(++++) MANY DOLLARS AND SOME SENSE

The Best Value Colleges, 2013 Edition: The 150 Best-Buy Schools and What It Takes to Get In. By Robert Franek, Laura Braswell, David Soto, and the Staff of The Princeton Review. Princeton Review/Random House. $21.99.

     The lesson of Princeton Review’s annual The Best Value Colleges book is that it is better, when it comes to higher education, to be very rich or at least moderately poor. That is how you get the best possible education with the smallest impact on the rest of your life.  That is not the intended lesson of this well-researched, plainly written book, which explores factors including academics, cost and financial aid at 650 colleges and selects 150 among them as offering the best value.  But reading only a little bit between the lines of these nearly 500 pages makes it clear that colleges get to be among the best in part because of the generosity of their financial-aid packages – “need-blind admissions” and all that.  The ability to allow children from families of modest means, or even out-and-out poverty, to get a top-quality college education is a major accomplishment for many of these schools and a major strength of the higher-education system in the United States.  And of course, families with considerable wealth can simply pay what it costs for their children to attend the schools – a $60,000-a-year cost may seem modest to them, especially in light of all the doors that a top-of-the-line college education can open.

     Left out of all this – in the book and in society in general – is what happens to families that scrimp and save diligently for 18 years after a child is born, managing to piece together enough money to pay for the child’s college education at a modestly priced school, but not enough to afford one of the absolute top-tier ones.  These families are the forgotten middle, because they cannot pay retail prices for these schools but also do not qualify – because of income, assets or both – for the extremely generous subsidies that the top schools offer to people who have done a poor job, or none at all, of saving for college.  As in some of the nation’s most-expensive cities, the very rich can afford the cost of living and the poor are well subsidized so they too can live there, but the vast and struggling middle group gets no help and little attention, much less sympathy.

     Someone should write a book about the best colleges for the children of those families, but that book is not this one.  This is a book for families that want the best education their money can buy – or the best that other people’s money can buy for them. As such, The Best Value Colleges, 2013 Edition is a highly valuable resource, although it is primarily a quantitative one: it does include numerous comments from students on what they like about their schools, but those comments tend to become repetitious after a while, indicating only that top schools generally have pretty satisfied students attending and also require a considerable amount of hard work.  The old and admittedly now archaic (if not obsolete) idea that college should “complete” a person, turning him or her into a more fully aware human being, is missing here, being unmeasurable. But costs, SAT scores, academic rankings, lists of most-popular majors and special study options, numbers indicating selectivity – all those and more are here, page after page and school after school.

     The Princeton Review (which is not, by the way, affiliated with Princeton University) has this year anointed Swarthmore College as the No. 1 value among private colleges in the country, followed by Harvard, Williams, Princeton, Pomona, Yale, Rice, Hamilton, Claremont McKenna and Grinnell.  A typical comment in the book is this, about Pomona: “The financial aid program here is exceedingly generous and goes beyond just covering tuition, room and board, and fees, for which Pomona can and does meet, [sic] 100% of students’ demonstrated financial need.”  That “demonstrated financial need” phrase occurs again and again, in multiple guises – so families should be sure they can demonstrate financial need (don’t have jobs that are too good or do too well at saving or investing!) to take advantage of aid that, in Pomona’s case, more than covers the $56,000-a-year cost.  Or consider the top 10 public universities, if you qualify for aid or live in those schools’ states and therefore are eligible for the comparatively modest in-state tuition costs.  The University of Virginia is No. 1 for 2013, followed by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, New College of Florida, College of William and Mary (another Virginia school), UCLA, North Carolina State, University of Wisconsin-Madison, State University of New York at Binghamton, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, and University of Georgia.  The difference between in-state and out-of-state tuition at these schools can be as much as $100,000 over four years, so some enterprising families may want to think about relocating if the parents’ work makes that possible – not that this book recommends that, but when it comes to college planning, anything creative is worth considering.  That includes thinking about the 10 tuition-free colleges discussed in this book: the five U.S. military academies plus Berea College, College of the Ozarks, Deep Springs College, Cooper Union and Webb Institute.  These are scarcely practical for the vast majority of people: the schools get vast numbers of applicants and have very specific orientations.  For example, Berea will not admit students whose parents can afford to send them elsewhere; Deep Springs has only 28 undergraduates; Webb is only for students of naval architecture and marine engineering, and has just 81 undergraduate students.  Still, learning about these colleges is interesting, and they will clearly be right for some people.

     And that is ultimately the best takeaway from The Best Value Colleges, 2013 Edition.  Many of these colleges will be out of reach, academically or financially, for many families, but they do show a cross-section of the very best educational opportunities to be found in the United States.  Even families that cannot aspire to the schools in this book – because they have not enough money or have too much to get the colleges’ generous financial-aid packages – can find out here what makes these colleges so special, and can use that information to help track down other, more-affordable or otherwise more-practical colleges that will also provide an excellent education. The reality is that, a few years after college ends, the specific college that someone attended ceases to matter except at networking events or when the development office comes calling to seek large donations to fund those super-generous financial-aid packages. There are many, many places to get a good, even a top-notch, college education today; and in fact there is no real consensus about how to determine the lifetime value of attending college, and therefore how to figure out what “best value” really means.  So The Best Value Colleges, 2013 Edition represents only one approach to the whole college search – a very well researched one that is very well presented, to be sure, but still only one way to look at the subject.  Figuring out how your family wants to look at the issue is ultimately what matters. This book can help, but it cannot make that decision for you, any more than it can help you pick which specific one of these colleges it would be best to attend – if any.

(+++) REAL AND IMAGINED

Hide and Seek. By Kate Messner. Scholastic. $16.99.

Seven Wonders No. 1: The Colossus Rises. By Peter Lerangis. Harper. $17.99.

Never Say Die. By Will Hobbs. Harper. $16.99.

     Preteen adventure novels often start in the real world and twist things one way or another. Hide and Seek, the first book in a new series by Kate Messner, is set realistically in the rain forests of Costa Rica, where protagonists Anna, Henry and José encounter a number of real-world animals and see various sights that any visitor can see for himself or herself: narrow, swaying river bridges, gigantic trees in which howler monkeys and birds make a racket, snakes both harmless and deadly, and of course torrential rains.  But the plot itself is beyond the ordinary. The three young adventurers are junior members of a group called the Silver Jaguar Society, whose mission is to protect the world’s important artifacts – such as the society’s own Jaguar Cup, which it turns out has been replaced by a forgery. This discovery is what sets Anna, Henry and José off to Costa Rica and to all the usual questions endemic to so many adventure novels. Who is really on their side? How do they find trusted allies in unfamiliar terrain? And is there a traitor in their group?  Good guys and bad guys alike are something less than fully formed characters here – the exotic setting is more interesting than the people placed in it: José “spotted another lump of old fruit with a  dead leaf resting on top and stretched out his foot to give that one a good boot, too. But before he kicked, the dead leaf took off with jerky, fluttering wings – blue wings.”  That leads to this: “It was like the glass frog, camouflaged against its own eggs, the giant iguanas with skin like bark, draped invisibly over tree limbs. The owl in the moonlit forest. All hiding in plain sight.”  And of course, that is a clue to the mystery – courtesy of the place where the search is taking place.  Other clues come from a misidentified bird and a baby monkey.  The bad guy here, Vincent Goosen (“this awful man – this thug”), does not get away with his nefarious scheme, but of course he does get away, so he can mastermind another plot in the next book, Manhunt.

     The real-world element is even thinner in The Colossus Rises, first book of a seven-book sequence  by Peter Lerangis, who is probably best known to preteen readers for the two books he wrote in The 39 Clues sequence and the one he wrote for The 39 Clues: Cahills vs. Vespers. Lerangis is actually a very prolific author, for adults as well as young readers, and he certainly knows how to pace a formulaic thriller, which is what The Colossus Rises is. There is a secret organization in this book, as in Messner’s, but here, at first, there is just one protagonist: Jack McKinley, who is 13 and has only six months to live – because of a genetic anomaly that is, however, capable of being handled if he goes on a suitable quest. This involves Jack joining three other young adventurers – Marco, Aly and Cass – in a search for seven magical objects that have been lost for thousands of years at the sites of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  These objects, called Loculi, need to be found and returned to...well...Atlantis (so much for the real world).  And the search needs to be completed before the four friends’ abilities destroy them. Yes, abilities – not diseases. The rare genetic abnormality inherited from a long-dead prince (apparently after skipping a few hundred generations but losing none of its potency) actually gives those born with it superior abilities, but it provides them too quickly, and the young people’s bodies cannot handle the changes.  This is the gimmick. Well, lots of gimmicks – the plot is nothing if not gimmicky.  It is also written in what is clearly an adult’s version of how young teenagers talk and think: “‘Well, excuse me for living.’ …I felt like a total jerk. I hadn’t meant to sound so sarcastic. Things were too tense. I was letting my nerves get the better of me.”  There are the usual mysterious clues to follow, the usual dangers to overcome, the usual relationship issues (mild ones), and the usual worries about the people supposedly helping the four protagonists: “We had to humor him like a kindergartner – while Cass was in the talons of a flesh-eating beast.”  Speaking of humor, most of it, like that juxtaposition, is unintentional.  The climactic eventual awakening of the Colossus will surprise no one familiar with teen-oriented adventure novels; nor will anyone be surprised that things do not quite work out for the central characters, who after all have six more books to get through.

     Nick Thrasher is lucky to get through one book. He is the protagonist of Will Hobbs’ Never Say Die. Fifteen years old and already an accomplished hunter among his Inuit people, Nick loses the caribou he has brought down to a most unusual creature: a “grolar” bear, so called because it appears to be a cross between a grizzly and a polar bear. This is not, as it happens, an unrealistic part of the book, because grolar bears do exist, both in captivity and in the wild. A wild one was identified in 2006, and a second-generation one (product of a female grolar bear and male grizzly) was confirmed in 2010.  What pushes Never Say Die beyond realism is a common trope of stories about large and dangerous animals (just think of Jaws): this grolar bear seems to be hunting Nick.  What happens is that Nick gets a letter from a half-brother he has never met, a former river guide who is now a famous wildlife photographer. This half-brother, Ryan Powers, wants to get pictures of migrating caribou, and to do so intends to raft the Firth River, near Nick’s home. Ryan also wants to learn about climate change in the Arctic – this is a book with a significant ecological subtext.  The quest in this book is interrupted soon after it begins, though, when Nick and Ryan are thrown into the frigid river beneath solid ice. The book quickly changes from one of exploration to one of survival: “By now I was coming out of the immediate shock, enough to get a grasp on the situation – complete disaster. …No more than two miles down the river, we’d lost everything. Everything!”  Soon Nick and Ryan are in the midst of mosquitoes, wolves, grizzlies and a distinctly hostile natural environment.  They make it through the worst of all that and resume their caribou hunt, but become increasingly worried about the grolar bear, “a creature of climate change,” in a scientist’s opinion, and a very dangerous animal, in the opinion of Nick and Ryan.  The two also have time to discuss issues such as the possibility of offshore oil platforms in the far North, whose presence, Nick points out, “would bring jobs and better houses and things to buy, but it might hurt the fishing and the sealing and the whaling.”  The grolar bear turns out to be a man-eater, but Hobbs finds a way to minimize that, having Ryan say that “the climate has become a beast, and we are poking it with sticks.”  The inevitable final confrontation with the bear is certainly exciting, but Hobbs really wants the point of the book to be larger than that of a standard adventure tale, and that fact drags at the narrative throughout. The story raises some significant issues, but the real-world elements and the invented-adventure ones end up as an uneasy mixture, not an especially effective blend.    

(++++) INNOVATORS

Berlioz: Overtures—Le Corsaire, “Béatrice et Benedict,” “Les Francs-juges,” Le Carnival romain, Waverley, Le Roi Lear, “Benvenuto Cellini.” Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew Davis. Chandos. $19.99 (SACD).

Alkan: Recueils de Chants Nos. 1-3; Une fusée—Introduction et Impromptu. Stephanie McCallum, piano. Toccata Classics. $12.99.

James Adler & Friends: Music of Leo Ornstein, James Adler, Paul Turok, Seth Bedford and Franz Liszt. James Adler, piano. Ravello. $15.99

Hope Wechkin: Music for Voice and Violin. Hope Wechkin, voice and violin. Ravello. $13.99.

Richard Cornell: New Fantasias; Tracer; Images; Acqua Alta. Boston Musica Viva conducted by Richard Pittman; Peter Zazofsky, solo violin. Ravello. $16.99.

     Berlioz’ music is so mainstream nowadays that it is easy to forget just how much it stretched listeners’ ears when he wrote it. One of classical music’s most-skilled orchestrators, Berlioz was perhaps the most Romantic of the Romantics, and his approach to form and style was so different from others’ that few listeners today even realize that he wrote four symphonies – none of which bears a number. The four are the Symphonie Fantastique of 1830, Harold in Italy (essentially a symphony with viola obbligato) of 1834, the choral Roméo et Juliette of 1839, and the ceremonial and rather backward-looking Grande symphonie funèbre et triomphale of 1840 (written originally for 200 winds – talk about innovation!).  Listening to seven Berlioz overtures, both concert and pre-opera, in the splendid performances by the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under Sir Andrew Davis, is an effective reminder of just how unusual Berlioz’ approach to musical structure and sound was.  Like Rossini’s, Berlioz’ overtures often – but not always – fall into the same pattern: in Berlioz’ case, a strong and quick opening followed by a broad, yearning and very beautiful theme, and then expansion and development coupled with the introduction and use of other thematic material.  Davis manages to make the similarities of several of these overtures a strength, because one thing Berlioz did not do was orchestrate them the same way – allowing Davis, thanks in part to Chandos’ superb SACD sound, to bring out some wonderful touches, from a delicate emergence of flutes in Le Corsaire to some really remarkable use of timpani in Les Francs-juges, which also contains one of the most meltingly beautiful melodies that Berlioz ever wrote.  Whether portraying an idealized Roman carnival, plumbing the emotional depths of Shakespeare’s King Lear (which Berlioz never saw on stage), or introducing operas such as Béatrice et Benedict and Benvenuto Cellini, Berlioz unerringly combined melodiousness with emotional impact and packaged the result in apt and frequently stunning instrumental garb.  Later excellent orchestrators, such as Rimsky-Korsakov, owe a great deal to the effects that Berlioz thought of first.

     Charles-Valentin Alkan is now acknowledged as a major innovator in piano music, but his reputation lay fallow for nearly a century after his death in 1888 and is only now flowering again – as more pianists attempt to scale the technical heights of his exceptionally difficult music.  Alkan’s best-known works are stunningly original, but even his pieces that are not among his most innovative are remarkable in many ways. The five books called Recueils de Chants (“Collections of Songs”), which Stephanie McCallum is in the process of recording, are a perfect example. These are “songs without words” in the Mendelssohn mode, and are in fact based very directly and unapologetically on Mendelssohn’s first book of such pieces (his Op. 19b).  Alkan’s Recueils de Chants contain six pieces each, using the same key sequence: E, A minor, A, A again, F-sharp minor, and G minor – the last piece always being a gentle and simple Barcarolle.  But within this self-selected set of constraints (probably a deliberate homage to Mendelssohn, who was just four years older than Alkan), Alkan’s inventiveness flows freely and often quite astonishingly.  McCallum is a marvelous interpreter of this music, sensitive to its nuances and comfortable with its very considerable difficulties.  She brings out the “dog barks” in the third piece of Book I, the very difficult whirling left-hand accompaniment in the fifth piece of that book, the insistent dissonance of the second piece in Book II and the swaggering of the third, the amazing perpetual-pianissimo second piece of Book III, and much more.  And she fully understands the care with which Alkan produced an occasional programmatic miniature in these collections, as in the remarkable fifth piece of Book III, Horace et Lydie, a syllabic setting of an ode by Horace – with, remember, no words.  In addition to the first three Recueils de Chants, McCallum’s Toccata Classics CD includes the first-ever recording of Une fusée—Introduction et Impromptu, a kind of spinning song gone mad and a very impressive piece in its own right. Alkan was one of the great piano virtuosi in an era packed with them. Thanks to modern virtuosi such as McCallum, his tremendous inventiveness is now being appreciated once again.

     All 19^th-century virtuosi do tend to take a back seat to Franz Liszt, though, and James Adler’s performance of Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1 on a new Ravello CD shows why. Unlike Berlioz, Liszt was no master orchestrator – in fact, he often turned to Joachim Raff for help – but in piano works, Liszt made his instrument encompass and sound like an orchestra, and Adler plays this piece for all it is worth (which, in strictly virtuosic terms, is quite a lot).  The Liszt is an interesting counterbalance to the two pieces on the CD immediately preceding it, both by Adler himself: Fantasy Grotesque on a Medieval Theme and Piano Fantasy on “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd,” both dating to 2011 (the Liszt dates to 1859-62). The Adler pieces are very much of the 21^st century, but in spirit they hark back to the 19^th and the celebration of pianistic splendor as much for its own sake as for any other reason.  The remaining works on this CD, though, are not at this same high-interest level. Adler’s Passacaglia for Piano (1974) certainly shows an understanding of the form, and two “piano-plus” pieces by him are nicely put together if not entirely convincing: Reverie, Interrupted (2009) for tenor saxophone and piano, with Jordan P. Smith, and A Song of the Road (2010) for lyric baritone and piano, based on a poem by James Whitcomb Riley and featuring Malcolm J. Merriweather. These are well-made works but not especially memorable ones. So are the remaining pieces on this disc: the straightforward Scherzino (1918) by Leo Ornstein, a very long-lived composer (1893 or 1894-2002) and the earliest significant exponent of tone clusters – yes, before Henry Cowell; Tango for James Adler (2011) and Passacaglia (1977) by Paul Turok; and Christopher Street Rag (2011) by Seth Bedford. The music is interesting in varying degrees and is all very well performed, but the CD, although it certainly has some top-notch elements, is not particularly consistent either in sequence or musical quality, so it gets a (+++) rating – although a high one.

     The (+++) rating is on the lower side for Hope Wechkin’s debut Ravello disc, where the solo instrument, the violin, is not quite a solo instrument, because Wechkin sings along with it – hence the “music for voice and violin” subtitle of a CD called “Leaning Toward the Fiddler.”  The innovation here seems more deliberate and self-conscious than that of James Adler or Leo Ornstein, with Wechkin taking a combinatorial musical approach – as many modern composers do – that involves her original pieces, arrangements of traditional Balkan folk songs, the voice-and-violin mixture, a blended-genres approach that is common nowadays, and a deliberate “world music” orientation that is perfectly all right but not really very different from the explorations of many other modern composers. Wechkin essays a number of different styles and themes in the 11 short works on this CD, from warmth and longing to a lover’s feud to responses to nature; and while her performance, both vocally and on the violin, is fine, the emotional connectivity that she clearly wants somehow does not quite come off as clearly as she wishes – as if she is trying so hard to make a connection that a certain level of wished-for genuineness never quite emerges.

     The solo violin work by Peter Zazofsky is more impressive in Acqua Alta, the concluding piece on a Ravello CD of music by Richard Cornell. Computer-mediated music is Cornell’s forte, but his innovative approach lies not so much in that area – which has been thoroughly explored by many composers since the mid-20^th century – as in his interest in the way performers and musical creator interact, consciously or not, in bringing music to an audience. The pieces on this CD were all recorded live, and the disc’s enhanced content – an unusual feature of many Ravello and Navona releases and in this case a particularly welcome one – provides a visual version of Tracer that gives a good sense of how Cornell sees his creations as being not only re-created but also created in the first place by the way performers handle them and put them across to an audience.  (For that matter, the audience’s own participation influences or even creates a work, as composers have clearly understood since John Cage’s 4’33” – which dates to 1952.)  The (+++) CD itself, strictly on an audio basis, does not come across as well as does the visual Tracer. Yes, Zazofsky’s playing is quite good, but Acqua Alta does not seem particularly tied to Venice, to which it is supposed to be a tribute. Images is based on birds’ quarrels and is certainly dense enough in scoring and performance, but it is not particularly interesting to hear. And New Fantasias, a four-movement chamber-orchestra piece, has expressive movement titles (“Travels in the Landscape,” “In Dark Night,” “Dance” and “Playing with Fire”) that are at best imperfectly reflected in the music itself. It is certainly true that modern composers continue to look for ways to go beyond what has been done before in music, and certainly their reaching out to computers, non-Western musical traditions, and in other directions represents innovation of a sort. But the ultimate test of music remains whether it communicates effectively to an audience beyond the composer himself or herself, and beyond the composer’s friends – a level of reaching out to which most composers aspire, but one that their often-elaborate productions frequently fail to attain.

(++++) RARE AND WELL DONE

Lehár: Der Göttergatte; Vocal and Orchestral Works from the German Radio Archive, 1933-1949. Liesl Andergast, Henny Herze, Anton Dermota, Franz Borsos, Fred Liewehr, Lizzi Holzschuh; Wiener Rundfunkchor und Orchester conducted by Max Schönherr. CPO. $33.99 (2 CDs).

     Despite all the ways in which this release is flawed – and it would be easy to make a long list – it is an extraordinary audio document that will be a must-have for devotees of Franz Lehár’s music. For one thing, there are exactly two Lehár operettas whose librettists were Victor Léon and Leo Stein: Die Lustige Witwe and Der Göttergatte. For another, these operettas appeared not quite two years apart, Der Göttergatte (the composer’s third completed operetta) in January 1904 and Die Lustige Witwe in December 1905. For still another, Der Göttergatte shows Lehár treading, somewhat uneasily, into Offenbach’s territory, a fact for which this operetta was condemned in some quarters and one that led the composer later to recast it as Die Ideale Gattin in 1913, and then to revise the revision as Die Tangokönigin in 1921. And for yet another, this performance of Der Göttergatte preserves some of the last vestiges of an age in which singers and actors jointly performed roles and the delivery of many of the arias was closer to that of cabaret songs than to that of grand opera.

     This recording dates to March 15, 1945, in the last days of World War II, and the mere fact that it was made in Vienna at a time when the Third Reich still existed may prevent some people from buying or even listening to it. That may be an understandable reaction, at least in some quarters, but it is also, on a purely musical basis, a most unfortunate one.  Chances to hear Der Göttergatte are almost nonexistent, and this is the only chance anyone today will have to hear it conducted by Max Schönherr (1903-1984), a great expert in the dance music of Vienna’s Golden Age who is best known today for his rather overwrought completions and updatings of music by the Strauss family, Lanner and others – which he accomplished by “modernizing” the instrumentation in ways that would be wholly unacceptable today. But if Schönherr was a man of his time in making his “improvements,” he was also very much in tune with the spirit of Lehár, who was still alive when this recording was made. And Schönherr does an excellent job with this nearly complete radio version of Der Göttergatte (one of the flaws here is that two numbers from the score, No.9 and No. 17, are omitted, not by CPO but in the original recording).

     The quality of the singing here is variable, from very fine to rather screechy, and some of that is connected with the quality of the recording, which CPO has cleaned up nicely but which is still, after all, nearly 70 years old, complete with tape hiss, cut-off high notes and overall sound compression. What is truly amazing, though, is how little any of this matters, because the music is filled with delights and can justly be called a “find,” or at least a rediscovery.  The opera’s title means “The God-Husband” and also puns on the notion of “The Lord and Master.”  The plot – which, in a flaw that does lie with CPO, is not given in the booklet; and of course a libretto is far too much to hope for – is a twisted version of the tale of Alcmene, whom Jupiter seduced by taking the shape of her husband, Alcibiades. When Offenbach brings up this conquest in Orphée aux Enfers, he has Minerva sarcastically remark that she knows plenty of women on whom the husband disguise would not have worked. But Léon and Stein play the mortals’ love straight. Their change to the story has Juno become suspicious of the goings-on and disguise herself as Alcmene, so Jupiter ends up seducing his own wife (and preserving Victorian notions of sexual propriety). It is easy to see here the same hands that will shape Die Lustige Witwe in the near future. It is easy to see the composer’s predilections, too. Der Göttergatte is in a prologue and two acts, and the end of its first act – comparable to the end of the second act in the three-act Die Lustige Witwe – sounds very much the same musically and in staging. There are many little touches that look ahead: for instance, the musical interlude between the first and second acts here is very similar to that between the second and third of Die Lustige Witwe. And there is a delightful pre-Merry-Widow-Waltz humming passage in Jeder Mann glaubt seiner Frau, and another in a Trinklied that also contains a “hopla hopla” refrain that will have listeners thinking of the Reitermann duet in Die Lustige Witwe.

     There are places here where Lehár channels other composers, too. He was at times accused of being a “poor man’s Puccini,” and one passage in the duettino Ich harre dein is nearly identical to one in La Bohème. And there are flickers of cabaret-style Kurt Weill as well, in the finale to the first scene of the first act and in the terzett Du hast mich doch betrogen. These instances do not, however, come across as if Lehár is groping for his own style: it seems almost completely formed already, although his typical extended yearning passages on solo violin are absent here. Instead, what comes across in Der Göttergatte is an attempt to superimpose the Lehár style on subject matter to which it adheres imperfectly – and indeed, the composer never again used a classical-times setting of this sort. But there is so much here that is delightful and unknown to modern listeners that this recording of Der Göttergatte is a simply wonderful one to have.

     And it comes with bonuses, too – eight of them, often in genuinely execrable sound but providing marvelous insights into Lehár and his music between 1933 and 1949. The composer himself conducts the Orientalischer Marsch (a 1941 recording) and one of the few pieces he wrote during the Third Reich years: Wien, du bist das Herz der Welt, with soprano Ester Réthy (1942).  One of Richard Tauber’s last recordings before he fled Germany in 1933 because of his Jewish ancestry is here: Du und ich sind füreinander bestimmt. And there is another song, An der Saar und am Rein, featuring tenor Herbert Ernst Groh (1939).  There are also three instrumental works conducted by Otto Dobrindt: Pikanterien-Walzer (1943), Stadtparkschönheiten (also 1943), and Serenade for Violin and Orchestra, with soloist Ferdinand Meysel (1949). Finally, Max Schönherr appears as conductor, with Willi Uhlenhut as solo violinist, in a 1943 recording of Lehár’s very early (1897) Ungarische Tanzfantasie. This entire CPO release shines considerable light on less-known Lehár works as they were performed and recorded in a dark, dark time in history – to which, at least retrospectively, they bring a certain amount of reflected light.

(++++) ECO-FABLES

Little Sweet Potato. By Amy Beth Bloom. Illustrated by Noah Z. Jones. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins. $16.99.

Emeraldalicious. By Victoria Kann. Harper. $17.99.

The Berenstain Bears Go Green. By Jan & Mike Berenstain. HarperFestival. $3.99.

     Protecting and interacting with the natural world has become a common theme of children’s books in recent years, with authors taking angles on environmental matters ranging from the soft-pedaled to the overtly instructive. Little Sweet Potato is decidedly in the soft-pedaled school, being as much about belonging and kindness as it is about anything ecological. The book is Amy Beth Bloom’s simple story of a particularly mobile little sweet potato – drawn amazingly endearingly, with huge eyes and three hairlike fibers on top, by Noah Z. Jones – who is accidentally uprooted by a tractor, falls over the edge of his home patch, and ends up rolling down the road looking for his home or somewhere else where he belongs.  Unfortunately, he runs into some distinctly unpleasant vegetables in his search: carrots that “fluffed their leafy green tops and wiggled their long orange bodies” while critiquing him for being “lumpy, dumpy, and...bumpy”; eggplants that consider themselves “handsome and purple with skin like satin” and have no room in their patch for someone who is “dumpy, bumpy, and kinda lumpy”; flowers that look beautiful but scarcely act that way toward Little Sweet Potato; and so forth.  This being the vegetable version of a fairy tale, Little Sweet Potato winds up in the rain as “one big tear rolled down his dear bumpy-sweet-potato face.”  But since this is a fairy tale, soon after he hits bottom, Little Sweet Potato hits the jackpot, finding a mixed rather than segregated garden, where carrots, eggplants, flowers and produce of all kinds can flourish – complete with a fence proclaiming “world peas” and “the leek shall inherit the earth.”  OK, this could be pretty overdone, but neither Bloom nor Jones lays it on too thickly, with the result that Little Sweet Potato simply absorbs the message that, while “some just like their own kind…we’re the kind that like all kinds.”  This is less an ecological message than a let’s-all-get-along one, but really, what’s wrong with that? Certainly nothing from the perspective of Little Sweet Potato, who dozes off happily at the end of the book with thoughts of how wonderful it is to be home – a straightforwardly pleasant conclusion that makes the book a fine bedtime story, as well as one that can be enjoyed anytime by any child who has ever felt left out and been comforted by knowing that home is the best possible place to be.

     Victoria Kann’s Emeraldalicious is a more overtly ecological tale, although here too the fact that it stops short of too-intense preachiness is what makes it effective.  The title is a variation on the name of Kann’s Pinkalicious character, whose fans will immediately recognize her on the cover – dressed in her usual pink, but with green mixed in and surrounding her. The story features Pinkalicious and her little brother, Peter, strolling in the park and suddenly coming upon a huge pile of garbage – a dump that appears to be within or adjacent to the park (never mind why; this is important to the story, if not logical).  Using a magic wand that Pinkalicious and Peter have conveniently created just before discovering the messy and smelly area, Pinkalicious spontaneously creates a thronelike chair for herself by inventing and reciting a poem that causes some thrown-away items to arrange themselves symmetrically (and apparently cleanly) into the right shape.  Sitting on the chair, Pinkalicious discovers that she can make flowers grow among the trash by saying the word “love,” and then she and Peter figure out that they can do all sorts of delightful things by using love and poetry together – for example, creating birds whose bodies show musical notes, numbers, and words such as “peace,” “laugh,” “happy” and “blessed.”  The siblings continue to have fun with the wand and the trash, cleaning up while creating playthings from a castle to a “boat mobile.”  Then Pinkalicious decides it is time to clean up the whole dump, and she uses the wand to transform it into “a greentastic garden” with an entrance banner that reads, “Emeraldalicious Garden.”  But of course, if environmental cleanup were that easy, there would be no lesson here – so at the end, the wind carries the magic wand away and breaks it into “sparkly seeds,” and Pinkalicious and Peter realize that they can use the seeds and  “a little love” to “make the entire world EMERALDALICIOUS!”  A pleasant combination of entertainment and advocacy, using a character whose familiarity makes the lesson easier to absorb, Emeraldalicious can be an attractive way to introduce young children to the idea that it is good to clean up and beautify the natural world whenever possible – even without the help of a magic wand.

     The instructional element is, as usual, paramount in the latest Berenstain Bears book, The Berenstain Bears Go Green, in which fans of the always-upbeat Bear family get to see the usual utopia of Bear Country (which has “green rolling hills and wide river valleys…cool shady woods and bright sunny fields” – and lots of smiling wildlife) and then discover that not everything is perfect. A pleasant family rowboat trip changes character when the Bear family encounters a bad smell and “a streak of dark, gunky-looking stuff” coming from the Bear Country Dump.  The dump is a mess, and the gunk comes from leaky old oil drums, so Mama decides to attend a town meeting to complain – but before she can speak, someone else does, and the mayor, who “did not know about that,” asks for volunteers to do a cleanup. This being a Berenstain Bears book, every single person at the meeting volunteers to help: “Everyone pitched in to clean up the trash and junk.”  There is no perfect solution here – the oil drums are simply “put in a safer spot far from the creek” – but there is the usual highly positive spin on the story, with Sister and Brother thinking of various ways beyond the dump cleanup that they can “make Bear Country clean and green.”  The typical preachy tone and overly simplistic approach to a difficult subject make this a (+++) book whose heart is in the right place but whose solutions are by no means as clear and easy as Jan and Mike Berenstain suggest. Even the clever idea of erecting a windmill in no way runs afoul of zoning ordinances or the opposition of animal-focused groups that, in the real world, worry about windmills’ effects on birds, or objections from organizations that favor wind power as long as it does not have to be created using heavy machinery and is located in such a way that it does not spoil anyone’s view of or access to anything.  Parents who read this book with their children, or who buy it for them to encourage their kids to read it themselves for the sake of ecological awareness, will have to be ready to supply some real-world corrective information to explain why human life is not as simple and tidy as the lives of the Berenstain Bears.

(++++) FORMAT WARS

The Stinking: A “Get Fuzzy” Treasury. By Darby Conley. Andrews McMeel. $16.99.

Masters of the Nonsenseverse: A “Get Fuzzy” Collection. By Darby Conley. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Survival of the Filthiest: A “Get Fuzzy” Collection. By Darby Conley. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

     Here at last is the definitive answer to the question of how best to purchase collections of comic strips published by Andrews McMeel, as smaller-size “Collection” books or larger “Treasury” volumes. And the definitive answer is:  it depends.

     This is not quite as wishy-washy as it sounds.  The “Collection” books always appear first, and nowadays they include Sunday strips in color, which used to be a feature only of the larger “Treasury” volumes.  “Collection” books cost less, but two of them together cost more than a single “Treasury” volume – and the “Treasury” does indeed contain two “Collection” volumes.  The size of the “Treasury” allows all the strips, daily as well as Sunday, to be reproduced in a larger size, which makes them look better as long as the art is even reasonably good (and Darby Conley’s in Get Fuzzy is more-than-reasonably good).  The cover of a “Treasury” is different from the cover of either of the two “Collection” books included in it, which means that if you want as many covers from an artist as you can get – Conley covers, in this case – you have to buy all three books.  So “Collection” volumes win for timeliness and because you get two covers by buying two of them. “Treasury” volumes win for price, for size, and for containing two “Collection” books in a single place.  Probably the best solution is to get the “Collection” books when they come out and read them so many times that they disintegrate. Keep the covers, and then get the “Treasury” so you have a third cover and pristine copies of all the strips included in the two previous “Collection” books.  How’s that?

     Somewhere out there, cartoonists are cheering this notion, as is Andrews McMeel, since this approach guarantees the publisher the sale of more books and increases whatever royalty pittance the cartoonists get. Everyone wins, including any buyer who enjoys a particular strip, such as Get Fuzzy, enough to keep making investments in it.

     Actually, Get Fuzzy is worth investing in, increasingly so these days.  Although mild-mannered advertising executive Rob Wilco is still a dull character and often drawn without appropriate expressions (when he has any at all), Conley’s really important characters, buck-toothed Siamese cat Bucky and put-upon mixed-breed pooch Satchel, have become more finely honed and much more fun to observe over time.  They would not be fun to live with, which is why it is good that they live with Rob rather than with Get Fuzzy readers, but any cat person or dog person will recognize just enough of real-life canines and felines in Satchel and Bucky to be grateful that these are cartoon versions only.  The Stinking has a marvelous cover taking off from Stanley Kubrick’s film version of Stephen King’s The Shining, showing Satchel looking nervously behind him as he rides a kiddie car with the license plate “Satc-Hell” along the film’s famous hallway – right toward oddly attired Bucky and other Get Fuzzy characters. But the two “Collection” books included in the “Treasury” volume have wonderful covers, too, especially Masters of the Nonsenseverse, which features a compendium of fish bones, armor, fur, a volcano, a deranged-looking Rob appearing as a wizard and carrying a rugby ball atop his staff while wearing a “Property of Evil” hoodie, and so forth.  Survival of the Filthiest offers a caveman-times cover, with another volcano and with Bucky about to club Satchel on the head.  As for the strips inside these various books, they include the now-usual antics revolving mostly around Bucky’s constant scheming: the anti-ferret petition, the bad poetry, the insistence on using dialogue from “Dust Bowl Willy” (a nonexistent Depression-era comic strip), the possessed litter box (with attempted exorcism), the declaration and eventual demise of the state of Buckyvania (located in the closet where Bucky lives), the attempted ghostbusting by the Atlantic Research of Supernatural Entities Group, the feline cable-access psychic – no surprises here, just a series of ordinary days in a home shared by a cat, a dog and a wimp.  At least this particular cat, dog and wimp.

           

     And what is the best way to buy into this fractured fairy tale of a world?  Well, you pays your money and you takes your choice.  Or you pays more of your money and you takes your choices, plural. These “Collection” and “Treasury” volumes are equally worth collecting and treasuring.

(++++) FAIRY-TALE LIVES

Fancy Nancy Storybook Treasury. By Jane O’Connor. Pictures based on the art of Robin Preiss Glasser. Harper. $11.99.

Ballpark Mysteries 6: The Wrigley Riddle. By David A. Kelly. Illustrated by Mark Meyers. Random House. $4.99.

Beholding Bee. By Kimberly Newton Fusco. Knopf. $16.99.

     Even more-or-less-realistic characters seem to live a fairy-tale life in some books for young readers, and Fancy Nancy is certainly one such. The little girl with the unbelievably overdone outfits, the fondness for French phrases and the delight in “fancy” words (which she helpfully defines for her readers) has six simple but wonderful adventures in Fancy Nancy Storybook Treasury, which contains reprints dating to 2008, 2009 and 2010.  Jane O’Connor’s pitch-perfect storytelling is beautifully complemented by the illustrations of these stories – although it is not quite clear why the pictures are “based on the art of Robin Preiss Glasser,” since the book’s copyright credits Glasser herself as the artist and there is no attribution of the illustrations to anyone else.  Fancy Nancy and the Late, Late, LATE Night has Nancy so eager to read a scrapbook that she stays under the covers long past her bedtime with a flashlight – and has consequences the next day. Fancy Nancy: Pajama Day is about a class pajama party in which Nancy’s decision to wear a unique outfit turns into a disappointment for her, at least until the story’s end. Fancy Nancy Sees Stars is about an astronomy field trip, and Fancy Nancy and the Delectable Cupcakes involves a school bake sale, a forgetful Nancy and a hungry family dog. Fancy Nancy: The Show Must Go On has Nancy putting on a performance with a classmate she does not know well, and Fancy Nancy: The Dazzling Book Report shows the consequences of spending too much time on an impressively fancy cover and not enough on a report’s written content.  The lessons here are soft-pedaled but always clear, and Nancy is so endearing a character that she charms readers as constantly as she delights all the adults around her in these books.  Fancy Nancy Storybook Treasury is easy to read and enjoyable to look at, with just enough of an air of unreality in Nancy’s outfits and in the way twists always turn out well for her so that its real-world settings seem to come with a sprinkling of fairy dust.

     The Ballpark Mystery series has the fairy-tale element of a two-kid detective team going around major-league stadiums and solving mysteries again and again. Mike and Kate are at it once more in the sixth of David A. Kelly’s (+++) books, The Wrigley Riddle. This one is set at the Chicago Cubs’ stadium and focuses on the ivy-covered outfield walls, one of the stadium’s most notable features.  Someone is cutting the ivy – but who and why?  As usual, Mike and Kate first get involved in the mystery and then follow a false trail, which this time leads them to focus on someone wearing a Chicago White Sox shirt – the White Sox (or at least their fans) being longtime enemies of the Cubs. Readers of the series will figure out quickly that the answer cannot be that obvious, and of course it isn’t, even though Mike and Kate take a while (most of the book, actually) to come to that conclusion.  The story also involves a treasure supposedly located somewhere behind all that ivy; and by the book’s end, the ivy cutter has been uncovered (and turns out to have a non-nefarious reason for the cutting, although still not an acceptable one) and the treasure has been discovered – several treasures, in fact. There are definitely fairy-tale elements to the ease with which this story comes together, but readers who like this series will not care – they will enjoy the many references to baseball and the specific information on the Cubs and Wrigley Field (including eight pages of facts at the back of the book).  Mark Meyers’ simple and straightforward drawings are as well-integrated into the story as usual, making The Wrigley Riddle a quick and pleasant read for baseball fans ages 6-9.

     The fairy-tale elements are far more prominent in Beholding Bee, a darker story for older readers, ages 8-12.  This (+++) novel really is a fairy tale coupled with a coming-of-age story and a find-your-family narrative – not really an unusual mixture for this age group, but one that Kimberly Newton Fusco handles well.  Beatrice (Bee), an orphan who lives with a carnival, is constantly taunted about a facial birthmark that Pauline – the only person who has ever cared for or about her – tells her is really a precious diamond. When Pauline goes to work for a different carnival, Bee loses the only support she has ever known – until a stray dog shows up and Bee decides to find a place for both herself and the pup to live. She ends up at a house where she is taken in by two sweet but mysterious women named Mrs. Swift and Mrs. Potter – whom Bee alone can see. Well, they are obviously ghosts – this is obvious to readers if not to Bee – but they are clearly caring and benevolent, and in the best fairy-tale tradition, they are sure to be keys to Bee’s eventual maturing and discovery of who she really is.  Mrs. Swift and Mrs. Potter help Bee go to school (but will not go in themselves), and they make sure she wears proper (if suspiciously old-fashioned) clothing, and they generally take care of her just as if they are part of her family – which of course, it turns out, they are.  None of these plot points is particularly surprising; and it is inevitable that Pauline and Bee will get together again and will turn out to be important in supporting each other – showing that Bee has strength of character beyond her years.  Bee is a sweet if rather one-dimensional character, although certainly more fully formed as an individual than Pauline or the various other people in the book.  Mrs. Swift and Mrs. Potter are actually the most lively (if no longer alive) and interesting characters here, and their relationship and byplay – which continue right to the book’s conclusion – are a big attraction of Beholding Bee.  As fairy tales with happy endings go, this is a pleasant one, with its mysteries being solved at a leisurely pace, its conclusion flowing naturally from the events that have come before, and the kindness of most of its characters throwing a magic cloak of sorts over the harsh realities of life that Bee is eventually successful in escaping.

(+++) FROM TRAUMA TO HEALING

Song without Words: Discovering My Deafness Halfway Through Life. By Gerald Shea. Da Capo. $25.99.

Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. Edited by Roy Scranton and Matt Gallagher. Da Capo. $15.99.

     Like Helen Keller, Gerald Shea had a bout with scarlet fever as a child and was left with permanent hearing damage. Unlike Helen Keller, Shea lost some of his hearing, not all of it, and found ways to cope with his partial hearing for decades: he was not diagnosed with hearing loss until he was 33 years old. Shea is among 30 million partially deaf Americans, and in Song without Words he tells his story as a microcosm of the tales of others – and, at the same time, as a highly personal recounting of a life in which he simply refused to accept limitations. In truth, he did not realize he had them: he thought that the process with which he had to interpret spoken words through context was one that everyone used, but that he was not as good at it as other people were. Shea’s partial deafness affects his ability to hear high-frequency sounds and, in particular, consonants. He hears vowels and other sounds, which he calls, collectively, “lyricals.” But until he was fitted with hearing aids in his mid-30s, he had to interpret, internally, the consonantal elements that would turn the vowels into intelligible words. Shea discusses how he did this, and in the process of exploring his own situation also talks about Keller’s – and contrasts it with that of Emmanuelle Laborit, a French actress who was born deaf in 1972 and was initially prevented (as Keller was) from using sign language or meeting children or adults who signed. Laborit, however, eventually connected with two sign-language teachers, one deaf and one hearing, and became, Shea says, more of a fully formed person than Keller – although less of a symbol. This analysis and argument lies at the heart of Shea’s belief that every individual needs to find an expressive language of his or her own, and that Keller was deprived of one while Laborit was able to find hers.  Shea clearly believes that he eventually found his own as well.  Shea talks about methods of helping those with partial deafness in school by the creative and careful use of blackboards, other visual aids, reading primers, front-row classroom seats, and so forth – all modest and reasonable ideas. But not all of his thoughts will likely strike readers as unarguably true. It is not just his position on Keller to which some will take exception. He disagrees, for example, with the use of cochlear implants in infants who are born profoundly deaf, arguing that this now-standard procedure causes them to lose the personal language that they need to develop in order to become the most that they can be.  The argument is intriguing but decidedly one-sided. He also talks about the “locusts” with which he lives constantly – Shea has a talent for labels, and “locusts” are what he calls the buzzing and ringing sounds in the ears that doctors diagnose as tinnitus. He believes that “locusts” are common in deaf people – who, under the best of circumstances, learn to live with them, but under other circumstances are tormented by them, as Beethoven was (Shea quotes Beethoven as saying that his ears “buzz and ring day and night”).  Structurally, the most interesting part of Song without Words is the way Shea shows readers how he interpreted “lyricals” in everyday life: he repeatedly presents a line of dialogue with words that were unclear to him (or meaningless) in italics, then shows the variations on those words that went through his mind in an instant until he eventually came up with what the speaker was talking about.  The process is fascinating and a testament to Shea’s determination and strength of character; indeed, the whole book shows that strength. Song without Words is somewhat discursive and can be argumentative (no big surprise there: by profession, Shea is a lawyer). But for those interested in the plight of the partially deaf and in one man’s unusual coping strategies – necessitated by the decades-long lack of a definitive diagnosis, occasioned by the fact that Shea hid his hearing difficulties so well – the book will be fascinating reading.

     Sometimes the way to face down real-world trouble is with fiction – that is the foundational argument of Fire and Forget, edited by Iraq veterans Roy Scranton (a former Army artilleryman) and Matt Gallagher (a former Army captain).  The book’s title relates to self-guided weapons such as heat-seeking missiles, and it reeks of irony, since the whole point of these 15 stories by members of the military who served in Iraq is that they cannot and will not forget.  In fact, many of the stories are not about life in the war zone but about the attempt to reintegrate with civilian society after returning home: Gallagher’s own contribution, “And Bugs Don’t Bleed,” is one such, as are Phil Klay’s “Redeployment” (where a shopping mall echoes with war memories) and Colby Buzzell’s “My War” (in which finding a job after serving in Iraq becomes a major battle of its own).  Both the editors are themselves good writers – Scranton contributes “Red Steel India,” a sort of absurdist buddy tale.  And they have uncovered some powerful voices among their contributors, including Siobhan Fallon, whose “Tips for a Smooth Transition” contrasts official discussions of and recommendations for reconnecting with a spouse after deployment with everyday reality, and Perry O’Brien, whose “Poughkeepsie” packs one of the book’s biggest emotional wallops despite being one of the shortest stories in it.  Indeed, a line from “Poughkeepsie” could stand as a motto for Fire and Forget as a whole: “Now that I’m on my own time, I don’t know what to do with it.”  This is not a pleasant book and not one that will attract people interested in veterans’ war experiences per se. It is a book filled with finely constructed, generally depressing stories by people who have seen much and done much in the name of their country, and who use fiction – generally, reality thinly disguised as fiction – to process what happened to them and try to open it up to themselves and to the folks back home, who will never share, or want to share, the circumstances that produced writing like this and feelings like these.

(++++) SOME THINGS OLD, SOME THINGS NEW

Bach: Suites Nos. 1-3. Hopkinson Smith, theorbo. Naïve. $16.99.

Bach: Suites Nos. 4-6. Hopkinson Smith, lute. Naïve. $16.99.

Bach: Harpsichord Concerto No. 2; C.P.E. Bach: Harpsichord Concerto in D, Wq 43/2; Johann Christian Bach: Piano Concertos, Op. 7, Nos. 3 and 5. Anastasia Injushina, piano; Hamburger Camerata conducted by Ralf Gothóni. Ondine. $16.99.

Brahms: Symphony No. 1; Martinů: Symphony No. 4. Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR conducted by Klaus Tennstedt. ICA Classics. $16.99.

Beethoven: Symphonies Nos. 4 and 7. Academy of St. Martin in the Fields conducted by Joshua Bell. Sony. $11.99.

     Hopkinson Smith is a revelation, and his performances are revelatory. He has now transcribed all six Bach cello suites for lute/German theorbo (the latter being a specific form of the theorbo, itself a different form of what is usually thought of as a typical lute); and his performances are so masterful that they lend cachet to the entire field of musical transcription – an area that has become tarnished over the years but was much in vogue in Bach’s own time. The music here is old and will be familiar to many, but Smith’s transcriptions and his handling of the suites are altogether new and utterly delightful on many levels – one of which is his unhesitating willingness to pick up the pace of many of the dance movements, reflecting the different sounds and means of sound production of plucked instruments compared with bowed ones.  Bach himself transcribed one of these suites, No. 5 in C minor, BWV 1011, but Bach’s transcription to G minor (BWV 995) has some playability issues, as Smith points out in his booklet notes to the Naïve CD containing it. Smith has therefore transposed the transcription up a tone to A minor, in which key it lies much better on the instrument and sounds simply wonderful. This is the oldest recording here, dating to 1980, and uses a Nico van der Waals lute. Suites Nos. 4 and 5 were recorded in 1992 using a Joël van Lennep lute. Both these modern instruments are faithful reproductions of Baroque models, and Hopkinson handles them with the consummate skill of someone as comfortable in historical performance practice as it is possible to be. The wonderfully bouncy first gavotte of Suite No. 6, just to cite one example among many, is a sheer delight.  Suites Nos. 1-3 are newly recorded using a 13-course van Lennep German theorbo, an instrument whose greater body size and longer string length produce a fuller sound than that of other lutes – a sound that Smith argues is more appropriate in the first three suites. Academic and musicological discussions aside, Smith proves his point simply by performing the suites magnificently, with such skill and understanding that it is tempting to regard his transcriptions of these old works as altogether new pieces of music, created on an old and still very sturdy foundation.

     The mixture of old and new is less successful in the (***) CD of Bach family concertos played on a modern piano by Anastasia Injushina. There is no need to rehash the eternal argument as to whether these works are better played on the instruments for which they were written or can sound equally good on modern ones. The fact is that they have long been performed both ways and will no doubt continue to be. But it is also a fact that performers using modern instruments would do well to bow to the time in which the composers lived and play in accordance with it, to the extent possible. Injushina does not do this – she is quite content to use the full resources of a modern piano to bring out the solo power and virtuosity inherent in these pieces. The problem is that it is not inherent to this extent. The J.S. and C.P.E. Bach works here were written for harpsichord, a plucked instrument whose notes do not naturally sustain—and therefore an instrument well-suited to contrapuntal writing. Injushina’s modern piano has a much larger sound and one in which sustained notes are the norm, and she makes no real attempt to downplay its characteristics to have the solo part conform to the primus inter pares ideal of the Baroque concerto. Therefore, these works are overweighted toward the solo parts – especially so because the Hamburger Camerata under Ralf Gothóni provides properly light, even delicate accompaniment.  The J.C. Bach concertos fare somewhat better: they were written for the early fortepiano (and are in fact among the first concertos created for that instrument), so they incorporate some piano features into their solo writing – not as many as Injushina introduces, but at least some. The playing on the CD is assured and very pleasant throughout, but this disc is a good argument for hearing these works on the instruments for which the composers wrote them.

     The balance of new and old on a new ICA Classics release of symphonies conducted by Klaus Tennstedt (1926-1998) is of a different kind. The release itself is new – this is its first worldwide availability (it was released previously only in Japan). The performances are old, the Brahms dating to 1976 and the Martinů to 1973. More interestingly, while the Brahms First exists in other Tennstedt recordings, the Martinů is new to his discography – and is by far the better performance here.  The craggy, dissonant, intense, rhythmically complex Martinů Symphony No. 4 must have had some special attraction for Tennstedt, because he pulls out all the stops in this studio recording.  The work comes across splendidly, propelling listeners through a series of emotional hither-and-yon moments that eventually yield an altogether satisfying conclusion. And the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR plays excellently, responding tremendously adeptly to the music’s moods as well as to Tennstedt’s direction.  Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the Brahms First, which was recorded live. Except for a nicely scaled finale, this is a disappointing performance, stolid and rather flaccid through its first three movements, played perfectly well but without real bite or very much warmth. Tennstedt seems to have far greater affinity for the Martinů than the Brahms – indeed, he was never particularly well-known as a Brahms conductor, and simply does not bring much to the music. On balance, this is a (+++) disc that will certainly be attractive to listeners interested in the Martinů and those wanting to hear more of Tennstedt’s conducting – but they should be prepared to be disappointed in his handling here of Brahms’ First.

     But there is no disappointment whatsoever in the (++++) Sony recording in which violinist Joshua Bell is heard for the first time in his new position as music director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields – and performs as its concertmaster as well. The orchestra has dropped its hyphens (it used to be the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, conforming to the name of the Anglican church in Westminster), but what is really new here is Bell’s appearance in his conductor’s role – and what is old and quite familiar is the music.  Bell, like Hopkinson Smith, provides his own booklet notes, offering a personal perspective on what he and the orchestra perform on this CD, although without Smith’s erudition and with an even-more-personal slant. (And the Sony booklet contains some bizarrely incorrect movement timings – 12-and-a-half minutes for the Allegretto of the Seventh and four minutes for its scherzo?) What really matters, of course, is whether Bell can translate his professed love of these symphonies into compelling performances. And the answer is an emphatic yes. There is an ebullience to the Fourth that conductors rarely bring out, a sort of Jovian good humor that is coupled highly effectively with the work’s many elegant instrumental and structural touches – this symphony was, after all, written after the “Eroica,” and this performance shows it as a distinct advance beyond its larger and more-famous predecessor. The contrast between the bounce of the first movement and the relaxed sweetness that pervades the second is particularly well handled here.  And the finale is simply splendid, with verve and spirit in the scurrying strings – and just enough bubbling from the bassoons to lend the movement some Haydnesque levity.  The Seventh opens with speed and celebratory enthusiasm and continues with a second movement that first whispers its beauty and then proclaims it forcefully.  A propulsive scherzo then leads to a finale that is all brightness and rhythmic vitality, with fine playing and lovely instrumental highlights. This music may be old, but in performances as well-played, well-balanced and well-thought-out as this one, it is quite clear why Beethoven’s symphonies are considered ever-new.

(++++) TONE PAINTINGS, THEN AND NOW

Ignacio Jerusalem: Al Combate; Symphony in G; Gorjeos Trinando; Cristal Bello; Santiago Billoni: Mariposa Inadvertida; Celeste Aurora Hermosa. Eleanor Ranney-Mendoza, soprano; Elda Peralta, mezzo-soprano; Alexander Edgemon, countertenor; Sandro Naglia, tenor; Vince Wallace, bass; Chicago Arts Chorale and Chicago Arts Orchestra conducted by Javier José Mendoza. Navona. $12.99.

Marga Richter: Out of Shadows and Solitude; Quantum Quirks of a Quick Quaint Quark; Spectral Chimes/Enshrouded Hills. Seattle Symphony and Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Ravello. $12.99.

Emma Lou Diemer: Santa Barbara Overture; Concerto in One Movement for Marimba; Concerto in One Movement for Piano. London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Brynmore Llewelyn Jones (Overture); Nathan Daughtrey, marimba; Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Joel Suben (Marimba); Betty Oberacker, piano; Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vladimír Válek (Piano). Navona. $16.99.

     A fascinating exploration of Italian-born composers’ contributions to 18^th-century New World music, Navona’s CD of works by Ignacio Jerusalem (1707-1769) and Santiago Billoni (ca. 1700-ca. 1763) provides a rare opportunity to hear the Baroque and galant styles in exported form – mixing with some of the folk tunes and colors of New Spain (Mexico).  The provenance of these pieces and the excellent playing by the Chicago Arts Orchestra under Javier José Mendoza are the primary attractions here: the music is interesting and well-made, but if it were not identified with the Americas, most of the works would simply sound like respectable but not highly distinctive 18^th-century creations. However, Al Combate, a nine-part instrumental, vocal and choral celebratory ode in honor of King Charles III of Spain (1716-1788, reigned 1759-1788), is worthy by any standards. Solos for countertenor and bass alternate with choral passages and purely instrumental ones celebrating the king, his conquests and his rule, and the work stands not only as a tribute to the monarch but also as one to Jerusalem’s powers of musical portrayal of conflict and praise. Alexander Edgemon and Vince Wallace sing well and are comfortable with period style, and the chorus and orchestra skillfully handle both the unsurprising bright elements of the score and its occasional unexpected portions (such as a sudden dip into the minor in the concluding section of the instrumental Overture).  Jerusalem’s brief Symphony in G is also worth hearing: it is scarcely innovative, but it is stylish and has some flair.  The four remaining works here, including the two by Billoni, are somewhat less interesting, because some of the soloists are not fully up to the pieces’ vocal demands: mezzo-soprano Elda Peralta sings and emotes well, but soprano Eleanor Ranney-Mendoza is distinctly rough in her lower range, and tenor Sandro Naglia is simply out of his depth in this music’s style – his sole contribution, Billoni’s Celeste Aurora Hermosa, is the one real disappointment on the disc. Everything else here, though, has value in itself and also for providing a window into the music of the California mission style, no longer well-known but important in its time for its transplantation of Old World models into fertile New World cultural soil.

     More than two centuries after Jerusalem and Billoni, the forms of tone painting and musical celebration have changed, but the desire to portray extramusical events and to take notice of specific occasions, while still producing music that is worthy for a wider audience, remains – as new CDs of pieces by Marga Richter (born 1926) and Emma Lou Diemer (born 1927) show.  The Richter CD, on the Ravello label, features Gerard Schwarz – a strong advocate of modern American music – leading three pieces intended to draw upon and evoke specific experiences.  Out of Shadows and Solitude (1985) intends to portray, in its expansiveness, the flight of a condor over mist-shrouded mountains – an avian form of inspiration that has often influenced musicians (think of the flight of cranes that inspired the finale of Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5) and that is effectively brought forth here. Quantum Quirks of a Quick Quaint Quark (1991) has more substance that might be expected from its rather self-indulgent title: it is filled with swiftly changing dance rhythms drawn from earlier Richter works, and its verve is frequently infectious.  Spectral Chimes/Enshrouded Hills (1978-80) requires more nonmusical knowledge than the other pieces and as a result is somewhat less successful. It is based on scenes from Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and although it is atmospheric enough and attractively enough orchestrated to be of some interest even to those unfamiliar with the book, it will be fully engaging primarily for those who know it.  Richter does have a fine sense of orchestral balance and a willingness to combine Romantic with modern rhythmic and harmonic techniques, and both orchestras conducted by Schwarz handle her works well and with a strong sense of involvement in the music.

     The tonal portraits in Diemer’s music on a new Navona CD are of a different type.  Diemer is based in Santa Barbara, California, and was composer-in-residence with the Santa Barbara Symphony from 1990 to 1992; hence the Santa Barbara Overture, a work that draws on multinational influences to celebrate the diversity of California.  First performed by the orchestra for which it is written, the piece sounds bright and involving as played by the London Symphony under Brynmore Llewelyn Jones – although the music is perhaps somewhat too obvious for its own good in its determined good will.  The Santa Barbara Symphony also gave the première of Diemer’s Concerto in One Movement for Piano, featuring the same soloist heard on this CD, Betty Oberacker, who clearly knows the music inside-out. In this work and the Concerto in One Movement for Marimba, featuring Joel Suben, Diemer has moved outside the world of sound portraits and into – or back into – traditional classical-music models dating at least to Liszt’s two piano concertos. The piano concerto is a highly virtuosic work, alternating lyricism with vigorously rhythmic passages in a mixture that is mostly involving even though it seems a touch more stretched-out than it needs to be. The marimba concerto, commissioned by the Women’s Philharmonic of San Francisco and using a reduced orchestra, is more compressed and offers an interesting sonic blend as well as some attractive handling of multiple rhythms – evidence that many tools of composers today remain the same as those of the Baroque era, however differently those tools may now be employed.