(++) BIT OF A MESS, THIS

The Other Woman’s House. By Sophie Hannah. Penguin. $15.

      The notion of starting a story in medias res, in the middle of things, is a very old one, dating back even farther than the Latin of the phrase – to Homer’s Odyssey, which picks up in the middle and, through flashbacks, fills in what we now call the “back story.”  There is a problem, though, when an author starts not just in the middle of things but in the middle of lots of things, which is what Sophie Hannah does in her sixth novel, The Other Woman’s House.  This is a book that relies entirely too heavily on genre conventions in order to pull readers into a story involving people who are not interesting or believable enough to interest an audience on their own.

      It starts with an intriguing enough mystery: a happily married woman named Connie Bowskill (who is not really happy in her marriage, for reasons initially undisclosed) searches a real-estate Web site in the middle of the night and, when looking at a house that we know from the book’s title (but not from the narrative) somehow involves “the other woman,” spots a body during the virtual tour – a woman’s body, lying in a huge pool of blood.  Terrified, she wakes up her husband, who comes to the computer and sees nothing of the sort – just a room.  Since there are already signs that Connie is unstable, you would think the whole matter would be written off; but no, Connie pursues it by calling Detective Simon Waterhouse, who, however, is unavailable because he is on his honeymoon with Detective Charlie (female) Zailer.  So Connie talks with Detective Sam Kombothekra, whose difficult last name is mildly commented upon and who is not as good as Simon but wants to be, and who therefore takes on this matter as a sort of challenge – all of this referring back to events in previous books that Hannah has no right to assume people have read.

      Meanwhile, the honeymooners are busy not having sex, which disturbs Charlie even though she is so intimidated (or something) by Simon that she will not make the first move, but prefers to brood and become snappish; and Simon, contacted because of the mystery of the dead body that isn’t there, plays a really nasty trick on Charlie, which is apparently all right because of, again, a relationship stretching back to books before this one.

      Also meanwhile, thanks to a family scene designed to provide more background on Connie, we learn that Connie not only has a dysfunctional (but close-knit) clan but also is pretty well off the deep end, because she has no problem discussing the body she thought she saw but cannot bring herself to mention that she has been brooding about serious marital issues (which, however, may not exist) for the past six months.

      The whole first part of The Other Woman’s House is a tapestry of unbelievability mixed with silliness, with no reason whatsoever given for anyone to believe Connie’s incredible story – or for Connie to avoid seeing a psychiatrist, although she does see a homeopath who is a therapist of sorts, and who has been close to Simon (although not in that way) but hasn’t seen him for years.  And here yet again, readers are supposed to pick up on things that happened well before the start of this book.

      Flashbacks and explanations do fill in some of the background as the book progresses, but the rattletrap beginning hangs over the proceedings for quite a long time.  Indeed, if it weren’t for the fact that Hannah suddenly changes the tone and entire speech pattern of Connie a little after page 120, the book would be a hopeless mess.  But Hannah does put the whole story on firmer footing at that point, as Connie starts to reveal her marital worries to Sam; and Hannah also relies heavily on genre conventions so readers will understand that, in a mystery, what the unstable character cannot possibly have seen is going to turn out to be some sort of key to whatever is going on.  This is shortchanging readers’ intellect, true, and also short-circuiting storytelling itself, which works better when it flows naturally than when it relies on conventional treatment of a particular kind of story arc.  But within her limits, Hannah does bring the narrative on track and into focus.

So far so good, or at least so adequate.  But then Hannah makes Connie’s thinking and behavior even weirder and more bizarre, as if Connie has had (another) personality transplant, and not long before page 300, she is an entirely different character from the one she has been before – but still, under any reasonable appraisal, absolutely bonkers.  However, Hannah again relies on the conventions of the genre to make sure that this wholly unappealing character (one among many here, not excluding Simon and Charlie – she is just as venal, petty and small-minded as he) proves to be able to see things that no one else can quite understand.  The plot goes beyond straining credulity – it is laughably ridiculous, except that Hannah makes it clear that this is really serious stuff, which somehow only makes it even more absurd.

Well, readers who get past the first 30% or so of the book – particularly ones already familiar with Hannah’s style and characterization, such as they are – will enjoy seeing how Hannah pulls the people and themes together and knits the threads of the mystery into a reasonably satisfying (if never fully believable) tapestry.  The problem is that the authorial hand pulling those threads is everywhere so evident: characters are motivated to do things because the plot requires them to be motivated to do those things, not because the characters have any depth of personality that makes their actions inevitable (or even understandable).  Readers familiar with Hannah’s first five books will have a significantly easier go of it here than ones coming to her work for the first time with The Other Woman’s House, which is terribly clunky on many levels if not quite, in the end, an actual clunker.

(++++) VOCALIZING

Beethoven: Complete Songs. Hermann Prey, baritone; Pamela Coburn, soprano; Leonard Hokanson, piano. Capriccio. $24.99 (3 CDs).

Carson Cooman: Choral Music. Cambridge Consonance conducted by Jeffrey Grossman. Gothic Records. $18.99.

      The 86 Beethoven songs just re-released by Capriccio show a rarely seen side of the composer: no storming of the heights here and not much profundity, but a great deal of what would later be called “salon music” and a real attempt to create works that could be played and enjoyed by aristocratic families’ amateur pianists and singers.  The songs were written as early as 1783 (when Beethoven was just 13) and as late as 1823, but Beethoven produced little in this genre after 1816, and even his latest songs show none of the late-Beethoven style associated with his string quartets and piano sonatas.  But if there is little “great” music here, and not all that much that is distinctively Beethovenian, there is a good deal of pleasurable material, and this three-CD set provides a rare opportunity to hear a more relaxed, less heaven-storming Beethoven than the one to whom listeners are far more accustomed.  Most of the songs are in German, but Beethoven also wrote songs in Italian, French and even, once, in English.  A few subjects recur: there is the six-song cycle An die ferne Geliebte (1816) and a separate An den fernen Geliebten (1809), and the ruins of the castle Merkenstein inspired a solo song in 1813-14 and a duet in1814-15.  And there are many songs on conventional topics, ranging from love to military matters.  There are 10 songs to texts by Goethe, one of which, Flohlied des Mephisto (1799), is a real gem; there is one song for which Beethoven wrote his own text (Lobkowitz-Kantate, 1797/1823); and there is the song in which the theme of the Choral Fantasy and finale of the Ninth Symphony first appears (Gegenliebe, 1794-95).  There are a few duets and a few songs with chorus, but most of the singing is done by Hermann Prey, with all the accompaniment by Leonard Hokanson, who worked with Prey for 25 years.  The recordings date to 1987-89; Prey died in 1998, Hokanson in 2003.  Prey’s voice was not in its prime for these recordings – he was almost 60 years old when he made them – but most of the songs do not make huge vocal demands, and even when Prey sounds strained (especially in the upper register), he is expressive, and attentive to the nuances of the individual works.  Pamela Coburn, who was only in her 30s at the time of these recordings, has a light, fresh voice that is not used often enough, and she is sometimes assigned songs that would seem more appropriate for a man (such as An Laura, 1790).  For his part, Hokanson makes no attempt to give the piano a larger sound or bigger musical role than Beethoven intended, although when he does have the chance to hold forth a bit – as in the introduction to Hochzeitslied (1819) – he makes the most of it. Capriccio provides texts for all the songs in their original languages, but unfortunately offers no translations either with the CDs or online.  And in a few cases, for no apparent reason, only some of the text is included, as in Sechs Gellert-Lieder (1802-03).  A complete set of Beethoven’s songs is nevertheless a delight to have, and if many of the songs tend to blur together either musically or topically, there are plenty that stand out, whether because of their texts, their lengths or their subject matter – indeed, one of the longest is Elegie auf den Tod eines Pudels (1787, the same year that Mozart wrote a poem on the death of his pet starling).  This is likely to remain the definitive Beethoven song collection for some time to come.

      It is far too early to speak of anything definitive in the vocal music of Carson Cooman, partly because Cooman was only born in 1982 and partly because he has already amassed a catalogue of some 600 works.  Cooman works in a variety of fields, from opera to orchestra to chamber music to vocal pieces; and within each type of music, he produces works of various kinds.  A new Gothic Records CD called The Welcome News focuses specifically on an hour of Cooman’s sacred choral music, which proves to be well constructed, easy to sing, suitably sincere, and not terribly distinctive stylistically – so this CD gets a (+++) rating.  Most of the 20 pieces here date to 2009 and 2010; the earliest, Faith, Hope, Love and Ad majorem Dei gloriam, are from 2003 and 2004, respectively.  Even those two show sureness and confidence in the vocal writing; indeed, all the works here have textural richness, and all are very well sung by Cambridge Consonance under Jeffrey Grossman.  The topics of sacred choral music are, by the nature of the material, quite limited, and the primary issue with this CD is simply that 20 pieces on similar subjects and in similar style, most of them just two or three minutes long, tend to blend together.  In fact, the last and longest piece here, O Lord, I Will Sing of Your Love Forever (2010), is one of the most interesting, simply because its length (almost 10 minutes) allows Cooman some developmental time and lets him show off the choral forces in a variety of ways.  But never too much showing off – that would not fit the material.  Cooman’s choral works on this CD will be of far more interest to amateur choristers and adherents of traditional organized religion than to more-casual listeners who might want to encounter an important young voice in 21^st-century classical music.  Cooman’s instrumental music, of which a considerable amount is elsewhere available on CD, is a better introduction to his style and abilities.

(++++) IN DAYS TO COME

2013 Calendars: 365-Day—Get Fuzzy; Non Sequitur; Peanuts; Vocabulary Cartoon-a-Day; Wild Words from Wild Women. Andrews McMeel. $14.99 each (Get Fuzzy; Non Sequitur; Peanuts); $13.99 each (Vocabulary; Words).

      You may think it rather early in the year to begin contemplating the next year, but not so: we may not know what 2013 will bring politically or economically, but the one thing that is absolutely, 100% certain is that it will bring 365 days.  And we can plan for that.  And that means planning to spice those days up a bit – whether individual ones bring good or ill – with page-a-day calendars designed to evoke chuckles, guffaws, laughs, smiles, or (come on!) at least an upward twitch of the mouth.

There are plenty of ways to make the coming year more amusing, at least from a calendrical standpoint.  One way is to get a calendar based on a favorite comic strip.  Andrews McMeel has plenty of these.  You can follow the misadventures of Bucky Katt and Satchel Pooch in Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy, for example.  This will expose you to Bucky’s new movie, “Your Banana or Your Life,” in which Satchel wears a “monkey augmentation suit” but can’t figure out how to load the banana gun.  And then there is Bucky’s remark to Rob Wilco, the none-too-bright human with whom Bucky and Satchel share living space: “As far as you’re concerned, an open-minded person is anyone who doesn’t kick you in the shins.”  And Bucky deciding that “fiction” is a dangerous country – and worrying that it has invaded Tennessee.  And complaining to Satchel, “Must you always decoolify my moments of triumph?”  And…well, you get the idea.

Or maybe you prefer to get the ideas, plural.  Then try Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur, which these days does have some continuing stories – principally involving proto-Goth-girl Danae, whose father asks her to create an anti-social network and who writes a constitutional amendment that allows boys to live wherever they want on a planet far away from her.  Still, Non Sequitur also has plenty of room for non-sequential humor: a man puts on diapers and brings along a baby bottle for regression therapy; a street beggar hopes to rise from “prophet of doom” to “blowhard on radio” and eventually to “Donald Trump”; a man and woman are almost at the altar as their lawyers argue whether “obey” is a deal-breaker; a family pays a visit to “Realityland,” which is “the ride with the shortest lines at Disneyworld.”  And so it goes.

Prefer humor that is simpler, nearly timeless, and a whole lot sweeter?  Charles Schulz died in 2000, but Peanuts shows no sign of going away anytime soon.  Fans will cherish the strips reprinted in the 2013 calendar, such as one in which Charlie Brown comments that sleep “gives your cells time to recover from the labors of the day,” and Snoopy, overhearing, thinks, as he drifts off, “I have very hard-working cells.”  And one in which the kids’ baseball team is looking forward to the start of a new season “with real horror.”  And one in which Charlie Brown tearfully tries to write to his baseball hero, who has been sent down to the minor leagues.  And one in which Sally is sure she will have a good game of jacks because the plays with a golf ball – “the ball that all the touring pros use.”  All the usual characters are here – Lucy, Schroeder, Linus – and their adventures retain a freshness and, yes, naïveté that may make the inevitable pressures of the coming year that much easier to take.

 Ah, but perhaps you would prefer cartoons that give you more than a daily dose of amusement.  Then try Vocabulary Cartoon-a-Day by Martha Gradisher.  This calendar really does teach genuine vocabulary words – using cartoons to make the words more memorable.  “Hebetude,” for instance, means “the state of lethargy or exhaustion," and the cartoon shows one dog commenting of another, “The only thing that gets him out of his hebetude is the Food Network.”  A “corollary” is a proposition that follows from something already proven, and the cartoon shows a panel of judges, with one saying, “My dog ate my corollary.”  And there are plenty of cartoons here that do not involve dogs.  For example, there’s one with a frog, for “diadem,” a crown – a princess, looking at a crowned frog sitting on a lily pad, comments, “According to my manual, I should kiss anything wearing a diadem.”  And there are even some all-human cartoons, as for “muliebrity,” which means female nature or qualities: one woman sitting at a bar, scanning the available men, tells another, “My muliebrity is signaling slim pickings.”  The cartoons put this calendar a step above others teaching daily vocabulary words – or a step sideways, at least.

Take several additional steps to the side and you will find Wild Words from Wild Women.  This one is indeed all words, but you won’t miss the drawings – you’ll be too busy laughing at the comments, or sometimes thinking about them, since some are genuinely thought-provoking.  Amy Ashton: “I find low self-esteem incomprehensible.  Why hate yourself, when you can hate others?”  Gertrude Stein: “If you can do it then why do it?”  Carolyn Wells: “Advice is one of those things it is far more blessed to give than to receive.”  Zsa Zsa Gabor: “The only place men want depth in a woman is in her décolletage.”  Naomi Mitchison: “The lesser evil is also evil.”  Tallulah Bankhead: “I’ll come and make love to you at five o’clock.  If I’m late, start without me.”  Helen Hathaway: “More tears have been shed over men’s lack of manners than their lack of morals.”  These are comments that will amuse on some days, enlighten on others, perhaps even infuriate on a few.  They will certainly help prevent 2013 from being a dull year – just in case you were worried that it might not have its share of excitement.

(++++) SCIENCE BASHES ON

Technology: A Byte-Size World! Created by Simon Basher. Written by Dan Green. Kingfisher. $8.99.

Basher Science Sticker Book: Science That Sticks! Kingfisher. $8.99.

      And now there are 11 – maybe 11½ .  The Basher Science line continues to grow and continues to intrigue preteens with its presentation of facts within a manga-derived realm of characters representing the various topics under discussion.  What that means is that the books don’t anthropomorphize science concepts so much as character-ize them.  Technology: A Byte-Size World! contains representations of a microchip (envisioned as a 10-legged insect), concrete (eyes, mouth and swirl of hair on a stack of concrete blocks), a laser (seen as wearing a lab coat), a rotor (on a smiling helicopter), an ion thruster (part of a determined-looking interplanetary spaceship), and many more.  The pictures are amusing, even wry, but not so the facts.  Each page gives a three-line basic description, a couple of paragraphs “spoken” by the character, and three “just the facts” lines at the bottom.  One item at the top of the “Space Suit” page, for instance, says, “Has legs that are color-coded to identify the occupier.”  One at the bottom says, “Number of parts in a typical space suit: about 18,000.”  And the first-person material says, among other things, “My hard, fiberglass torso protects your vital organs, and a gold coating on the clear, plastic bubble helmet blocks out most radiation.”  Similarly, “Steel” says, “A mighty, heighty tower of strength, I build the world’s tallest buildings.”  One top-of-page note says, “Hard-as-nails alloy made from iron mixed with a little carbon,” and one at the bottom of the page says, “Typical carbon content: 1.2%-2%.”  But, you may wonder, what is steel doing in a technology book?  Well, “technology” is defined quite broadly here.  The book explains the spring (“This bouncy fellow stores mechanical energy when deformed”), the screw (“An axle with a sloped spiral track called a thread”), paper (“Made in a paper mill out of a mesh of tiny cellulose fibers”), and the toilet (“First flushing system: 1596”).  Of course, the book also includes computers, mobile phones, flash memory, particle accelerators, smart cards, robots and other items more conventionally thought of as technology.   But by mixing those items with the printing press, sail, battery, and wheel and axle, Technology: A Byte-Size World! helps preteens learn just how diversified the tech field is, and just what the words “technology breakthrough” would have meant at different times through the years.  Like its 10 predecessors, this latest Basher Science entry is a winner.

      And what about that “maybe 11½” comment?  Well, the half book is a whole book – of stickers, and nothing but stickers and places to put them.  There are plenty of science words in it: “hematite” on the “rocks and minerals” pages, “Oort cloud” with “Solar System,” “Tripod fish” in “Oceans,” and such amusingly drawn weather characters as a Cyclopean hurricane, a lightning-eyed thunderstorm and a smiling and puffy cloud.  Other sections are called “Planet Earth,” “Physics,” “Chemistry” and “The Periodic Table.”  The stickers are cleverly designed and fit neatly into the anime-style drawings: ghostlike talc, shivery-looking ice storm, spouting blue whale, amusingly drawn representations of force, inertia and mass, and many others – more than 60 stickers in all.  Stickers are not provided for the Periodic Table page, but every element gets its own little drawing, and the table goes all the way to element 118, although it does not include the just-approved names for elements 114 (flerovium) and 116 (livermorium).  Young readers already familiar with Basher Science books may enjoy this sticker collection, but they may be past the target age range for this book, which is for kids ages 7-10.  Those not yet familiar with the Basher approach may be drawn into it by the book of stickers – or may simply be bewildered, since the book contains no explanatory material at all.  Therefore, Basher Science Sticker Book gets a (+++) rating – it is fun to look at and ties neatly to the more-substantive books in the series, but it really is the equivalent of only half a book, lacking the content that makes the other Basher Science books so attractive.

(+++) READY, WILLING AND READING

Ballet Shoes. By Joan Holub. Illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas. Random House. $3.99.

Pretty Penny Comes Up Short. By Devon Kinch. Random House. $3.99.

Traction Man and the Beach Odyssey. By Mini Grey. Knopf. $16.99.

      Starting kids on the path to reading is always a wonderful experience – usually beginning by watching them interact with board books, start to recognize colors and pictures, and become involved in the physical activity of turning pages, pulling tabs and otherwise participating in a process they are too young to understand fully.  As children get a little older, there are various ways to get them interested in doing reading on their own.  One popular approach is the “stepped” series, such as “Step into Reading” from Random House.  Series like this one start with super-simple stories and gradually become more involved.  Ballet Shoes, for example, is a “Step 1” book for preschoolers and kindergartners, designated a “ready to read” work.  The very simple rhymed story, in large type, is about a ballet class and performance: “We do stretches./ We do bends./ We warm up/ with ballet friends.”  None of the kids is named, but they are determinedly multicultural, as is the case in many books today – Caucasian, African-American, Asian – and there is a boy in the mostly female ballet class.  Everyone smiles all the time; there is cooperation without conflict; and the last page simply says, “We are ballet stars tonight!”  Very easy to read and understand, the book also includes two pages of stickers – piano, tutu, ballet shoes, flowers – so the earliest readers can have fun that extends beyond the book itself.

      Pretty Penny Comes Up Short is significantly more involved.  This is a “Step 3” book for first through third graders, designated “reading on your own.”   The central character is Devon Kinch’s Pretty Penny, a little girl with a huge head, even bigger hair, and no visible neck – a caricature, but a charming one.  Kinch’s books are designed to teach young children about making and handling money, and that is the theme here, too; but the conflict (by this stage of reading, books have conflicts) is really an ethical rather than financial one.  Penny wants to make a donation to an animal farm, but she doesn’t have any money to donate, so she comes up with a plan to show a movie to neighborhood residents in return for donations that she will collect and pass along to the farm.  Penny gets help from several friends and, as always, from her pet pig, Iggy, who runs the popcorn stand.  But when some money falls on the floor, Iggy puts it in his hat instead of the register, and decides to keep it to buy himself some treats – after all, the money is for animals, and he is an animal.  The rest of the book is about Penny finding out what Iggy did, explaining that it is wrong, and arranging a suitable way for Iggy to earn back the money he kept – by helping out at the animal farm.  The whole book is a trifle heavy-handed, but amusing enough to keep the interest of word-oriented readers ages 5-8.

      Readers of the same age with more of a picture orientation will do better with Traction Man and the Beach Odyssey, Mini Grey’s third foray into Traction Man territory – after Traction Man Is Here! and Traction Man Meets Turbo Dog.  These are ”secret lives of toys” books, but nothing like the Pixar Toy Story movies: Traction Man and the other toys he encounters retain their blank-eyed, hard-plastic look throughout, and their adventures are decidedly mundane.  What happens in Traction Man and the Beach Odyssey is that Traction Man and his pet, Scrubbing Brush, are swept away from their family by a wave and picked up in a Beach-Time Brenda bucket by a different family; Traction Man and Scrubbing Brush spend some time in a sand castle with two dollies; and then they are rescued, somewhat messily, by playful Truffles the puppy, from Traction Man’s family.  Grey plays some amusing games here for readers, especially on the inside front and back covers.  At the front is an “ad” for “fully accessorized” Brenda “with lots and lots of stuff,” who wears “teeny tottery microshoes (doll cannot stand alone as shown)” and is available in “light pink, mid pink or sick pink.”  At the back is a Brenda adventure called “It Came from the Sea,” in which Traction Man is swept ashore and says, “I seem to have been washed up in the wrong comic strip,” after which he and Brenda encounter “something enormous” that “seems quite partial to cocktail sausages.”  These little features are funnier than the man book, but the drawings are amusing throughout, and young readers who do not need to be “stepped” into books – and who enjoy somewhat silly summertime stories – will have plenty of fun here.

(++++) IMPRESSIVE PIANISM

Idil Biret Solo Edition, Volume 3: Liszt—12 Grandes Etudes (1837). Idil Biret, piano. IBA. $9.99.

Idil Biret Solo Edition, Volume 4: Schumann—Abegg Variations; Sonata No. 2; Fantasie, Op.17; Toccata, Op. 7. Idil Biret, piano. IBA. $9.99.

David Del Tredici: Complete Piano Works, Volume 1—Aeolian Ballade (2008); Ballad in Lavender (2004); Ballad in Yellow (1997); S/M Ballade (2006); Gotham Glory (Four Scenes of New York City) (2004). Marc Peloquin, piano. Naxos. $9.99.

      The Idil Biret Solo Edition, featuring recent rather than historical performances by the Turkish pianist, is turning out to be a truly exceptional experience.  The IBA (Idil Biret Archive) label has been releasing a flood of Biret recordings in “Beethoven,” “Concerto” and “Archive” series, but the Solo Edition ones are in some ways the most impressive of all.  Biret’s handling of the rarely performed 1837 Grandes Etudes by Liszt is simply magnificent.  This set is the second of three, the first dating to 1826 (the year Liszt turned 15) and the third, which is the one almost always heard, to 1851 (the Transcendental Etudes). The difficulty level of the 1837 set is very high, the piano writing is less refined than in the later set but more youthful and daring, and the overall effect is of glitter, grit and high-octane virtuosity throughout.  The 1837 set is certainly less carefully worked through than the later one, but its sheer enthusiasm is infectious, and its keyboard writing makes up in intensity what it lacks in subtlety.  Essentially, the 1837 set is less mature than the 1851 one – and that brings many pleasures as well as a certain level of display for its own sake.  Biret’s playing in this 2011 performance is simply outstanding.  The tremendous difficulties of, for example, Nos. 5 (its tempo designated Egualmente) and 8 (Presto strepitoso) are clear but become almost irrelevant as Biret, a very cerebral pianist, thinks through the music and brings it exactly where she wants it to go.  One other example of Biret’s thoughtfulness, among many: in No. 11, at 11 minutes the longest of these pieces (and one that Liszt shortened in 1851), Biret uses sensitivity and absolute mastery of the keyboard to produce a work of gorgeous lyricism, more a miniature tone poem than a “mere” etude.  Indeed, there is nothing “mere” about any of these works – the set of 12 takes 80 minutes to play – and Biret fully plumbs the depths of the pieces’ emotions while scaling the heights of intensity and pianism that they demand.

      Robert Schumann, for one, did not think much of the 1837 set of Liszt’s etudes, preferring the 1826 version.  But Schumann came to regard Liszt very highly, dedicating his Fantasie, Op. 17 to Liszt.  This is one of the works that Biret performs on her new Schumann CD for IBA – and it really is new, having been recorded in January of this year.  The complexities and technical demands of Schumann’s music are quite different from those of Liszt, and Biret accordingly handles this music with a lighter touch and considerable attention to its structure.  The lengthy Fantasie comes across almost as a sonata, with three distinct movements, the first of which quotes Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte.  The first two parts of the work are more hectic, the third more meditative, and Biret brings out the differing sections sure-handedly and with great skill.  The Abegg Variations, Schumann’s Op. 1, are more straightforward, and here Biret opts for clarity of line and delicacy throughout, producing an altogether winning performance.  The Toccata, Op. 7, on the other hand, is a pure display piece – Clara Wieck, later Clara Schumann, used it often in her recitals – and Biret plays it for all it is worth, which turns out to be quite a bit.  She also serves the sheer drama and enthusiasm of the fourth and last movement of the Sonata No. 2 in G minor very well: this very fast rondo (marked Presto and getting even speedier toward its conclusion) is a bright and brilliant tour de force that caps a work of greatly varying moods, from the intensity of the first movement to the lyricism of the second and rather jagged energy of the Scherzo.  In some of the earlier recordings released by IBA, Biret has stood a bit apart from or above the music, thinking about it so carefully that a certain level of emotional involvement was diminished.  Not so on either of these Solo Edition CDs: Biret is fully involved in the music, highly expressive as well as totally in command of her instrument, and the result is two discs filled with excellence from start to finish.

      The excellence of the Naxos release of piano music by David Del Tredici (born 1937) is of a different sort, but one that has its roots, in a sense, in the Romantic era. Indeed, one piece here, Ballad in Lavender, quotes Schumann (Kreisleriana) rather liberally.  But the Romantic connection goes beyond that.  It was late in life that Brahms, who had stopped composing, discovered the delights of the solo clarinet, thanks to Richard Mühlfeld – the result being some of the composer’s most beautiful and elegant pieces. Del Tredici has not stopped composing, but he too has found a late-in-life performer as a muse: pianist Marc Peloquin, who commissioned S/M Ballade and is now recording all Del Tredici’s piano works – this is the first volume of a planned three-CD series.  Del Tredici is supervising the recordings himself, so they deserve to be called definitive.  More importantly for listeners, this first disc contains some very fine and interestingly constructed music.  In style, Del Tredici is a neo-Romantic, using tonality to anchor his pieces even when he deliberately violates conventions (as by having bits of Kreisleriana performed atop a persistent, dissonant and rather annoying G-flat).  The works here come from various emotional directions, and each is effective in its own way. Aeolian Ballade is a prelude and fugue, Ballad in Lavender more of a fantasy, Ballad in Yellow a song transcription, and S/M Ballade a gigantic display piece requiring tremendous virtuosity and the ability to play two differing rhythms against each other for long stretches.  The longest work here, the four-movement Gotham Glory, is a tribute to New York City that contains a prelude (“West Village Morning”) and fugue (“Museum Piece,” a clever title that refers both to the city’s museums and to the fugal form itself).  The third movement is an unusual tribute to the absent World Trade Center.  It is called “Missing Towers” and described as a “perpetual canon,” which turns out to mean that most of the movement is in two voices constantly following each other.  The biggest movement, as long as the other three put together, is the finale, an elaborate and exhilarating Grand Fantasy on Émile Waldteufel’s The Skaters’ Waltz that is a tribute to Wollman Rink and as demanding as any pianist could wish, sounding something like a 21^st-century transcription and expansion by Leopold Godowsky.  Peloquin’s handling of all this music fully repays Del Tredici’s admiration of his skill and will have listeners eager to hear the other CDs in this series.

(++++) FROM EARLIEST TO LATEST

Mozart: Early Symphonies—No. 7a, “Alte Lambacher”; “Neue Lambacher”; Nos. 6-9, 12, 18-20 (with alternative slow movement for No. 19), 45-48, 50-52, 55.  Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields conducted by Sir Neville Marriner. PentaTone. $39.99 (4 SACDs.)

Mahler: Symphony No. 9. Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks conducted by Bernard Haitink. BR Klassik. $16.99.

      A strange collection, the four-disc one labeled as “The Complete Youth Symphonies” of Mozart.  The remastered analog sound is warm and rich; the recordings, which date to 1972 and 1973, are poised, elegant, and sensitive to the techniques of Mozart’s time even though they are not period-instrument performances.  The music is delightful, whether or not it is by Mozart (the provenance of some of it remains uncertain).  But what an odd presentation.  These are not Mozart’s complete early symphonies, by any stretch of the imagination; one of them, the Neue Lambacher, is by Leopold Mozart; Nos. 45-47 may not be by Mozart at all; and No. 51 is performed twice, given the designation “K. 196/121” one time and simply “K. 121” the other.  Were the music itself not so exhilarating, were not the playing of the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields such a joy, this set would sink under the weight of its own peculiarities.  But it doesn’t, and that is testimony to the players, to Sir Neville Marriner, and above all to Mozart, whose earliest works (and these are some of them) have charm, poise and beauty even though they exhibit few, if any, of the characteristics of his later, far more fully developed symphonies.  Some of these early symphonies are in three movements, some in four, and several draw on or even duplicate overtures to Mozart’s early operas: La finta giardiniera, La finta semplice, Apollo et Hyacinthus, Ascanio in Alba, and the dramatic serenade Il sogno di Scipione.  Generally, the works not tied into theatrical performances might as well be: they partake of the lightness characteristic of the Italian sinfonia, which was interchangeable with the opera overture and was only later replaced by the sort of overture familiar from Mozart’s later operas.  Many of these symphonies are virtually indistinguishable from others of the 1760s and 1770s, but even in these early works, composed during Mozart’s teen years, some pieces stand out with exceptional balance, authoritative use of orchestral forces, and Mozart’s distinctive blend of melodiousness, harmonic assurance and absolute formal mastery.  The four-movement Symphonies Nos. 18 and 20 (both from 1772) are highlights, and so is the earlier No. 8 (1768) – Mozart’s first to use trumpets and drums.  Listeners will find much to enjoy even in the works with less of a “Mozart flavor,” and since the symphonies are intermingled on the discs in no particular order (another oddity of this set), it is enjoyable to hear one of greater maturity adjacent to one that is clearly less developed.  There is no reason for repeating No. 51, which consists primarily of the overture to La finta giardiniera, but there is a good rationale for presenting both slow movements written for No. 19, one of the weightier works here: the Andante is expressive and surprisingly intense, while the alternative Andantino grazioso treats the orchestra in an interesting way by creating a dialogue between violins and oboes, on the one hand, and the rest of the orchestra, on the other.  The numbering of these early works, incidentally, makes it abundantly clear that Mozart did not write the “41 symphonies” usually thought of as canonic, ending with the “Jupiter.”  But in fact that number, 41, has long been known to be incorrect: No. 37 is actually by Michael Haydn, although Mozart wrote the introduction to the first movement.  So one thing this beautifully played but strangely presented set shows is that there is more to the Mozart symphonic oeuvre than can be encompassed by the traditional numbering system.

      There is, by contrast, little dispute about the numbering of Mahler’s symphonies, although there is argument about whether Das Lied von der Erde is really No. 9 and whether the one given the No. 9 designation is the composer’s last symphonic word or whether that honor goes to the unfinished No. 10.  Most conductors do handle No. 9 as an 80-minute Abschied, although there is considerable disagreement on the question of whether the putative farewell to life is an anguished, resigned or nostalgic one.  Bernard Haitink, one of the great Mahler conductors,  has led and recorded this work often enough to have had a variety of different perspectives on it.  The new release from BR Klassik, a live performance from December 2011, has an exceptionally intense and heartfelt first movement, filled with grief.  From the start, this movement pulls listeners into a world of regret, which only deepens – although not quite all the way into depressive gloom – as the movement progresses. The second movement is an exceptionally effective contrast, its pastoral simplicity offering comfort through closeness with nature: the movement almost rocks the listener into repose, although, again, it never quite attains the feeling toward which it seems always to move.  The second half of this performance is not quite as effective as the first, although it is still very fine. The Rondo-Burleske is played somewhat too smoothly – the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks does not seem to know how to snarl – and although it is certainly hectic enough, it never realty becomes grotesque, even at the very end.  Therefore, when the final Adagio begins, it offers less contrast and less respite than it otherwise might.  What it does proffer, though, is gentleness and a kind of “peace that passeth all understanding.”  There is resignation here, to be sure, but it is a kind of serenity, not a sense of despair, that permeates the music.  Haitink’s pacing here may not please all listeners: the finale lasts just over 23 minutes, which is quite fast.  But the speed works once a listener grows accustomed to it – which admittedly may take a minute or two.  Haitink shapes the music so well and keeps it flowing so smoothly that the passage of time soon becomes irrelevant as he immerses himself, the orchestra and the audience in a conclusion that, far from being emotionally wrenching, eventually brings a sense of calm mixed with inevitability.  As a whole, this is a convincing and often lovely performance, very well and stylishly played, from a master Mahler conductor whose last word on Symphony No. 9 this is unlikely to be.

(++++) SPECIAL CHARMERS

Small Bunny’s Blue Blanket. By Tatyana Feeney. Knopf. $16.99.

Mario Makes a Move. By Jill McElmurry. Schwartz & Wade. $16.99.

Ollie & Moon: Fuhgeddaboudit! By Diane Kredensor. Photographs by Mike Meskin. Random House. $15.99.

Elephant Joe, Brave Knight! By David Wojtowycz. Random House. $16.99.

The Itty-Bitty Knitty Committee: An “Argyle Sweater” Collection. By Scott Hilburn. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

      There are charms aplenty in many books for children up to age seven or so – but the books are charming in different ways.  In four new ones, the focus is on what makes things and people special.  The title of Small Bunny’s Blue Blanket tells it all: just about every parent and child will know that there is one super-cuddly, super-loved item from which a young boy or girl simply cannot be separated.  The item’s slightly worn appearance is no problem; indeed, it is part of what makes the special something so endearingly comforting.  And so it is with Blue Blanket and Small Bunny.  They are inseparable on the swings, while painting and reading, while playing in the sandbox, while doing everything.  But then Small Bunny’s mother says it is bath time – for both of them.  Crisis!  “Small Bunny thought Blue Blanket was perfect the way it was,” and he runs away and tries to hide with it – but Mommy catches them both, bathes Small Bunny, and puts Blue Blanket in the washing machine for 107 minutes.  “And Small Bunny watched Blue Blanket for every single one.”  The super-clean Blue Blanket does not make Small Bunny happy: “He did not like new.”  But the two inseparables restart all their activities together, and after a while, Blue Blanket is “perfect” again.  Tatyana Feeney’s delightful story is matched by her wonderful illustrations, which are super-simple, cartoony, yet expressive – a set of amusing line drawings that convey far more emotion than would seem possible.  Especially for toddlers and preschoolers, Small Bunny’s Blue Blanket will be an immediately recognizable slice of everyday life – and a very comforting one.

      Slightly older children will get a kick (and a hop, skip, jump and cartwheel) out of Mario Makes a Move, which is all about the special moves that squirrel Mario invents, ranging from Charmed Arm to Super Looper to Upside-Down Around – all of them shown very amusingly indeed by Jill McElmurry.  But then Mario’s super-special move, the Amazing Amazer, doesn’t impress his friend Isabelle at all.  She has her own amazing move, and she shows Mario that everyone has an amazing move of some sort: the very funny two-page spread of “moves” by raccoons, a fox, a beaver, a skunk, birds, and a bonnet-wearing bear makes everything clear.  So Mario, no longer feeling special, gives up on moves and starts collecting sticks – until he and Isabelle agree to teach their special moves to each other, then combine them into “the Even More Amazingly Amazing Amazer.”  And that is how the two squirrels discover what is the most special and amazing thing of all: their friendship.

      The friendship of Ollie and Moon, two stylized cartoon cats, continues to develop in their second adventure, Fuhgeddaboudit!  After the first-book hijinks of Diane Kredensor’s characters in Paris, the two find themselves this time zipping around New York City, as Moon tries to win a bet by getting Ollie to laugh – something he likes to do, often at Moon’s antics, but just not at this particular time.  The simple plot gives the two friends plenty of chances to do silly things against Mike Meskin’s well-photographed New York scenes.  For instance, Ollie, Moon and various other cartoon animals take a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, listen to mouse musicians performing on a subway platform, and visit the main branch of the New York Public Library – where Moon tries to make Ollie laugh by trying to “tame” one of the building’s famous lion statues.  It is left to a snail taxi driver named Johnny to utter the book’s title word, but that doesn’t make Ollie laugh, and neither does a troupe of pantomiming chickens or a unicycle-riding cartoon elephant.  Moon eventually gives up – in New York, she just can’t get Ollie to laugh – but then, thanks to an incontinent pigeon (a slightly gross element that the target age group for this book will enjoy), the two friends end up laughing “until there were tears in their eyes and their bellies hurt.”  So, again, the special thing here is friendship, cemented in a series of small but pleasant adventures; and if adults won’t find the eventual laugh-provoking event particularly pleasant, that’s just because they have outgrown the Ollie-and-Moon stage.

      The adventure is different in Elephant Joe, Brave Knight!  And so is the setting, which (of course) is vaguely medieval.  But the cartoon characters drawn by David Wojtowycz look like first cousins of Kredensor’s, and the book is clearly for kids in the same age range of 3-7.  Here, though, just about everything is cartoony, from the castle moat in which Elephant Joe and his sidekick, Zebra Pete, play on inflatable floats, to the king, a tiny hippo, whose crown has been stolen by the Dark Knight.  Elephant Joe and Zebra Pete set out for the Dark Knight’s castle, passing through an enchanted forest where trees are lollipops or have cupcake fruit, listening to the occasional commentary of a frog wearing a crown (not the king’s crown, though), until they arrive at the castle and encounter not the Dark Knight but a damsel in distress – who turns out to be not at all what she claims to be.  An encounter with a dragon (who becomes cooperative when spoken to politely) turns into a speedy trip back to the king’s castle, which lies in a land that looks something like an old-fashioned board-game playing field.  Several mishaps later, ranging from a crocodile that cannot swim to a frog that turns out not to be an enchanted prince after all, the crown is back where it belongs (on the king’s head) and everyone enjoys a feast at a table set partly with cartoon drawings and partly with photographed foods and implements.  Amusingly offbeat and just slightly surreal, Elephant Joe, Brave Knight! (originally published in Great Britain last year with the slightly different title, Elephant Joe Is a Knight!) is filled with fun and silliness, all in the service of a story that shows just how special friendship and derring-do can be.

      Adults insist on specialness of a different sort in their cartoons, although the word “charm” would be stretching things in describing The Argyle Sweater, Scott Hilburn’s perpetually weird, usually single-panel creation that mashes together falsified fairy tales, peculiar pop culture and Hilburn’s own decidedly weird sense of humor.  The last of these is apparent in cartoons in which a black widow spider asks that her husband’s “leftovers” be given to her in a “to-go box,” a beaver shop teacher tells students not to eat their projects until he grades them, a vulture eating at Carrion Café turns down a menu item because it is too fresh, and Adam complains to Eve that she keeps shrinking his dry-clean-only fig leaves.  Among pop-culture entries are a “Transformers Outtake” in which a battle leads to activation of a robot’s OnStar system, a “Jurassic Pork” panel featuring pig-headed dinosaurs, a frightened-faced daisy reading “Something Wilted This Way Comes,” and a subdivided panel looking at “Seldom Seen Superhero Accessories” such as Aquaman’s towel and Hulk’s stress ball.  And then there are the takeoffs on myths, fairy tales and nursery rhymes: King Midas offers second-place Olympic athletes an upgrade of their medals, the cow jumping over the moon makes a deposit into which an astronaut steps, one of the snakes on Medusa’s head consumes the Gorgon’s pet parrot, the three little pigs look on in fear as the big bad wolf learns to use karate to break cinderblocks, and Rapunzel gets her weekly order of hair spray delivered by truck. Hilburn’s humor misfires occasionally – sometimes it is hard to figure out what point, if any, he is making – but most of the time, his writing and drawing are skewed in weirdly appropriate ways that range from the funny to the bizarre and back again.  Certainly the kids who enjoy incontinent pigeons are candidates for laughing out loud, some years later, at a Hilburn panel called “Common Dung Beetle Expressions,” in which one insect says to another, “Does a bear prepare a scrumptious, tantalizing delicacy in the woods?”

(++++) BROKEN PEOPLE

Broken Harbor. By Tana French. Viking. $27.95.

      As a mystery writer, Tana French stands out in several ways, and it is difficult to pinpoint just which one makes her books so good.  It could be her training in how to reach an audience: she acts professionally in both theater and film.  Or it could be the way she creates a world within which her characters exist, then links her books within that world – without requiring readers of one book to have read the others.  This means that Broken Harbor, French’s fourth novel, stars and is narrated by Detective Mike “Scorcher” Kennedy, who first appeared in French’s third book, Faithful Place, where he was a distinctly unpleasant character and the nemesis of that book’s protagonist, Frank Mackey.  Or it could be that French consistently delves into the motivations of her characters – what makes them who they are – and then deftly uses the characters’ personalities to bring her novels to satisfying conclusions.

      It is this last characteristic that French handles particularly well in Broken Harbor.  The title refers to a village that Detective Kennedy knows well from childhood – and of course the word “broken” is no accident, since it will turn out to apply not only to the location but also to Kennedy himself, and to others in this book as well.  The area has been rechristened Brianstown, a would-be-upscale name referring to a housing development that, because of the economic collapse in Ireland, is only partly finished and looks like a ghost town before its time.  And there are ghosts in it: those of Kennedy’s own past, as well as any that may have been produced by the gruesome triple murder of a father and two young children that Kennedy and his rookie partner, Richie Curran, are assigned to investigate.

      French gives Kennedy a distinctive and thoroughly believable voice.  For readers who remember Mackey’s view of Kennedy as a systematic, by-the-book dullard, Kennedy’s self-assessment near the start of Broken Harbor will have extra resonance: “Probably he was thinking what a boring bollix I was. Plenty of people think the same thing.  All of them are teenagers, mentally if not physically.  Only teenagers think boring is bad.  Adults, grown men and women who’ve been around the block a few times, know that boring is a gift straight from God. Life has more than enough excitement up its sleeve, ready to hit you with as soon as you’re not looking, without you adding to the drama.”  Later, Kennedy makes it clear that he has taken his life experience and turned it into a technique: “Plenty of people take me for a pompous git way too fond of the sound of his own voice, which is absolutely fine with me. Go ahead and dismiss me; go right ahead and drop your guard.”  But it is not necessary to have read Faithful Place – or French’s first two novels, In the Woods and The Likeness – to figure out that these little speeches show that Kennedy has indeed “been around the block a few times” and is about to go around it again, in unexpected ways, during his latest case.  Nor are Kennedy’s initial remarks on boredom and drama the first hint of how things are going to go in Broken Harbor, because by the time he makes them, Kennedy has already texted his older sister, Geri, about helping to “look out for” their “baby” sister, Dina, who is obviously no child – there is something going on there.

      And of course there is not just something going on – there are some things going on.  The murder investigation itself is skillfully handled in police-procedural mode, with the usual false trails – it’s pretty obvious that a voyeur/stalker, clearly a prime suspect, will not be the killer (this is one of the few ho-hum elements of French’s books: a very standard use of red herrings and false suspicions).  Kennedy, whose braggadocio and misplaced self-confidence are clear from the book’s first page, could very easily become as unattractive a character as Mackey thought him to be in Faithful Place.  But French never lets that happen.  She insists on making her narrator more sympathetic and deeper as the story progresses and the mystery, inevitably, deepens.  True, Kennedy remains a blunt and rather dull person – an occasional deviation from his straightforward narrative reads not like a previously unknown facet of his personality but like an authorial misstep: “rare as a sweet-voiced hidden bird that no one ever sees alive,” or “like a cello string when a tuning fork strikes the perfect tone to call it awake.” But bit by bit, elements of Kennedy’s past – his mother’s suicide, his sister Dina’s mental instability, his own traumatic memories of Broken Harbor – come out as the story builds, and they thoroughly humanize him even if they never make him fully likable.  More importantly – and more to the point of what makes French’s novels so good – it is Kennedy’s flawed personality, his difficult past, even his deep-seated prejudices, that lead to his approaching the murder investigation in the particular way he does, and that ultimately make it possible for him to figure out what happened.  In a wonderful bit of irony of which French is quite aware but Kennedy cannot be, this always systematic detective, thinking that he is probing a murder using correct and standard procedures, is actually moving toward the solution through a combination of intuitive leaps and personal predilections whose use he would certainly condemn if he saw them employed by anyone else.

      And this is a large part of what makes French such a standout.  The concept of “character comedy” is well known, and that of “character tragedy” dates back to the ancient Greeks, if not earlier.  What French does is produce “character mysteries” – and interlinked ones, yet.  Broken Harbor is a virtuoso performance from start to finish, with every sign that there are plenty of other splendid psychological thrillers masquerading as murder mysteries where this one came from.

(++++) FORMS OF BEAUTY

Apple Cake: A Recipe for Love. By Julie Paschkis. Harcourt. $16.99.

Ballet Beautiful: Transform Your Body and Gain the Strength, Grace, and Focus of a Ballet Dancer. By Mary Helen Bowers. Da Capo. $20.

      Sometimes a book that is ostensibly for young readers transcends its genre and goes well beyond its intended audience through sheer distinctiveness.  Such a book is Julie Paschkis’ Apple Cake, a short charmer with virtually no plot but with such lovely illustrations and so attractive an overall concept that it can be read – or rather looked at – again and again for the sheer joy of its appearance.  The story is that “beautiful, kind, brilliant Ida” is always so busy reading that she ignores Alfonso, who wants desperately to get her to pay attention to him.  But “what could be more interesting than her book?”  Well, the first time we see Alfonso, he is clutching an amazing bouquet of flowers, larger than he and Ida put together, as beautifully ornamental butterflies as big as a man or woman flutter delicately overhead.  Ida does not respond to the flowers, or to Alfonso’s serenade, so the determined and very graceful suitor – his gouache body all curves and colors – decides to bake Ida a cake.  The rest of the book shows him gathering the ingredients in utterly enthralling ways: riding a horse to a mountaintop to pick apples, cutting the apples with a sword as long as he is tall, getting butter from a sunbeam and sugar from a puffy cloud, hanging upside-down from a high tree branch to drop an egg into a bowl on the ground, diving into the ocean for a pinch of salt, then diving into the batter bowl to stir everything together.  The illustrations could easily be absurd, but they are not – or not only absurd, because they convey so much emotion and are simply gorgeous to see.  The butterflies flit about throughout Alfonso’s cake-baking quest, and in one especially lovely picture, he imagines himself and Ida transformed into butterflies themselves.  There is just the right touch of piquancy in the narrative – for example, Alfonso adds three wishes to the batter, “one bitter and two sweet.”  And when Ida peeks past her book – only her eyes showing above the binding – there is just the right touch of humor, too.  Nothing really “happens” at the end – Ida and Alfonso simply eat the apple cake together – but any reader will know that this is the start of a beautiful friendship, or perhaps much more.  A thoroughly lovely book with a delicious recipe as its foundation (and given in full at the end), Apple Cake is a treat and a joy.

      The beauty in Ballet Beautiful is of a very different type and is aimed squarely at adults.  Anyone familiar with ballet will immediately know that this is not just an exercise book but a book about grace, style and elegance, which ballet dancers have in abundance – and which they work very hard to attain and maintain.  Anyone not knowledgeable about ballet will find out very quickly just how demanding an art form it is, and just what it takes to assume some of the poses that ballet requires.  Professional ballerina Mary Helen Bowers, formerly with the New York City Ballet, now trains and tones celebrities, several of whom are quoted as endorsing her method – but that is the least interesting part of this book.  The most interesting part is the photographs of the various exercise positions, because Bowers is so poised, so closely in tune with her body, so stylish, that the photos themselves become encapsulations of the art form from which the poses and exercises are drawn.  Unfortunately, this is also the book’s primary weakness and the reason it gets a (+++) rating – and that only for readers who are willing to overlook their own comparative physical imperfections when examining the pictures and considering the Ballet Beautiful approach to toning and fitness.  Bowers tries to be encouraging, urging readers to “try it with me” as she describes some positions and including quotations like this one: “I noticed a change almost immediately when I started Ballet Beautiful.  My body felt different.  My butt and muscles became more toned.  And I discovered muscles that I never knew I had – after two weeks!  The look and feel was [sic] totally different and I felt so proud of my results.”  These comments are surely sincere, as anyone who tries this program for two weeks will find out: these stretches and extensions are hard.  Ballerinas manage to make the long, lithe look seem almost effortless, but Bowers’ forthright introduction to using ballet moves as exercise tools shows just what is involved in creating that illusion.  Only a few readers of Ballet Beautiful are going to end up looking as toned and graceful as Bowers does – it would have been much fairer (although less visually attractive) to have shown photos, perhaps before-and-after ones, of everyday non-celebrities who have tried Bowers’ approach and succeeded at it.  Beyond the fitness routines, the book is straightforward, including some recommended recipes and five “Ballet Beautiful Eating Principles” that all come with exclamation points: “Principle 2: Eat Often!”  “Principle 4: Be Flexible!”  Specific food recommendations are exclamatory, too: “Beware of Sweet Drinks!”  “Don’t Be Afraid of Carbs!”  There is nothing new to learn from the dietary portions of Ballet Beautiful, but they are not the book’s main point.  The fitness routines, which are the book’s main reason for being, are an unconventional approach to toning and shaping, and will certainly be effective for readers who can stick to them.  But just as very few dancers are capable of becoming ballerinas, very few readers who do not look like Bowers will likely have the fortitude and stick-to-itiveness to stay with this program long enough to attain significant results.

(+++) INFORMATION, PLEASE

How to Find Out Anything: From Extreme Google Searches to Scouring Government Documents, a Guide to Uncovering Anything About Everyone and Everything. By Don MacLeod. Prentice Hall. $20.

      This is essentially a list of information resources with a little bit of copy explaining how to use them.  Nothing wrong with that: it has long been a cliché that we live in the Information Age, and in fact information seems to come in an increasing flood day after day, as if we know a smaller and smaller percentage of what there is to know every time we wake up in the morning.

      Law librarian Don MacLeod has gathered a series of information sources over the past 20 years – two decades in which the nature of searching for data has changed dramatically – and offers lists of them at the end of each chapter: “Sites and Sources Mentioned in this Chapter.”  These lists are the heart of the book and the main reason to buy it – they are, collectively, a quick guide to methods of searching at specialized libraries worldwide, in records of professional associations, in filings made by corporations, and in government documents.  The lists are accompanied by discussions of ways to get more from Google by using its Advanced Search features, to track down individual people or types of people (doctors in an area where you are planning to move, for example), and to understand and make use of reference materials.

      The book’s text, though, is less valuable than its lists.  MacLeod starts with some interesting questions: “How much money does my boss make? Where is my great-grandmother buried? Who [sic] did my college girlfriend marry?”  And he strikes an appropriately explanatory note about the importance of careful searches: “Serious research is information gathering that is complex, demanding, and undertaken for a more critical purpose than finding out how tall your favorite celebrity is.  For instance, you may be conducting research to flesh out a business proposal… Or you might be a graduate student writing a paper on an emerging scientific subject… Complex research requires skill, imagination, and creativity.”  All this is true, but How to Find Out Anything is not itself very imaginatively written.  It is basically a recitation of techniques, many of them repeated word for word in larger type elsewhere on the same page – a design element of the book that quickly becomes tiresome: being told once that “the date filter is a godsend for the researcher who needs to look for time-sensitive information” is quite enough; being told twice, once in larger letters, is overkill.

      This is not to say that MacLeod’s explanations aren’t useful – they are.  So are his discussions of some information sources with which readers are unlikely to be familiar: “If you need to contact a company that makes some quotidian products like zippers, then ThomasNet is where you’ll find the info. This unprepossessing site holds a masterfully designed database of company information… Even when you don’t have [a] specific question in mind, it’s fun to browse the site just to see the range of very weird objects for sale.”  On the other hand, MacLeod’s treatment of more-familiar data sources is not particularly revelatory: “The advent of social networking tools has introduced an entirely new way of locating individuals.”  “If your local [library] branch doesn’t keep a particular book in its collection, you can request it from another library that does.”  MacLeod’s own creativity comes through better in sections such as the one about tracking down an organization’s E-mail convention, then sending messages to various possible addresses: jsmith@thejonescompany.com, johnsmith@thejonescompany.com, john.d.smith@thejonescompany.com. “If you’re wrong, the email bounces back,” writes MacLeod. “If not, the address is probably a valid one.”

      MacLeod’s brief discussions of how to use research sources will not turn readers into expert investigators overnight.  But at a time when “to Google” is a well-known verb, the basics of information search will already be familiar to readers of How to Find Out Anything.  Adding them to the end-of-chapter lists of familiar and less-familiar data and search sites will give readers a good foundation for finding a great deal of information on a great many subjects, if perhaps not quite, as the book’s lengthy subtitle claims, “anything” about “everything.”

(++++) IN OLDEN TIMES

Haydn: The Creation. Amanda Forsythe, soprano; Keith Jameson, tenor; Kevin Deas, bass-baritone; Boston Baroque conducted by Martin Pearlman. Linn Records. $34.99 (2 SACDs).

Los Ministriles in the New World. Piffaro, The Renaissance Band. Navona. $16.99.

Bruckner: Symphonies Nos. 8 and 9. Vienna Philharmonic and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch. Music & Arts. $29.99 (2 CDs).

      The brilliance and beauty of Haydn’s 1798 oratorio, The Creation (Die Schöpfung) come through most clearly when the work is performed on period instruments by an ensemble of appropriate size that is well-versed in the style in which this monumental hour-and-a-half work was written.  Actually, the “appropriate size” issue is the least significant one, since The Creation was played at the time Haydn wrote it by orchestras with widely differing numbers of players.  But using the correct instruments, playing in the correct style, and ornamenting the arias with understanding and musicality – these are real keys to the success of the work.  Boston Baroque, under Martin Pearlman, holds all those keys and knows how to use them to unlock the manifest beauties of the score: the group’s performance is outstanding.  The Creation was written to a German text, but an English one was provided in Haydn’s time and is sometimes used; the booklet with the Boston Baroque performance includes both texts, but the actual singing is done in German – which is more appropriate and fits the musical lines better.  And the lines themselves are wonderfully brought out by the 40-person orchestra.  Haydn’s tone painting in The Creation is sometimes dismissed as naïve, other times deemed a highly effective handling of the words.  Pearlman clearly finds it very admirable, and brings out, with care, everything from the amazing portrayal of chaos that opens the oratorio to the sounds representing specific elements of creation (from the brilliant C major chord for “light” to the sequences tone-painting individual animals) to the unusual (for Haydn’s time) inclusion of trombones and contrabassoon within the ensemble.  Lovely, melodic, carefully shaped and nicely ornamented singing by Amanda Forsythe, Keith Jameson, Kevin Deas and the 25-member chorus fits beautifully and fully idiomatically within the sound world that Haydn created, resulting in a mixture of fervor and beauty that makes the rather ordinary text shine through, again and again, with style and grace.  Hearing this performance transports the listener back in time to an age when Haydn’s music was fresh, new and exciting, providing a chance to hear The Creation with all the joy and wonder that Haydn so successfully packed into it.

      A trip even further back in time – 30 trips, actually, one for each track – is offered by Piffaro, The Renaissance Band, on a CD entitled Los Ministriles in the New World.  There is a fascinating premise underlying this beautifully played recording: Spanish composers of the 16^th and 17^th centuries bringing their works to the New World and being influenced, in their turn, by Indian and African music.  Few, if any, of the composers here will be known to listeners; they include such names as Antonio de Cabezón (c. 1510-1566), Diego Ortiz (c. 1510-1570), Francisco Lopez Capillas (c. 1615-1673), Hernando Franco (1532-1585), and Cristóbal de Morales (c. 1500-1553), as well as a number of anonymous works.  And none of these pieces is of particular depth or duration: they last from one to four minutes.  But there is beauty aplenty in these brief items, and Piffaro provides a fascinating journey through the many styles of music from this time period, from entertaining dances and songs to uplifting motets and masses.  There is no particular order, chronological or in terms of content, to the CD, and no particular relationship between one piece and the next.  And it does not matter.  Collectively, these works show the musical dynamism of the New World from 100 to more than 250 years before the establishment of the United States as an independent nation, during a time when Spain was the region’s dominant colonial power.  The period-music sound of Piffaro and the inherent charms of these small gems transport listeners to an age of refinement and elegance, as well as one of conquest and ferocity – all built upon a religious foundation that some of these pieces make explicit and that others simply take for granted.  The experience of this CD is an involving and salutary one.

      The times are not chronologically as “olden” as those of Haydn or Spanish composers of the 16^th and 17^th centuries in a new Bruckner recording, but in some ways the interpretative distance that listeners will travel when listening to Hans Knappertsbusch’s recordings of the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies is longer than that traversed when listening to Boston Baroque or Piffaro.  Those two ensembles make every effort to reproduce the sound of the music they play through instruments and interpretations that are in accord with the practices of the times when the music was written.  Knappertsbusch’s Bruckner goes the other way – and as a result opens a sonic window to the past that is very different from those through which we see and hear Classical and Renaissance music.  These are live Bruckner performances, the Eighth with the Vienna Philharmonic from October 1961 and the Ninth with the Berlin Philharmonic (and an unusually noisy audience) from January 1950.  And they are performances in which Knappertsbusch (1888-1965), as was his wont, uses the first editions of the symphonies – editions now long discredited for errors and inconsistencies – and modifies those editions to try to bring out what he considers to be Bruckner’s intentions more clearly than the scores themselves do.  Nowadays this approach is sacrilege, even in the case of Bruckner, whose “real” intentions are impossible to know for many of his oft-rewritten symphonic works.  But in Knappertsbusch’s time, which was also that of such other famed Bruckner conductors as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Eugen Jochum and Jascha Horenstein, there was nothing untoward about modifying this composer’s “difficult” and even “turgid” scores to make them “clearer.”  It is therefore with a different set of ears (so to speak) that listeners must approach a recording like this one – hearing it within its time, if possible, rather than as a throwback from our own.  And on that basis, Knappertsbusch’s performances are remarkably involving, just as he intended them to be.  He varies tempos frequently, sometimes pauses before a big climax (that is, pauses at times other than those at which Bruckner indicated a pause), and does not hesitate to choose speeds that are considerably at variance with those of other conductors of his time (as, for example, in the Scherzo of the Ninth).  He adds or removes elements for effect, and he uses portamento liberally (especially in the Ninth) – an approach that is actually more authentic than that in more-recent recordings.  Ultimately, the only fair way to judge these Knappertsbusch recordings is on their own terms: do they communicate effectively?  And the answer is decidedly yes: they are broad and dramatic by turns, always intense and committed, and (despite the execrable sound, especially in the Ninth) uniformly well-played.  What they communicate is not really Bruckner; certainly not Bruckner as we now know him from modern critical editions.  Call this “Bruckner-prime,” then, or call this “Alte Bruckner” and more-modern performances “Neue Bruckner.”  By any name, Knappertsbusch’s performances are intelligent, committed and worthy ones, redolent of a time long gone in musical terms even though, historically, they are little more than half a century old.