(++++) MAHLER’S MARVELS

Mahler: Symphony No. 1; Webern: Im Sommerwind. SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg conducted by François-Xavier Roth. Hänssler Classic. $18.99.

Mahler: Symphony No. 3. Michaela Schuster, alto; Mädchen und Knaben der Chöre am Kölner Dom, Damenchor der Oper Köln and Gürzenich-Orchester Köln conducted by Markus Stenz. Oehms. $29.99 (2 SACDs).

Mahler: Symphony No. 9. Badische Staatskapelle Karlsruhe conducted by Justin Brown. Pan Classics. $21.99 (SACD).

      When Mahler wrote rather plaintively in 1902 that “my time will come when his is finished,” he was speaking of Richard Strauss, master of the late-19^th- and turn-of-the-20^th-century tone poem and, not coincidentally, a composer highly focused on the profitability of what he wrote.  Mahler was better known in his time as a conductor, did his composing almost entirely in summertime breaks from his conducting duties, and had little expectation that his vast symphonies and unusual cycles of songs with orchestral accompaniment would be to audiences’ tastes during his lifetime.  He was proved wrong, to an extent, with the success of his Symphony No. 8, but in fact it was not until half a century after his death in 1911 that Mahler’s works, championed by conductors including Bruno Walter and (especially) Leonard Bernstein, moved into the standard repertoire.  These compositions are now so firmly cemented there that it is hard to imagine them fading from public consciousness, even though there really are so few of them.  One of the most amazing things about Mahler is that he wrote so little – yet almost everything that he did write, except perhaps for the single surviving piano-quartet movement and Das Klagende Lied – is played again and again, all over the world.

      The result of this intensifying interest in a small number of works has been a tremendous rise in the quality of performances, to the point that readings of the Mahler symphonies today are generally at a level unimaginable when Walter and Bernstein made their recordings.  Conductors study Mahler as carefully as they study Beethoven, and it shows in releases like the new ones of Mahler symphonies by François-Xavier Roth, Markus Stenz and Justin Brown.  These are all exemplary, thoughtful, beautifully played renditions that reveal anew the depths of the music – which, like Beethoven’s, still seems to have even more elements that can be brought forward in the future.

      Roth’s Mahler First starts slowly and very softly indeed, the first movement opening in a magical landscape and then flowing beautifully into the world of Des Knaben Wunderhorn.  This movement builds well throughout, with especially fine brass and percussion.  The second movement is quick, propulsive and so lively as to be almost perky – scarcely an adjective usually associated with Mahler.  The third movement is especially well done, with a pervasive sense of the wry and sarcastic.  The images here are funereal but not dismal, and the satirical “oom-pah” section is particularly well handled.  Thanks to the fine quality of the recording, the movement fades away very gradually to inaudibility, with the result that the bursting forth of the opening of the finale is genuinely startling – as Mahler wanted it to be.  This movement, which meanders and can all too easily lose its way, is beautifully proportioned here, with the strings of the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg being especially impressive.  Roth’s attentiveness to detail is remarkable, too – for example, the full-orchestra rest about three minutes into the movement is as dramatic in its own way as the tutti elsewhere, the silence seeming even more amazing in a live recording, which this is.  The finale strides boldly to the end and makes an exciting and wholly satisfactory conclusion to an extremely fine performance.  Roth also offers here a kind of “what might have been,” Anton Webern’s Im Sommerwind, which interestingly bridges the gap between Strauss and Mahler in some ways (leaning more toward the former) and which shows how Webern could have composed if he had not become an ardent adherent of Schoenberg and a minimalist par excellence.  This thoroughly Romantic tone poem, which Webern called an “idyll,” was written in 1904 – 15 years later than the first performance of the first version of Mahler’s Symphony No. 1.  It is as much a throwback in some ways as Webern’s later music was to be a look into the distant future.  Roth brings out its sectional changes effectively, offering wonderful attention to detail, and the orchestra – particularly the horns – plays with great beauty.  The pairing of these works is an intriguing one, and the performances are of the highest caliber.  The one flaw here is Hänssler Classic’s incorrect timing for the CD: it runs just over 66 minutes, not the 76-plus listed.

      Stenz’s Mahler Third is at just as high a level as Roth’s Mahler First.  Stenz is proving to be one of the best Mahler conductors of the present day, with so sure a hand for the pulse and the meaning of the music that his performances are both exciting and revelatory.  The gigantic first movement of the Third gets a brisk and bold opening, with a very big sound from the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln and a strong march rhythm.  The low strings are especially impressive throughout a movement that flows from element to element with rare confidence, seeming far better connected and less episodic than it often does, thanks in part to superb SACD sound that brings out every detail of the playing.  The second movement, gentle and flowing, gives way to a beautifully balanced third movement in which Stenz pays close attention to changes in dynamics – and the orchestra offers a posthorn solo that is not only beautifully played but also surprisingly wistful.  Alto Michaela Schuster is intense and passionate in the Nietzsche text of the fourth movement, whose darkness is contrasted exactly as it should be with the lithe and quick fifth, where Stenz brings the brass – especially the trumpets – to the fore, providing as much lightness as there was dark in the prior movement.  Oehms gives the texts only in German – a consistent irritation from this company, for English speakers – but Stenz’s conducting makes the emotional contrast of the movements abundantly clear.  And the emotion of the finale sums up and ties together everything that has come before.  Starting delicately and in quietude, this movement is conducted more quickly than usual, but except in a few sections, it does not feel fast: the overall impression is that Stenz is more focused on the second and third parts of the tempo designation – Langsam. Ruhevoll. Empfunden. – than the first: this is music that is calm and heartfelt to a greater degree than it is simply slow.  Stenz builds the movement surely and carefully to a highly involving climax and conclusion, scaling emotional heights that are simply breathtaking – and cathartic.

      Justin Brown and the Badische Staatskapelle Karlsruhe are not as well-known in Mahler interpretation as the other performers considered here, but they will be if this reading of the Symphony No. 9 is indicative of their abilities.  Like Roth’s Mahler First, this is a live recording; like Stenz’s Mahler Third, it is blessed with SACD sound that lets the conductor bring forward every nuance of the music.  And Brown discovers and brings out a very substantial number of them.  The horns are especially impressive in the first movement, where the sense of yearning is almost palpable from the start.  The movement builds in intensity and emotion, the exceptionally clear sound being of particular value in measures where the percussion bursts through either strongly or – at least as impressively – with delicacy.  The second movement’s sense of grotesquerie is particularly clear here, with Brown focusing on the angularity of Mahler’s rhythms and highlighting the music’s dissonances.  And then comes the frantic, near-hysterical energy of the third movement, which constantly sounds as if it going to veer off-track but never does – not even when it comes that close to going out of control at the very end.  Listeners will be so breathless at this point that the very broad opening of the gorgeous finale will be a genuinely startling contrast.  Here the strings excel, but the winds are equally wonderful, especially in the chamber-music-like sections on which Brown dwells lovingly, balancing the substantiality of the music’s emotionalism with minimalist expressiveness that is amazingly forward-looking.  This movement proceeds on ocean-like waves of inevitability, swelling and subsiding on its way toward a very gentle ending that proffers the peace, not of death (as in some other performances), but of transcendence and acceptance.  This is a gorgeous and deeply meaningful conclusion that makes one hope for more Mahler from Brown and his orchestra – and, for that matter, from Roth and Stenz as well, since all show convincingly in these recordings that Mahler’s time to be understood, analyzed and emotionally explored has most certainly, even gloriously, arrived.

(++++) UNABASHEDLY ROMANTIC

Brahms: Symphonies Nos. 1-4; Variations on a Theme by Haydn; Academic Festival Overture; Tragic Overture. Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrew Manze. CPO. $50.99 (3 CDs).

Dvořák: Symphony No. 7; In Nature’s Realm; Scherzo capriccioso; Slavonic Dance, Op. 46, No. 8. Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by José Serebrier. Warner. $18.99.

Verdi: Complete Ballet Music from the Operas. Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by José Serebrier. Naxos. $19.99 (2 CDs)

      No matter how fashionable it becomes in some circles to scoff at Romantic music and the endless public taste for it, there is always room for another cycle of great and grand 19^th-century symphonies – provided that the conductor has something new to communicate in what could otherwise be thrice-told musical tales.  Andrew Manze’s Brahms cycle for CPO is a perfect argument that there is no such thing as too much Romantic music out there, because even with the innumerable alternative Brahms recordings, of the complete symphonies and individual ones, this performance by the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra stands out.  Manze is a remarkably thoughtful conductor and an exceptionally perceptive one; moreover, he knows how to translate his careful analysis of the music into performances that are gripping, emotional, exciting, dramatic and structurally impressive.  Manze is young (born in 1965) and a fine violinist; perhaps these two characteristics help explain the enthusiasm he brings to these well-known works and the marvelous clarity he calls forth through a combination of sensitive orchestral balance and carefully chosen tempos that he tries to bring into conformity with what Brahms himself would have wanted (which generally means faster outer movements than other conductors offer – and, frequently, more-leisurely slow ones).

      Manze’s Brahms is the opposite of heavy-handed or turgid.  This is music that lives and breathes, and it sounds livelier and far more pellucid than the Brahms symphonies usually do.  It is also music filled with elegance and lovely details – the woodwinds in the third movement of Symphony No. 1, for example, and the deliberately lighter-than-usual (but very effective) treatment of the timpani near the end of the introduction to the finale.  This symphony is paired on its disc with the Haydn Variations, which are rhythmically sure, beautifully balanced and structurally solid: the orchestra’s middle voices, which so often disappear in performances of Brahms, come through quite clearly here, and the music is both richer and more colorful as a result.  Manze does employ some rubato in a few of the variations, but he does so judiciously and in ways that successfully emphasize certain instrumental details without impeding the forward flow of the music.  The first movement of Symphony No. 2 has absolutely lovely flow and warmth, but is far more transparent and less heavy-handed than in many other performances; and it contrasts beautifully with the heartfelt Adagio non troppo.  This symphony’s finale is even more ebullient than usual, too.  The CD continues with an excellently played Tragic Overture that emphasizes drama and intensity rather than portentousness, and an Academic Festival Overture that positively bubbles with good spirits.  Symphony No. 3, the most tightly knit of the four, here has more individuation among movements than is typically the case, thanks to Manze’s tempo choices and his careful balance of orchestral sections – the emphasis on the lovely wind parts in the Andante, for example, and the solid focus on brass in the finale.  And Symphony No. 4 stylishly displays its roots in Bach, with a clean sound all the way from the poised and graceful first movement through the elegantly proportioned finale.  Manze’s interpretations may not be to all tastes: they are quite different from the massively proportioned Brahms symphonies that are far more often heard.  But they represent something fresh and distinctive in the interpretation of these quintessentially Romantic works, and indeed in some ways are a return to an approach that Brahms himself would have recognized more readily than the frequently overblown readings to which his symphonies have so often been subjected.

      José Serebrier is a better-known conductor than Manze and a far more experienced one: born in 1938, he made his New York conducting debut in the year that Manze was born.  A Dvořák cycle by Serebrier is certainly a Romantic-era offering to anticipate and ought to be one to celebrate.  But something is going wrong with this usually perceptive conductor’s readings with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.  The first volume of the sequence, featuring the ubiquitous “From the New World,” established some quirks that the second volume confirms, and not to the music’s benefits.  Serebrier has apparently decided to combine each symphony with some of the composer’s shorter works, creating a kind of recorded “concert program” with the symphonies being central.  There is nothing wrong with this – it is an interestingly creative approach – but the specific works chosen do not seem to have been picked very thoughtfully.  Each of the first two volumes opens with a Slavonic Dance, which is fine as a “curtain raiser.”  But the new Warner recording follows the symphony with In Nature’s Realm, the first of the three tone poems that Dvořák collectively called “Nature, Life and Love,” and then does not follow with the second and third such works (Carnival and Othello) but with the Scherzo capriccioso.  Serebrier himself contributes a booklet note mentioning the three tone poems and so is certainly well aware of their interrelationship; undoubtedly Carnival and Othello will show up eventually.  But why not here?  Strange.  Furthermore, and this is the real disappointment of this series so far, Serebrier’s interpretations are well below the level of his capabilities.  Scherzo capriccioso is taken mainly at an Andante tempo that pulls this ebullient work back instead of letting it plunge forward.  In Nature’s Realm drags even more – this is nature struggling to emerge from a soporific state and potentially putting the audience into one.  The orchestra’s playing is quite good, the musicians clearly giving Serebrier what he wants; but what he wants just does not serve the music well.  As for the symphony, which is Dvořák’s most deeply emotional: the third movement is excellent, well-paced and deep, and the finale is mostly effective despite one unnecessary ritard.  But the first movement never gels, and the second features capricious tempo variations that may be intended to emphasize the emotional content but serve only to strangle it.  Serebrier is capable of much, much better interpretations than these, but seems unwilling to let Dvořák’s music flow and develop according to the scores; and by trying to add to the composer, he subtracts instead.  This release will be worth a (+++) rating to those who admire the orchestra’s playing and the impressive handling of the second half of the symphony, but only a (++) rating to those with higher expectations of this conductor.

      Those looking for confirmation of how good Serebrier can be in Romantic music need look no further than a fascinating (++++) Naxos release in which Serebrier – again with the Bournemouth Symphony – presents all the ballet music from Verdi’s operas.  Ballet scenes were required by certain opera houses (notably the Paris Opéra) as a condition of mounting works there, and composers complied by writing music ranging from the inspired to the fairly dull.  Occasionally, a balletic element of an opera has not only survived but has become more popular than the opera itself – the “Dance of the Hours” from Ponchielli’s La Gioconda comes immediately to mind.  But more often, the ballet scenes – which were, after all, usually occasional pieces rather than integral to the works containing them – disappeared after a while.  Even ballets written by composers with real skill in dance forms, such as the one Johann Strauss Jr. created for Die Fledermaus, have largely evaporated.  But now we have a fascinating recording, and a very well-performed one, of ballet music from Otello, Macbeth, Jérusalem (a reworking for Paris of I Lombardi alla prima crociata), Don Carlo, Aida, Il trovatore and I vespri siciliani.  The Aida and Otello ballets are still heard, at least from time to time, and the half-hour “Four Seasons” ballet from I vespri siciliani has survived, but that is about it.  Perhaps because this two-CD set offers less-familiar music rather than works as well-known as those in his Dvořák series, or perhaps because he likes to include the ballet music when he conducts Verdi operas, Serebrier does not attempt to turn these works into more than they are or twist them in any particular way – he lets them flow naturally, which means listeners can simply hear how Verdi wrote in a form that was not especially congenial for him: concert music.  Some of this material fits the operas quite well: the short Aida dances, for example, are actually worked into the stage production, and Verdi carefully conceived the Otello ballet music to go with a particular series of dances (however awkward the concept of a ballet is in this opera’s third act).  Other music here stands well on its own for the simple reason that it has nothing in particular to do with any stage action.  Sometimes lively, sometimes sensual, always well-constructed and often quite interesting its own right (although not all the time), Verdi’s ballet music shows a side of the composer with which many listeners, including regular operagoers, will not be familiar.  It also shows a side of Serebrier with which listeners are familiar, and one that will hopefully re-emerge as his Dvořák sequence for Warner continues.

(++++) CITY STORIES

Laundry Day. By Maurie J. Manning. Clarion. $16.99.

The Little House. By Virginia Lee Burton. Houghton Mifflin. $16.99.

The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse. By Paul Galdone. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $8.99.

     A tale of big-city tenements told with surpassing innovation and in celebration of the now-old-fashioned notion of the American “melting pot,” Maurie J. Manning’s Laundry Day is the deceptively simple story of a young boy who finds a red cloth when he heads out of his apartment into the crowded streets to try to make a little money by shining shoes. Manning sets the time in the early 20^th century by showing horse-drawn vehicles and period clothing, and makes the boy’s poverty evident through his repeated unsuccessful attempts to find someone’s shoes to shine. But instead of dwelling on problems, this boy looks up from the curb in wonder – in a beautifully drawn scene showing how the buildings and clotheslines appear from below – when a long piece of red cloth flutters down onto him. Putting his supplies behind some boxes for safekeeping, the boy takes the fallen fabric and starts climbing up from the street to the apartments in the closest building, trying to find the cloth’s owner and encountering someone of different ethnicity each time he rises higher. He helps a Chinese woman fold laundry, but the cloth is not hers; he shimmies across a clothesline to ask a prospector who is reading about the Klondike if he lost the cloth, and helps retrieve the man’s hat when it blows off, but again, no luck; the cloth does not belong to the Ukrainian family with the new baby, the Italian organ grinder, the four Polish girls – it doesn’t seem to be anyone’s. Manning does a wonderful job portraying the different households and showing the shoeshine boy interacting with kids and adults alike as he climbs, higher, ever higher, eventually connecting with a Jamaican lady who claims the cloth – it is her headscarf – and brings a little magic into the boy’s life after he shimmies down the drainpipe to get back to the street. Laundry Day is an entrancing book and a very unusual one, with a clear sense of time and place, of hustle and bustle, of the immigrant experience, and of the sheer joy of a journey through multiple cultures.

     A city tale of a different sort, The Little House is now 70 years old and as sweet a fable as ever. Virginia Lee Burton (1909-1968) based the book, which won a Caldecott Medal, on her own house; the new, 70^th-anniversary edition includes a CD with two readings by Lorraine Lee Hammond (one with page-turn signals, one without, both with music composed by Hammond), plus an introduction by Burton’s son, sculptor Aristides Burton Demetrios. The ancillary material is fine, and often informative – for instance, Demetrios points out the way Burton kept the house in the same place on each page for almost the whole book, having things happen around it while maintaining its centrality. Still, it is the original words and pictures that Burton created that are the main attraction here. The story goes back even further into the past than does Laundry Day, to a time when the house was out in the country, happily watching the seasons change – a time when the city was distant, a time well before the “horseless carriage.” Burton imagines how a country house might have felt, if it could feel, as the city began to encroach on it, as roads were built, housing developments sprang up, and “everyone and everything moved much faster now than before.” And then “no one wanted to live in her and take care of her any more,” Burton writes, with the personalization that is a hallmark of the book; and after many years, the Little House is actually surrounded by the much-expanded city, where “everyone seemed to be very busy and everyone seemed to be in a hurry,” until eventually “her paint was cracked and dirty” and “she looked shabby” amid skyscrapers, cars, buses, elevated trains and lots and lots of people. But there is a happy ending in store for the Little House, and the final line of the book, “all was quiet and peaceful in the country,” brings this “once upon a time” story full circle in a blend of nostalgia and wistfulness that is as lovely today as when the book was first published in 1942.

     The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse is an even older tale, based on one of Aesop’s fables and reimagined by Paul Galdone in a book originally published in 1971. The attractive new edition gives today’s children a chance to see Galdone’s colorful illustrations and to follow his version of the story, in which the elegantly dressed town mouse refers to the country mouse’s home as a “dismal place” and the food as “rustic fare,” luring his old friend to town – and to court – with tales of “dancing and feasting and all kinds of merriment.” So the humble country mouse – dressed like a friar, in a plain brown robe tied with rope – heads to town with his friend, and indeed encounters a table where “there were creams and jellies and sweetmeats,” fine cheese and delicious champagne. But there are also threats, with which the town mouse is quite familiar but the country mouse is not: Galdone’s drawings of the open-mouthed, large-fanged cat and the scowling servants (seen from mouse height) clearly communicate the country mouse’s terror. The country mouse realizes, in a typical Aesopian moral, “‘What good is elegance without ease, or plenty with an aching heart?’” And so he heads home to “the peace and quiet of his cottage,” the same peace and quiet that Burton’s Little House finds at the end of that book. Cities do have their pleasures, but for the Little House and the country mouse, they are not worth the tradeoffs – although certainly Laundry Day shows the humane side of city life (old-fashioned city life, to be sure) to very good effect.

(++++) BUNNY FUNNIES

A Big Boy Now. By Eileen Spinelli. Illustrated by Megan Lloyd. Harper. $16.99.

The Easter Bunny’s Assistant. By Jan Thomas. Harper. $12.99.

     Kids will be kids, but bunnies can be kids, too. The little rabbit in Eileen Spinelli’s A Big Boy Now is a stand-in for every human child, ages 4-8, on the cusp of doing something more grown-up than what he or she used to do. The book starts with the bunny explaining that he can now get dressed, make his bed, pour his breakfast cereal, even wash his bowl by himself, “because I am a big boy now.” He can play at the playground, help his father wash the car, share with friends and his sister – do lots of “big boy” things. But what about riding his bike without training wheels? Well, the bunny decides to find out, and all goes well for the first part of his big-boy ride – until he loses his balance, the bike falls over, and he scrapes his knee and elbow. Crying, the bunny runs home to Mom, hurt as much by the notion that he really isn’t a big boy as by the accident itself. A little reassurance and a few bandages later, though, he feels better, and has to decide: put the training wheels back on the bike, or no? The way he makes the decision and decides that he is, after all, a big boy, provides a happy ending to a book that will help parents when their own little bunnies (the human type) get some cuts and scrapes while trying to prove what big boys or girls they are. Megan Lloyd’s expressive and brightly colored illustrations help make Spinelli’s tale of growing up (at least a little bit) even more enjoyable to read.

     The rabbit is a very specific one in The Easter Bunny’s Assistant, but it is the assistant who quickly becomes the focus of Jan Thomas’ Easter-egg-coloring book for ages 2-5 – because the assistant is a skunk, and when he gets excited, he…well…stinks. And he keeps getting excited as the Easter Bunny gives step-by-step information on “how to make beautiful Easter eggs.” Skunk gets excited when the Easter Bunny hard-boils the eggs…and when he makes dye to color them…and when he talks about using crayons to decorate them. So Step 4 of the Easter Bunny’s instructions is, “Remove skunk from room (push if necessary).” But the Easter Bunny feels sorry for Skunk, who is right outside the window, knocking on the glass, and eventually the two friends figure out a way to handle Skunk’s excitement and work on the eggs together. The book ends with more-detailed step-by-step instructions on making Easter eggs, suitable for use by human “Easter bunnies” and their parents…but not for skunks. A pleasantly offbeat seasonal book, The Easter Bunny’s Assistant combines an amusing story with simple, enjoyable instructions that should please kids and parents alike.

(++++) WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM THEIR FRIENDS

Big Nate and Friends. By Lincoln Peirce. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

The Adventures of Sir Balin the Ill-Fated. By Gerald Morris. Illustrated by Aaron Renier. Houghton Mifflin. $14.99.

No Such Thing as Dragons. By Philip Reeve. Scholastic. $6.99.

     Sixth-grader Nate Wright, king of detention and self-importance, can’t do it all (whatever “it” may be) on his own. That is why he has Francis and Teddy, his best friends – and Artur, who is friends with everyone but whose unforced niceness Nate can’t stand; and Gina, who as the top student in Nate’s class is friends with teachers but definitely not with Nate, a slacker-in-training if there ever was one. And there you have Big Nate and Friends, the latest collection of Big Nate comic strips by Lincoln Peirce (pronounced “purse”), who says he himself was a budding cartoonist back in sixth grade – just like Nate. Unfortunately, we don’t get Nate’s cartooning efforts (most notably “Dr. Cesspool”) in this particular collection, but we get plenty of other Nate-isms: Nate as a peer counselor, using honesty to help his fellow students (one helpful comment: “Your breath smells like a sack of dead fish”); Nate as Monopoly master, building hotels on railroads because he is “an entrepreneurial visionary”; Nate in ecstasy when he sees a lawn sign indicating that his nemesis, Mrs. Godfrey, has moved, and then in agony when it turns out she has only moved across the street; dog lover Nate and cat lover Francis competing with each other in a series of canine and feline clichés; Nate relaxing by “hitting myself in the head with an empty two-liter plastic soda bottle” and saying to an incredulous Francis, “Don’t try to pretend like you haven’t done it.” Peirce establishes Nate’s personality so well that readers will quickly realize what he is going to do even before he does it; but Peirce also makes sure to mix things up a bit from time to time. For instance, in one sequence here, Nate actually bests Gina on a test, getting a 96 to her 94 -- until she looks at his paper and discovers that Mrs. Godfrey made a 10-point error, so Nate should have gotten an 86. Gina tells Mrs. Godfrey – who, however, lets Nate keep his grade because she is the teacher and grading is up to her, not to Gina. And in fact, Mrs. Godfrey – who is a very good teacher even though Nate dislikes being challenged by her – gives Gina detention for her attempt to get Nick’s grade lowered, leaving Nate with a big, self-satisfied smile and the thought, “This is the happiest day of my life.” By playing Nate mostly to type but occasionally against it, and surrounding him with recognizable characters against whom his personality shines (or, as the case may be, is tarnished), Peirce makes sure that Nate has plenty of friends not only in school but also among readers.

     Sir Balin has friends, too, and he certainly needs them in Gerald Morris’ The Adventures of Sir Balin the Ill-Fated. This is the fourth book in an easy-to-read series of short novels that Morris calls The Knights’ Tales (the three previous ones dealt with Sir Lancelot the Great, Sir Givret the Short, and Sir Gawain the True). All the books are sendups of Arthurian legends, and all are packed with silliness and filled with amusing illustrations by Aaron Renier. Sir Balin’s problem is – well, he has several. For one thing, his older brother is named Sir Balan, creating instant confusion for everyone except their mother, who insisted on the nearly identical names. For another, just after Balin’s christening, a dire prophecy is uttered by the Old Woman of the Mountain, whose failure to specify what mountain leads Morris and his characters also to call her the Old Woman of a Mountain Somewhere, the Old Woman of Some Mountain, the Old Woman of an Unknown Mountain, and so on; you can see how this works. In any case, the old-woman-of-whatever says Balin will be known as the noblest knight in England, but will bring misfortune on all his companions; will do marvelous deeds, “but they will only serve him ill”; will strike “the Dolorous Stroke,” a phrase whose meaning no one seems quite to understand; and so forth. Balin’s adventures involve fulfilling the various prophecies in unexpected ways, or perhaps not fulfilling them at all, thanks to such friends as his brother (whom he unexpectedly encounters in the midst of one adventure) and the Lady Annalise, who is a Questing Lady, which means she goes along with knights on their knightly quests and helps them do some of their derring-do (unlike her sister, who is “off at school now, studying to be a Damsel in Distress”). Balin’s adventures involve obtaining a second sword to go with the usual knightly one, encountering and eventually defeating an invisible knight, getting trapped into a fight that is supposedly against a villain but that is really a game arranged by some unscrupulous villagers, and more. At the end, Balin and Balan and their parents and Lady Annalise come to realize that the whole prophecy business is just so much bunk, except when it isn’t or when it’s convenient to pay attention to it and act as if it makes sense. The non-moral of the story is as much fun as the story itself, which means it is very enjoyable indeed, and not a bit dolorous.

     The derring-do is a great more serious in Philip Reeve’s No Such Thing as Dragons, originally published in 2009 and now available in paperback. And the friendships are on the decidedly peculiar side. The story is about Brock, a knight in rusty armor who goes from village to village conquering dragons – except that he knows they do not exist, so he is really a con man or, at most, is conquering the fear of dragons. On his travels, Brock buys a young mute boy named Ansel from the boy’s father, and the two make an odd but logical pair, since Ansel, who is also unable to read or write, cannot let anyone know that Brock is a phony and dragons are not real. Except…maybe they are. The two come to a mountain village where a young girl has already been taken from her mother to be given to a dragon that the villagers say lives on the nearby peaks. Brock and Ansel pick up a third compatriot – another con man, Flegel, who is posing as a friar – and plan to pretend to defeat the dragon, then claim their reward from the villagers and the local nobility. But they run into an unexpected sort of reality, and it is not the reality of other books about dragons and knights. It turns out that Reeve imagines a dragon as neither more nor less than a vicious, frightening animal, having some traditional dragon characteristics, but for animal reasons (for example, it hordes shiny objects as a magpie does, not out of some mystical attraction to gold). This dragon is not to be trifled with – it attacks and eats horses and even a person – and the scam artists (with the addition of Else, the girl who is supposed to be sacrificed to the monster) have to confront both the beast and the wintry conditions in which it lives. This is a book with equal parts of action and characterization (Reeve seems genuinely interested in why Ansel is mute and in showing that there is good in Brock even though he has been making his living dishonestly); and it is one in which friendships blossom in unexpected places and through unlikely acts of courage – which certainly show bravery, but not in the ways that readers are likely to expect. It turns out that there is indeed such a thing as a dragon, but more importantly, there are such things as human relationships, boldness and compassion.

(+++) WITCHY BUSINESS

Beswitched. By Kate Saunders. Delacorte Press. $16.99.

The Witch’s Revenge. By D.A. Nelson. Delacorte Press. $16.99.

     Magic is all well and good, but it cannot carry a story all by itself. There have to be characters doing the magic, or having it done to them, and for a book to be effective, readers have to care about those characters. That is the issue with Beswitched: it is hard to care very much about Kate Saunders’ central character, 12-year-old Flora Fox. Flora is a spoiled 21^st-century preteen who is selfishly upset about being sent to boarding school so her parents can go to Italy and take care of her ill grandmother, bringing her to their home in England. Then, instead of going to Penrice Hall, Flora finds herself magically relocated to a school called St. Winifred’s and to the year 1935. Far from marveling at what has happened, Flora is mainly worried about losing access to computers, cell phones and her favorite hair-care products – she is really rather whiny and superficial. Flora has to adjust to clothing and customs with which she is completely unfamiliar, and she does get used to things after a while; she also has to handle homesickness and some of the mean girls at school – issues for every generation. Eventually Flora settles in with a group of friends who start to experiment with the same sort of magic that brought Flora to St. Winifred’s in the first place. So…will Flora find her way back to her own time? Will she mature, and learn more about herself, through her magical time travel? Why was she brought to the past in the first place? These are really very ordinary questions for a book of self-discovery, and Flora is not a sufficiently interesting or admirable character to hold the book together: she does progress and grow somewhat, but she remains an immature complainer for too long, making it hard to care as much about her as Saunders wishes. The settings of Beswitched, which is intended for ages 10-13, are well pictured; Flora’s roommates (Pogo, Dulcie and Pete) are interestingly portrayed, tending to overshadow Flora herself; and the ending has a nice twist and a certain amount of poignancy. But Beswitched is not as involving as it could have been with a more admirable central character, or simply one who seemed to start with greater potential for depth and develop into a person more deserving of empathy and admiration.

     The witchery is of a different sort in The Witch’s Revenge, a sequel to DarkIsle that was originally published as DarkIsle: Resurrection and is aimed at readers ages 8-10. The book will make little sense to anyone who has not read its predecessor, which was D.A. (Dawn Ann) Nelson’s first novel. The first book introduced 10-year-old Morag, whose cruel foster parents locked her in the house’s cellar. There, she heard voices and, following them, met a talking rat named Aldiss and a talking dodo bird called Bertie. She went with them on a journey to their kingdom, where the evil Devlish (certainly evil with that name!) was bent on conquering the world. Together with the pygmy dragon Shona and other helpers, Morag and her newfound friends had to steal the Eye of Lornish and defeat the warlock. The basic plot of DarkIsle was thoroughly unsurprising, although the way Nelson leavened it with humor was attractive. The Witch’s Revenge is also unsurprising and, unfortunately, less amusing. Essentially, having once saved the magical kingdom of Marnach Mor, Morag and her friends need to save it again: Devlish may be gone, but his daughter, Mephista (another obviously evil name), is very much alive, and bent on getting even with Morag and her companions. Mephista is given to typical evil-witch tirades: “‘When we captured [wizard and magical-kingdom leader Montgomery], the town began to fall apart. One seems not to be able to survive without the other. How delicious is that? I get to destroy not only you, but that place as well, and all the Goody Two-shoes who live there!’” Yes, thank you, we know, we know. Mephista has been stealing magical objects, Morag is having frightening dreams, and matters have generally been deteriorating in ways that are extremely easy to anticipate. Rat, dodo, dragon and girl must somehow battle back from an apparently hopeless situation to defeat Mephista, despite the added strength the witch has gained from stolen magic. And of course the good characters succeed – and, also of course, Morag learns of her true lineage, which is as royal as can be expected; and she is even more-or-less reunited with her parents, whom she is determined to rescue in the next book of this series. Many fans of DarkIsle will enjoy this further-adventures tale even though so much of it is predictable, but its fairly ordinary good-vs.-evil plot and standard quest elements prevent it from being much more than a reasonably well-written genre entry.

(++++) WELCOME SELF-PROMOTION

Bach: Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 1-6. Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. Tafelmusik Media. $18.99 (2 CDs).

Vivaldi: The Four Seasons; Sinfonia in B minor, “Al Santo Sepolcro”; Concerto for Four Violins, Op. 3, No. 10. Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. Tafelmusik Media. $16.99.

Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra: The Galileo Project—Music of Vivaldi, Lully, Monteverdi, Tarquinio Merula, Michelangelo Galilei, Biagio Marini, Purcell, Rameau, Handel, Telemann, Zelenka, Silvius Leopold Weiss, and Bach. Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. Tafelmusik Media. $24.99 (CD+DVD).

     So many music organizations have started their own labels in recent years that there almost seems to be a proliferation of the equivalent of vanity-press projects. But there is good economic reason for orchestras and other entities to produce material themselves instead of turning it over to large national or international recording companies: costs for a relatively limited number of items sold can be better controlled by these small producers, the orchestra keeps whatever it makes from the sales instead of having to split the proceeds, and the amount of marketing can be adjusted based on what the performers themselves (and their management) believe each release warrants. The big issue, distribution of the finished product, is much easier to solve than it used to be, thanks in particular to Naxos, whose “distributed labels” include a large number of small niche products, given economy of scale through Naxos’ international distribution network and benefiting from Naxos’ own strong commitment to classical music through the CDs and DVDs it produces under its own label.

     One of the new niche labels in the Naxos orbit is also one of the most welcome. Tafelmusik, the excellent Canadian period-instrument ensemble, has created Tafelmusik Media to release its new recordings and re-release some of its older ones (often originally Sony Classical products). This label’s first three offerings are so good that their appearance bodes well for the label’s future. Most of the music on all three releases is well-known, but playing of this quality and with this level of commitment to the works’ original style is not. These are exceptional performances that offer attractive warmth in presentation to complement the accuracy of playing on period instruments and carefully made copies.

     There are many recordings of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, and many are quite good, but Tafelmusik’s, recorded in 1993-94 and originally released in the latter year, is exceptional. Music Director Jeanne Lamon, playing violin in the first five concertos and viola in the sixth, picks tempos carefully, balances instruments even more carefully, and propels the music with a superb sense of its underlying dance rhythms as well as a deep-seated understanding of the conventions of ornamentation, double-dotting and instrumental balance. Tuned to a pitch of a’=415 Hz and blending with subtlety and real style, the instruments provide just the right mixture of verve and warmth, and the solo elements – from the recorders in Concerto No. 4 to the harpsichord in No. 5 – emerge naturally from the chamber ensemble, the soloists then blending back in with their fellow players seamlessly as their front-and-center roles are concluded. There are occasional small elements here that are not quite authentic and are not ever explained – for example, Alison Mackay plays a violone in No. 6, but in No. 3, which also calls for one, she plays a contrabass instead. Nevertheless, the performances are so good and so thoughtful that it seems certain that Lamon and Tafelmusik have good reasons for their decisions, even if they do not share all of them.

     The decisions are equally well-thought-out in Tafelmusik’s splendid recording of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. Lamon is the soloist here, taking a more forthrightly virtuosic role than in the Bach works – as she should, since Vivaldi wrote these pieces for his own performance, which contemporaries found to be quite attention-getting (although they did not always mean that as a compliment). There are some oddities in this release as in the Bach – both positive and negative. On the plus side, the booklet contains the four sonnets that Vivaldi provided as guides to the music (and may have written himself; their provenance is unclear). Also a plus – a big one – is the inclusion of two additional works, the brief but deeply heartfelt Sinfonia “Al Santo Sepolcro” and the four-violin concerto, Op. 3, No.10, here performed with one player per part and sounding beautifully balanced as a result. On the negative side, that concerto is twice identified erroneously (on the back cover and in the listing of movement timings) as being Op. 4, No. 10, although elsewhere it is correctly identified. Also on the negative side – to some ears – will be the tuning of the instruments here to a’=440 Hz, which is essentially modern tuning. There is a reason for this, and the booklet explains what it is, but it seems odd to have the Bach and Vivaldi works offered with different tunings and, as a result, different levels of brightness (the Vivaldi solos certainly ring out more clearly than those in the Bach). This Vivaldi CD dates to 1991, but its sound does not seem to be 20 years old, and fits the music just as well as does the style of the performers.

     The most unusual of these first Tafelmusik Media releases may prove to be something of an acquired taste, not because of the music but because of its multimedia structure. The Galileo Project takes just under an hour of music (offered on a CD) and combines it with a series of images from Canadian astronomers and the Hubble telescope, for a kind of “fusion” show lasting an hour and a half (presented on a DVD). Packaging that gives listeners/viewers the option of hearing the music on its own or in the context of the visual presentation is a wonderful idea, and the show’s narration and choreography – intended to commemorate Galileo’s first demonstration of the telescope; hence the project’s name – complement the works nicely, although they do tend to push the musical experience well into the background. The music itself has been chosen to reflect the astronomical theme, ranging from Phaeton excerpts by Lully to an Allegro by Telemann, an Adagio ma non troppo by Jan Dismas Zelenka, and brief works by several little-known composers of the 17^th and 18^th centuries (that is, during and not long after Galileo’s time). Seekers of complete pieces will find few of them here: the musical selections were chosen and guided by the theme of the visual display. Nevertheless, bass player Mackay, who picked the music and was in charge of putting the show together, chose the works wisely and well, and she and the other members of Tafelmusik perform them with just as much aplomb as they bring to, say, Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos or Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. The concept of The Galileo Project is scarcely unique, but the amazing visual images, the way the program is put together, and the very fine instrumental playing that pervades it, make the whole thing a most worthwhile experience, whether heard on CD or viewed as it was intended to be when first presented to the public in 2009. Tafelmusik Media has set itself high standards for its releases with this initial crop; but then, the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra players always set high standards for themselves, and consistently live up to them.

(++++) TWENTIETH-CENTURY DIRECTIONS

Respighi: Complete Orchestral Works, Volume 1—Feste Romane; Fontane di Roma; Pini di Roma; Gli Uccelli; Suite for Strings; Suite in G for Strings and Organ. Antonio Palcich, organ; Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma conducted by Francesco La Vecchia. Brilliant Classics. $11.99 (2 CDs).

Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin (complete ballet); Concerto for Orchestra. Seattle Symphony conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Naxos. $9.99.

Orff: Carmina Burana. Mädchenchor Hannover, Knabenchor Hannover and NDR Radiophilharmonie conducted by Eiji Oue. Rondeau. $18.99.

     The works on these three new releases were composed within a short period of time, from 1902 to 1945, but what a fertile time it was! Respighi, Bartók and Orff took music to very different places, partly because of their respective Italian, Hungarian and German heritages and partly because of their personal predilections. Brilliant Classics has embarked on a very interesting project of releasing all the orchestral works by Respighi, with the first two-CD volume containing a mixture of familiar and less-known material. The Suite for Strings of 1902 and Suite for Strings and Organ of 1904-06 are the earliest works here and are firmly neoclassical in orientation, with Respighi applying some of the same techniques he was later to use in the three sets of Ancient Airs and Dances (1917, 1923, 1931). The six-movement Suite for Strings uses a pattern dating back to Telemann’s time, although the elaborate first-movement “overture” here is a Ciaccona with no fewer than 17 variations. Respighi chooses keys and themes to give his work greater unity than its models generally had, but the work’s overall style clearly reflects an older time. The Suite for Strings and Organ is in four movements, of which the deeply felt second, marked Aria, is especially expressive. Respighi’s neoclassical interests are felt even more strongly in Gli Uccelli (“The Birds”) of 1927 – a well-known work portraying the dove, hen, nightingale and cuckoo through arrangements of music from the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Francesco La Vecchia leads the Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma with all the verve and spirit that this music invites – and also brings great understanding and rhythmic flair to Respighi’s wonderfully scored Roman Trilogy, although it is a bit odd that Feste Romane (1928) is here offered before rather than after Fontane di Roma (1916) and Pini di Roma (1924). The three tone poems are musically unconnected but are very strongly interrelated in that each is a tour of scenes of Rome within a specific framework (architecture, broadly considered, in the two earlier pieces, and the population in Feste Romane). La Vecchia handles the varying elements of these pieces with considerable skill, and the orchestra seems so thoroughly familiar with the music that the sections balance and contrast with each other seemingly effortlessly. As often happens with Brilliant Classics releases, there are a few oddities, here ranging from the decision to place Feste Romane before the other tone poems to an apparent inability to decide whether Jacques de Gallot (one source of music for Gli Uccelli) died circa 1685 or 1695 (the latter is correct). The music itself, though, is quite wonderful, and the performances are top-notch – listeners will eagerly await the next release in this Respighi series.

     What a contrast between Respighi’s work in the 1920s and Bartók’s! While Respighi was exploring the past, Bartók was defiantly looking ahead both musically and thematically in The Miraculous Mandarin, orchestrated in 1924 although composed in 1918-19. The piece was not performed until 1926 and was too much even for Weimar Germany, being banned after a single performance in Cologne and not heard again during the composer’s lifetime. Filled with dissonances and strange, barbaric rhythms, the work – described as a pantomime rather than a ballet – has a gritty setting and an unpleasant story focused on sex and death as metaphors for intuitive behavior and the corruption of modern civilization. There are three thuggish tramps, three seduction attempts by the girl they are prostituting, and three attempts to kill the strange mandarin who desires the girl but can find fulfillment with her only at the cost of his own death. There is nothing of Tristan und Isolde here, though, for there is no love and only a crude yearning conveyed through intensely impulsive music in which a fugato is used to show the mandarin chasing the girl despite the thugs’ attempts to stop him. Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony (with the Seattle Symphony Chorus in part of the work’s climactic scene) do a fine job with the rattling sounds and ever-changing rhythms of the work: this Naxos recording, of a 1988 performance originally released by Delos, has held up very well indeed. So has the 1989 performance of Bartók’s last completed major work, the Concerto for Orchestra, which also gets a rousing, even exuberant reading here. This piece is a real workout for every section of the orchestra – it certainly deserves its title – and the Seattle Symphony mostly rises to the occasion, despite sounding a touch ragged here and there and not really possessing the full, rich string warmth that the Elegia calls for (the finale, taken very fast, is especially exciting). All in all, this is a highly satisfying performance of a work that is less forward-looking than The Miraculous Mandarin but offers a more accessible combination of folklike, contrapuntal and highly virtuosic elements.

     Yet for sheer drama, the 1945 Concerto for Orchestra does not measure up to Orff’s Carmina Burana, which was first heard eight years earlier. Although this piece is actually the first part of a triptych (the other works are Catulli Carmina and Trionfo di Afrodite), it not only overshadows the two later works but also stands above pretty much every choral work of its time. Even after 75 years, it retains unmatched freshness, rhythmic vitality and an absolute brilliance of scoring that is in its own way a match for Respighi’s – and Respighi was one of the 20^th century’s greatest masters of orchestral color. Orff’s pounding rhythms, his insistence on static repetition as a developmental device (rather than musical metamorphosis, the guiding principle of classical works for hundreds of years), produce a piece that lies easily on the ear but has a feeling both of complexity and of atavism. Eiji Oue’s version with the NDR Radiophilharmonie is a simply marvelous one. This live recording from 2008 not only features superb orchestral playing and excellent choral work, but also includes three soloists who are really involved in the music and quite willing to emote with an intensity that mirrors that of the orchestra: soprano Heidi Elisabeth Meier, tenor Jean-Sébastien Stengel and baritone Stefan Adam. Meier’s Dulcissime, Stengel’s Olim lacus colueram and Adam’s Ego sum abbas are just three highlights among many. The rhythmic intensity is compelling throughout this performance, and the contrasts between the gigantic full-choral sections and the delicacy of such segments as Chum, chum geselle min are fully exploited to produce a performance that ranges from the thrilling to the emotionally moving. There is, however, one flaw in the Rondeau release: no texts are included, and Carmina Burana really needs them – this is not mere noise but a carefully arranged set of celebrations of springtime, life and love, and listeners need to know that in order to appreciate the work fully. Yes, the texts can be found in various places online, but they really ought to be included with the CD. Aside from that omission, there is almost nothing negative to say about a performance that mixes jubilation and thoughtfulness in appropriate measure and thrillingly conveys Orff’s vision for this deservedly famous choral work.