(++++) TO HALLOWEEN AND BEYOND

Little Goblins Ten. By Pamela Jane. Illustrated by Jane Manning. Harper. $16.99.

Hampire! By Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen. Illustrated by Howard Fine. Harper. $16.99.

Pinkalicious and the Pink Pumpkin. By Victoria Kann. HarperFestival. $6.99.

Trick or Treat, Marley! By John Grogan. Illustrated by Richard Cowdrey. Harper. $17.99.

The Rotten Adventures of Zachary Ruthless. By Allan Woodrow. Illustrations by Aaron Blecha. Harper. $5.99.

     Scary but not too scary – that’s the watchword for Halloween-themed books for younger readers, and also for scary books that are not quite tied into Halloween but have some of the same elements as ones deliberately focused on the candy-coated holiday. Little Goblins Ten is a good example of a book that takes a nursery rhyme and “repurposes” it for Halloween. The rhyme here is “Over in the Meadow,” a pleasant counting rhyme about various animal families doing everyday things. Pamela Jane transforms it into not-very-scary silliness that is nicely complemented by Jane Manning’s amusing illustrations. For example: “Over in the forest/ Where the shadows come alive/ Lived an old mother mummy/ And her little mummies five./ ‘Moan!’ said the mother;/ ‘We moan,’ said the five./ So they moaned and they groaned/ Where the shadows come alive.” From number one (mommy monster) through number 10 (father goblin), all the odd-looking but smiling creatures do what comes (un)naturally, until everyone gets together for Halloween fun at the end. Seasonal amusements don’t come much better than this.

     Hampire! is not exactly a Halloween book – there is no specific tie-in to the day – but it is certainly the sort of book that parents will enjoy reading with young children on or around Halloween. Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen here offers a barnyard tale with what seems to be a creepy element: a Hampire with “red-stained fangs” who leaves red droplets on the grass after prowling the farm. The frightened animals are careful to stay home all night, every night, until the time that one restless duck decides he simply must have a midnight snack. He goes into the farmhouse, loads his plate with goodies, and walks out – quickly attracting the attention of the Hampire (a huge, cloak-wearing pig). The best of Howard Fine’s very good illustrations is the one showing the Hampire looming over the duck, who carries his laden plate of snacks in temporary blissful ignorance of what is behind him. An amusing chase that involves the duck, a chicken and a pony soon ensues, until eventually the Hampire bursts into the shed where the others are hiding – and, of course, turns out not to be fearsome after all (and the red drops turn out to be something other than blood). Funny and silly, this book – like Little Goblins Ten – gives parents of kids ages 3-8 a chance to provide some nonthreatening and very enjoyable Halloween fun.

     Victoria Kann’s Pinkalicious is in a Halloween mood, too, and fans of the pink-loving girl will have a great time with Pinkalicious and the Pink Pumpkin, a lift-the-flap book about Pinkalicious’ search for a pumpkin of her favorite color at a farm run by Mr. Pink. Of course, pumpkins are orange, and everywhere Pinkalicious looks, that is all she sees – but the plucky pink lover never gives up the search, even when her brother, Peter, teases her with a pink balloon, and her parents show her some pink flowers (which, however, are not pumpkins). Eventually, though, it turns out that there is a pink pumpkin, courtesy of Mr. Pink himself, and everyone is very happy to see it – Pinkalicious most of all. The flaps are fun, the simple story moves along nicely, and the character of Pinkalicious is as delightful as ever, whether she is chasing a pink piglet or watching an excited Peter falling harmlessly off hay bales.

     Somewhat less enjoyable, no matter how hard it tries to be heartwarming, is the (+++) Trick or Treat, Marley! This is the latest John Grogan picture book based loosely on his adult bestseller, Marley & Me. Other children’s books by Grogan have shown Marley at Christmas, at school and interacting with kittens. Fans of the franchise will enjoy this one, too, but others will likely find it a little bit too sloppily sentimental. It simply tries too hard to be adorable. It is not just that Marley gets constantly into trouble – it is that everyone in the family enjoys all the messes he makes, no one blames him for anything, and all the illustrations by Richard Crowley show super-happy people and a super-happy dog, no matter what the narrative says is going on. So the kids, Cassie and Baby Louie, smile broadly while scooping out a pumpkin by hand, even though baby Louie is saying, “Yuck-yuck!” When Marley gets his head stuck in the pumpkin and smashes it (the pumpkin, not his head), Mommy watches with an expression of mild amusement and no apparent concern about cleaning up the huge mess. And so on. Even when Marley accidentally gets caught in a sheet and briefly frightens the kids, the picture Crowley shows is entirely intended to amuse. Marley himself is super-cuddly and super-cuddlable – so much so that even dyed-in-the-wool dog lovers may find the whole book a bit much.

     The Rotten Adventures of Zachary Ruthless, the first book in a new series by Allan Woodrow, is a bit much, too, but middle-grade readers will find at least parts of it funny, thanks both to Woodrow’s writing and to Aaron Blecha’s illustrations. This is another book that is not specifically tied to Halloween but that fits the season well. Woodrow’s hero is a reluctant one – very reluctant. He wants to be a villain, not a hero at all (fans of the animated movie Despicable Me will quickly get an idea of how this goes). Zachary has a nemesis, goody-goody Amanda Goodbar, who has a way of getting in his way and therefore ends up getting blamed for doing evil things that Zachary really wants to get blamed for (or get credit for). Zachary also has a henchman, Newt, who isn’t very good at being evil but who does help Zachary carry things around and save the town from zombies and so on. Actually, Zachary wants to turn the town’s mayor into a zombie, but things backfire when it turns out that the mayor himself is thoroughly rotten, and so is the “lieutenant mayor.” The book becomes a battle of silly evilness (or evil silliness), complete with a jar of boll weevils, some zucchini-flavored gum, and multiple applications to a consortium of bad guys known as SOURBALLS (the Society of Utterly Rotten, Beastly, and Loathsome Lawbreaking Scoundrels). There is also a fair amount here about mustard. This first Zachary Ruthless book is just odd enough, just peculiar enough, to attract young readers (likely boys rather than girls) who want something other than more-typical goody-goody books about really nice people (Zachary gets sick to his stomach when his super-sweet parents say they are going to send him to Good Samaritan School for the summer). The plot elements are fairly predictable, and it is obvious that Zachary is going to turn out to be better than he wants to be, so the book gets a (+++) rating for a high level of obviousness. But it’s certainly worth a look, especially at or near Halloween.

(++++) COMICS, COMICAL AND SERIOUS

Your Accomplishments Are Suspiciously Hard to Verify: A “Dilbert” Book. By Scott Adams. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

Gandhi: A Manga Biography. By Kazuki Ebine. Penguin. $15.

     There need not be anything especially comic about comics – but there can be. Scott Adams has spent more than 20 years finding the comic side of corporate life, taking events that would not, in the real world, be funny at all, and turning them into amusements. When you think about it, the notions that corporations are managed by incompetents, performance reviews are demeaning and useless, most assignments have no meaning, corporate efficiency is nonexistent, and paperwork is the reason for most policies’ existence, are not amusing at all. What Adams does is make them amusing by taking real workplace occurrences (many sent to him by his readers) and exaggerating them ever so slightly, or sometimes simply presenting them in ways that seem exaggerated but really aren’t (such as one self-referential sequence about people being reprimanded for posting anti-management cartoons – such as Dilbert – on their cubicle walls). Adams himself has mastered one element of corporate life to his own great profitability: the retread. A number of his oversize “Treasury” books, including Your Accomplishments Are Suspiciously Hard to Verify, include the umpteenth reprints of strips from the 1990s, all vaguely connected to the vague theme of the book. More power to Adams that he gets away with this. And he does, because so many of the themes he has been exploring for two decades are just as prevalent in business today as they were the first time (or times) he dealt with them. Corporate lawyers whose reason for existence is to shoot down creative proposals; meaningless mission statements; the unending need to produce status reports and forecasts instead of doing any actual work; demands to do projects faster than they can be done, including regular status reports about why they are not finished yet; strategic planning that is “like work but without the satisfaction of accomplishing anything”; a human-resources library filled with binders labeled “downsize”; the combination of a philosophy that emphasizes quality with a reality that insists defective items be shipped immediately – these and many other realities of 21^st-century corporate life were also realities of 20^th-century corporate life. About the only things that have changed – as the strips in this book make clear – are the technological methods of work avoidance (YouTube was not available as an ongoing time-waster until 2005). Spend enough time reading Adams’ book of “accomplishments” and you will be torn between laughing out loud and crying softly at the meaningless of it all. Sounds a bit like what happens with some real-world work assignments, doesn’t it?

     But comics that seek actively to tell about the real world, such as Kazuki Ebine’s graphic novel on the life of Gandhi, can be serious from start to finish. Gandhi: A Manga Biography is a bit of pictorial hagiography about one of the most highly regarded figures of the 20^th century, a man whose name has become synonymous with nonviolent resistance, a modest person who became a towering hero to independent India and whose family is still deeply involved in governing the nation. Ebine’s book is well-intentioned from start to finish, and may serve to introduce a new generation of visually oriented people to Gandhi. But it is not a particularly deep or revelatory work – not that it ever really tries to be – and its words are not as carefully created or assembled as its drawings. For instance, at one point the dialogue reads, “Thanks you so much, brother.” At another: “They say that discrimination against the black and Indians are more prevalent in the neighboring republic of Transvaal.” And at another: “When I first heard your speech, I was so inspired as if you boiled my blood.” The dialogue is stilted throughout, even when correctly written (which it often is not: “Two years later, apprehended with the increasing criticism, the British government released Gandhi unconditionally”). Gandhi’s own words are highlighted from time to time, and they retain their impact: “We must become the change we want to see in the world.” “If they answer not to thy call, walk alone.” But the book is even more one-sided than most once-over-lightly biographies of Gandhi – showing not only the British functionaries who ruled India as venal and corrupt, but also producing unflattering portraits of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. The ongoing religious strife between Hindus and Muslims, which resulted in the partitioning of India and the creation of Pakistan, is included but never really explained. Interesting elements of Gandhi’s life peek out, such as the fact that Henry David Thoreau inspired him, but nothing is really put together convincingly. Gandhi: A Manga Biography gets a low (+++) rating for its attempt to use the visual power of comics to present elements of a complex life in a format that may attract people who would not read a straightforward biography. But the work is such an oversimplification and has so many instances of poor writing that it serves, at best, as a stopgap until someone else does a better job of visualizing Gandhi’s life and times.

(+++) NATURE, GRAND AND SMALL

Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature. By Joyce Sidman. Pictures by Beth Krommes. Houghton Mifflin. $16.99.

Everest, Book Two: The Climb. By Gordon Korman. Scholastic. $5.99.

     From spiral-arm galaxies to chipmunks curled up in spirals in their underground burrows, Joyce Sidman and Beth Krommes consider one of nature’s most common and most interesting shapes in Swirl by Swirl. The main part of the book does not actually explain the ubiquity of spirals of all sizes – it simply shows many circumstances in which the shape appears and discusses elements of what makes a spiral a spiral. For example, “a spiral is a growing shape” shows spirals that start small and get larger, such as nautilus shells – shown both in cross section and in the form of living nautiluses. “A spiral is a strong shape” explains that “its outer curves protect what’s inside,” and the pictures show such creatures as a land snail and a European hedgehog – the latter curled into a spiral ball as a red fox sniffs it curiously. It is unusual to treat shapes as if they had emotions, but Sidman’s text does just that, calling a spiral “clever” and “graceful” and saying that it is “bold.” For these comments, Krommes provides pictures of breaking ocean waves and such flowers as daisies and calla lilies. Larger and larger spirals are shown, from a tidal whirlpool to a funnel tornado to, at last, a galaxy, and every picture is drawn to emphasize the spiral-ness of what is portrayed and also to show beauty – even the tornado has grace and lovely proportions. From the largest spirals, Sidman and Krommes return at the end to the small “snuggling shape” with which the book begins. But it is only after the story itself is told that end notes explain how spirals “work so well in so many ways.” This is the place where, in brief, readers learn about the spiral-shaped DNA helix and the frequency of Fibonacci spirals (organized mathematically: each number is the sum of the two previous ones). Here too are explanations of how waves, whirlpools and tornados form and how spiraling in flowers “makes the best use of space and sunlight.” These two explanatory pages are the most fascinating part of the book – everything that comes before is artistic and decorative, but a little lacking in substance. This is one case in which parents should be sure that children read the back-of-the-book material – or, even better, adults and kids can read it and learn together.

     The second book in Gordon Korman’s three-book Everest series is about a something in nature that is bigger than many spirals and smaller than others – and that has loomed large in the human imagination for many years. The Climb, first published in 2002 and now available in paperback, follows The Contest, in which an energy-drink company holds a competition to sponsor the youngest climber ever to surmount Everest. The first book follows several young would-be climbers competing for a place on the four-person teen climbing team. The Climb takes the four young people up the mountain. Korman paces the whole book for action, throwing in some surprises as well (one involving a Slinky that freezes is both dramatic and amusing). The teens, along with the expedition leader, a doctor and a cameraman, have prepared for the climb in tough conditions in Alaska, but Everest, of course, throws even more difficulties at them. Dominic, Perry, Sammi and Tilt are all tested in different ways. It is Dominic’s bravery that will pull most readers into and through the story, especially since it results in the heroic rescue of other climbers. But to make Dominic appealing, Korman paints him as headstrong and unwilling to listen to others or follow a number of rules, including ones designed to keep him and other climbers safe. This makes for appealingly dramatic scenes, but it is also very misleading in terms of the real world: failure to take things very carefully and to listen to the voice of experience is likely to be fatal on any mountain climb, and especially so when climbing Everest. The Climb ends before anyone reaches the top of the mountain – the third book, The Summit, takes the story to its conclusion. There is certainly enough drama and tragedy in The Climb to make young readers eager to find out what happens next; but despite the realism of the setting and the accurate information on mountain climbing, the somewhat overdone interpersonal dynamics mean that The Climb is more melodrama than realistic fiction.

(+++) THE DISUNITED STATES OF AMERICA

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. By Colin Woodard. Viking. $30.

     Here is an intriguing foray into American history – not United States history, but history that includes the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Journalist/historian Colin Woodard redraws the map of North America to show 11 “rival regional cultures” whose names range from the familiar (Far West, Deep South) to the unexpected (New France, which includes Quebec and the New Orleans region; El Norte, which is in the Southwest and includes part of Mexico). Woodard argues that the various cultures, extending over state and national boundaries, are the modern remnants of European founders who came to the New World with tremendously different ideas about freedom, government, religion and politics. It is the persistence of these founding principles, says Woodard – not something as simplistic as the now-commonplace division of the map into “red” and “blue” states, and indeed not a division into states at all – that explains the intransigence of people who live in one cultural area as regards the ideas and ideals of those who live in another.

     This is all very interesting, and some of the byways of history that Woodard explores are genuinely fascinating – such as the first American rebellion, which took place in the 1680s in reaction to the harshness of King James II. Other elements of the book are less attractive. Woodard is a trifle too apologetic for the Eurocentrism without which he would have no argument at all: “History has tended to portray the native peoples of the Americas as mere extras or scenery in a Western drama dominated by actors of European and African descent. Because this book is primarily concerned with the ethnocultural nations that have come to dominate North America, it will reluctantly adopt that paradigm.” Indeed, bending over backwards to show his sensitivity and political correctness, Woodard concludes the book with a glowing description of the wonders of “communalistic, environmentally minded, and female-dominated” First Nation – the huge, very sparsely inhabited far-North land mass inhabited by descendants of American aboriginal people.

     Thankfully, most of the book is better than this. Woodard is particularly good in his “founding” sections, explaining what sorts of people created Yankeedom, New Netherland, the Left Coast and the other regions he identifies as sharing a common culture and belief structure. In Tidewater, for example, “Virginia was an avowedly conservative area, Royalist in politics and Anglican in religion. Maryland was even more so, with the Lords Baltimore ruling their portion of the Chesapeake like medieval kings of yore.” On the other hand, the Midlands, “the most prototypically American of the nations,” owes its existence, surprisingly, to William Penn and the Quakers: “Difficult though it may be to understand today, the Quakers were considered a radical and dangerous force, the late-seventeenth-century equivalent of crossing the hippie movement with the Church of Scientology. …Their leaders strode naked on city streets or, daubed with excrement, into Anglican churches in efforts to provide models of humility.” The disparate nature of the regional areas makes it hard to understand how they united to fight the American Revolution, and Woodard has an explanation ready: they didn’t. Unite, that is. In fact, he says , “the four nations that did rebel – Yankeedom, Tidewater, Greater Appalachia, and the Deep South – had little in common and strongly distrusted one another,” overcoming their profound differences only with great difficulty. Woodard’s reconsideration of the American Revolution is worth a book in itself, filled as it is with telling tidbits, such as this throwaway explanation of the much-reviled taxes imposed by the British on the American colonies: “The average American colonist’s tax burden was just one-twenty-sixth that of his British counterpart.”

     Woodard similarly rethinks the “manifest destiny” concept of expansion westward, showing that there were multiple westward moves rather than a single, unified one. The eventually established Far West, he writes, “is the one place where environment really did trump the cultural heritage of settlers. …As a result, the Far West has long been an internal colony of the continent’s older nations and federal government, which possessed the necessary capital [for development]. Its people are still often deeply resentful of their dependent status but have generally backed policies guaranteed to preserve the status quo.” That last statement, broad and unsupported, is typical of Woodard’s assertions, many of which are not nearly as obvious or clear as he thinks they are. Still, his take on cultures within North America is a fascinating one, and some of his comments, surprising on their face, are well grounded in fact and highly intriguing to contemplate: “Contrary to popular opinion, the Dixie bloc has not been a particularly stable coalition. The dominant parties – the Deep South and Greater Appalachia – have been archenemies for much of their history, having taken up arms against one another in both the American Revolution and the Civil War.” Indeed, Woodard’s trenchant analysis of the fault lines among “nations” during the Civil War is genuinely revelatory

     On the other hand, Woodard’s argument that 21^st-century political deadlocks stem directly from the founding of the various regional cultures in the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th centuries is not always entirely convincing. But it does provide a new way of looking at modern “culture clashes” and a form of insight into the difficulty of resolving what seem to be differences of opinion but are in reality profound differences of belief. Unfortunately, to the extent that Woodard is right in seeing modern politics through this lens, the difficulties of governance seem insurmountable. And indeed, Woodard suggests that the political boundaries of the United State and Mexico, and maybe even Canada, are likely to change, perhaps dramatically, by the year 2100. If change does come, the map of North America will assuredly not look like the one Woodard offers of his 11 regional cultures. But it is not unthinkable that those cultures will indeed be responsible for redrawing at least some parts of the geographic and cartographic world.

(++++) VIOLA TRIUMPHS

Martinů: Sonata for Viola and Piano; Kodály: Adagio; Dohnányi: Sonata in C-sharp minor; Joachim: Hebrew Melodies (“Impressions of Byron’s Poems”); Enescu: Concertstück. Sarah-Jane Bradley, viola; Anthony Hewitt, piano. Naxos. $9.99.

Penderecki: Viola Concerto; Cello Concerto No. 2. Grigori Zhislin, viola; Tatjana Vassiljeva, cello; Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Antoni Wit. Naxos. $9.99.

Bartók: Viola Concerto; Violin Concertos Nos. 1 and 2. James Ehnes, violin and viola; BBC Philharmonic conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. Chandos. $18.99.

     It is probably fair, at last, to proclaim the viola a stepchild no more. Long neglected as a solo instrument (despite a few viola concertos written in the 18^th century and the occasional 19^th-century aberration, such as Berlioz’ Harold in Italy), the viola came increasingly into solo use in the 20^th century and has now begun to attract an entire new generation of viola-focused string players – as well as an increasing number of recordings. The viola repertoire is not as deep as that of the violin, and likely never will be, but the days in which violists had little original music to play and had to rely primarily on arrangements of violin pieces are now mostly gone. And composers are showing themselves increasingly interested in making use of the viola’s unusual expressive potential, its deeper and richer sound made possible by its tuning a fifth beneath that of the violin and its virtuosity potentially just as great as that of its smaller cousin.

     Sara-Jane Bradley’s new viola-and-piano CD shows all these elements. Bohuslav Martinů’s 1955 sonata combines folklike melodies with considerable lyricism, mixing pungent and rhapsodic elements and using sounds from the wistful to the modern. Close cooperation between viola and piano is crucial here, and Bradley works very well with pianist Anthony Hewitt. Zoltán Kodály’s early Adagio (1905) can be, and is, played on violin or cello as well as viola, but its quietly intense romanticism sounds particularly moving when played with the sensitivity that Bradley brings to it. Ernő Dohnányi’s Sonata in C-sharp minor is a bit of a throwback for this CD, since it is actually a violin work that Bradley has arranged for viola – not a piece originally written for her instrument. Dating to 1912, the sonata is in three movements that are played continuously. It combines romanticism with an effective cyclic structure that ends in a mood of nostalgia. As a composer, Dohnányi was strongly influenced by violinist Joseph Joachim, who in turn was influenced by Liszt in his own compositions, such as Hebrew Melodies. This is the only 19^th-century work on this CD, dating to the second half of the 1850s, and it is deeply imbued with the spirit of the Romantic era. Based on Old Testament stories and Byronic poems, but without any specific notation about ways in which the music is intended to correspond to any particular tale or poetry, the three-movement work is mostly in minor keys – in which the viola’s tone is particularly apt – and ranges in mood from melancholy to pastoral simplicity. Bradley and Hewitt conclude this fine CD with George Enescu’s well-known Concertstück, which was written as a competition piece in 1906 and which very effectively combines the lyricism and virtuosity that together are the hallmarks of the well-played viola.

     It is not only in chamber music that the viola has come into its own: concertos for viola have been written by an increasing number of composers, in a wide variety of styles. Krzysztof Penderecki’s dates to 1983 and quickly became so popular that, for a change, a viola work was soon being transcribed for other instruments (cello and clarinet). Opening with a viola solo and initially playing the string sections against each other before involving the full orchestra, the work meanders through many moods in seven connected sections of widely varying lengths (one lasts only 40 seconds). The elements of traditional concerto writing are all here – slower and faster sections, expressive and scherzando character, segments in which the soloist leads the orchestra and others in which the solo instrument responds to and plays against the ensemble. But Penderecki uses these elements in his own distinctive way, which includes considerable use of percussion and a formal structure that has the work beginning and ending in the same slow tempo and eventually fading into nothingness. Grigori Zhislin plays with fervor and emotional involvement, and Antoni Wit and the Warsaw Philharmonic provide strong and nuanced backup. They are equally fine accompanists for Tatjana Vassiljeva in Penderecki’s Cello Concerto No. 2 (1982), which was written for Mstislav Rostropovich. A larger and grander work than the viola concerto – it lasts nearly twice as long – this concerto has a generally bleaker and more “modern” sound, with abundant use of chordal clusters, forceful climaxes and (not surprisingly) considerable percussion involvement. Penderecki, who has been stylistically accretive for the past 30 years, also includes elements that bespeak romantic earnestness, if not romanticism of harmony or form. The longest of the concerto’s seven sections (which, as in the viola concerto, are played continuously) is the central one and the heart of the work, and includes a particularly affecting cello monologue played initially against a sonically interesting woodwind-and-percussion background. The concerto is perhaps more impressive than immediately attractive, but it reveals new elements on additional hearings – which it deserves.

     One of the two best-known 20^th-century viola concertos, and arguably the most important of all, is the incomplete one left behind by Béla Bartók at his death in 1945; only William Walton’s concerto is equally highly regarded. Bartók’s work is usually heard in the version by Tibor Serly, although other completions are now gaining ground as more authentic and effective in their own ways (notably that of Bartók’s son, Peter). It is the Serly version that James Ehnes performs with Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic, and this concerto has rarely been heard with as much intensity and lyrical beauty as it has here. Ehnes has so effectively conquered the considerable technical difficulties of the concerto that listeners hear the work’s flow, its dynamism, its mood changes and structural elements, rather than simply its complexity, resulting in a highly rewarding and emotionally very moving experience. Ehnes is also a violinist of considerable skill, as he shows in the two violin concertos that accompany the viola concerto on his new Chandos CD. The viola concerto is in the composer’s late style, while the two violin concertos are in his early and middle style, respectively. Ehnes is equally comfortable with all the works. The first concerto (1907-08) mixes a late-Romantic ethos with a tonal and rhythmic structure reminiscent of folk songs, which Bartók was collecting at the time but had not yet begun incorporating into his music in any significant way. The more-substantial second concerto (completed in 1938 and first played in 1939) is largely built around variations, with the central movement in variation form and the finale using variations of themes from the first movement. Bartók neatly introduces something akin to 12-tone music in the first movement, but manages to keep the overall effect tonal. The harp is significant here, beginning the entire concerto and also figuring prominently in the second movement. And there is particularly clever use of the violin in a second-movement passage in which the overall tempo is slow but the soloist pays rapid figurations. Throughout all these works – the violin concertos and the viola concerto – the sense of camaraderie between Ehnes and Noseda never flags, and the result is a very impressive CD that not only shows how far the viola has come but also shows just how interesting modern concertos for the violin can be.

(+++) AMONG THE MODERNS

Howard Hanson: Symphony No. 1, “Nordic”; The Lament for Beowulf. Seattle Symphony and Chorale conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Naxos. $9.99.

Robert Helps: Chamber Music with Piano. ATOS Trio (Thomas Hoppe, piano; Annette von Hehn, violin; Stefan Heinemeyer, cello); Naomi Niskala, piano; Bernhard Krug, horn; Ronald Carbone, viola; Frank Dodge, cello; Marieke Schneemann, flute; Lars Wouters van den Oudenweijer, clarinet; Robert Helps, piano. Naxos. $19.99 (2 CDs).

Arvo Pärt: Piano Music. Ralph van Raat, piano; Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Naxos. $9.99.

Kaija Saariaho: Clarinet Concerto; Laterna Magica; Leino Songs. Kari Kriikku, clarinet; Anu Komsi, soprano; Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sakari Oramo. Ondine. $16.99.

Ross Edwards: Violin Concerto, “Maninyas”; Sibelius: Violin Concerto. Adele Anthony, violin; Adelaide Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arvo Volmer. Canary Classics. $16.99.

     Consider, for a moment, a cyclical view of “modern” classical music, defined very roughly as music composed from the beginning of the previous century to the present day. The enormous upheavals in harmony, structure and effect of this music have made it difficult even to define what “classical music” now means and what listeners it is designed to attract. Composers of every sort still seek audiences and still feel they have something to communicate, but their means of doing so have changed so radically that it sometimes seems there is little to connect them. Sometimes – but not always. Howard Hanson’s music is quite approachable to anyone who enjoys Sibelius, a lifelong influence for Hanson (1896-1981). Hanson’s first symphony (1922) is in the same key as that of Sibelius (E minor) and, with its subtitle “Nordic,” could be expected to partake of similar sensibilities. To an extent, it does, but it is a more serene and stately work and less distinctly Germanic than that of Sibelius, which dates to 1898. It is paired on a new Naxos CD with another clearly Nordic-influenced work, The Lament for Beowulf (1925) – Beowulf was, after all, a legendary Scandinavian king and hero. Not surprisingly, this is a dark and poetic piece, and it is well sung and well played by the Seattle Symphony and Chorale under Gerard Schwarz. This disc is actually a re-release of a Delos CD: the performances date to 1988 (symphony) and 1990 (Beowulf). The sound stands up well, and the inclusion of Beowulf texts in the booklet is welcome – but the CD runs just 48½ minutes, so some listeners may feel a bit shortchanged.

     The music of Robert Helps (1928-2001) has a generally more “modern” aural palette than that of Hanson, and the new two-CD Naxos set of his complete chamber works for strings or winds with piano will be welcomed by those who enjoy Helps’ sonic world. Helps sometimes sounds a bit like Scriabin (as in the 1997 Piano Quartet), but more often partakes of the sensibilities of Schoenberg and his followers (as in the 1963 Fantasy and 1997 Piano Quintet). Also on the first CD here are Postlude (1964) and Duo (1977). But the second CD is in many ways more interesting. It includes Helps’ two Piano Trios (called simply Trio I and Trio II) – works written more than 40 years apart (1957 and 2000) that, between them, showcase nearly all the styles and influences informing Helps’ career. They are offered on a CD that also contains more than half an hour of Helps’ own piano playing – not only of his own work but also of pieces by Mendelssohn, Ireland, Poulenc and Godowsky. These live recordings were made during Spectrum Concerts Berlin performances in 1997 and 2000, and they show Helps to have been not only a considerable pianist but also a composer quite familiar with and attuned to the works of earlier times, whether he chose to absorb their lessons or discard them.

     Arvo Pärt’s piano music moves still farther, sonically, into an identifiably “modern” idiom. Like the trios on the Naxos Helps disc, the Naxos Pärt CD provides an opportunity to hear where a composer’s thinking began and where it has gone over time. The first two published works by Pärt (born 1935) are the first two on the CD: Zwei Sonatinen für Klavier and Partita. Both show the Estonian composer’s respect for and understanding of earlier music – a stance from which he broke rather dramatically during the 1960s, when his language became entirely atonal. The sound of the two earlier works contrasts with the simplicity of line in the latest piece here, Für Anna Maria (2006), which is also the shortest work at the CD, lasting just over one minute. The two other solo pieces stand somewhere between the earliest and latest ones in both sensibility and length. They are Für Alina (1976) and Variationen zur Gesundung von Arinuschka (1977); all this solo piano music is very well played by Ralph van Raat. He also does a very fine job in the longest and most substantial work on the CD, a 2002 piece for piano and orchestra called Lamentate: Homage to Anish Kapoor and his sculpture “Marsyas.” Described by Pärt as a lament for the living rather than the dead, this is a large-scale work whose programmatic effect will be clear only to those familiar with Kapoor’s giant steel-and PVC sculpture, which dates to the same year as Pärt’s composition and which reached from one end to the other of a 3,400-square-foot hall in London’s Tate Museum. Effectively orchestrated and very well played by the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic under JoAnn Falletta, the work will nevertheless seem somewhat abstruse to those who are not already acquainted with its subject and inspiration.

     Even less known to almost all listeners will be the music of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (born 1952), who proves on a new Ondine CD to have a distinctive voice and considerable skill in both instrumental and vocal composition. The Clarinet Concerto is called (in all-capital letters) “D’OM LE VRAI SENS,” and it will be up to individual listeners to decide what “the true meaning” of the work is. But there is no doubt that it is filled with large gestures and requires very considerable virtuosity – even athleticism. Kari Kriikku is fully equal to the work’s many challenges, although it is arguable whether the considerable skill required of the soloist fully repays the listener: this may be a work that is more interesting to see in concert than to hear in recorded form. Saariaho is the 2011-12 Composer-in-Residence at Carnegie Hall in New York, and her Laterna Magica (2008) would likely sound particularly good there: it is a substantial piece for large orchestra that shows her eclectic musical tastes and approaches (which range, in various works, from the tonal to the electronic and from rather delicate chamber music to large-orchestra pieces such as Laterna Magica). Four Leino Songs conclude this CD, on which all the works receive their world première recordings. The songs are settings of poems by one of Finland's most important poets, Eino Leino, whose work mixes symbolism, mythic tradition and influences from Nietzsche with a highly Romantic concept of the poet as truth-seeking visionary. The four songs (“Looking at You,” “The Heart,” “Evening Prayer” and “Peace”) were written for Anu Komsi, who performs them with elegance and grace.

     Leino (1878-1926) is of the era of Sibelius (1865-1957), even though Saariaho’s national connection with Sibelius does not show in her music in the way that American composer Hanson’s emotional one does. But the tie back from the very modern to the “modern” of a century ago is nevertheless intriguing. And it is even more so in a new Canary Classics CD that actually pairs the justly renowned Sibelius Violin Concerto with a violin concerto by Australian composer Ross Edwards (born 1943). Edwards has some highly nontraditional ideas about composition – his oboe concerto, for example, includes choreography for the soloist. In the case of the violin concerto, what Edwards offers is reuse of two of five pieces that he had previously written for other forces under the meaningless title “Maninyas.” The made-up word came to connote, for Edwards himself, the chant-like quality of this rather static music, which he created from what he describes as “randomly chosen phonetic units.” What this will mean to the listener uninitiated into Edwards’ approach is unclear: the violin concerto was composed in 1988, but the deliberate use of randomness in its creation harks back to an earlier sort of “modern” music in which aleatoric construction was a major element. There is something gimmicky about the whole process, although the concerto itself – which Adele Anthony plays very well – is more than intermittently effective. Pairing it with the Sibelius concerto, however, may not have been the wisest decision. The Sibelius, even though it dates to 1904, still sounds distinctly modern, yet it pulls the listener along inexorably in a way that the Edwards concerto never does; and although Sibelius’ language is essentially tonal, this is tonality stretched so far that it is on the verge of breaking – again, an element of the work’s very modern sound. Anthony plays this concerto quite well, too, and she gets fine accompaniment in both works from the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under Arvo Volmer. What this CD ends up showing is that modernity is, to a certain extent, in the eye (and ear) of the beholder (and listener) – and that anyone interested in how classical music has developed in the last century can both start with Sibelius and his influence and end with it.

(++++) CONFUSION WITH A PURPOSE

Everything Goes: On Land. By Brian Biggs. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $14.99.

I Will Not Read This Book. By Cece Meng. Illustrated by Joy Ang. Clarion. $16.99.

     One way to pull reluctant readers into books is by giving them a lot to look at rather than, or in addition to, a lot of words. And there is a lot to see in Brian Biggs’ Everything Goes: On Land, which combines illustrative complexity with a very simple story line (father and son driving to railroad station to pick up mother) and a lot of mini-narratives that keep popping up in the super-busy pages (birds wearing hats or wishing they had them, a stuck car that may or may not have a dead battery, and so on). This is a book that names everything – on one page, “electric car,” “antique car,” “hatchback,” “station wagon,” “very large car” and so on; on another, “mountain bike,” “commuter bike,” “road-racer bikes,” “bicycle built for two,” “unicycle” and others; and so on. Some pages show details of particular vehicles – a long-haul truck or a bicycle, for example. While all this is on display, so are the numbers 1 through 100 – finding them is fun – and there is an ongoing ice-cream saga (different people prefer different flavors) to go with the constant snippets of humor: labels for a recreational vehicle identify “driver & passenger” and “Miss Kitty,” and a white rabbit barely misses a subway train and worries, in rhyme, “Oh wait! I’m late! I can’t believe my fate!” Throughout the drive, the father explains the sights: “That’s an electric high-speed train. That small one is a switch car, or shunter. It’s used to assemble trains and move railroad cars around in a switchyard.” Near the end of the journey, there are two facing pages that fold out to produce the equivalent of a four-page spread of the bustling area near the railroad station, where there are huge numbers of people and a wide variety of vehicles to see. Everything Goes: On Land is a book that will captivate even kids who do not usually pay much attention to books: there are so many narratives and so much to see that the whole thing is just plain fun, and the busy-ness (reminiscent of the books of Richard Scarry) is enjoyable in and of itself. The father’s explanations, although they provide the main flow of information, can wait for a second, third or fourth reading if they seem too matter-of-fact for a child’s taste. There is plenty to see here and plenty to do without focusing too much on the words – those can always be the focus during a later visit to Biggs’ world.

     There won’t be even one reading of a book if the boy in I Will Not Read This Book has his way. He is the reluctant reader par excellence, being absolutely determined not to read the book he is carrying. Period. The complexity here is not in the story line, not in the illustrations, but in the “house that Jack built” piling-up of the boy’s strong statements of determination not to read (which he begins producing after coming up with as many delaying tactics as possible). The boy says forthrightly why he won’t read the book: “Reading is hard and I don’t read fast and sometimes there are words I don’t know.” So he creates a scenario explaining how determined he is not to read – he will not read “even if you hang me upside down by one toe” with a variety of things going on: being suspended over a cliff, with a monkey tickling his feet, during a rainstorm, with lightning above and sharks below and a dragon nearby and so on and so forth. As he adds each new element, the boy repeats all the previous ones; that is the “house that Jack built” (or “Twelve Days of Christmas”) narrative approach. In this case, it also helps the boy delay any thought of reading for a longer and longer time. But then…well, at the very end, where we see the boy laughing as his mom plays with him, he confesses that maybe, just maybe, he will read the book after all – if she reads it with him. And that is the whole point of Cece Meng’s story: the boy may have lots of bad reasons for refusing to read, but he has one good one for agreeing to do so…and parents can and should take note. Joy Ang’s illustrations amusingly highlight the absurdities of the boy’s protests, making it clear that there is no reason to take the sharks or dragon (or bright-blue monkey) very seriously. But parents who do take their children’s reading seriously will get a lot out of this book – a fine go-to volume when kids’ reading reluctance turns into out-and-out refusal.

(++++) MIDDLE-SCHOOL PICTURES

Big Nate 3: Big Nate on a Roll. By Lincoln Peirce. Harper. $12.99.

The Girls’ Book of Secrets. By Ellen Bailey. Illustrated by Nellie Ryan. Scholastic. $7.99.

     Nate Wright is up to more of the same shenanigans in Big Nate on a Roll, which is just as entertaining a comic-strip-driven ride as its predecessors, In a Class by Himself and Big Nate Strikes Again. All these books are based on the Big Nate comic strip by Lincoln Peirce (whose name is not a misspelling of “Pierce” – it is pronounced “purse”). But unlike straightforward comic-strip collections – Peirce has produced some of those as well – these books are middle-school graphic novels filled with illustrations from the strip and others created especially for the books themselves. Many of the illustrations are about Nate and his world; others are by Nate, since he is himself a budding cartoonist (as Peirce says he really was in sixth grade). The “Nate-created” art appears on the front and back inside covers of the book (“Trivia Trove,” “Gnome Name Game” and so on), and from time to time within the narrative (“Dr. Cesspool,” “Hike to Nowhere,” “Ultra-Nate”). All the characters in 12-year-old Nate’s world show up in Big Nate on a Roll: friends Francis and Teddy, crush Jenny, super-smart Gina, teachers from Miss Godfrey to Mr. Ortiz, Nate’s dad, school bully Chester, and – in particular – Artur. The plot of the book revolves around Nate’s jealousy of Artur and competitiveness with him: Nate admits that Artur is friendly, helpful, hard-working, respectful and more, and all that, in Nate’s book, adds up to “sickening.” Artur succeeds at everything (including becoming Jenny’s boyfriend), and Nate is determined that, at least once, he will defeat “Mr. Perfect.” He will do so by selling more fundraising items for the Timber Scout troop to which both he and Artur belong – thereby getting himself a new skateboard, which he needs because his old one ended up in the creek after a bizarre dog-walking incident. A personalized skateboard is the top prize in the troop’s fundraiser, so Nate has two reasons to win: the prize and besting Artur. The comic complications are scarcely surprising, especially for those who already know Nate’s style and his frequent miscalculations and mishaps. But Peirce works through the intertwined themes skillfully and amusingly, and because there is underlying good humor throughout the story – Nate is too full of himself, but is scarcely a bad kid – the eventual working-out of the plot satisfies all the characters, and will make real-world sixth-graders (and other middle-school students) as happy as it makes Nate and his friends.

     Nate’s stories, although intended for all middle-schoolers, will likely be more fun for boys than girls, but The Girls’ Book of Secrets is for girls only. The pictures that count here are not so much the rather ordinary ones already in the book as the ones that readers create on their own. This is one of those get-to-know-yourself-better books, encouraging girls to test themselves (“What’s Your Style?” and “Personal Profiler,” for instance), make lists (“Best Books of All Time,” “Sweet Dreams”), and create doodles, invent fortune-cookie fortunes, draw or write about your favorite things in each season of the year, get four friends to draw pictures of you, and more. This is not an especially inventive book, but it gets a (+++) rating for having at least a few out-of-the-ordinary things to think about. For example, girls must choose whether they would rather have no eyebrows or have eyebrows that meet in the middle…and whether they would rather never wash their hair again – or never wash their pants again. One question asks, “What is the most important news event that has happened in your lifetime?” There is a horoscope section – but it is based on ancient Egyptian gods. A section called “All in a Night’s Sleep” asks whether you sleep like Sleeping Beauty or wake up in a bed that looks as if you fought a monster in it. Nothing in The Girls’ Book of Secrets is difficult to answer, but the book does have fun with its premise from time to time, and that makes it more interesting. For example, on a page about travel, girls are supposed to check off boxes if they have ever been on a ferry, cable car, helicopter, train, plane, boat – or unicycle. As lighthearted fun that can be enjoyable to share with friends, the book makes a pleasant diversion as long as middle-school girls don’t take too much of it too seriously.

(+++) A WORLD OF PURE FEAR

Children of Paranoia. By Trevor Shane. Dutton. $25.95.

     Imagine if the title of Intel cofounder Andrew S. Grove’s famous business book, Only the Paranoid Survive, were actually descriptive of the world. Then imagine that not even the paranoid survive. Then you have first-time author Trevor Shane’s world. Children of Paranoia is one of the bleakest dystopian novels of recent years, so packed with violence, terror and underlying anomie that it would be genuinely upsetting if its foundational premise were not so ridiculous.

     Shane’s problem is that he works so hard to stack the deck against his protagonists that, when he succeeds, there is nothing surprising about what happens to them. Upsetting, yes – he writes well and with intensity, and even though readers know that things are sure to go horribly wrong for Joseph and Maria, Shane makes the way things go wrong so distressing that readers will worry, gasp and be upset. Repeatedly.

     But about that stacked deck: Shane’s idea is that there is a centuries-long war going on of which most people are unaware, but that consumes the lives, bodies and minds of those involved in it. Fair enough; readers may think of, say, long-term Mafia vendettas. Furthermore, the origins of the war are lost in history – no one is sure what either side is fighting for or about, except that one side is purely good and the other purely evil (each side thinking itself the good one, of course). Still fair enough, if a little hard to accept, especially when Shane goes out of his way to show – repeatedly – that “why” questions about the war are rarely asked, barely tolerated when asked, and apparently unanswerable by participants.

     Ah, but there is more. It turns out that this war has utterly unbreakable rules – which means, readers will realize immediately, that they will be broken, with disastrous consequences. One rule is that innocent bystanders may never be killed, on pain of the hunting down of the killer by both sides in the war. Hmm…so much for any Mafia parallel. Another rule is that no one under age 18 may ever be killed – a bizarre formulation that both sides adhere to 100% of the time and that is so senseless and unbelievable that it is obviously put in place only as a major plot hook. A third rule, a corollary of the second, is that if anyone under 18 has a child, that child is turned over to the other side – to prevent either side from taking advantage of the no-killing-under-18 rule and breeding its way to superiority. All right, this is ridiculous, and the notion that the rules are never, ever, ever violated is more so. Well, actually, they are violated from time to time – Joseph tells a story of a man who inadvertently killed a civilian and survived all of six days before being tracked down and eliminated. And of course we know that Joseph himself will violate at least one of the rules, because otherwise there would be no story.

     There is a story. It involves Joseph, who is nearly 26, and who for almost eight years has been a cold-blooded murderer – a conscienceless soldier in a war without meaning – falling immediately and intensely in love with Maria while he is on a job. And Maria turns out to be – to Joseph’s surprise but likely not to that of many readers – 17 years old. And although she is a college student and scarcely a virgin, she does not use birth control. And she very quickly gets pregnant. And because she is barely 17, her child and Joseph’s will be born before she is 18, thereby violating a cardinal rule of the war; and of course no one even considers abortion, which would stop the story in its tracks. Instead, Joseph and Maria immediately go on the run, even though running is utterly hopeless, and all sorts of awful things happen to them, and there you have Children of Paranoia.

     All this makes the book sound worse than it is. The ridiculousness of the rules and the utter unbelievability of many of Joseph’s and Maria’s actions are actually played down by Shane – wisely so. Instead, he focuses on the couple, on the tough choices they need to make, on the peculiar and sometimes deadly interactions they have with everyone from Joseph’s mother to Joseph’s best friend from childhood. It is apparent from the start that Joseph and Maria are not going to get away; the question is how well they will fight the good fight (for each other and their child) while trying to escape the bad one (the endless and inexplicable war). Shane uses the bizarre nature of the war (which he may think of as a stand-in for all wars, but which is too strange to be thought of that way) to create some decidedly odd scenes. For instance, at one point Joseph is assigned to kill an old man from the other side; he is told to stay at a safe house, which belongs to an old man on his side; but it turns out that the two old men are friends, and Joseph’s success at his mission is fatal for the man on his side as well – which is just fine with Joseph’s boss, who says it serves the old man on Joseph’s side right for fraternizing with the enemy. Huh? Children of Paranoia is full of twists and turns like this one, and most of them are creepy. For that very reason, the book reads a lot like a movie script; it is easy to imagine it being filmed. It is certainly a fast-moving book, and certainly packed with enough adventure and violence to attract readers who love thrillers and do not care much about plot niceties. But it is not, ultimately, a very good book – its underpinnings are just too incoherent. Still, it is an exciting book, and that alone will likely garner it many readers and considerable attention.

(+++) FOOD STUFF

The Kitchen Counter Cooking School: How a Few Simple Lessons Transformed Nine Culinary Novices into Fearless Home Cooks. By Kathleen Flinn. Viking. $26.95.

American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It). By Jonathan Bloom. Da Capo. $16.

     Both these books deal with Americans’ penchant for wasting food, but they come at the subject from entirely different angles – one indirectly and one directly. Kathleen Flinn is well aware of Jonathan Bloom’s book, which was originally published last year and is now available in paperback. Flinn quotes Bloom approvingly in a chapter called “Waste Not, Want Not,” where she picks up on Bloom’s assertion that Americans waste more than $100 billion worth of food annually. “This jived [sic – she means jibed] with what I found in the interviews with the volunteers and the kitchen visits and what I observed in my own house and in the homes of friends.” The waste issue, Flinn believes, is directly connected to Americans’ unwillingness to cook – “as a country we collectively waste about 40 percent of the food produced for consumption” throughout the year, except perhaps at Thanksgiving. Flinn spins the waste issue into a discussion of how to prepare meals from leftovers – soups (cold or hot) from vegetables, for example. “The way to avoid a lot of leftovers in the first place is to plan meals,” Flinn writes, and this is what connects her discussion of waste with her general topic of cooking from scratch instead of buying prepared foods. The missing ingredient in people’s kitchen lives today, Flinn believes, is confidence, and The Kitchen Counter Cooking School is all about instilling that confidence in people, whether they are 22 years old or 61 (the age extremes of the “nine culinary novices” around whom the book is structured). This book is a followup and in some ways a supplement to Flinn’s previous effort, The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry, but it can be read independently – although it is more enjoyable and will carry more meaning for readers who know the earlier book. Flinn believes that a lot of supposed reasons for failure to cook are simply excuses, and not very good ones. For example, she says that only a few people are genuinely too pressed for time to prepare meals; most simply do not perceive cooking as sufficiently important to be worth the time investment that it requires. Furthermore, she believes that American society’s emphasis on speed (“20-minute meals” and such) downgrades the value of cooking. The Kitchen Counter Cooking School goes through a wide range of food-related issues while maintaining, at its core, a narrow focus on the volunteers who learned with and from Flinn (and with the help of some celebrity chefs). Some of Flinn’s suggestions are counterintuitive – shop more often for fewer items, for example, and buy spices in small amounts and more frequently instead of stocking up on them. But she defends her approach effectively, and the book also includes 23 recipes that readers who want to give home cooking a try can test for themselves.

     As for American Wasteland, its author is one of those journalistic crusaders with a strong sense of the way things aren’t, but ought to be. Bloom points out, for example, that Americans frequently shop for their “aspirational lives” rather than their real ones – buying lots of fruits and vegetables because we ought to eat more of them, for example, but then not eating them and having them go to waste. Bloom does tend to hector, and is always ready with a compelling statistic (e.g., Americans are 5% of the world’s population but create 30% of the world’s trash, with each individual throwing away an average of 197 pounds of food a year). Okay, we are bad, evil people; we have heard this before – about energy consumption, greenhouse-gas production and many other issues. It would be quite understandable if readers simply decided that enough is enough: we are not bad people, certainly not individually, and are tired of being told all the things that are wrong with the way we live. But American Wasteland is not quite so easy to dismiss. For one thing, Bloom leavens his jeremiads with humor (something that the biblical Jeremiah never did); for another, his book is far more prescriptive than most exposés. He really has thought through what can be done, by individuals and society as a whole, to reduce food waste. Many of his recommendations for shoppers are actually easy to implement: eat before shopping, so you will be less tempted to buy things purely out of hunger; make a list and stick to it, no matter what else is put temptingly on display in the store; be careful at superstores that sell in large quantities – there is no reason to buy a three-pound tub of sour cream if you will only use a pint; calculate in advance how many nights you will eat at home in a week, and buy only enough food for those nights. This last idea gets into a more difficult realm: planning, which Americans do not do very well when it comes to meals (a point that Flinn makes as well). This is a key skill to develop, Bloom contends, and one that not only repays you by reducing waste but also repays you financially. That is a pretty good argument. But readers who want to get the most out of American Wasteland will have to be comfortable with Bloom’s tendency toward self-praise, as when he takes an entry-level grocery job to look into waste at the supermarket level: “I’d be lying if I said that throwing away so much food as my first act of employment wasn’t validating and somewhat satisfying. I’d researched food waste for more than a year at that point, and here I had found my white whale.” Readers also need to decide how they feel about Bloom’s ideas for remaking American society, which tend to rely on vast expansion of the power of the government. Among other things, he praises the actions in Britain of the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; suggests creating “a federal caretaker to advocate for food recovery and against food waste” in the United States; would like to have the government ban the disposal of food in landfills; and more. These are not necessarily bad ideas, and are certainly well-meant, but with them, Bloom starts to sound like just another “grow the government and everything will get better” idealist. His suggestions for individual attention to food waste make him better than a kneejerk government expansionist, and those approaches are ones that readers can address on their own. But Bloom’s societal thoughts are better taken with, ahem, a grain of salt.

(++++) LIGHTWEIGHT FEMMES FATALES

Lehár: Frasquita. Rupert Bergmann, Laura Scherwitzl, Vincent Schirrmacher, Robert Maszl, Romana Noack, Thomas Zisterer; Chor des Lehár Festivals and Franz-Lehár Orchester conducted by Vinzenz Praxmarer. CPO. $33.99 (2 CDs).

Mark-Anthony Turnage: Anna Nicole. Eva-Maria Westbroek, Susan Bickley, Jeremy White, Rebecca de Pont Davies, Loré Lixenberg, Grant Doyle, Gerald Finley, Andrew Rees, Alan Oke, Peter Hoare; Royal Opera Chorus and Orchestra of the Royal Opera House conducted by Antonio Pappano. Opus Arte DVD. $29.99.

     “Celebrification” is nothing new; certainly not in the realm of opera. Some composers take real-world celebrities and turn them into the stuff of legend, as Verdi did in La Traviata and as Mark-Anthony Turnage has tried to do in Anna Nicole. Other composers take characters who never existed – but who are immense celebrities within the operatic world itself – and expand upon, reinterpret and rethink them, as Franz Lehár did in reconsidering Bizet’s Carmen through the operetta Frasquita. Gypsy lore and gypsy lives were something of an obsession with Lehár, who felt his Hungarian heritage strongly. In 1910, Zigeunerliebe rather oddly told of “gypsy love” in the context of the taming of a Valkyrie-like heroine. In 1934, in his final work, Giuditta, Lehár reconsidered the Carmen legend and reinterpreted it for a modern age in which the conclusion is not the great drama of murder but the lesser killing of a failed relationship that quietly disintegrates after initial fireworks. In between, in 1922, there was Frasquita, in which the gypsy dancer of the title – clearly identified with Bizet’s heroine, even to the point of working in a cigarette factory and having a fight with another of the “cigarette girls” – performs highly suggestive dances in order to lure and humiliate her suitor, realizing only after his explosive reaction that she loves him after all (setting the stage for a rather contrived happy ending). Frasquita is a Lehár oddity on several levels. Less tuneful than his earlier works, less serious than his later ones, it was the first Lehár operetta with a “Tauber song,” the middle-of-the-second act Hab’ ein blaues Himmelbett! But the song was written for Hubert Marischka, not for Richard Tauber, who was to be so influential on Lehár’s later works – Marischka, not Tauber, created the role of Armand, the singer who rather prematurely invites Frasquita to his heavenly blue bed. But Tauber did fill in during the original run of Frasquita, and the song was a huge hit when he sang it, and it was this that eventually led to the Lehár-Tauber collaboration.

     Frasquita showcases Lehár’s ability to write in many Spanish forms redolent of Carmen but also reflecting a central-European sensibility. There is a tango here, and a bolero, a valse espagnole, even a habanera. Lehár’s underlying romanticism pervades them all; and the melodies are frequently gorgeous, carrying the audience along on waves of beauty even though the tunes are not as well differentiated as in many of the composer’s other works and are therefore less memorable. As for the thin plot: a libretto was originally prepared for Puccini, Lehár’s colleague and friend, but Puccini eventually decided that the whole subject, leading up to a final consummation of the love between Armand and Frasquita, was too over-the-top. Lehár’s librettists (A.M. Willner and Heinz Reichert) avoided that issue by having the curtain fall before the couple’s union. What they could not get around, though, was the question of how and why Frasquita should captivate audiences – beyond its elements of titillation. Unlike the fiery Carmen, Frasquita is not larger than life, not especially dramatic or intense – not, in short, a major-league heroine for an opera or operetta. This is true even though the Lehár Festival performance of Frasquita is a very fine one, with all the principal roles well filled, the chorus and orchestra performing with strength and exuberance, and Vinzenz Praxmarer leading the production with verve and style. Yet this two-CD set is really a must-have for admirers of Lehár and anyone interested in hearing how this composer’s works developed over time. Infuriatingly, CPO fails to provide a libretto or a link to one online – an absolutely unjustifiable omission, especially since a number of crucial elements of Frasquita occur in dialogue, not in the sung portions. And the plot summary offered in the booklet is a bare-bones one; it would be stretching things to call it adequate. It is enough, though, to show that Frasquita is a pale imitation of the more-famous fictional gypsy on whom she is based. The question that Lehár never quite answers in this work is just why anyone in the audience should particularly care about what happens to her.

     The identical question trips up Turnage’s Anna Nicole. If Lehár’s Frasquita is an operetta that occasionally strives for elements of grand opera, Anna Nicole is an opera that might have been more effective as an operetta. The seriousness with which Turnage and librettist Richard Thomas approach their subject is all out of proportion to the importance and meaningfulness (if any) of the life of tabloid fodder Anna Nicole Smith, who died at age 39 in 2007. Smith, a onetime Playboy model who married an octogenarian billionaire, offered little evidence of depth during her life and is portrayed with little enough of it in the handsome and often clever Royal Opera production. The music and libretto do not always fit easily together, with the story line moving along in traditional TV “docudrama” form while Turnage’s music, filled with jazz elements, now evokes the work of Bernstein, now dips into honkytonk, now makes a pass at a waltz (which certainly sounds nothing like any waltz by Lehár). Turnage and Thomas would actually have done well to steal a page from Lehár by having Anna Nicole (Eva-Maria Westbroek) and her lawyer and occasional lover, Howard K. Stern (Gerald Finley), explain – separately and/or together – the basis of their relationship, which is the most interesting part of the opera. But no such aria or duet is ever forthcoming. Even if it had been unconvincing (as Lehár’s explanatory ones sometimes were), this “what it’s all about” aria/duet would have grounded the story, giving audiences something to hold onto beyond the glitz and glamor of the production’s visual attractions. Without this central element – or any other one – there is nothing but glitz to hang onto here. Sometimes, in fact, the presentation works well, as at the very beginning, when the chorus energetically sings a moralizing summary of Anna Nicole’s life that is set to lively, syncopated music and has some genuinely funny lines. Indeed, the first half of Anna Nicole is more effective than the second, in which Turnage and Thomas strive for drama and pathos but run head-on into the reality that there is not enough worth caring about in Anna Nicole’s life to provide the foundation for a La Traviata-style “isn’t it sad?” conclusion. No one writes operetta anymore, which is really a shame, because the Anna Nicole story would potentially have worked quite well if done in the form of one of Lehár’s later, unhappy-ending operettas, which conclude with pathos rather than tragedy. Anna Nicole might also be effective as a Broadway or West End musical, musicals being the operettas of the present day. But there just isn’t enough emotional depth to Anna Nicole, or to Anna Nicole, for this work to succeed as grand opera. Nevertheless, this flawed but very well performed work is as much a must-have in its way as Frasquita is for other reasons. It is hard to escape the notion that Anna Nicole may represent the future of opera – a future in which celebrities and popular, well-known topics are given superficial treatment with eclectic music that is, by and large, easy to listen to and well constructed. In retrospect, it is easy to see how Frasquita looks back on its composer’s past as well as ahead to his future. It is also just possible that Anna Nicole will turn out to provide both a window into past opera and a view toward where the form may go in the future.