic, here come across as elements of the wild whirligig of life, with even the Rondo Burleske emerging as hectic but not frantic or depraved. And the finale – well, here Norrington decidedly breaks with Mahler performance tradition, as a cursory glance at the timing of the movement will show. This is one of the fastest Adagio conclusions ever recorded for this symphony – and yet, and this is the surprising and wonderful thing, it does not feel fast except in a very few places. Somehow Norrington, while keeping the underlying pace quicker than usual, brings out all the emotion that Mahler put into this finale and that listeners have come to expect in it. And the very ending is truly sublime: impeccably played and almost unbearably beautiful in the mode of “I hope this never ends.” In all, Norrington’s Ninth is an extraordinary performance that remakes the Mahler landscape in important ways.

     Gerard Schwarz’s Mahler Fourth – also recorded live – is not at this rarefied level, but it is one of the better entries in the Mahler cycle that Schwarz is currently producing with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Simply from the point of view of tempos, Schwarz tends to go in the direction opposite Norrington’s: this is a leisurely Fourth, running almost a full hour. It does not drag, though, because once he selects tempos, Schwarz stays true to them; and the ones he picks help him bring out the naïve and bucolic qualities of the symphony – which is filled with them. The sleigh bells in the first movement give the impression of a wintertime country scene here, and the musical conflicts of the movement are not harsh but more like those of natural forces. The second movement, with its scordatura solo violin, sounds like something out of folk stories: Death may be present, but in the comparatively companionable form of a fairy-tale character rather than the terrifying one of other Mahler symphonies. The slow (sometimes quite slow) variations of the third movement wind unerringly upward in a subtly balanced performance that emerges into real splendor when the gates of Heaven open at the movement’s climax. Once through those gates, though, there is a bit of a letdown, for soprano Maureen Mackay’s singing in the finale is a touch too breathy and a little too emphatic for Mahler’s extremely innocent, childlike setting of the “Heavenly Life” song from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (whose short text Artek really should have provided in this CD’s booklet). The very simplicity of this movement makes the vocal line extremely difficult to deliver effectively – Bernstein famously had it sung by a boy soprano, who almost made up in purity what he lacked in technique. Mackay has a bit too much technique to put across the childlike wonder of the whole scene to which the symphony builds. As a whole, though, this Mahler Fourth is a very satisfying one.

     Christoph Eschenbach’s studio-recorded Mahler First is somewhat less effective and therefore gets a (+++) rating. Eschenbach has a very fine orchestra here – the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin easily handles everything the conductor asks of it – but this performance does not seem to be as thoroughly thought-through as those of Norrington and Schwarz. Eschenbach repeatedly slips into small but irritating mannerisms, such as a ritard and brief pause before this or that emphatic chord – something that Mahler, a brilliant conductor, was perfectly capable of writing into the score if he had wanted it. This periodic jerkiness disrupts the musical flow. And Eschenbach seems less than fully comfortable with some of Mahler’s tone painting – the opening of the first movement, for instance, seems not an awakening of nature but just a set of introductory bars leading to the main theme. The playing is excellent throughout – the brass section is especially good – and when Eschenbach calls for a really big sound, as at the end of the second movement and beginning of the fourth, the orchestra comes through very well indeed. But the quieter sections are not as expressive as they can be. The entire third movement, with its mixture of sincerity and sarcasm, falls rather flat, and the reminiscences contained in the finale (including the references to the dropped “Blumine” movement) seem elements to be gotten through rather than ones in which to dwell for a brief time. There is plenty of skill in Eschenbach’s performance, but it is rather lacking in heart. The five Rückert songs on the CD are uneven as well. Christine Schäfer sounds a touch strained at times, and although she gets the words and rhythms right, she misses a certain level of emotional connection with the texts, especially those of “Im Mitternacht” and “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.” Eschenbach and the orchestra provide fine support, but the performance as a whole is emotionally a bit shallow. There is really nothing wrong with this Mahler CD, but there is not quite enough right for it to be recommended wholeheartedly at a time when so many performers are doing Mahler so outstandingly well.

(++++) EVERYONE IS GOING SOMEWHERE

Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Party Edition. By Dr. Seuss. Random House. $17.99.

Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go Pop-up! Pop-ups by David A. Carter. Robin Corey Books. $28.99.

Dr. Seuss’s Oh, Baby! Go, Baby! Based on and inspired by Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Random House. $10.99.

     The last Dr. Seuss book to be published during Theodor Seuss Geisel’s lifetime, Oh, the Places You’ll Go! has proved to be one of the most adaptable. Nearly two decades after its author’s death in 1991, the book continues to spawn greeting cards, posters, graduation gifts and many other variations that make it seem a wholly upbeat affirmation that the recipient, any recipient, has great things in store in the future.

     Except that it’s not the book that many people think it is. That makes it worthwhile to buy the new “Party Edition” of Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (which has an embossed jacket printed on foil but is otherwise the same as the version first published in 1990) and read it from start to finish. There’s some worry and even cynicism in this book to balance its upbeat moments; and although, yes, the conclusion is resolutely optimistic, it will be hard for a reader to forget the Seussian scenes of the boy playing basketball alone at a ramshackle house, dreaming of something better; the “things that scare you right out of your pants” looming darkly on both sides of a gateway that leads to a road to who-knows-where; and especially The Waiting Place, filled with people waiting for “the phone to ring, or the snow to snow,/ or waiting around for a Yes or No/ or waiting for their hair to grow.” This is the Seuss of such other late works as The Butter Battle Book and You’re Only Old Once! – gently chiding the world, but chiding it nevertheless. There is a great deal more to Oh, the Places You’ll Go! than many 21^st-century readers realize – the book is definitely worth a visit, or revisit. Or several.

     But of course it is the celebratory aspects of the book that are most amenable to repackaging and selling in a wide variety of guises – and in truth, those upbeat elements are as wonderful now as they were when the good doctor created them. David A. Carter, who previously created a pop-up of Horton Hears a Who! and has written (or, rather, engineered) 75 pop-up books in all, brings tremendous creativity to an excerpted version of Oh, the Places You’ll Go! No Waiting Place here, but a couple of the darker and lonelier scenes do appear – and seem far less threatening in three-dimensional form. Carter gets the Seuss lollipop colors right, and manages to keep many of the perspectives of the original drawings while creating 3D packed with balloons, pennants, castles and humbler abodes, and even the “mountain” that Dr. Seuss has his character moving – here attached to the boy by three lengths of bright yellow thread. This is a gift book par excellence, not a substitute for the original but a supplement to it, designed for someone who is graduating from somewhere and is certainly, definitely, or at least most likely going on to even greater things.

     Aimed at the other end of the Seussian spectrum, Dr. Seuss’s Oh, Baby! Go, Baby! is sort of an introduction to Oh, the Places You’ll Go! Intended for children up to age three, it is a bright and bouncy board book with tabs to pull or turn (the “optical illusion” created on one page is particularly impressive), fluffy stuff to feel, a few touches of foil, and even a flap that opens to the promise, “Baby, you’ll move mountains!” That’s not quite what Dr. Seuss had to say, but it scarcely matters: this is simply a book for the youngest Seuss fans, or rather fans-to-be, providing a sturdy, visually attractive sampling of Seuss sentiments to young children who will presumably be enthralled by this easier-than-easy version of the book and eventually graduate – not from Dr. Seuss but to him and the many delights of his work.

(++++) TROUBLES BEHIND AND TROUBLES AHEAD

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance. By Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm. Penguin. $27.95.

     This book’s subtitle is doubly unfortunate. First of all, the primary meaning of “crash course” – a quick study – is subsumed within an economic context by that word “crash,” which indicates a level of pessimism that the book’s two authors do not fully communicate in the text itself. Second of all, the subtitle refers to the future, but the book itself is mostly a dissection of the lessons that can be learned from the past (and to some extent from the present) rather than a look at what is likely, or even reasonably likely, to occur in the future.

     This is nevertheless a closely argued, well-thought-through book whose contents are better and more cogent than its subtitle would indicate. Nouriel Roubini, former White House advisor and professor of economics at the Stern School of Business at New York University, and Stephen Mihm, associate professor of history at the University of Georgia and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Boston Globe and other publications, analyze the most recent financial meltdown not just through the often-used but now-tired comparisons with the Great Depression but also by delving into the Panics of 1825, 1837, 1847, 1857, 1866, 1873, 1893 and 1907. Among other things. Roubini wears his “Dr. Doom” sobriquet proudly, having been awarded it (if that is the right way to put it) after he predicted the coming global recession back in 2006. But Roubini and Mihm manage not to discuss other famed market prognosticators who got it right until they got it wrong and fell into obscurity – such as, say, Joseph Granville, perpetual bear (even after 1982) and perhaps the most-admired technical analyst of the 1970s, whose pronouncements actually did move the market. It would be wonderful to know how much confidence Roubini personally had in his advance warning of the global recession -- what changes did he make to his personal investments, and how did they weather the market plunge? Did he, perhaps, go to all cash in 2006 and miss more than a year of extraordinary (if ultimately unsustainable) gains? No word on that in Crisis Economics – because this is a macro look at the periodicity of downturns, not a “do what I do” book of investment advice.

     So Roubini and Mihm discuss, for example, the way J.P. Morgan singlehandedly strong-armed the bankers of 1907 into ending that year’s panic, and the way Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson unsuccessfully tried something similar 101 years later. Why did Morgan succeed where Paulson failed? There are many reasons, from the systemic to those involving personality, but again, this is not what Crisis Economics is about. The authors instead focus on the results of Paulson’s failure: the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the ruination of the credit rating of AIG, the run on and eventual closing of the once-prominent Reserve Fund money-market fund, and so on. It is the interconnection of apparently disparate elements of the economy that interests Roubini and Mihm – a state of affairs that, they argue, makes it very important to understand that recessions and other apparent economic “hurricanes” are not in fact rarities but are integral to the functioning of the United States and world economies. This in turn makes it crucial to plan for crises, to understand what they have in common and how they spread.

     There is a bit of self-contradiction here. If crises are in fact predictable, and if Roubini’s and Mihm’s ideas for handling them were to be accepted – but if crises are also inherent elements of economic life – then the implementation of those recommended policies cannot possibly succeed, since crises will occur anyway, perhaps in some new form less closely related to those of the past. However, a book like Crisis Economics would be of interest only to historians if it did not include prescriptions as well as descriptive elements; so the authors, after arguing effectively for the periodicity of economic crises, proceed to offer ideas that they say will blunt those inevitable recurrences. The ideas are not particularly new, and Roubini and Mihm underplay and underestimate the political realities that make them difficult to implement. But they are certainly reasonable proposals from the point of view of economists: break up huge companies to eliminate the notion of institutions being too big to fail; create a new form of the Glass-Steagall legislation of 1933, strengthening it through transparency and tough requirements to keep different aspects of financial institutions truly separate; use the powers of central banks to prevent asset bubbles from getting out of control; and so on. The authors do acknowledge disagreement with some of their ideas: “In all fairness, the reluctance of central banks to prevent bubbles from forming reflects the fact that the idea remains controversial in academic and policy circles.” But they tend to be dismissive of counterarguments, sometimes through ad hominem comments: “[Ben] Bernanke and other apologists for the status quo have countered by arguing that central banks can’t possibly intervene against rising asset prices because of ‘uncertainty.’ This is nonsense: all monetary policy decisions are plagued by uncertainty.” At another point, they say of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s argument that massive new regulation should not be based on an unusually deep recession, “That’s ridiculous.” Not a lot of room for reasoned discussion there.

     Roubini and Mihm would no doubt argue that the issues discussed in Crisis Economics are too important to mince words, and they would have a point. But wide-ranging and complex policy changes are unlikely to come about with a “my way or the highway” attitude – the recent healthcare debate being one case in point among many. What changes are eventually adopted will of necessity, if not by design, end up being messy, imperfect and far from anyone’s original ideal – again, look at what emerged from the healthcare morass. Furthermore, as Roubini and Mihm accurately note, decisions made in the United States must be implemented within a world grown increasingly skeptical of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency and of the U.S. government’s ability and political will to manage its huge and growing debt. “The recent [economic] cataclysm …marks the end of the financial stability ushered in by the Pax Americana,” the authors write. Nevertheless, they say that there is a “road to redemption,” through a series of reforms ranging from the radical to the “even more radical.” But how likely is anything radical to emerge from the sausage-making machinery of Congress? What is the real-world chance that “regulations can be carefully crafted with an eye toward the future, closing loopholes before they open”? Unfortunately, Roubini and Mihm, for all their understanding of the historical inevitability of severe economic shocks, seem not to know about, or at least not to accept, the equally historically inevitable imperfection of the governing process and its laws and regulations. Just as “this time it’s different” is a dangerous phrase when applied to investing, so “this time it’s different” is self-delusional when applied to the U.S. political establishment and the elected and appointed people who run it and ultimately profit from having it continue to do business mostly as usual.

(+++) FATHERS AND SONS

Devoted: The Story of a Father’s Love for His Son. By Dick Hoyt with Don Yaeger. Da Capo. $22.95.

The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare: A Tale of Forgery and Folly. By Doug Stewart. Da Capo. $24.95.

     There are some books that, no matter how firmly they wear their hearts on their sleeves, it is impossible to criticize without seeming unsympathetic to the point of inhumanity. Devoted is one of those “beyond criticism” books There is simply no way to find the tale of Rick Hoyt and his father, Dick, anything less than tear-jerking, emotionally wrenching, uplifting, an example of humanity at its best, a tale of what “family” really means, and so on. And it would be unfair to suggest that the book is in any way exploitative of Rick, a 48-year-old congenital spastic quadriplegic, because Rick comes across as a thoroughly remarkable individual who deserves every single break he ever gets, and then some. And his father, 69-year-old Dick, deserves not only applause but also a standing ovation for his amazing dedication to Rick and his utter refusal to see his son as anything other than a complete, talented and very able (as opposed to disabled) human being. These two men have bonded through athletic events, in which Dick has pushed Rick’s wheelchair through – among other things – 27 Boston Marathons and the Hawaii Ironman competition. Rick’s mother, Judy, became a crusader when school administrators would not let Rick enroll in public school, eventually being instrumental in the passage of the nation’s first special-education reform law. There is a purity to this family – not an angelic one, but a gritty one – that simply admits of no reaction but admiration. Except…well, after readers are done crying with joy and empathy at all that the self-named Team Hoyt has accomplished, after everyone lives vicariously through the unspeakable difficulties, after everyone reads the letters from Team Hoyt admirers worldwide and imagines being in a similar position (unimaginable for anyone who has not been in one), there may be a niggling little bit of uncertainty about what to do with this astonishingly positive microcosmic story – from a broader perspective. Consider: Dick Hoyt writes, “You know, I’m just a regular guy. …I’m like any other man in America. Only I got lucky – I have a beautiful son and an activity we can do together, despite his disability. It’s been an incredible journey. I’m not a hero. I’m just a father.” But Dick Hoyt is a hero, and so, in his own way, is Rick. Yet not all people with disabilities are heroes, certainly not in this way; not all fathers have military careers that help them hone the discipline needed to manage a severely disabled child; not all children with disabilities can function, much less excel, in a public school setting; not all disabled young people can negotiate the vagaries of college, even with caregiver assistance, to become Boston University graduates; not all people with disabilities, and their families, become icons of a cause, with speaking engagements and TV appearances galore. There are huge issues – social and economic as well as familial – associated with disabled members of society. Devoted raises many of those issues, mostly indirectly, but never addresses any of them: its focus is entirely on these people in these circumstances. It is a heartbreakingly heartwarming book, but it is also a story so remarkable in its atypical way that it makes it more difficult, not less, to try to find ways to address the many, many thousands of people with disabilities who did not have the good fortune to be born with Rick’s amazing will to overcome physical handicaps and into a family as tremendously determined and devoted as the Hoyts.

     If Rick Hoyt’s father stands way, way off at one end of the spectrum of fatherhood in terms of love and devotion, William-Henry Ireland’s stood nearly as far on the other end. Samuel Ireland denigrated his son, was emotionally distant and seems to have scared William-Henry nearly out of his wits. Samuel was also a tremendous devotee of Shakespeare, whose works were being rediscovered in England in the late 18^th century and were being wildly acclaimed after a long period of eclipse that had begun even while Shakespeare was still alive (in the early 17^th century, he was not considered as with-it as, say, Ben Jonson). The troubled father-son relationship and the fortuitous reascent of Shakespeare combined to lead to one of history’s more curious footnotes: William-Henry, an unsuccessful aspiring writer, managed to forge a great number of documents that scholars of his day believed had been created by Shakespeare. The Boy Who Would Be Shakespeare tells this odd story in lively detail, explaining how William-Henry was able to pass off supposed letters, poems and even a “lost play” by Shakespeare after writing everything himself. Much of this was made possible by one of the great oddities of English literature: no one knows what Shakespeare’s everyday handwriting looked like (this is one reason some people still stubbornly insist that his works must have been created by someone else). A few signatures on legal documents exist, but there is not one poem, not one play, not one draft of anything known to be by Shakespeare in Shakespeare’s own hand. So William-Henry, using crabbed and often nearly indecipherable handwriting, old paper or parchment, and watered ink so faded that it appeared old, was able to convince the most prominent scholars of his day that he had unearthed a treasure trove of genuine Shakespeare manuscripts. Why did he do it? Not, argues history-and-art journalist Doug Stewart, in an attempt at self-aggrandizement or for personal riches, but in order to impress his father, whose collection of old books and manuscripts would be immeasurably enhanced by the Shakespeare works “discovered” by his son. In one of many ironies in this story, Stewart points out that Samuel Ireland never believed that William-Henry had forged the documents, even after they were exposed as fakes – because Samuel did not think his son smart enough to pull off such a fraud successfully (nor did many others: for years, people argued that Samuel himself did the forgeries and forced his son to take the blame). Oddly enough, William-Henry succeeded in fooling such giants of his age as James Boswell and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and managed to fool his father as well – despite not wanting to do so. William-Henry’s tell-all (or at least “tell-much”) book about his forgeries, The Confessions of William-Henry Ireland, was one of three books of memoirs that he wrote, and is itself incomplete and not wholly reliable. Indeed, sorting out what William-Henry did and meant to do is difficult, and Stewart does not claim to have uncovered every last bit of this minor but fascinating mystery. Shakespeare aficionados will enjoy this book a great deal, although it will be rather arcane for the general reader, despite Stewart’s accessible writing style. But how delightful it would have been if, let us say, William-Henry had turned out – as was suggested at one point – to have an ancestor with the same “W.H.” initials who had been the mysterious dedicatee of Shakespeare’s sonnets! “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride,” goes a proverb that dates to Shakespeare’s time. Indeed, wishes so often lead astray even those who supposedly know better – and even those who want no more than to prove their worth to their fathers.

(+++) MYSTERIES (ALMOST) SOLVED

The 39 Clues, Book 7: The Viper’s Nest. By Peter Lerangis. Scholastic. $12.99.

The 39 Clues, Book 8: The Emperor’s Code. By Gordon Korman. Scholastic. $12.99.

Young Jesus Chronicles. By Spencer Smith and Mark Penta. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

     By now, anyone who is going to get sucked into the multimedia whirlpool of The 39 Clues is, like Poe’s narrator in A Descent into the Maelstrom, thoroughly trapped and “going down.” But down into what? The complexities of this 10-novel, online-game, playing-card series start to come together in its seventh and eighth books, which will only whet participants’ appetites for the final two volumes (both due out this year) and their extensive and inevitable tie-ins. Peter Lerangis, who also wrote The Sword Thief (Book 3), and Gordon Korman, who also did One False Note (Book 2), are thoroughly familiar with and comfortable in the world of Amy and Dan Cahill and the seven teams of members of the far-flung and amazingly prominent members of the Cahill family – all of them competing for clues that will eventually bring ultimate power to those who solve the mystery. The Viper's Nest is full of partial solutions, some of which attentive readers may already have guessed. For example, in Book 6, In Too Deep, it turns out that Amy’s hero, Amelia Earhart, was not only a Cahill (no surprise: just about everyone famous or notorious in world history seems to have been a Cahill) but was also a Madrigal (a member of the most mysterious of the seven Cahill groups). So when, in Book 7, Amy and Dan finally learn where they fit into the Cahill clan, the surprise may not be especially surprising to readers, although it shocks Amy and Dan. Some revelations about Amy and Dan’s parents are perhaps less expected, such as the fact that they traveled under the name of a murderer. The books of The 39 Clues take Amy and Dan around the world, with Book 7 landing them in South Africa, where they learn about a famed warrior – all the books intertwine bits of real-world history with the fictional Cahills and their clues chase.

     Book 8 takes place in China and features one of the periodic separations of the two protagonists, allowing each to go his or her own way for a while and make separate discoveries. In The Emperor’s Code (the title refers to a note written on silk by a Chinese emperor), Dan is captured by Team One (the Kabras) and rescued, or maybe kidnapped, by Team Six (the Wizards). Team Two (the Holts) turns up as well – climbing Mount Everest. Korman certainly gives readers their money’s worth of people rushing all over the place in this book. Amy and Dan get back together in time to use a helicopter to climb Earth’s highest aboveground mountain, “soaring past altitudes far beyond the ceiling of any other helicopter in the world.” But of course the mystery is not solved atop Everest – although the essential goodness of Amy and Dan is made clear yet again when Amy finds an object that may be vitally important, then loses it while rescuing one of the Kabras. Dan, however, has found another important object – which points them toward the Caribbean and Book Nine. Clearly all will be revealed in the not-too-distant future, although not just yet.

     A far greater mystery than anything in The 39 Clues gets a far lighter treatment in a set of cartoons from friends and fellow catechism school attendees Spencer Smith (writer) and Mark Penta (artist). It happens that the Synoptic gospels tell nothing of the life of Jesus between birth and the start of his ministry in adulthood; nor does the gospel of John have anything substantive to say about this time period, which represents the greatest part of Jesus’ life. Enter Young Jesus Chronicles, a book of mild but respectful irreverence and absolutely-not-to-be-trusted speculation. It is divided into three parts. In “0-VI A.D.” we find Joseph and Mary, covered with hay, turning in their keys at the hotel’s front desk and being told they misunderstood – they were supposed to go to the manager’s suite, not the manger. Also here, Mary looks into the sky while complaining, “The least you could do is change a diaper once in a while!” In “VII-XII A.D.,” Jesus delivers “The Sermon at the Jungle Gym” and offers an enormous tie to an overhanging cloud on Father’s Day. And in “XIII-VXIII A.D.,” those awkward teenage years, Jesus wins a swim meet by running on top of the water and goes on a date with a stereotypical ditz, leading to the comment, “He could cure the blind, but He couldn’t cure the blonde.” Young Jesus Chronicles is, shall we say, a bit of an acquired taste – and in truth, it is neither the first nor the best cartoon-style speculation on Jesus’ life (The Adventures of Jesus [1962] and The New Adventures of Jesus [1969], both created by Frank Stack – under the pseudonym Foolbert Sturgeon – are minor classics). The Smith-Penta book will offend the easily offended (that is why they are called the easily offended), but in truth, it is pretty silly and harmless stuff, occasionally a trifle tasteless but never overtly vulgar or disrespectful. Far worse has been done in Jesus’ name.

(++++) INVITATIONS TO THE DANCE

Brahms: Sonatas Nos. 1 and 2 for Viola and Piano; Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano (transcribed for viola by Csaba Erdélyi). Roberto Díaz, viola; Jeremy Denk, piano. Naxos. $8.99.

Mozart: Duets for Violin and Viola, KV 423 and 424; Divertimento for Violin, Viola and Cello, KV 563. Francesco Manara, violin; Simonide Braconi, viola; Massimo Polidori, cello. Concerto. $16.99.

Johann Strauss Sr. Edition, Volume 16. Slovak Sinfonietta Žilina conducted by Christian Pollack. Marco Polo. $9.99.

     Chamber music is, in a sense, an elaborate dance for two or more players. Although it is often described as a “conversation,” it is one done to specific rhythms and is filled with nuances that always approximate the elaborate interconnection of dance partners – with movements sometimes literally in dance forms. Thus, even though there are no overt dance movements in Brahms’ two viola sonatas (although the Allegretto grazioso of the first comes close), a worthwhile interpretation makes it sound as if the viola and piano are dancing with each other – now together, now apart, always in figurative as well as literal harmony. Roberto Díaz and Jeremy Denk for the most part get this sense of interconnectedness just right in their warm and well-played versions of the sonatas. The second of the two – a more introverted work – comes across particularly well, progressing with seeming inevitability from start to finish, the instruments intertwining with delicacy and skill. In the first sonata, in which the performers take a few unjustified and unneeded liberties with tempo, the result is not quite as effective, although when Díaz and Denk do let the music flow naturally, they mesh very well indeed. They are effective too in violist Csaba Erdélyi’s D major transcription of Brahms’ G major Violin Sonata No. 1 – which the composer himself transcribed into D for cello. This work does not lie quite as comfortably on the viola as do the two sonatas (which are at least equally often played on clarinet): Brahms does seek richness in tone throughout his music, and this proves an effective use of the violin in this sonata as well as an attractive handling of the cello in the composer’s own transcription. The viola arrangement, in contrast, works all right as music but does not have the emotional heft of either the violin or cello version. Still, it is always nice to have another well-crafted work for viola players to bring to the chamber-music dance.

     Certainly Mozart knew how to give every possible grace to every instrument – even ones he did not especially like, such as the flute. Mozart’s two duets for violin and viola may not be among his major works, but neither are they throwaways. In fact, they show Mozart’s willingness to treat the viola as an equal partner of the violin – in contrast to the instrument’s handling by Haydn, who generally used violas only to fill in harmonies. The first duet, in G, is better known than the second, in B-flat; but in the performance by Francesco Manara and Simonide Braconi, it is the second that shines. It is longer than the first (20 minutes vs. 16) and comes across as a more elaborate, more thoroughly worked-through piece, especially in its final Andante con variazioni. And having shown Mozart’s skill (and their own) at the violin-and-viola dance, Manara and Braconi then join Massimo Polidori for a piece that is one of Mozart’s most remarkable: the Divertimento in E-flat, a work of amazingly broad scope whose six movements give the three players every possible opportunity to play as soloists, in duets and as a full complement of three. The emotional depth of this music is quite astonishing – and stands in lovely contrast to its lighter, overtly dancelike elements, including two minuets and a finale whose rocking motion is as gentle as it is infectious. The performance here is at times a touch restrained – a little bit of sheer exuberance goes well in this context – but is admirably balanced, with fine integration of the instruments’ sound and great sensitivity shown by each player for each of the others. Always a lovely work, this divertimento here comes across with all its profundity and most, if not quite all, of its joyfulness.

     For sheer joy in dance motion, it is a small step from the ¾ beat of the minuet to the ¾ beat of the waltz, and there have been few composers who could churn out danceable waltzes with such consistency as Johann Strauss Sr. Unlike the more-famous, more-symphonic waltzes of his sons, Johann Jr. and Josef, those of Johann Sr. rarely pretended to be more than occasional pieces – trifles perhaps, but delicious ones, with clear rhythms created for the express purpose of making it impossible to stand still while Strauss Sr. led his orchestra. The 16^th volume in the continuing Marco Polo series of Strauss Sr.’s music shows yet again that there is no finer exponent of these works than Christian Pollack, and no orchestra that plays them with more verve than the Slovak Sinfonietta Žilina. There are six waltzes – actually waltz sets, each of them containing as many as five mini-waltzes – on the new CD, plus two Quadrilles, one each for the name days of Emperor Ferdinand I and Empress Maria Anna. All eight works here date from the period of November 1842-August 1843, and it is wonderful to hear the unending flow of melodies produced by Strauss Sr. with such apparent ease. However, it must be said that some of these waltzes seem a touch pale, because one of the pieces here is among the composer’s greatest: Loreley-Rhein-Klänge, a lengthy and thoroughly winning piece that unfolds with a combination of naturalness and beauty. Die Dämonen (“The Demons”) is nearly at the same level, featuring some especially neat twists in its tunes. The other waltzes on this CD – Künstler-Ball-Tänze, Tanz-Capricen, Brüder Lustig and Astraea-Tänze – are less distinguished, although the last of these is pleasantly animated and quite upbeat. If chamber music is a dance of sorts, then the dances of Johann Strauss Sr. – which were often played by small ensembles, not full-size orchestras – qualify as dances writ large, and ones that still retain their bounce and beauty.

(+++) OUT-OF-THE-WAY OPERAS

Rachmaninoff: Aleko. Sergey Murzaev, Evgeny Akimov, Gennady Bezzubenkov, Svetla Vassileva, Nadezhda Vasilieva; Coro del Teatro Regio di Torino and BBC Philharmonic conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. Chandos. $18.99.

Samuel Arnold: Polly. Laura Albino, Eve Rachel McLeod, Gillian Grossman, Marion Newman, Loralie Kirkpatrick, Bud Roach, Lawrence J. Wiliford, Andrew Mahon, Matthew Grosfeld, Jason Nedecky; Aradia Ensemble conducted by Kevin Mallon. Naxos. $8.99.

     Rachmaninoff’s first completed opera, Aleko, brought him great success as a student at the Moscow Conservatory, where he wrote it as a graduation exercise. It won the judges’ highest prizes in 1892 – when the composer was 19 – and was first performed in Moscow that year, then given its Bolshoi Theatre premiere in 1893. Quite an accomplishment – but it did not point toward a successful operatic career for Rachmaninoff, who completed only two other operas (The Miserly Knight and Francesca da Rimini). Aleko, like The Miserly Knight, is based on a work by Pushkin. It is a one-act work lasting less than an hour, in plot being a sort of Cavalleria Rusticana featuring the gypsies of Carmen. The most original thing about it, at least retrospectively, is the extent to which the music rather than the singing tells the story, which is a straightforward-for-its-time one of love, betrayal and murder, complete with an infant in a cradle as a convenient prop. All that happens is that Aleko, an older man who has been the lover of Zemfira and has a child with her, discovers that she is unfaithful to him with someone called only Young Gypsy; in a jealous rage, he kills both lovers; and the thoroughly idealized members of the gypsy band declare themselves too gentle and kind-hearted to punish him but unable to live with him any longer – so they leave with the lovers’ bodies and Aleko ends up alone. Rachmaninoff had yet to find his personal style when he wrote Aleko – indeed, the first gypsy chorus (a celebration of freedom) sounds remarkably like something Sir Arthur Sullivan could have written – but in the darker parts of the opera, the composer is already moving in a direction he would later take more effectively. Included in the 50-minute running time of Aleko are 12 minutes of instrumental music, so there are only the bare bones of a story here. But elements of it are nevertheless effective: the Old Gypsy’s tale of his own lost love, which resulted in him being left with his daughter, Zemfira, whose mother ran off with another man; Zemfira’s Cradle Scene, really an in-your-face song of defiance hurled at Aleko; and Aleko’s Cavatina, in which he recalls the happy times with Zemfira that he now realizes are gone. Gennady Bezzubenkov is sonorously effective as the Old Gypsy, Svetla Vassileva is appropriately fiery as Zemfira, and Sergey Murzaev gets Aleko’s misery right even though his rage seems insufficient for his eventual bloody revenge. This is another in a fine series of recordings made possible by the Serge Rachmaninoff Foundation and featuring the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda – a conductor who is turning out to have quite a way with Rachmaninoff’s music. Aleko may not ultimately be particularly convincing, but it would make an interesting double bill with Cavalleria Rusticana or another melodrama, such as Puccini’s Il Tabarro.

     If Aleko is off the beaten operatic path, Polly is so far afield that it might take a Mars Rover, figuratively speaking, to find it. Think for a moment of The Beggar’s Opera, that wonderfully irreverent sendup of the world of 1728 by John Gay and Johann Pepusch. Now imagine a sequel, also a “ballad opera,” by the same team, focused on Polly Peachum and created in 1729. Now imagine censorship that prevents the staging of that sequel – then the death of both Gay and Pepusch in 1732 – and then, nearly half a century later, a complete revamping and toning-down of the unperformed opera, the writing of a great deal of new music for it, and the interpolation into it of works by well-known composers of the day such as Thomas Arne and Jeremiah Clarke. Imagine all that and you have Samuel Arnold’s Polly, a work about as incoherent – even by operatic standards – as you are likely to find anywhere. The Aradia Ensemble and a batch of fresh-voiced young Canadian singers press their way through this spectacle with verve and appropriate period style, but to what end is hard to say. The synopsis included with the CD is virtually impossible to follow, thanks to its constant cross-references to musical tracks that appear at different places. Reading the libretto – which, thank goodness, Naxos makes available online as a PDF file – is an absolute must in order to figure out what is going on. But, again, to what end it is worthwhile to follow the plot is unclear. The music is almost uniformly undistinguished, and virtually all the bite that made The Beggar’s Opera such a success (and an inspiration for, among others, The Threepenny Opera in the 20^th century) has been removed. Polly has no teeth; it barely has gums. Anyone who reads the libretto will find out why in a scene set before the Overture is to be played. An actor called the Poet says, “I know that I have been unjustly accus'd of having given up my moral for a joke, like a fine gentleman in conversation; but whatever be the event now, I will not so much as seem to give up my moral.” And one called the First Player responds, “Really, Sir, an author should comply with the customs and taste of the town.” And there we have it: a morally instructive story in compliance with the “customs and taste” of the right-thinking people of 1777: Polly’s father has been hanged for his crimes before the work starts, Macheath is hanged for his before it ends, Polly (who has followed Macheath to the New World) proves to have noble sentiments that enable her at the end to wed a suitably noble Indian prince; and the eventual triumph of virtue is celebrated to the tune (this is not a joke) of Clarke’s famous “Trumpet Voluntary.” A small amount of the unrecorded dialogue of Polly retains a bit of the Gay/Pepusch spirit, and an occasional hint of their sly irreverence does manage to peek through in the songs. But by and large, Polly is a piece of 18^th-century bourgeois gentlemanliness, without even a particularly tuneful score to relieve its dull sting. This CD gets a (++) rating – and then only because it is so earnestly sung and so well played. Now, if someone would dig up the original version of Polly and see what Gay and Pepusch wanted to create, that might be interesting.

(++++) MOVABLE FEASTS FOR THE EYES

Bee & Me. By Elle J. McGuinness. Illustrated by Heather Brown. Animation created by Jeffrey Charles Cole and Heather Brown. Accord Publishing/Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

Zoo Babies. By Paula Hannigan. Illustrations by Heather Brown. Animation created by Jeffrey Charles Cole and Heather Brown. Accord Publishing/Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

Trucks. By Paula Hannigan. Illustrations by Shannon Chandler. Animation created by Jeffrey Charles Cole and Shannon Chandler. Accord Publishing/Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

     Lenticular photography has a long and honorable history. It was, among other things, the basis of the Kodacolor process that made it possible to shoot color images using black-and-white film. And that process, which dates all the way back to 1928, was itself based on earlier lenticular work. What does this have to do with three clever new board books from Accord Publishing? Well, the modern version of lenticular printing makes still objects seem to move when seen from different angles – and has been used in everything from advertising to novelty prizes in Cracker Jack boxes. Thanks to the precision placement and photography made possible by computers, lenticular motion looks better than ever these days, and can now be done inexpensively enough to enhance children’s books – indeed, to provide a significant part of their enjoyment.

     That is what happens in all three of these short books. The Bee & Me board book is an abridged version of the original Bee & Me, which appeared last year and which also featured color “moving” pictures of a bee that gets trapped behind window glass and uses the opportunity to teach a little boy about the importance of bees in general. This shortened version still contains a modicum of the ecological awareness that was a big element of the original book – told in poetry that does not rhyme or scan very well but does argue its points effectively: “We’re good for much more than just honey, you see,/ We bees help the flowers, the bushes and trees./ We gather their pollen and spread it around –/ The only way to keep them growing, we’ve found.” Four of the five animations here (Accord calls the process “AniMotion”) show the bee chased by the family dog, trapped by the window, wiggling its body and shedding a tear; the fifth shows a flower apparently moving in the breeze. The book’s remaining, non-moving illustrations are nothing special, but they carry the story along well, and the juxtaposition of moving and non-moving pictures is well handled.

     The other two new “AniMotion” titles have even less to offer in terms of story line, but here again, the five moving pictures per book are the primary interest. Each of these books emphasizes specific words related to the subject matter – for instance, “Zebras RUN with the herd” and “Dump trucks DROP piles of dirt.” Each emphasized word is illustrated by a moving picture – and some of the illustrations are especially clever: a lion cub pounces on its mother’s tail (only the cub and the very end of the tail are shown in motion), a baby elephant sprays water to cool itself off, a steamroller presses dirt into smooth pavement. Very young children will find these board books endlessly fascinating, although slightly older kids may be tempted to try to separate the thick “AniMotion” pages to find out why some pictures move – and still older ones will tire quickly of books whose main attraction is purely visual and that include only five moving pictures in a total of only 12 pages. Parents should consider their children’s developmental stages carefully when deciding whether to buy any of these books. They can be tremendously attractive and a lot of fun – but only for kids of the right age and interest level.

(++++) MARRIAGE MATH AND MORE

For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage. By Tara Parker-Pope. Dutton. $25.95.

     Distinguished from typical self-help books by its penchant for research and insistence that marriage partners ask and answer similar questions – and then compare their responses – For Better is a well-written and impressively analytical look at an intimate relationship in which everyone thinks, “My situation is different,” while scientists and other researchers say, “No, it isn’t.”

     Getting over the “my situation is different” hurdle is the hardest part about getting into this book, whose author is a New York Times columnist and blogger (and formerly wrote for The Wall Street Journal). Herself divorced after a 17-year marriage, Tara Parker-Pope is not naïve about this form of coupling and does not have her head in the romantic or societally sanctioned clouds. This lets her produce a book that is both plainspoken and filled with research-backed good sense. Despite the work’s optimistic title, only the first of Parker-Pope’s three sections is actually called “For Better.” The second is entitled “For Worse (But You Want It to Be Better)” and the third is “From This Day Forward,” being intended to help couples apply what they learn in the first two sections.

     Parker-Pope tackles all the main elements of marriage: commitment, attraction, sex, illness, parenting, conflict, household chores, money and more. Her basic approach is to discuss research in a given field and then suggest ways for couples to apply it. For example, she cites a 1981 study of 50 married couples’ sex lives and the different reasons men and women reported for initiating sex. Then she presents one of her many “For Better quiz” segments, asking partners to write down five things each would like the other to say or do during sex – and then compare answers. Parker-Pope cannot know how closely readers’ responses will compare, of course, but she can show what happened when researchers asked similar questions: husbands wanted their wives to be more seductive, initiate sex more often, be more experimental, be sexier and give more instructions; wives wanted their husbands to talk more lovingly, be more seductive, be more experimental, give more instructions and be warmer and more involved. That is, three of the five responses were the same, although not in the identical order – indicating that in the bedroom, men and women seem to want many of the same things. Yet the two differing responses were significant, since men focused more on sex apart from the rest of life and women tended to place it in a broader context . Couples can use this research as a jumping-off point to analyze their own responses – and if they feel this particular test is not helpful in their situation, they can ignore it and try plenty of others.

     Parker-Pope spends some time on the issue of mutual perception – how two people can see the same event very differently, not only in terms of their own personalities but also in terms of the strength of their marriage. This is an especially useful element of self-analysis, as Parker-Pope shows how happier couples tend to discuss hard times in their relationships in a more positive light: a wife says her future husband’s apartment was “a wreck…definitely a bachelor pad,” or says it was “disgusting – even back then, he was a complete slob.” Thus, a series of questions about how partners met can be very significant, since it shows their current perceptions of the earliest, most romantic time of the relationship: “What were your first impressions? …Was it an easy or difficult decision [to get married]? …What moments stand out as really good times in your marriage? What moments stand out as the really hard times?” The answers to questions like these matter, says Parker-Pope, because “we end up recasting history to reflect our current state of discontent.”

     So, what to do with all the research, all the tests, all the questions? It is one thing for Parker-Pope to point out studies showing that “in stable marriages, there are at least five times more positive interactions than negative ones,” and quite another for people to make use of the mathematical data and analyses. Indeed, the three chapters in Parker-Pope’s concluding section are her weakest, because even though they include reasonable ideas from a researcher’s point of view, there is no focus on how hard it can be to implement those ideas in daily life. “Keep your standards high.” “Pay attention to family and friends.” “Don’t expect your spouse to make you happy.” “Reignite romance.” Well, yes. And yes, yes and yes. But what to do in the real world? Parker-Pope sometimes seems well aware of the disconnect between these lofty ideals and everyday life – at one point, she offers “The lesson: Forget the lesson. Put down this book and go have sex with your husband or wife.” Cute – but what time of day is it? Where are the kids? How are matters of health and hygiene? What stressors are intolerable at the moment? The person reading For Better may be only too willing to toss the book aside for a bedroom break, but the other spouse may at that time be somewhere entirely different, mentally or emotionally if not physically. This is certainly not Parker-Pope’s fault: it would be worse if she came to no conclusions and made no recommendations after all her research than it is for her to come up with thoughts that are longer on idealism than on practicality. The reality is that marriage only works if it is for better and (not “or”) for worse. And despite her book’s title, Parker-Pope’s studies (not to mention her own experience) indicate that she knows this. So her ideas about keeping things in the “for better” column are best viewed as ideals worth striving for – not prescriptions that must be followed lest hard marital times inevitably loom.

(+++) WOODSY TALES

Out of the Woods. By Lyn Gardner. Pictures by Mini Grey. David Fickling Books. $17.99.

The Owl Keeper. By Christine Brodien-Jones. Illustrations by Maggie Kneen. Delacorte Press. $17.99.

Star in the Forest. By Laura Resau. Delacorte Press. $14.99.

     “The woods are lonely, dark and deep,” wrote poet Robert Frost, and the woods have been a place of both literal and metaphorical loneliness, darkness and depth for many, many years. Fairy tales by Charles Perrault, the brothers Grimm and others take place in the woods and depend on them for all or part of their effect. Even in the modern age, a time of urbanization and deforestation, there is something primeval about the woods, or about what we imagine the woods to be – and they still make an effective setting for all sorts of stories, for adults and young readers alike. Out of the Woods is particularly attuned to the history of woodlands as places of mystery, adventure and – not to make things too serious all the time – humor. This is a sequel to In the Woods, and brings back the Eden sisters, Aurora, Storm and Any, who have escaped from Dr. DeWilde for good – or have they? “Aurora had always been scared of the woods, and her fear had increased after she and her sisters had been chased through the trees by evil Dr. DeWilde’s wolves.” But the sisters – Storm in particular – seem oblivious to danger now that it seems to be past, with Storm skating down the frozen river through the center of the woods. The fact that she skates, she thinks, makes it safer; and Any (who is not yet two years old but has been talking since the day she was born) agrees: “‘Wolves can’t skate. They can never find boots to fit all four feet.’” So with all this in the background, there comes into the foreground the sisters’ self-proclaimed new stepmother, Belladonna, who happens to be a wicked witch. Let’s see…there is an enchantment meant to deprive Aurora of her heart, and there is a frog rescue (the frog being Any), and a lion named Zeus who loves madeleines, and a sort of county fair brimming with traps, and much of this new-plot-every-minute story revolves around Storm’s all-powerful pipe, which Belladonna covets and which the sisters must return to the land of the dead to make everything right again. Lyn Gardner’s story is a great deal of fun, and Mini Grey’s illustrations are wonderful, although at times Out of the Woods seems to be trying a little too hard to pull in the threads of the previous book and of as many fairy tales as Gardner can press into service. Readers who missed Into the Woods really ought to start with it before trying to follow this sequel, and readers not immersed in fairy tales (and even some who are) may well find Out of the Woods rather overdone. But parts of it are very amusing indeed (a picture of the Underworld Booking Office, chapters called “Out of the Forest Into the Frying Pan” and “Squashed!” – and the menu of a fine establishment called The Legless Frog). There is also a delicious bonus at the end: a recipe for “Granny Ridinghood’s Double Chocolate Brownies with Hot Fudge Sauce.”

     Although also targeted at preteens and young teenagers, The Owl Keeper is as dark and complex as Out of the Woods is light and complex. Christine Brodien-Jones’ novel is a mystery/post-apocalyptic SF/fantasy story whose 12-year-old protagonist, Maxwell Unger, is said to be allergic to “sun particles,” so he must remain all day in a darkened room with the shades drawn close. This turns out not to be much of a problem for Max, who has always loved the night – but what is a problem is the absence of his Gran and the stories she used to tell Max about the time before the Destruction. Max used to hear those tales with wonder, and used to be brave enough to go into the forest at night with Gran. Now Max is scared of the dangerous forest and the things within it, and his favorite story – about the Owl Keeper, who would appear in dark times to unite the forces of good against those of evil – seems at best a thin legend. These are the elements of a fairly standard find-or-rediscover-your-courage story, complete with ancient prophecy sure to be fulfilled by the time the tale ends (although perhaps not exactly as expected). And indeed, the main weakness of The Owl Keeper is that it hews so closely to the story arc of so many other “discover who you really are” books for young readers. There is even an organized group of repressive characters squeezing the light out of everyone’s life: “They lived in constant fear of the High Echelon and its tedious rules.” And yet The Owl Keeper, even when it smacks of formulaic plotting, is often gripping and intense. A mysterious girl who appears sometimes – but not all the time – under what Max calls “the owl tree” is an important element in Max’s self-discovery. And there is genuine evil in this book; even the words, such as skræk and Misshapen, communicate it. And although there is little doubt from the start that apparently helpful characters such as Mrs. Crumlin and Dr. Tredegar will turn out to be evil, the depth of their betrayal and intensity with which they pursue their designs nevertheless prove shocking once revealed. Indeed, The Owl Keeper is a bit much to take at times. Very near the end, Max comments, “‘This is all so … well, I just can’t quite believe it. It seems incredible.’” Readers will likely agree; but there are plenty of thrills and lots of excitement before Brodien-Jones knits the plot strands together.

     The use of the woods in Star in the Forest, a story set in today’s world, is different. Intended for ages 7-10, Laura Resau’s book is about Mexican immigrants and their difficulties in the United States. It is not overtly preachy about immigration reform (although Resau tackles that issue after the story ends); instead, it stays focused on family issues. At the book’s center is an 11-year-old girl named Zitlally, whose undocumented-immigrant father has been arrested and deported to Mexico – and then is kidnapped and held for ransom. The “forest” of the book’s title is not a woodland but a scrap heap of rusty car parts behind the family’s trailer home. The “Star” of the title is a dog that Zitlally finds and that she believes may be her father’s “spirit animal,” which means her Papá will be safe as long as the dog is. But then Star disappears…. Could the dog have been kidnapped? Can Zitlally and her friend, Crystal, find Star and rescue him? Eventually everything works out just fine – somewhat unbelievably, but every reader will be rooting for things to go just the way they do. And the book ends with a folktale about a forest – the real kind, filled with trees – and the admonition, if you ever find yourself in the deep and magical woods, to “be kind to whatever creature you meet there.” Kindness is not entirely simple in Star in the Forest, or in real life, but the book’s happy outcome is tied as closely to the impulse to be kind as it is to the desire to be free.

(+++) MULTIVIEWS

Click: One Novel, Ten Authors. By David Almond, Eoin Colfer, Roddy Doyle, Deborah Ellis, Nick Hornby, Margo Lanagan, Gregory Maguire, Ruth Ozeki, Linda Sue Park, and Tim Wynne-Jones. Scholastic. $8.99.

Top of the Order: 25 Writers Pick Their Favorite Baseball Player of All Time. Edited by Sean Manning. Da Capo. $15.95.

The Kingfisher Soccer Encyclopedia. By Clive Gifford. Kingfisher. $19.99.

     Anthologies have inherent advantages and disadvantages. When they are collections of stories – built on a central theme – by various authors, they can provide an interesting variety of viewpoints, insights and styles, some inevitably more congenial than others for any given reader. On the other hand, anthologies inherently lack cohesion, and very few readers are likely to enjoy all their elements. But then there are what could be called “anthological modifications,” such as these books – one fiction and one nonfiction. Click, the novel, is more than a clever assemblage of individual chapters by 10 different authors, more than a set of variations on a theme. It is in fact a fully coherent book built around a connecting premise that allows the writers to produce chapters ranging from gritty and grim to futuristic and fairy tale. It may be a little too neat, a little too carefully intertwined for all tastes, but it has enough points of interest to make a fascinating read. At its center are photojournalist George “Gee” Keane and his grandchildren, Maggie and Jason. Keane has died in the book’s first chapter (by Linda Sue Park), and has left certain inheritance items for Maggie and Jason. The balance of the book moves – effectively if not always seamlessly – between what happens later to the young people and what Keane encountered during his life. Each chapter is named for a person, and “Min,” by Tim Wynne-Jones, has Jason neatly summing up what his grandfather did: “‘He was this socially conscious kind of miracle. He had a nose for chaos, for disaster: Hiroshima, Bangladesh, Eritrea, Darfur – wherever the world was falling apart, he’d be there. …It wasn’t exploitation he was after. He was like trying to make sense of these tragedies. His pictures are…Oh, beautiful and horrible, and they ask hard questions.’” It is the “hard questions” element that attracts most of the authors of Click, often starkly: Ruth Ozeki’s “Jiro” begins, “When my older brother came home from the war, he had no legs.” There are, though, occasional flashes of humor, such as a birthday-party scene in Eoin Colfer’s “Jason,” and there is a sense of wonder here and there, too, as in David Almond’s “Annie,” which may, just may, be about a selkie or two. In the final analysis, Click is attractive in an offbeat way. And the authors are certainly well-meaning in real-world terms: all royalties from the book are being donated to Amnesty International.

     If Click is designed to be relatively seamless, Top of the Order is just the opposite. It represents a more traditional approach to the anthology format – and is designed more to bolster (or contradict) readers’ own opinions than to convince anyone of anything. If you do not actually make your living from sports, the field has no significant objective value to your life; but fans invest sports with a huge amount of subjective importance, to the point of living parts of their own lives through fantasy leagues and imaginary games and battles (pairing boxers or tennis players of different eras against each other, for example). So devoted baseball fans will surely have their favorite players – and Top of the Order gives readers a chance to compare their picks with those of 25 writers, then argue endlessly among themselves about which writers are correct, partially correct, completely full-of-it, and so on. Some but not all the writers here are sports journalists – the list also includes novelists, humorists, and even former major-league players Jim Bouton (who chooses Steve Dembowski) and Doug Glanville (who picks Garry Maddox). Actually, the choices are all over the place, as are the writing styles. Editor Sean Manning himself contributes an essay in which he chooses, of all people, Michael Jordan – and has a very specific personal reason for doing so. Vanity Fair contributing editor Seth Mnookin, usually a serious type, selects Pedro Martinez, and writes a very amusing and amply footnoted piece replete with off-color anecdotes. Actor/comedian Michael Ian Block, on the other hand, puts nothing humorous at all in his piece on Mookie Wilson, instead turning his contribution into a meditation on his own childhood racism – of which he was made aware when Wilson gave a speech. Block also hits, in passing, on the attitude of many adult sports fans – although he is talking about how he felt at age 11: “In my mind, ballplayers inhabited a different, better universe. The kind that was populated only with athletes, astronauts, assorted rock musicians, and Christie Brinkley. It was certainly a better place to live than my constrictive New Jersey town.” Indeed, those sentences encapsulate the feelings of many adults about sports: that somehow they can get outside their own narrow lives by focusing on highly paid celebrities whose world appears far different from the mundane one of 99% of the population. This sort of thinking is harmless as long as it does not become a belief system that distracts people from real-world, everyday responsibilities. And Top of the Order is a bit of harmless enjoyment, too, opening up many chances to discuss why certain writers chose Tom Seaver, Mariano Rivera, Kirby Puckett or Yutaka Enatsu as their favorites players – while others gave the nod to acknowledged all-time greats of the game, such as Lou Gehrig and Jackie Robinson. These 25 writers, making 25 choices, offer readers far more than 25 chances to argue, debate, agree, complain and then, hopefully, return to real-life pursuits.

     Younger sports fans, or fanatics-in-training, can find an even more colorful book (although the language is not as colorful): The Kingfisher Soccer Encyclopedia, which is helpfully subtitled “The Facts, the Goals, the Superstars.” The timing of this big-splash release is obvious: this year’s World Cup starts June 11 in South Africa. But soccer (which is called football just about everywhere except the United States) is a year-round worldwide passion, causing even more temper flares and unseemly rowdiness than is even seen in American football. The British bow to no one in their propensity for over-enthusiasm for this game, and Clive Gifford – a British author and soccer coach – certainly brings plenty of intensity to this oversized, beautifully photographed and nicely laid-out book. Originally published in 2006, The Kingfisher Soccer Encyclopedia has been thoroughly updated to 2010, even to the point of including a bound-in wall chart for the upcoming Johannesburg World Cup. Although intended for readers as young as age eight, this book will appeal to fans throughout the age spectrum, right into adulthood (or pseudo-adulthood, for really intense fans). The reason is that it not only includes the game’s basics (goalkeepers “must wear a shirt that distinguishes them from other players and officials”) but also throws in a lot of history (“In 1882 goalkeeper James McAulay was pressed into service as a center-forward and scored in Scotland’s 5-0 defeat of Wales”) and the sort of detail that will appeal tremendously to fans of any age. The inner workings of team selection, picking and playing in a particular match, making substitutions – all are here. There are “snapshot” pages with wonderful photos and remarkable stories: “Madrid’s Magnificent Seven” in 1960, “The Wingless Wonders” of 1966, and so on. “Fact file” boxes provide tidbits of information within chapters that focus on legendary individual players, great teams, “Soccer Fortunes” (some good, some not), and so on. There are even pages on “Soccer Nightmares,” including fixing, cheating, stadium riots, racism and more. The Kingfisher Soccer Encyclopedia is not really comprehensive – it treats many topics, but all of them briefly rather than in depth. But for fans, would-be fans, committed fans, fans who probably ought to get a life but probably won’t, fans who live for the thrill of the World Cup, fans who care only to support their local teams – for all these and more, Gifford’s book is both a fine introduction and an excellent reference. It is not, however, for those who believe that soccer/football, like any other sport, is a distraction from most people’s real lives rather than a big part of the heart and soul of existence.

(++++) BYPASSED SYMPHONIES

Taneyev: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 3. Novosibirsk Academic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Thomas Sanderling. Naxos. $8.99.

Taneyev: Symphonies Nos. 2 and 4. Novosibirsk Academic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Thomas Sanderling. Naxos. $8.99.

Bruch: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2. Staatskapelle Weimar conducted by Michael Halász. Naxos. $8.99.

     There are many reasons that well-made symphonies of the 19^th century have been passed over in later years. In the case of the four symphonies by Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev, the neglect is part of a more general one: the composer himself, a pupil of Tchaikovsky and Nikolai Rubinstein and teacher of Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, falls into a kind of intergenerational musical limbo, and the neglect of his symphonic works is merely a part of the lack of attention given to everything he composed. Since much of his music is quite well constructed, and since there has in recent years been increasing interest in less-known composers of the Romantic era, Taneyev is slowly emerging from obscurity – but his symphonies are nevertheless rarely heard. In fairness, it should be pointed out that part of the neglect is self-inflicted: only the fourth symphony, which Taneyev designated No. 1, was published in his lifetime (1856-1915) and given an opus number, since the composer did not deem the others sufficiently worthy. In fact, he never finished No. 2 at all, despite the urging of Tchaikovsky. Thanks to mostly strong performances by Thomas Sanderling and the Novosibirsk Academic Symphony Orchestra, it is now possible to hear all the Taneyev symphonies and judge whether both history and their composer have been fair to them.

     Taneyev was sometimes called “the Russian Brahms,” but except for some superficial harmonic similarities and the fact that Brahms too wrote four symphonies, the comparison is not a very good one. Taneyev’s symphonies lack the grandeur and the simultaneous structural rigor and innovation of those by Brahms, while also falling short of the emotionalism of Tchaikovsky – this latter characteristic not necessarily being a failing. (Like Tchaikovsky, interestingly, Taneyev wrote only one symphony in a major key.) Taneyev wrote all his symphonies between 1875 and 1898. No. 1, completed when he was 18, has some resemblance in its finale to Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2, and features themes that seem to stop and start rather than flow both in the opening movement and, more disconcertingly, in the scherzo. The finale not only sounds somewhat like Tchaikovsky’s “Little Russian” symphony but also includes a folk song later used by Stravinsky in Petrushka. Symphony No. 2 (Taneyev’s only major-key one, in B-flat) is a significantly broader, more expansive work, although Taneyev never wrote a scherzo for it and left the second movement only partially scored (the completion used by Sanderling is by Vladimir Blok). The first movement here shows skill in both polyphony and monumental orchestration, and the finale – in which timpani are prominent – is quite effective. Symphony No. 3 is broader still but, at least in this performance, suffers from a bloated-seeming first movement, which Sanderling takes at a slower tempo than the Allegro con spirito indication. The finale is this work’s best movement, featuring double canons and other contrapuntal techniques worked through with considerable skill. And No. 4 is, as Taneyev himself rightly perceived, his best symphony of all, using counterpoint to very strong effect in the first movement, employing a three-note unifying motif throughout, including a powerful and affecting Adagio and nicely flowing Scherzo (both using that three-note motto), and concluding with a movement that is grand in scope and majestic in affirmation. It remains to be seen whether any Taneyev symphony will become popular in the concert hall – but all four are certainly worthwhile experiences for listeners at home.

     The same is true of the first two of Max Bruch’s three symphonies, whose neglect is one of being overshadowed by the composer’s other works rather than involving inattention to the composer himself. Indeed, Bruch’s first violin concerto so overshadows so much of his other music that many people do not know it is the first of three. Like Taneyev’s symphonies, Bruch’s No. 1 shows some influence of Brahms – to whom, in fact, it was dedicated. It also sounds at times like works by Mendelssohn (notably in the Scherzo) and Schumann, and if it has a significant fault, it is that it never quite sounds like Bruch himself, lacking the gorgeously lyrical melodies (usually for strings) for which he is best known. Bruch had finished his overwhelmingly popular Violin Concerto No. 1 the year before he started writing this symphony in 1867, so this is in no sense a “starter” work. It is well formed, traditionally structured and effectively put together, although not especially memorable. The Symphony No. 2 of 1870 – in three movements (the last immediately following the second), without a Scherzo – is nevertheless a longer work, and its F minor key keeps it darker than No. 1 in E-flat. Bruch’s Second Symphony has more individual touches, including scoring variations among the movements (the lovely Adagio ma non troppo generally being lighter in instrumentation) and an effectively quiet ending of the first movement. Bits of Bruch’s beautifully flowing themes peek out here and there – in the violas in the finale, for example – and the work as a whole is more emotionally satisfying than the earlier symphony. Staatskapelle Weimar plays these symphonies with warmth and fervor, and Michael Halász conducts with a good sense of control and balance. Like Taneyev’s symphonies, Bruch’s first two (as well as the third, for that matter) are worthy of being heard more often, even if they are scarcely at the pinnacle of the Romantic symphony.

(+++) MODERNS, SMALL AND EXPANSIVE

Idil Biret Archive Edition, Volume 4: Berg—Piano Sonata No. 1; Webern—Variations, Op. 27; Boulez—Piano Sonata No. 2. Idil Biret, piano. IBA. $8.99.

Rautavaara: Before the Icons (1955/2005); A Tapestry of Life (2007). Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leif Segerstam. Ondine. $16.99.

     The gigantism of many works of late Romanticism and the early 20^th century produced various reactions in composers as the century progressed. Some, led by Schoenberg, sought an entirely new tonal language, which others, notably Webern, then used to take miniaturization to an extreme. Others adapted the large forces commonly used early in the century to new ways of thinking and new instrumental emphases – led in this, not always knowingly, by Mahler, who was as capable of using his huge orchestras for chamber-music detail as for overwhelming power. The latest Idil Biret Archive release from the Finnadar catalogue – actually a compilation of two separate Finnadar vinyl records – shows the “miniaturization” trend quite clearly. Alban Berg’s first piano sonata – which is his Op. 1, dating to 1907 – actually straddles the older and newer musical approaches in some ways. It almost (but not quite) breaks with tonality; it almost (but not quite) is organized in a horizontal/contrapuntal fashion rather than a vertical/harmonic one; and despite its wandering chromaticism, it retains a certain amount of Romantic sensibility. Webern’s Variations, written much later (1936), are fully in the 12-tone camp, with all three movements based on the same row. Here the horizontal symmetry is nearly complete in the first movement, while there is vertical but non-harmonic symmetry in the second, which is a canon. Boulez’ second piano sonata is later still (1947-8), and is the most difficult piece on this CD to hear – and to play. There is an underlying structure that Boulez strictly controls, as often in his works; but, as is also common, the structural underpinnings are by no means apparent to the listener, even after several hearings. To the extent that Webern’s Variations retains a sort of classical purity within a new musical language, Boulez’ sonata has a complexity of arrangement and sound that looks forward to further developments in piano composition (by Boulez himself and others) while nearly abandoning any clear ties to the older forms from which it grew. To say that this music will not be to everyone’s taste is an understatement, but Idil Biret makes the case for all of it – particularly the Boulez – with a combination of virtuosity and intellectual understanding that is quite remarkable. Indeed, Biret, whose approach can at times seem a touch too cerebral for gentler and more delicate works of earlier times, seems quite at home here, delivering thoroughly impressive interpretations from start to finish.

     Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Before the Icons had its start as a fairly modest piano work, too. Simply called Icons and written in 1955, the musical portrait of six Byzantine icons was the Finnish composer’s Op. 6. But unlike the Berg, Webern and (especially) Boulez works played by Biret, Icons always “wanted” to outgrow its original miniature form: Rautavaara says he knew from the start that he would orchestrate it. It took him half a century to do so, though, and when he did, in 2005, he produced a much larger work than he had originally written. It is this piece, now in 10 movements and called Before the Icons, that gets a knowing and carefully shaped performance from the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra under Leif Segerstam. The four added movements are called Prayer, and are intended to represent people praying before the icons described in the orchestrations of the six original movements. Most of the work is lyrical and uplifting – although clearly in the musical language of the 20^th and 21^st centuries. The first movement (“The Death of the Mother of God”), third (“The Madonna of Blakernaya”) and fifth (“The Holy Women at the Sepulchre”) are most traditional – along with the concluding “Amen” – in their religious expression. The second movement (“Two Village Saints”) has more of a folk-music flavor; the fourth (“The Baptism of Christ”) builds in more dimensions than the title would lead the listener to expect; and the sixth (“Archangel Michael Fighting the Antichrist”) is an effective battle scene – with Rautavaara here using the substantial orchestral size clamorously. Before the Icons is paired by Segerstam with one of the prolific Rautavaara’s even more recent works, A Tapestry of Life, whose underlying theme nicely complements the religious foundation of Before the Icons even though the music itself is quite different. A Tapestry of Life is a mostly solemn four-movement work. “The Stars” is a night vision of stars falling in a garden; “Halcyon Days” looks backward to contentment despite some disturbing episodes; “Sighs and Tears” is mostly a lament; and “The Last Polonaise” is a solemn dance, although it has little in common with the Valse Triste of Sibelius, whose successor in Finnish music Rautavaara is sometimes considered to be. Neither this moody work nor the largely solemn Before the Icons will necessarily have immediate, widespread appeal, but Rautavaara does speak his own musical language successfully and with skill, and those who find his approach to melody, harmony and orchestration attractive will welcome a chance to hear these two recent examples of his thinking and feeling.