(++++) WHAT WE SAY AND HOW WE SAY IT

How to Speak Brit: The Quintessential Guide to the King’s English, Cockney Slang, and Other Flummoxing British Phrases. By Christopher J. Moore. Gotham Books. $20.

Shortcut: How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas. By John Pollack. Gotham Books. $27.

     Incomplete rather than “quintessential,” Christopher J. Moore’s How to Speak Brit is nevertheless enjoyable enough, and fact-packed enough, to be both informative and a lot of fun. The book professes to show English speakers (American version) how “real” English speakers (British version) talk, why they use particular phrases in specific ways, and where some idioms come from. It largely fails in the last of these endeavors, with Moore quite often saying no one is sure where this word or that, this phrase or that, comes from. But in other respects, this short book (a mere 120 pages) has a good deal of highly engaging information. There are numerous explanations of British words and phrases that Americans are unlikely to know, such as “send someone to Coventry” (ostracize or ignore the person), “gone for a Burton” (World War II phrase used of an airman who had been killed or was missing in action), “pottering” (Americans would say “puttering,” the reference in Britain being specifically to doing little things in one’s garden), “curate’s egg” (something that is good in parts but not as a whole), and “lollipop man” (“crossing guard” in the United States). Oddly, though, there are also a number of entries of words and phrases that Moore seems to think are uniquely British but that will be quite familiar in the U.S.: “Dickensian,” “binge-drinking,” “goody two shoes,” “lame duck,” “by hook or by crook,” “raining cats and dogs,” and many more. When Moore does present the history or derivation of a word or phrase, the information is often fascinating: “yob” (hooligan), for example, is “boy” spelled backward, while “whinge” (complain or moan) derives from “whine” but refers to the content of the complaint rather than its sound. There is a lot left out of How to Speak Brit – for example, the very brief entry on Cockney rhyming slang, under the entry “dog and bone,” is a tremendous disservice to some highly colorful language, compounded by the fact that Moore does not really explain how the system works or why. But this is a book to enjoy for what it is rather than one to criticize for what it is not. There is something purely delightful in reading about shandy (beer mixed with lemonade or ginger beer), toff (someone with more money than sense), and argy-bargy (a playful word for a disagreement) – far better to enjoy what is here than to bemoan what is left out.

     There is less amusement and more seriousness in the use of language as discussed by former Bill Clinton speechwriter John Pollack in Shortcut. Pollack here analyzes analogies, those figures of speech in which something is compared to something else with, ideally, a subtle use of framing to make a difficult subject seem easy or a complex one simple. Pollack, of course, draws largely on politics to make his points; for instance, he discusses President George W. Bush’s comment on criticism of the U.S. war in Iraq, “America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people.” Pollack correctly argues that this analogy to childhood rules and requirements subtly indicates that the United States will not be treated like a disobedient child by the international community – raising American listeners’ ire even though, in reality, war and school permission slips have nothing to do with each other. The point of analogies, in fact, is that they make things seem to be parallel even when they are not: good analogies can certainly make difficult subjects understandable, but poor or manipulative ones (like some of those created by Pollack himself) can be designed to move public opinion with more subtlety than propaganda but no more truthfulness. Analogies, Pollack writes, meet five criteria: using what is familiar to explain what is not; highlighting the similarities between things while passing over or obscuring differences; identifying useful abstractions; telling a coherent story; and resonating emotionally – a particular requirement for analogies in the political context. “Analogies encourage and sometimes even force our thoughts in certain directions,” says Pollack, and of course this has value far beyond politics – in advertising, for example. Pollack’s discussions of ads and of attempts to change public perception in other ways – by making football games seem less like war in order to draw more female fans, for example – are trenchant and well considered. Other elements of Shortcut go farther afield, though, with somewhat less success, such as his discussion of the Wright Brothers on the basis that flight is analogous to riding a bicycle – a point that could have been made more effectively at less length. Still, Pollack brings up intriguing elements regarding analogies, such as Thomas Edison’s citation of them as one of the three essential qualities for an inventor (the first being persistence, the second imagination, and the third “a logical mind that sees analogies”) and Albert Einstein’s remark that elemental laws cannot be discovered through logic but only through “a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.” The usefulness of thinking by using analogies becomes clear in a variety of anecdotes in Shortcut, such as the discussion of Swiss engineer George de Mistral’s analogical development of Velcro after finding his socks covered in tiny burrs. This particular analogy was not exactly a shortcut, since the development took 15 years; but in other cases, the effect of analogies is nearly immediate, and this can be true when analogies compete. Pollack points this out when comparing Ford’s notoriously unsuccessful Edsel being described in positive terms by The New York Times as having taillights with “the graceful wingspread of a sea gull” but by others as having a front grille that looked like a toilet seat – the latter analogy being the one that captured the public’s imagination and doomed the car. Pollack is, unsurprisingly, rather too forgiving of the use (and misuse) of analogies in politics, although he does note that these comparisons can be taken to vicious extremes, as when Adolf Hitler referred to Jews as “a virus” and compared his treatment of them to “the same sort of battle waged…by Pasteur and [German physician Heinrich] Koch.” Shortcut is scarcely a complete exploration of thinking and persuading by analogy, but it is a well-written and often entertaining one, even though it comes to the rather wishy-washy conclusion that “while a good shortcut is a great thing, a bad one can lead us astray.” True. And it is worth remembering that the author was, for a time, in the business of explicitly creating analogies designed to lead people, if not astray, at least in a particular direction. Indeed, he remains in an analogous business – as a communications consultant for politicians and Fortune 500 companies.

(+++) SERIES IN PROGRESS

The School for Good and Evil 2: A World without Princes. By Soman Chainani. Harper. $16.99.

Kate the Great #1: Except When She’s Not. By Suzy Becker. Crown. $12.99.

     There is potential, and then there is potential unfulfilled, and then there is potential not fulfilled yet. Soman Chainani’s The School for Good and Evil was fraught with potential, a wonderful debut novel that not only turned fairy-tale tropes on their head but also raised some genuinely thoughtful questions about good, evil and the many grey areas in between. The book cried out for a sequel, and its conclusion made it clear that there would be one, although how there would be one was a reasonable question, since the novel’s chief manipulator/evildoer was thoroughly defeated (to the point of being dead). Now we know how: through a distinctly inferior followup novel that eliminates the thoughtfulness of the original, creates a substitute for the primary bad guy of the first book, and eventually even finds a way to resurrect that initial evil character – in a bit of plot absurdity that borrows rather too much from the fairy-tale concepts that Chainani neatly twisted and embellished in his first outing. The original idea of a world in which stereotypical Good and Evil characters attend separate academies that are really part of a single school was an excellent one. And the basic plot mover was very clever: two girls being brought to the school and placed – so they believe – in the wrong sections of it. It turns out, in the first book, that the girl placed in Evil belongs there, despite her princess-like appearance and mannerisms, while the one placed in Good may look dark and witchy but is actually in the correct place as well. Eventually reconciled despite many dangers and misunderstandings, the girls at the end escape the school and its fairy-tale world altogether. But in the second book, that world calls to them again, and when they return this time, they find that the opposing school contingents are now not Good and Evil but Boys and Girls. Oh, that’s original. And it is only one of a series of disappointments in A World without Princes. Sophie, who looks angelic but is a very foul witch internally, is so overdone in this book that any balance between her and actually-good Agatha is completely lost. Sophie has become a cardboard character, a type, utterly narcissistic, manipulative, untruthful, scheming, and all the other things one would expect of an Evil character: there is no tension anymore, except insofar as readers will wonder why Agatha is such an idiot that it takes her considerable time to realize what Sophie is and what she is doing. Yes, Agatha has been simplified, too, turned into a slow-witted, slow-on-the-uptake character who knows what she has to do but constantly questions herself and doubts herself and ties herself into knots because maybe, maybe, just maybe all the evidence involving Sophie is wrong. This is simplification to the point of caricature, and this is what Chainani does throughout the book with other characters as well, including other girls as well as the teachers and the absurdly overdone dean of the girls’ school (who is so formulaic that she would be twirling a mustache if she had one). What rescues A World without Princes from the abyss of total mediocrity is the quality of Chainani’s writing: even with so unpromising a plot, he manages to create cinematic scenes whose action-packed pace will keep many readers interested and unconcerned about the gaping plot holes and dumbing-down of the whole story arc. The result is a book that is a lot of fun to read and almost no fun at all to think about – a real shame, since the first book invited both enjoyment and thoughtfulness. However, there is sure to be a sequel to this sequel, and hopefully Chainani will find his way back to an approach that transcends the ordinary instead of becoming mired in it.

     Bright writing and pleasant pacing rescue the first Kate the Great book from mediocrity, too, although its plot is so ordinary that it might as well have been taken from a list called “what to write for middle schoolers.” Using the increasingly popular form of a highly illustrated book containing tons of drawings “by” the title character – a format that is not quite novel, not quite graphic novel – Suzy Becker makes Kate the usual caught-in-the-middle middle child, with a too-good-to-be-true older sister and too-cute-to-be-real younger sister. Kate has the usual middle-school issues to handle: school and homework assignments, friends and frenemies (no out-and-out enemies here), and family-relationship matters. There is nothing at all creative about her list of problems and concerns, but there is creativity in Becker’s illustrations “by” Kate, and they are what save the book and make it an enjoyable series launch. The “also known as” self-portraits on the inside front cover give an immediate clue to how “Kate” draws and thinks, and the many illustrations within the story rescue it, time and again, from becoming just another recitation of middle-school sort-of-angst. Becker clearly has a great time with these drawings – she even encloses the book’s back-cover bar code in a “Kate-drawn” zebra – and readers will, too: the moon, carrying an umbrella, three times reminds Kate that her music teacher said “well done, Kate”; a pie chart shows several possible explanations of “why I said ‘what?’”; “Robin’s cross-eyed fish face” is drawn three ways, including “Calder style – my favorite”; a drawing of a building portrays “Mrs. Staughton’s Brilliant Idea Factory”; there are pictures of potential new ways to communicate, including “singing gorilla” and “friendship herbs”; and so on. The underlying plot elements, such as Kate giving “frenemy” Nora a horse figurine belonging to older sister Robin and then having to figure out how to get it back, apologize and mend fences all around, are nothing special. But the way the story is told is special, and that is what can propel the Kate the Great series from now on. Potentially.

(++++) ROADS LESS TAKEN

Lehár: Wo die Larche singt. Gerhard Ernst, Sieglinde Feldhofer, Yevgeny Tauntsov, Wolfgang Gerold, Miriam Portmann, Florian Resetarits, Sinja Maschke; Chor des Lehár Festivals Bad Ischl and Franz Lehár-Orchester conducted by Marius Burkert. CPO. $33.99 (2 CDs).

Bartók: Kossuth—Symphonic Poem; Two Portraits; Suite No. 1. Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Naxos. $9.99.

Bruckner: Symphony No. 3—original version (1873). Altomonte Orchester St. Florian conducted by Rémy Ballot. Gramola. $18.99.

Mozart: Bassoon Concerto; Françaix: Divertissement for Bassoon and String Orchestra; Vivaldi: Bassoon Concerto in C, RV 472; Villa-Lobos: Ciranda das Sete Notas for Bassoon and String Orchestra; Elgar: Romance for Bassoon and Orchestra. Rui Lopes, bassoon; English Chamber Orchestra. Solo Musica. $18.99.

     Many, many people know Franz Lehár as the composer of the incomparably tuneful, gorgeously and seductively scored Die lustige Witwe, one of the greatest operettas ever written. Fewer, although still a fair number, know of his longtime collaboration with Richard Tauber after World War I, a relationship that blossomed through works such as Paganini and Das Land des Lächelns. But very few music lovers know of the Lehár who composed between The Merry Widow and the later Tauber-focused works. This is the Lehár of war and the runup to it, the composer whose world of elegant salons and flippant aristocratic dalliances collapsed around him as World War I systematically destroyed rulers and their empires. This is the Lehár of Endlich allein (1914), Der Sterngucker (1916) and Wo die Lerche singt (1918). The last of these was the most affected by the war, having been largely written in 1915-16 and completed in 1917. It is almost wholly unknown nowadays, although it was in its time the composer’s second-most-successful work at Theater an der Wein, trailing only Die lustige Witwe. And it was the only Lehár operetta to have its première in Budapest – fitting, since the whole work is set in Hungary, to which the setting was moved because of the war (the work was originally to take place in Russia, which was on the other side in the conflict). CPO’s recording of Wo die Lerche singt is a very fine one and will be of exceptional interest to those who love Lehár and are interested in the way he developed into a composer of sentimental dramas with unhappy endings – along the lines of his good friend Puccini, whose own La Rondine (1920) shares many of the feelings expressed by Lehár in Wo die Lerche singt. The libretto set by Lehár (based on a German play from the 1840s) is a standard upstanding-country-vs.-corrupt-city tale: naïve young country girl falls for an artist who paints her while visiting her small town, follows him to the city, but discovers after some months that town life is not for her and she is not for him – so she returns to the country and her spurned fiancé, and he goes back to his sophisticated former lover. The ending is bittersweet rather than heartbreaking – less emotionally fraught than the conclusions of later Lehár operettas – and the characterizations are on the one-dimensional side. But the music is highly expressive, especially in the effective way Lehár contrasts country girl Margit (Sieglinde Feldhofer) with city woman Vilma (Miriam Portmann). The various relatives, hangers-on and servants all fill their roles effectively, while Margit’s grandfather, Török Pál (Gerhard Ernst), makes an effective contrast to the superficial, city-focused painter, Sándor Zápolja (Yevgeny Tauntsov). In music and plot, Wo die Lerche singt is neither here nor there – it is easy to see it, with hindsight, as a transitional work for Lehár. It is nevertheless effective on its own terms and as representative of a time of enormous upheaval in the composer’s life and in the world in which he lived and worked. Unfortunately, the effectiveness of the recording – of a live performance – is significantly undermined for English speakers by the absence of a libretto or any link to one online. The audience in Bad Ischl frequently reacts to elements of the dialogue and music that those not fluent in German will be wholly unable to understand. CPO’s very brief synopsis of the operetta’s action is no substitute for access to a translated libretto – it is a real shame that the company persists in undermining the excellence of its Lehár releases by preventing non-German speakers from understanding the musical numbers’ words and the very extensive dialogue and thus from enjoying the performances fully.

     The Bad Ischl Festival specializes in less-known Lehár; JoAnn Falletta focuses on the obscure, too, but casts a wider net by performing less-known music by well-known composers as well as works whose creators are themselves unfamiliar. Falletta’s new Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra CD on the Naxos label offers works by Bartók that are so intriguing that their comparative obscurity is hard to explain. True, they are early works, in which the composer was still groping toward a unique style and his later intense focus on folk music. But these pieces communicate so well and are so interestingly orchestrated that one would expect orchestras seeking something out of the ordinary to play them at least from time to time. Perhaps this very well-performed CD will encourage some to do so. Kossuth is a dramatic symphonic poem whose subject is the unsuccessful 1848 battle for Hungarian independence – part of Europe-wide protests and rebellions in that year. The scene-setting may remind some listeners of works such as Dvořák’s Hussite Overture, despite the difference in sound and the fact that Bartók’s work does not end with a musical promise of eventual triumph. Bartók does offer some very well-done musical storytelling here, albeit in line with what was being done by others in the late 19^th century (especially in Richard Strauss’ tone poems) rather than in any significantly personalized direction. Two Portraits, featuring a fine solo violin performance by Michael Ludwig, is a work of strong contrasts between the initial, comparatively lengthy Ideal: Andante and the following, much shorter Grotesque: Presto. Again, there is nothing new here musically, despite the considerable emotional impact. But Suite No. 1, first performed in 1905 and revised in 1920, does hint strongly at the direction in which Bartók was to go: it follows the well-worn form of the Baroque suite, with five movements in contrasting tempos and expressiveness, but its orchestration is unusual in mixing clarity and fullness – and its demands on performers look all the way ahead to the decades-later Concerto for Orchestra. This is a work of considerable interest that might be heard more often if it were not by Bartók, of whom we expect certain things that this piece does not yet fully deliver. Falletta makes a very strong case for the Suite No. 1 to be performed more frequently.

     Another strong case, and an unusual one, is made for Bruckner’s Third Symphony by the Altomonte Orchester St. Florian under Rémy Ballot. This would scarcely seem, at first glance, to be a little-known work – but it is, in the version heard on this Gramola CD. Ballot does something rare here, performing the first (1873) version of the symphony, the one that Wagner allowed Bruckner to dedicate to him (Bruckner had asked Wagner to choose either his Second or his Third for the dedication). The labeling of this work as the “Wagner Symphony” likely puzzles some modern audiences, because in its later, more-often-performed revisions (1877 and 1889), it is not particularly Wagnerian except in scale. Indeed, this is the most-revised Bruckner symphony – there are six versions, and the very first is the grandest, especially when taken at the slow and stately pace that Bruckner wanted: this performance runs a full hour and a half (all of which, remarkably, the engineers at Gramola have managed to fit onto a single disc, in an extraordinary display of technical prowess: a CD almost never includes more than 80 minutes of music). Ballot does a fine job emphasizing the “Brucknerian” elements of the symphony, which is filled with quotations from Wagner’s works but is also the first Bruckner symphony in which the composer’s own unique style comes through clearly, from the opening trumpet motto that unites the work to the overall sense of majesty and monumental structure that listeners will readily identify as “typical” of Bruckner. Various conductors in recent times have successfully emphasized the Schubertian elements of Bruckner’s work and the delicacy with which he sometimes employs sections of the orchestra and even individual instruments – and this is a justifiable approach for the Third, particularly when conducting later versions of it. But in playing the first version, a large and strong sound is clearly called for, and this is what Ballot and his orchestra deliver. Together with their sensitivity to the symphony’s structure, it is the performers’ clear appreciation of the monumental elements of this work that makes this live recording an altogether winning one.

     A combination of less-known and better-known music adds up to a very fine Solo Musica CD featuring bassoonist Rui Lopes and the English Chamber Orchestra. Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto, with cadenzas by Lopes himself, is the centerpiece of the CD, played with verve and a fine sense of ensemble and fully exploring the bassoon’s varied moods, from the virtuosic to the comedic. Vivaldi’s concerto RV 472, one of more than three dozen that he wrote for the bassoon, is also a pleasure to hear: bright and relatively uncomplicated, it lets the soloist take center stage without requiring too much intensity or expressivity – what matters here is poise and balance. The same is true of Elgar’s poetic Romance for Bassoon and Orchestra of 1909-10, here receiving its world première recording in an arrangement that Lopes made for string orchestra. Elgar himself arranged the work for cello and orchestra, and its songfulness fits well on either solo instrument and also works in the Lopes string arrangement – although there is no particular reason to play it using strings alone as accompaniment, except perhaps to provide an even stronger focus on the soloist. Heitor Villa-Lobos’s 1933 Ciranda das Sete Notas was created for bassoon and string orchestra in the first place, and the blending and interplay during this dance fantasia come through very well in Lopes’ recording. Also here is Jean Françaix’s Divertissement, which receives its world première recording in a version for bassoon and string orchestra and which also sounds very fine indeed. Interestingly, this 1942 work was designed by the composer for full orchestra or string quintet, so the string-orchestra version is not much of a stretch. The Lopes disc bears the rather unnecessary title Through Time, presumably intended to show how the bassoon has been handled by composers from the 18^th century well into the 20^th. What is more interesting about this CD than the time span is the way in which the works frequently showcase the bassoon’s thoughtful and poetic potential rather than the amusingly bubbly sound with which it is more-often identified. The Elgar is the clearest example of this, but there are elements of this sort of sensitivity in all the works here, and Lopes’ warmth and fine breath control make his instrument’s emotive capabilities very clear indeed.

(+++) EVOKING EMOTIONS

Copland: Lincoln Portrait; David Lang: mountain; Nico Muhly: Pleasure Ground. Maya Angelou, narrator; Nathan Wyatt, baritone; Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra conducted by Louis Langrée. Fanfare Cincinnati. $16.99.

The Bells of Dawn: Russian Sacred and Folk Songs. Dmitri Hvorostovsky, baritone; The Grand Choir “Masters of Choral Singing” conducted by Lev Kantorovich. Ondine. $16.99.

Sing Thee Nowell. New York Polyphony (Geoffrey Williams, countertenor; Steven Caldicott Wilson, tenor; Christopher Dylan Herbert, baritone; Craig Phillips, bass); Sarah Brailey and Elizabeth Baber Weaver, sopranos. BIS. $21.99 (SACD).

Shining Night: A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen. A film by Michael Stillwater. Hänssler Classic DVD. $29.99.

     It is a fair bet that Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait will be the main drawing card for a new Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra CD on the orchestra’s own label, because the familiar work is narrated by the late Maya Angelou, who is prominently pictured on the CD case with conductor Louis Langrée. This release, the orchestra’s first with Langrée, features a Lincoln Portrait recorded live in November 2013, commemorating the 150^th anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. And it is a fine performance of the work, narrated by Angelou with heartfelt intensity and played by the orchestra with all the solemnity and seriousness the occasion demanded. Objectively speaking, it is not really “better” as a musical/narrative reading than others, but Angelou’s recent death and the fact that the recording was made to mark a milestone in American history will make the CD attractive. But also speaking objectively, the remainder of the disc has much less to recommend it. The CD as a whole is very short – just 46 minutes – and couples the Copland with première recordings of two contemporary works of considerably less interest. One is David Lang’s mountain, spelled in that affected way (with a small “m,” an approach Lang has also used in other works, for no particular reason). This is said to be a Copland-inspired piece, but it pays no obvious homage to the earlier composer. It is a standard minimalist work, somewhat hypnotic in effect, replete with notes and echoes and slides and other typical-for-its-genre sounds. Nico Muhly’s Pleasure Ground, featuring baritone Nathan Wyatt, is described as inspired by landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead. It is as flat as a Midwest prairie and as esoteric as an academic course in architecture. Neither the words nor the music will be of wide interest, and indeed this whole CD seems very narrowly focused, targeting Cincinnati Symphony fans and people seeking an auditory souvenir of Maya Angelou’s life.

     Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s richly burnished baritone tends to be put at the service of almost any kind of music, and he tends to sing all of it in much the same way: intensely and feelingly but not always with much attention to composers’ individual styles or to the meaning of the words. The new Ondine release, The Bells of Dawn: Russian Sacred and Folk Songs, is typical Hvorostovsky in its eclecticism, vocal quality and inattention to the nuances and sometimes-significant stylistic differences among the songs. The composers featured here are scarcely household names: Dobri Khristov, Pavel Chesnokov, Mikhail Burmagin, Aleksandr Arkhangelsky, Aleksandr Varlamov, Elizaveta Shashina and Georgy Sviridov. Their works span two centuries, from Varlamov’s birth in 1801 to Sviridov’s death in 1998. But the stylistic differences among the pieces are nowhere near as significant as this time span would seem to indicate, and Hvorostovsky’s handling of the material makes all the songs sound more similar than different – with, to be sure, great beauty of tone and considerable expressiveness. The sacred songs are complemented, rather oddly, by half a dozen folk songs that also get the big, broad Hvorostovsky treatment, which tends somewhat to overpower their essential simplicity. Hvorostovsky’s fans will welcome this new collection, but those who are only casually interested in his singing will not find much that is special here.

     The works sung by New York Polyphony span even more time: seven centuries. And they have a singular focus: Christmas and its many meanings. The 20 works on this BIS recording range from medieval and Renaissance considerations of Christmas, including motets and carols, to modern pieces by contemporary composers Michael McGlynn, Andrew Smith and John Scott – with O Little Town of Bethlehem as a conclusion.  The juxtaposition of old music and new, of words in modern and older forms of English with ones in Latin, is a touch destabilizing, but the inclusion of Richard Rodney Bennett’s Five Carols, the highly focused singing and the fact that all the music deals with essentially the same topic give this very well-recorded SACD greater unity than might be expected. Particularly interesting sonically are the subtleties of difference between the countertenor and soprano registers. The works are uniformly well sung, both in individual parts and in voice groupings, and the disc as a whole is a very pleasant (if scarcely revelatory) seasonal offering that includes music that, if not great, is forthright, heartfelt and attractively devotional.

     Songs and choral works are the entire focus of American composer Morten Lauridsen (born 1943), the subject of a 2012 documentary film that is now available for fans of the man and his music. Michael Stillwater’s Shining Night: A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen follows the usual arc of biographical/hagiographical documentaries, showing Lauridsen at his Pacific Northwest home, basking in the beauty of the area, and offering commentaries on him and his work by poet Dana Gioia, conductors Paul Salamunovich and Robert Geary, composer/conductor Paul Mealor, and composer Alex Shapiro. Lauridsen is seen in rehearsals in California and Scotland, and the 56-minute film includes performances of several of his works: O Magnum Mysterium, Lux Aeterna, Madrigali, Dirait-on, and Nocturnes. A nicely made film of very limited interest, this is a chance for fans of Lauridsen’s music and members of choirs that have performed his pieces to learn more about the composer, to obtain some insight into his working methods and his thoughts about his art and craft. Because the film’s orientation is entirely positive, it is strictly for people who already know and admire Lauridsen and would like to find more reasons to do so. The included performances – by Volti, Con Anima, the San Francisco Choral Society and the Aberdeen University Choral Society – are all fine; but they are not really the point here. The intention of this Hänssler Classic DVD is simply to pay tribute to a well-regarded contemporary choral composer; and Stillwater’s film does so with attractive pacing, some lovely visuals, and many complimentary words from a wide variety of sources.

(++++) MONSTROUS AMUSEMENTS

Desmond Pucket 2: Desmond Pucket and the Mountain Full of Monsters. By Mark Tatulli. Andrews McMeel. $13.99.

Case File 13, Volume 1: Zombie Kid. By J. Scott Savage. Harper. $6.99.

Case File 13, Volume 2: Making the Team. By J. Scott Savage. Harper. $14.99.

Case File 13, Volume 3: Evil Twins. By J. Scott Savage. Harper. $14.99.

     The ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night can be fun rather than frightening when authors know how to make them, well, funny. And authors who do that in age-appropriate ways can create book series that reach out highly effectively not only to regular readers – especially in the hard-to-reach 8-12 age range – but also to what are euphemistically called “reluctant readers,” which basically means those who would much rather do everything electronically than anything in a form requiring paper, ink and concentration. Mark Tatulli is particularly well-equipped to reach this “reluctant reader” group. He has created two comic strips: the amusing but fairly straightforward Heart of the City and the amusing but decidedly not straightforward Liō, a pantomime strip whose central character spends most of his time interacting with…well, ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night. If Liō did speak, and were to write his own amply illustrated book, you would get something like the Desmond Pucket series, which is one small step for Tatulli, one giant leap for those who think frights are and, darn it, ought to be hilarious. Desmond spends most of his time, even in school – especially in school – thinking up monster-themed creations that he hopes to build professionally someday. In the first book of the series, he made a complete wreck of the school show, in a way that was such a success that he helped the school make enough money for a field trip to the Crab Shell Pier amusement park. This is one of those series where everything possible goes wrong until it eventually goes right – with monsters. The Mountain Full of Monsters is a huge attraction at Crab Shell Pier, and one that Desmond has wanted to go on forever – especially if he can go with Tina Schimsky, the cutest girl in school, and doubly especially if he can do so while avoiding his two arch-nemeses, bully Scott Seltzer and nasty disciplinarian Mr. Needles, who became an unwitting and unwilling hero in the first book because of Desmond’s antics. Desmond Pucket and the Mountain Full of Monsters is best enjoyed by readers who already know the “back story” from the first book, Desmond Pucket Makes Monster Magic, although Tatulli does fill in bits of background for those new to the series. The first part of the new book progresses pretty much as you might expect, with Desmond having multiple unfortunate encounters with both Seltzer and Mr. Needles, being embarrassed to within an inch of his life in front of Tina until he finds out that maybe she actually sorta-kinda likes him, and getting to ride the Mountain Full of Monsters roller coaster repeatedly because of some quick thinking he does when Principal Badonkus shows up. That’s the expected stuff – very amply illustrated by Tatulli, in a style that makes it look as if Desmond himself is doing all the drawings. Halfway through the book, though, there is a new wrinkle: an announcement that the Mountain Full of Monsters will close forever. Now Desmond has a CAUSE – and the way he takes it up, maneuvering through a convoluted plot to save the monsters of the mountain by frightening a group of girls during a birthday campout (a group unfortunately including Tina, who is the birthday girl), is a delight to read and watch and laugh at and generally find monstrously enjoyable. The snow-in-July solution alone is worth a lengthy laugh out loud (and makes perfect sense in the context of the book’s characters). Tatulli definitely has a hit series going here, and the fact that he can more or less cross-pollinate some of the weirdness of the silent Liō with the adventures of the highly talkative Desmond certainly doesn’t hurt the long-term prospects of either the books or the comic strip.

     The first three entries in the Case File 13 series have plenty of promise, too – for many of the same reasons as the Desmond Pucket sequence. These are more-traditional books, with only a few illustrations, and their emphasis is more strongly on adventure and chills (albeit rather mild ones). But like Tatulli’s books, J. Scott Savage’s offer entertaining characters, offbeat situations, and plenty of humor – the ingredient that, when well mixed with all the adventuring, keeps the books light enough for enjoyable casual consumption while also drawing young readers into the more-serious elements of the plot. Case File 13 focuses on three boys – Nick, Carter and Angelo – who have improbable paranormal adventures and find themselves in various odd forms of competition with a trio of girls. Zombie Kid, originally published last year and now available in paperback, opened the series with a story in which Nick inadvertently puts on a cursed amulet that turns him bit by bit into a zombie (a state of affairs in which he loses himself bit by bit – an ear falling off; that sort of thing). With chapter titles such as “Can You Really Have Too Many Cemetery Chapters in a Scary Story?” and “Where Things Become Clearer, and More Confusing,” the book offers lines such as, “It was so wrong to be standing there with a broken body in an alien landscape, only a mile or two from likely death at the hands of a powerful zombie sorcerer, howling like an idiot.” But the three friends laugh anyway, and so will readers, as absurdity piles on absurdity until, with the help of a relative’s spirit, a talking cat, a worm in a glass of chocolate milk, and a rolled-up Snickers bar, the Zombie King is defeated and the boys need only worry about the girls – Angie, Dana and Tiffany – being determined to watch them closely to find out what monstrous matters they are up to all the time.

     What they are up to in the second and third Case File 13 books is more of the same, and mostly in equally amusing form. The second book’s title, Making the Team, is reminiscent of the title of a Tatulli Liō book, Making Friends – which features Liō actually constructing “friends” out of various body parts and such. That is just what is going on in Making the Team: the typical mad scientist doing typically mad-scientific and evil things for the purpose, in this case, of winning football games and eventually extracting souls. The situation here is so dire and troubling that the three boys and three girls actually join forces, which of course does not stop them from constantly bickering. One chapter here – the chapter titles are integral to the amusement – is called “This Is Why You Should Never Judge a Book by Its Cover, Except for This Book, Which Has a Really Amazing Cover,” and that is about as self-referential as things get while the sextet of preteens looks into the doings at a newly opened, suitably mysterious private school with a too-good-to-be-human football squad. The solution to this particular monstrous mystery turns on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the fact that the name of the mysterious school is Sumina (which is animus, Latin for “soul” or “life force,” spelled backwards), and a few other inconsequential coincidences that are of course More Than They Seem To Be. A backup generator, some insane cackling and a plan that is “incredibly stupid but amazing” later, the bad stuff ends with a timely visit from Bartholomew Blackham, the “reference librarian” who narrates these books. And so the stage is set for Evil Twins. This time, Nick, Carter and Angelo go camping (and it is time to note that Savage is surely aware that “Nick Carter” is a long-lasting fictional detective who first appeared in 1886 and was revived as a James-Bond-style secret agent starting in 1964). One of the amusements of the Case File 13 books is the way titles and even page numbers reflect their themes: thus, in Evil Twins, the hands that usually enclose the page numbers are doubled, and the final lines of chapter titles are shown with their reflections. The plot here is a touch weaker than in the first two books, and Evil Twins lacks the excitement of discovering the story basics (Zombie Kid) or working and competing with the girls (Making the Team). This is nevertheless a solid (+++) book that fans already grabbed by the series will enjoy as a well-developed entry in it. Sasquatch footprints and gremlin-like creatures with the ability to copy human appearance are the monstrous attractions this time. The doppelgänger plot is milder than the earlier ones, and the eventual “figure out which are the real kids and which are the evil duplicates” climax is on the obvious side. But there are still plenty of exciting moments here, and enough amusing ones to keep readers – reluctant or not – interested in the series and waiting for the next entry in Case File 13.

(++++) PICTORIAL LEARNING

My Grandfather’s Coat. Retold by Jim Aylesworth. Illustrated by Barbara McClintock. Scholastic. $17.99.

Reading with Pictures: Comics That Make Kids Smarter! By Josh Elder. Andrews McMeel. $19.99.

     An amusing story retold from a Yiddish folk song and universalized to apply to the immigrant experience in general, My Grandfather’s Coat is all about thrift, adjustment, generational communication, and the importance of family. Jim Aylesworth’s words are right in line with the original story of a coat made by an Old World tailor that journeys with him to the New World, wears out, and is remade by him again and again – each new item containing less material as the years go on, but the story itself growing to encompass more and more experiences shared by him and his family. It is Barbara McClintock’s illustrations that really lend this version of the tale so much warmth and personality. She shows the increasingly aged tailor moving through life and from place to place, always retaining his skill with needle and thread and his love of the garment that he originally made as a young man, for his wedding day, and liked so much that he never stopped wearing it even when “little bit by little bit, he frayed it, and he tore it, until at last he wore it out.” Hand sewing gives way to use of a sewing machine, the young man gives way to a young father, and the coat gives way over time to a jacket, then a vest, then a tie, and eventually to a small toy for a grandchild’s kittens – which promptly tear it apart. “Nothing has been wasted,” the grandfather tailor assures the little boy, and indeed, a mouse finds the remains of the cat toy and uses it to make a nest for her family, while the human family makes something else: a story. This story. The book ends with the grandchild, now older but still able to sit on his mother’s lap, being read this very tale – a lovely final picture and a wonderfully warm concluding sentiment for a narrative that emphasizes how little is lost when families create their own traditions and maintain them through the years, wherever life may take them.

     The teaching is more direct and overt, and very cleverly designed, in a collection of comic strips gathered by Josh Elder under the title, Reading with Pictures. The intent here is a super-serious one: to engage students in learning by using comic strips to teach them Common Core State Standards elements of math, science, history and other subjects through a visual medium that will grab their attention more effectively than other methods. To that end, there are 15 stories in this book, by a wide variety of cartoonists with highly varying styles – and for those not familiar with comics, there is even a guide to how to read them and what the different structural elements of them are called. The material here draws visually on just about all comic-book designs currently in use, from fairly straightforward, similar-sized panels to elaborate, artistically interesting collections of multiple panel sizes and shapes. The various genres of comics are well represented, too: a story about similes and metaphors features an alien who misunderstands Earth figures of speech; one about Newton’s laws of motion has the famed scientist’s head in a jar that is carried around by “Dr. Sputnik” as he and his assistant, Spud, repeatedly miscommunicate; an attack by the monstrous Emperor Genghis Kong is foiled by an understanding of the square-cube law; a Pokémon parody called “Probamon!” explains probability; an oddly intriguing tale of George Washington identifies him as “Action President!” and shows him at one point as a marionette manipulated by Alexander Hamilton (reflecting some actual opinions from late in Washington’s life). And so on. Reading with Pictures is specifically designed for classrooms, resulting in some cartoonists’ use of stilted dialogue and duller-than-necessary characters. But other writers and artists get very much into the spirit of the project, and the result is salutary: there is genuine learning here, and there is a great deal of fun as well. Certainly other comics have led to many teachable moments – classes have used Art Spiegelman’s Maus graphic novels to explain the Holocaust, for example – but the works in Reading with Pictures are designed expressly for instruction. And while that somewhat limits their impact and leads some of the contributors to produce less-than-compelling work, it focuses other cartoonists on just how much this visual medium can communicate – leading them to create stories that are both information-packed and a lot more enjoyable to read than are most textbooks. Few textbooks would contain language like this: “That’s enough, you metamorphic menace! You remember the last time? Absolutia melted you into a puddle of goo. It took you 183.2 days to regenerate!” Isn’t that great? Now the Lost Scroll of Eratosthenes is safe! (And what might that be? Read the book – and look at it, too!)

(++++) BEYOND THE BEARABLE

A Bear Called Paddington. By Michael Bond. Illustrated by Peggy Fortnum. Harper. $9.99.

Paddington. By Michael Bond. Illustrated by R.W. Alley. Harper. $17.99.

The Paddington Treasury. By Michael Bond. Illustrated by R.W. Alley. Harper. $21.99.

Paddington Bear All Day. By Michael Bond. Illustrated by R.W. Alley. HarperFestival. $6.99.

Paddington Bear Goes to Market. By Michael Bond. Illustrated by R.W. Alley. HarperFestival. $6.99.

     Paddington Bear never went away, not really. Ever since Michael Bond created the first story about the bear from “Darkest Peru,” arriving in England with a tag saying “please look after this bear” – that was back in 1958 – Paddington and his gentle adventures have charmed kids and their parents. Bond, who is now 88 years old, continues to write and continues to produce Paddington tales: Love from Paddington, a particularly apt title, is due to appear later this year. But if Paddington has been around for more than half a century, he has not shown up in the many and various inevitable ways that beloved fictional characters do nowadays: in new editions, in collections, in board books, and of course in non-book media such as movies. All these forms of appearance have now come to Paddington, or will soon, and HarperCollins is leading the print-media charge with a series of highly attractive reissues of some of the Paddington tales.

     Nowadays kids’ stories are differently told for children of different ages, and differently packaged at various “price points” and in various formats. So the original A Bear Called Paddington is again available, intended for ages 8-12, and is as great a charmer today as it has been for all those years. Peggy Fortnum’s illustrations have much to do with this, complementing Bond’s writing as beautifully as E.H. Shepherd’s did those of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh. Fortnum is expert at suggesting Paddington’s expressions and activities rather than making them perfectly clear and obvious, and this adds to the charm of Bond’s book, which is part fairy tale, part wry amusement, and part (large part) gentle surrealism. The Paddington stories that collectively make up A Bear Called Paddington are individual gems, from the initial discovery and naming of the bear to his inadvertent re-painting of Mr. Brown’s art to his seaside adventure – and more. Everything is sweet, the problems small and amusing ones that bring no harm to anyone and actually bring the family (Paddington included) closer together. Reading or re-reading the original book is a pleasure, despite the fact that there is a faint whiff of an earlier, apparently more-innocent life and era about it – or because of that fact.

     Paddington makes a wonderful character for younger kids, ages 4-8, to meet, and two picture books with R.W. Alley illustrations give them the chance to do just that. Alley’s work more plainspoken (or the artistic equivalent) and more forthright than Fortnum’s, his Paddington influenced as much by Walt Disney’s Pooh as by Milne’s. Roly-poly and highly expressive, this Paddington has adventures that seem more typical for those in kids’ books than do the ones illustrated by Fortnum – even when they are the same adventures. A lot has to do with the characterization of the others in the stories: Alley makes them, collectively, rather typical “character types” for young children’s tales, posing them in expected ways and doing anticipated things. Yet this does not diminish Paddington’s charm – it just rearranges it a bit. Parents unsure of how 21^st-century children will react to Bond’s bear will want the new edition of Paddington, which was originally published in 1998 and subsequently in 2007. This is simply a pleasant oversize-picture-book version of the very first Paddington story, in which the bear meets the Browns and comes to live with them. If families find it congenial, they can move on to The Paddington Treasury, which is subtitled “Six Classic Bedtime Stories” – even though there is no reason for them to be read only at night. The first Paddington tale is included here as well, so families “moving up” to this book (which was first published in England in 2010 but is only now available in a U.S. edition) will have that story twice – perhaps encouraging them to donate Paddington to another family and, in modern parlance, “pay it forward” by sharing the joy. There is certainly plenty of joy in all the stories here: the “origin” one is followed by Paddington at the Palace, Paddington at the Zoo, Paddington in the Garden, Paddington and the Marmalade Maze, and Paddington the Artist. All are delightful, all are warm, all are as cuddly as the bear himself, and all are filled with minor predicaments and small amusements that are, collectively, more fun than the pratfalls and extreme gags so common in books for children today.

     Actually, kids are never too young to delight in Paddington, which is where the new board books – their contents originally dating to 1998 but now available in small, easy-to-handle format – come in. Paddington Bear All Day and Paddington Bear Goes to Market both feature Alley illustrations and simple, amusing, rhymed stories. From the first of these: “Lunch comes next,/ and then it’s tea,/ with marmalade./ Oh, lucky me!” And from the second: “Around the corner, down the street,/ He’s off to get his daily treat.” Officially designated for ages 4-8, these little books are fine for children of any age, from newborns on up – although a top age of 4-6 seems more correct than 4-8. In these short-short stories as in the longer ones that collectively make up the Paddington books, the bear from South America is positively adorable as he fits into everyday London life, or tries to; and the interactions he has with the Brown family, the neighbors, the shopkeepers, the gardeners and all the other area residents are unfailingly pleasant, amusing, and thoroughly endearing. Paddington may be 50-plus years old, but he has long since attained that rarest of fictional-character statuses: he seems always to have existed, and is truly timeless.

(+++) SHORT AND SWEET

No Nap Book and CD. By Eve Bunting. Illustrated by Susan Meddaugh. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $10.99.

Pinkalicious: Thanksgiving Helper. By Victoria Kann. HarperFestival. $8.99.

The Berenstain Bears: Thanksgiving All Around. By Mike Berenstain. HarperFestival. $6.99.

     Short, cute and charming, but potentially problematical for families with small children, Eve Bunting’s No Nap, first published in 1989 and first released in paperback in 1996, is now available in the paperback edition packaged with a well-read, nicely paced CD that offers the book in two separate versions. In one, narrator Jan Staab simply reads the whole book through, with the story enlivened by some Michael Moss music. In the other, the reading and music are the same, but there are page-turn signals as well, so kids can learn to read the book on their own by listening to Staab’s narration and turning pages as she moves on in the story. That story remains delightful, from an adult perspective: little Susie does not want to nap while Mom is out, so Dad tries to come up with ways of getting her to rest: walking, dancing, exercising, reading and more. Finally, Dad gets Susie to lie down with him, but she keeps coming up with things that she wants him to get for her – which he obligingly does. The end result is that exhausted Dad is the one who falls asleep, with toys piled all over him. The text is simple and winning, and Susan Meddaugh's watercolor illustrations bring the words even more enjoyably to life as they contrast Susie’s wide-open eyes with her father’s increasingly sleepy ones. This book-plus-CD offering is a delightful one on many levels – but there is a catch. Young children – the package is aimed at ages 3-8 but will be most attractive for ages 2-5 – may very well see the book as an instruction manual rather than an amusing fictional story. Kids like little Susie do find ways to avoid naps, and all children, especially toddlers and post-toddlers, are constantly on the lookout for new ways to escape midday sleep – not realizing that the lack of a nap will make them (and their parents!) cranky, uncomfortable and generally miserable later. No Nap Book can easily be read as a step-by-step guide to escaping nap time and making sure that a highly tolerant parent, such as the father in Bunting’s book, simply cannot find a way to get a young child to rest for a while. Doubt it? Then by all means get this book/CD combo and turn your young child loose on it – he or she will surely enjoy looking at and listening to it time and again, and eventually reading it on his or her own. But don’t say you weren’t warned of the possible consequences!

     “Short, cute and charming” are also the aims of some brand-new books featuring popular series characters, and fans of those characters will enjoy these entries even though they are rather thin both in size and in plot. Both Pinkalicious: Thanksgiving Helper and The Berenstain Bears: Thanksgiving All Around are, as their titles indicate, strictly seasonal books; and both try to attract young readers with extras rather than simply with stories – Victoria Kann’s book features stickers, a poster and tear-out Thanksgiving place cards, while Mike Berenstain’s offers a flap to lift on every page. As it happens, the added items are at least as interesting as these particular stories. Pinkalicious: Thanksgiving Helper is distressingly free of the title character’s usual preoccupation with the color pink – although not entirely absent, it has very little role in the tale, with the result that this becomes just another family-in-autumn story. Pinkalicious and her little brother, Peter, try to help their parents with yard work and kitchen duties, but make a mess of everything they do until, finally, they set the table attractively (although incorrectly; their ever-tolerant parents thank them profusely; and everyone sits down for Thanksgiving dinner. The occurrences here are characterless – the same story could be told with pretty much any central characters from kids’ books, such as the Berenstain Bears. As it happens, though, The Berenstain Bears: Thanksgiving All Around is a different – but still entirely ordinary – story. There is no Thanksgiving meal here at all, and the only reason the characters are looking for a turkey is to allow Papa to proclaim the bird “a fine, proud fellow” and give the Bear family a chance to wish readers a happy Thanksgiving. Title aside, the story is seasonal, not holiday-specific, showing the Bear family walking around and seeing nature scenes, a pumpkin patch, farm work, a pond, and so on. The flaps do not reveal anything particularly surprising: at the pond, for instance, Brother mentions that there must be ducks, geese and swans nearby, and lifting the flap shows ducks, geese and swans. A pleasant, meandering little tale, thankfully free of the moralizing that too often gets in the way of Berenstain Bears storytelling, The Berenstain Bears: Thanksgiving All Around is a nice but not very notable entry in this long-running series.

(++++) SELECTED SYMPHONISTS

Schumann: Complete Symphonic Works, Volume II—Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3. WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln conducted by Heinz Holliger. Audite. $18.99.

Clementi: Symphonies, Op. 18, Nos. 1 and 2; Piano Concerto; Minuetto pastorale. Bruno Canino, piano; Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma conducted by Francesco La Vecchia. Naxos. $9.99.

Rimsky-Korsakov: Sheherazade. Toronto Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Oundjian. Chandos. $14.99 (SACD).

Barbara Harbach: Orchestral Music II—Night Soundings; Gateway Festival Symphony; A State Divided—A Missouri Symphony; Jubilee Symphony. London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by David Angus. MSR Classics. $12.95.

     The second volume in Audite’s series of Schumann’s complete symphonic works continues in the vein of the first, but with more-familiar music. The first volume contained Symphony No. 1; Overture, Scherzo and Finale; and the very rarely heard original 1841 version of what would later be known as Symphony No. 4. This time, the adept Heinz Holliger leads Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3 in rousing performances that break no new ground but that are sensitive and well-balanced, showing that Schumann’s instrumentation was not lacking (as it has often been accused of being) but simply reflected the forces available to him when he wrote these works. The music comes across quite well as played by the smooth, well-balanced WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln. Holliger paces the first movement of Symphony No. 2 particularly well, giving the problematic main theme enough forward impetus and rhythmic bite so that it follows the very fine introduction without becoming a letdown. He carefully explores the unifying features of this symphony, too. In Symphony No. 3, Holliger paces the first and fifth movements carefully to parallel and reflect each other, giving them the effect of bookends. Between them nestle three contrasting movements that build in seriousness to the climax of the fourth – after which the finale offers a burst of enthusiastic release and relief. These are highly attractive readings in a series that holds considerable promise and is well on the way to fulfilling it.

     Muzio Clementi’s Op. 18 symphonies speak of a much earlier era: they were written while Mozart and Haydn were still alive, in 1787. They are particularly Haydnesque, as were many minor and not-so-minor symphonies of the time, and nicely constructed and balanced without ever approaching the quality and poise of their models. At a time when Haydn and Mozart were expanding the symphonic canvas harmonically and lengthening their works significantly, Clementi produced two works in the 17-minute range with straightforward orchestration and well-made but undistinguished themes. Yet these early Clementi symphonies contain some surprises in modulations and dynamics, and it is these that make them particularly interesting to hear. Clementi was not a distinguished composer, but he did have some intriguing ideas, even though he never broke through to full originality in these early works. Clementi was better known in his own time as a piano manufacturer (a few of his instruments have survived) and a performer, so his sole surviving Piano Concerto would seem to be of particular interest. But it is curiously pallid, even when as well performed as it is by Bruno Canino on this Naxos CD. The orchestration has some particularly well-wrought elements, which are very well handled by the Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma under Francesco La Vecchia. Yet this concerto, which dates to about 1796, seems more a throwback to earlier Mozart than a work in the vein of early Beethoven, whose first piano concerto (published as No. 2) appeared in 1795 (and in fact was largely composed in the previous decade). It is of course unfair to compare Clementi, a workmanlike composer, with the geniuses of his time, and this work, heard to the extent possible without thinking of other composers’ concertos, is certainly nicely made and suitably (but not overly) virtuosic. It does not have much staying power, but gives a fair idea of the level at which Clementi himself must have performed. Unfortunately, in the absence of other surviving Clementi piano concertos, it provides something less than a complete picture. Yet it is worth noting that Clementi often has some surprises in store for listeners – in, for example, the brief Minuetto pastorale, whose nickname barely fits it at all. Clementi here starts in pastoral vein but does not continue in it, introducing significantly darker elements as the piece progresses and producing a very dramatic Trio that hints strongly at his ability to tone-paint when he wanted to. A problem with Clementi’s music is that much of it has not survived, so it is very difficult to get an overview of him as a composer. This CD contains tantalizing hints about his strengths, even though the works as a whole tend toward the mundane.

     There is nothing mundane in Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade, a symphony in all but name that consists of a series of four interlinked tone poems whose superb orchestration shows the composer at his finest. The work’s longstanding and wholly justified popularity does set the bar high for new performances, and on that basis, the new recording featuring the Toronto Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Oundjian gets a (+++) rating. Nothing is out of place here – Jonathan Crow’s solo violin is especially strong – but nothing really catches fire, either. There is grandeur to Sheherazade, but here things are on the matter-of-fact side, nicely played but never truly compelling. The initial threatening sounds representing the sultan are not particularly menacing, and the climactic last-movement shipwreck is considerably less than cataclysmic. The middle movements flow nicely and pleasantly, but without a strong sense of characterization of the figures limned by the composer – the music is all there, but its storytelling elements are compromised. It is also rather odd in this day and age to have a release that contains only this symphonic suite – a 45-minute disc of a well-known repertoire work really shortchanges listeners, although this is admittedly a lower-than-usual price for a Chandos SACD. On balance, this is a fine, even admirable handling of Sheherazade, but there is nothing outstanding about it, nothing to make listeners sit up and take notice to the extent of finding this recording a must-have.

     Nor is the second MSR Classics release of Barbara Harbach’s orchestral music a must-have – but here the reasons do not lie in the performances, which are first-rate throughout. This is actually the ninth disc in an ongoing series devoted to Harbach’s music, a major commitment for any contemporary composer; and certainly the skill with which Harbach handles the large-scale works here is attractive in many ways. The works themselves, though, are on the pale side. Night Soundings, a three-movement orchestral suite, offers three nocturnal-sounding movements – that is to say, the title neatly encapsulates what the music offers, but there is nothing especially distinguished in the way Harbach interprets darkness (although the final Midnight Tango has some engaging moments). Two Missouri-focused works, Gateway Festival Symphony and A State Divided—A Missouri Symphony, are deliberate exercises in regionalism, but unlike some others (such as Ives’ Three Places in New England), Harbach’s pieces seem straitlaced and too deliberately intended for a narrow audience that has strong familiarity with the subject matter (sunset in St. Louis, the Missouri Compromise, the Battle of Westport, etc.). Jubilee Symphony is also a locally oriented work, written for the 50^th anniversary of the University of Missouri at St. Louis and culminating with a musical paean to the Greek god Triton, the university’s mascot. Very well focused on its subject matter and certainly targeted with care at the university that commissioned it, the work, when heard simply as music and without regard to the occasion of its creation, does not contain very much that is unusual or compelling. Harbach, a fine organist as well as a composer, certainly uses an orchestra with skill and creates more-accessible pieces than many contemporary composers produce. The ones here are, however, somewhat surface-level works for anyone beyond those whose imagination and interest they are intended to capture: they neither reach out to listeners in general nor appear intended to do so.

(+++) SONGS OF PRAISE AND WONDER

Mendelssohn: Elijah. Rosalind Plowright, soprano; Linda Finnie, contralto; Arthur Davies, tenor; Willard White, bass; Jeremy Budd, treble; London Symphony Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Richard Hickox. Chandos. $18.99 (2 CDs).

Moses Pergament: Den Judiska Sängen (The Jewish Song). Birgit Nordin, soprano; Sven-Olof Eliasson, tenor; Stockholm Philharmonic Choir and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by James DePriest. Caprice. $19.99.

Sacred Love—Music of Yuri Falik, Arturs Maskats and Georgy Sviridov. Ieva Ezeriete, soprano; Aleksandrs Antoņenko, tenor; Latvian Radio Choir conducted by Sigvards Kļava. Ondine. $16.99.

Dan Locklair: Choral Music. Bel Canto Company conducted by David Pegg, with Ann Doyle, piano; The Choral Art Society conducted by Robert Russell, with Prometheus Chamber Players and Shirley Curry, piano. MSR Classics. $19.95 (2 CDs).

     Mendelssohn’s Elijah gets a rather old-fashioned reading from the late Richard Hickox (1948-2008) in Chandos’ re-release of a 1989 performance – and it is hard not to wonder what Hickox would have done in a newer recording with greater sensitivity to historic performance practices. There is grandness and epic scale to this Elijah, but it is also rather overblown and over-dramatic, more operatic than the music can really sustain over more than two hours. Certainly there is grandeur and spirituality aplenty here, but there is also somewhat too much neither-here-nor-there in the reading: it is neither as expansive and large-scale as in the work’s original performances, which often involved hundreds of singers, nor as streamlined and classically poised as more-modern versions that attempt to show the ways in which Elijah stands as testimony to Mendelsohn’s strong roots in the works of Bach and Handel. The singing is on the bland side, with Willard White a rather disappointing Elijah – he tends to hit notes slightly too low, and does not emote very effectively. The other soloists are all right but not outstanding. And Hickox is not at his best here: his conducting is curiously bland in some sections, although it does catch fire periodically – part of what will make Hickox fans wonder what the conductor might have done with this work as he matured in later years. All in all, this is a good but scarcely great Elijah, its English text clearly enunciated by the soloists and somewhat less so by the chorus, its music played well and often dramatically, but not always convincingly. Certainly there is great drama in Elijah, as in the competition between Jehovah and Baal; but there is also transcendence, especially toward the work’s end, and that is largely absent here.

     Mendelssohn was born Jewish, although baptized as a Lutheran when he was seven years old. Elijah is taken from the Old Testament but is certainly not used by Mendelssohn to showcase Judaism as a religion in any significant sense. Other composers, however, have thoroughly embraced the Jewish experience and sought to express it musically. For example, Moses Pergament (1893-1977), a Finnish-Swedish composer who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish home in Helsinki, created Den Judiska Sängen (The Jewish Song) in a three-week period in 1944, when the full extent of the Holocaust and Nazi depredations was becoming known. The work has not been performed in its entirety since 1974 – and it is the 1974 performance that is now available on the Caprice label. Pergament was best known for his music criticism and analysis, and for his advocacy of new musical trends even when he said he could not understand them (which was his comment on electronic music). He immersed himself in Jewish musical traditions, even learning ancient musical notation, and incorporated both sacred and popular Jewish musical idioms into his own works – along with jazz, which was slow to emerge as a significant component of modern Swedish classical music. Den Judiska Sängen follows a story arc from Biblical through modern times, from emotions of intense bitterness to feelings of pride and to an eventual level of hope and confidence in the future – being in this way, if few others, similar to Mendelssohn’s Elijah. Musically, Den Judiska Sängen sets lyrics taken from two of Swedish author and art historian Ragnar Josephson’s poetry collections, The Chain (1912) and Jewish Poems (1916). The work contains musical interludes as well as sung sections, and the Adagio and Intermezzo drammatico are in fact two of its most affecting and effective movements. The vocal elements, for soprano and tenor soloists both with and without chorus, are uniformly well-written, and the work as a whole emerges as an effective and unusual modern oratorio that will intrigue listeners unfamiliar with its subject matter and composer – Pergament was well-known in his time but is almost completely obscure today.

     Also very little known are the three composers heard on a new Ondine CD featuring the Latvian Radio Choir, which is considered one of the best chamber choirs in Europe. The disc is called Sacred Love, but in fact mixes the sacred with the secular in works by Yuri Falik (1936-2009), Arturs Maskats (born 1947) and Georgy Sviridov (1915-1998). The music ranges from the traditionally and expressively religious (Falik’s Your Temple, Lord and Maskats’ Let My Prayer Be Granted) to works that celebrate nature and the seasons (Falik’s Autumn and Maskats’ Spring) and ones focusing on personal relationships and love (Sviridov’s About Lost Youth and Natasha). Five of the pieces include solo parts sung by two noted Latvian singers, soprano Ieva Ezeriete and tenor Aleksandrs Antoņenko; the remaining works are entirely choral. The choir sings very well indeed, with clarity of enunciation and sensitivity of phrasing, and Sigvards Kļava directs it well. The music is intermittently interesting without ever really impressing through its expressiveness or design – indeed, there is little distinctive in the composers’ individual styles and little to distinguish one from the next, although Maskats does paint larger and more intricate musical canvases than do Falik and Sviridov. The CD will be of most interest to listeners interested in modern Eastern European vocal music and those who have found earlier performances by the Latvian Radio Choir, such as its recording of Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil, to be attractive.

     The attractions are multiple in a new MSR Classics release of choral music by Dan Locklair (born 1949). Like the ones on the Ondine CD, the works on this two-disc set encompass both the religious and the worldly, and here they also span a decade and a half of creativity and thus show Locklair’s changing compositional concerns and techniques. The first CD, featuring the Bel Canto Company under David Pegg, includes Holy Canticles (1996), Alleluia Dialogues (1990), Instant Culture (1985), On Cats (1978), Break Away! (1983), Dona Nobis Pacem (also 1983), Proclaim the Lord (1985), A Christmas Carol (1981), and Three Christmas Motets (1993). The second disc, performed by The Choral Art Society directed by Robert Russell, offers Windswept (the trees) (1992), For Amber Waves (1993), Tapestries (1983), Brief Mass (1993), Changing Perceptions (1987), and Epitaph (also 1987). The juxtapositions are sometimes telling, sometimes whimsical, and in the case of Brief Mass and Changing Perceptions genuinely thoughtful. The amusements of On Cats, the nature scenes of Windswept (which includes some fine a cappella writing), the straightforward religious expression of Brief Mass, all show aspects of Locklair’s personality and musical concerns. The singing and instrumental backup are well-handled throughout. Locklair’s choral music is more accessible than many other modern choral works, and there is certainly a lot of it here – indeed, there is likely too much for any listener not already enamored of the composer. His fans will welcome this compilation of recordings from 1995 and 1996, and members of choruses that have sung Locklair will enjoy hearing some pieces with which they are likely to be familiar, complemented by ones they probably do not know. For listeners with limited interest in modern choral works, however, this release of two-and-a-quarter hours of music will likely be a bit too much.