(++++) PORTRAITS IN SOUND

Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue; Neil Sedaka: Manhattan Intermezzo; Keith Emerson: Piano Concerto No. 1; Duke Ellington: New World a-Comin’. Jeffrey Biegel, piano; Benjamin Wesner, clarinet; Brown University Orchestra conducted by Paul Phillips. Naxos. $12.99.

A Tribute to the Band of the Welsh Guards. British Military Music Archive. $19.99 (2 CDs).

Paul John Stanbery: Robert McCloskey—The Life for Me; Craig Madden Morris: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. Frank T. Restesan, violin; Hamilton Fairfield Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul John Stanbery. Navona. $14.99.

     An intriguing mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar, a blending of musical styles as well as genres, and a portrait of New York City in all its sprawl and excitement, a new Naxos CD of the music of Gershwin, Sedaka, Emerson and Ellington features first-rate pianism and a pervasive sense of joy in music-making. Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue has been recorded innumerable times, although not always in the Ferde Grofé orchestration heard here. Jeffrey Biegel and the Brown University Orchestra under Paul Phillips proffer a performance in which the jazz elements of the music predominate and the rhythmic verve of the music carries it through from start to finish. This may be a student orchestra, but it is a well-trained and well-rehearsed one that has considerable polish and does not seem to be struggling with any of the material. The other three pieces on this disc are less often heard, much less often recorded, and also feature contributory work by hands other than those of their composers. Second-oldest after Gershwin’s 1924 piece is Ellington’s New World a-Comin’ from 1943, as arranged and edited by Maurice Peress. This is written-out jazz, with a written-out cadenza originally created by Sir Roland Hanna – something of a contradiction in terms, but the work retains the feeling of spontaneity associated with the jazz form, and the cadenza also sounds spontaneous, as if Biegel were making it up on the spot. Emerson is best known as a founder of the group Emerson, Lake & Palmer, not as a classical musician, but he clearly has abilities in the classical field. His Piano Concerto No. 1, which dates to 1976 and was co-orchestrated by John Mayer, is in the traditional three movements but gives very short shrift to the central slow one, which is not in an especially slow tempo (Andante molto cantabile) and lasts just two-and-a-half minutes in a 20-minute piece. The result is a work weighted toward positive emotions and a kind of bright optimism, despite the initial fury of the finale. Although not overtly connected to New York in the way the other works on this CD are, the concerto is certainly reflective of some aspects of the city’s personality, notably through its insistence on fighting through to optimism in the end – despite whatever reversals appear earlier. In contrast, Sedaka’s 2008 Manhattan Intermezzo, orchestrated by Lee Holdridge, does directly celebrate New York; and it makes a fascinating parallel and contrast to Gershwin’s Jazz Age piece of virtually the same length. Sedaka, like Emerson, is known for popular music, not anything classical, but here he shows himself quite capable of working in an admittedly free-form sort of concert piece, for which Biegel himself filled out and embellished the piano part. Essentially a freewheeling tribute to the energy, intensity and diversity of New York (Manhattan is only one of the five counties that make up the city, but is the one that virtually everyone refers to when speaking of the city as a whole), Sedaka’s piece is superficial but quite attractive – as the city on which it focuses often seems to be. Actually, none of the works here tries to look for the artistic and cultural depths that are elements of New York life: there is certainly no grandeur here. But all four pieces suggest that there is a great deal of enjoyment to be had in music that relates to New York, as well as in the city against whose backdrop the pieces were produced.

     Even people who are not New Yorkers and perhaps not fans of the city can enjoy the Biegel/Phillips collaboration, but the new British Military Music Archive release paying tribute to the Band of the Welsh Guards is for a distinctly limited audience. This two-disc set chronicles the band’s first 25 years – it is now a century old; hence the “tribute” concept – and that means the recordings heard here date from 1916 through 1941. The ability to restore such early material to anything approaching acceptable modern sound is quite a feat, and the very fine job done by the producers and engineers of this release is to be commended. That does not, however, mean that the discs are up to modern sonic standards or that the performances will be of significant interest other than to devoted collectors of military music or ones particularly enamored of this specific band; it is the limited-audience nature of the production that results in its (+++) rating. The entire first CD offers recordings from 1916, from the very first one the band ever made (The Welsh Guards on Parade) to such curiosities as The Phantom Brigade (representing a retired colonel thinking of the glory of the past) and March of the ANZACs (a tribute to the fighters of Australia and New Zealand at Gallipoli – it is important to remember that this band was founded during World War I and did a tour to the front lines). The selections on the second CD were recorded from 1921 to 1941. Here, for instance, is Wedded Whimsies, a musical potpourri from 1931 including everything from Turkey in the Straw and My Old Kentucky Home to snippets of Schubert’s “Unfinished” symphony and Bizet’s Carmen. Separately, also recorded in 1931, there is a selection from Gounod’s Faust. From 1934 comes Eric Coates’ sturdy London Bridge, and from 1941 there is a collection of Welsh national songs featuring tenor David Lloyd. None of this material will be a must-have for listeners in general, but those devoted to fine band music and interested in celebrating a century of one first-rate ensemble’s performances will find the release very attractive.

     The musical portrait is not of a city or a performing group but of an individual person in Paul John Stanbery’s Robert McCloskey—The Life for Me. This is film music, composed for a movie about the author of the well-known kids’ book, Make Way for Ducklings. Stanbery has extracted two brief suites from the film, and he conducts them with the Hamilton Fairfield Symphony Orchestra on a new Navona CD. This is uncomplicated, straightforward music, as befits both the film medium and children’s books: there are, for example, clear portrayals of mechanization in The Donut Machine and of broad outdoor spaces in The Rocky Coast of Maine. The most amusing movement, and the one most directly tied to McCloskey’s most-famous work, is called Ducklings Everywhere! It channels a touch of Copland through irregular “waddling” rhythms and is just plain fun. There is certainly nothing of far-reaching importance in Stanbery’s suites, but they are easy to listen to and enjoyable. Stanbery here also conducts the violin concerto by Craig Madden Morris, a substantial three-movement work with rather nonspecific programmatic titles for its movements: By the River, Breezes and Dance. Violinist Frank T. Restesan handles the solo part well – it is nothing special, but does include its fair share of technical complexities. There is little tone painting in the music, though. There is nothing especially bucolic about the first movement, and while there is some gentle swaying in the second, it is not particularly evocative of anything, although there is some attractive lyricism on display. The third movement adds some percussive elements to the mood of the second, but if these are dances, most are very slow ones, and they are not especially rhythmic through the majority of the movement. There is an overall monochromatic feeling to the concerto, a fact that is largely responsible for the (+++) rating of this CD despite the pleasantries of the shorter and lighter tribute to Robert McCloskey.

(++++) FANTASTIC BEASTS

The Bear and the Piano. By David Litchfield. Clarion. $16.99.

A Dragon’s Guide to the Care and Feeding of Humans. By Laurence Yep & Joanne Ryder. Illustrations by Mary GrandPré. Yearling. $6.99.

     There is something so sweet, so touching, so peculiar and yet so strangely familiar in David Litchfield’s story of The Bear and the Piano that it feels as if the book has been around for a long time even though it is brand-new. The story just seems to fall into place as a series of impossibilities that quickly seem only improbable and soon after become maybe-could-be. The concept is odd, initially made comfortable only because Litchfield’s beautifully evocative art quickly pulls readers into a world that never existed but maybe does exist. The tale starts in a forest where, for reasons never explained, a piano sits beneath a tree – where a bear cub happens upon it and creates a plonk sound by touching it with a paw. Not much there; the bear cub leaves. But something draws him back to this place, this instrument – which, by the by, is perpetually in tune, as befits a piano in a fairy tale. The intrigued bear keeps returning and figuring out, note  by note over “days and weeks and months and years” (the passage of time being shown simply and gorgeously in the illustrations), how to play the piano so that “the sounds that came from the strange thing were beautiful.” The grand and great power of music not only makes the bear happy but also makes him dream “of strange and wonderful lands.” Night after night, for an audience of the other bears that discover the strange thing in the clearing, the never-named bear performs, until one night a man and girl happen to hear the musical marvel and ask the bear to come with them to the big city. Somewhat reluctantly, not wanting to disappoint the other bears but moved by curiosity and opportunity, the bear joins the man and girl – and now we have a fish-out-of-water (or bear-out-of-forest) theme. But things go well for the bear, not badly – very well indeed, as he becomes the toast of the town and a huge success: Litchfield’s rendition of a bustling New York City street scene with piano-playing-bear-themed focus is marvelous. All goes well, all of it, except for one small thing: “He missed his old friends. He missed his home.” Can you go home again? That is now the book’s question: the scene of the bear, back in the forest but still wearing his tuxedo, dashing along toward the clearing where he always played the piano, is a gem. And when the bear arrives there, he finds – nothing. No piano. No other bears. Nothing. Sad? Yes – but not permanently so. For Litchfield finds a way to show that you can go home again, can recapture the magic of an earlier time, can return to acceptance, can again produce joy and wonder for your original audience. And what then? Litchfield is smart enough not to answer that question: kids and parents who read The Bear and the Piano can have long talks about whether the bear stays in the forest or returns to the city, whether he alternates his time between the two, whether the man and girl come looking for him, whether he finds true satisfaction back home or again yearns for the delights of large-scale success. A book that answers many questions while resolutely refusing to answer all of them, The Bear and the Piano is marvelously sensitive and a glorious celebration of the power of music, which here has charms far beyond those needed to soothe a savage breast.

     Matters are considerably lighter in A Dragon’s Guide to the Care and Feeding of Humans, the first book of a planned trilogy by Laurence Yep and Joanne Ryder, originally published last year and now available in paperback. The basic idea here is to explore the relationship between a 3,000-year-old dragon who frequently transforms into the human shape of Joan of Arc and goes by the name of Miss Drake – and a typically feisty 10-year-old girl named Winnie. Instead of having Winnie keep the dragon as a pet – something that has been done innumerable times before – this book has the dragon keep Winnie as a pet, one in a long line of human pets Miss Drake has had from Winnie’s family. Predictably, the two central characters clash from the start, but readers will realize very soon that they are much alike under the skin, or scales, as the case may be. Miss Drake, who narrates the book, is neither as crusty nor as unemotional as she wants Winnie to believe her to be; and Winnie, who takes care both of herself and of her injured and slowly healing mother, is not as independent and adult-before-her-time as she thinks she is. Both characters are misfits, and both find, as the story progresses, that they have much to offer each other. Miss Drake slowly introduces Winnie to the magical world that dragons and other fantastic creatures inhabit, which coexists with San Francisco but which humans are prevented, by spells, from perceiving. However, it turns out that Winnie has some magic-making ability of her own – of a problematical kind. She is a talented young artist, constantly drawing in a sketchbook – which proves to be enchanted in a way that results in her drawings coming to life. Yep and Ryder throw in occasional real-world references to keep this rather frothy concoction of a (+++) novel interesting, but young readers may not get them. The Joan of Arc reference, for example, is supposed to come through even though the authors never actually mention Joan of Arc. Elsewhere, Miss Drake discusses a magical shopkeeper – an air sprite named Clipper – and says, “Over four hundred years ago, when I had been in London with my pet Renwick, I’d introduced her to a neighbor, an actor named William. Her large eyes and delicate features had inspired him to write a funny little piece about the midsummer that still seems to please audiences today.” Whether preteens will know that the authors are referring to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an open question. In any case, these passing references are not the core of the story; nor are Miss Drake’s often-amusing personality traits, such as her using a bank debit card and having “digital subscriptions to all the fashion magazines” so she can transform into a human wearing trendy clothing. The book’s climax involves a magic-eating monster that Miss Drake and Winnie conquer together at the Enchanters’ Fair, specifically at the Spelling Bee – which is a contest involving spellcasting. The book ends with the promise of further adventures, of course; the next novel will be called A Dragon’s Guide to Making Your Human Smarter, and an excerpt is offered at the end here. It is true that the “turnaround” aspect of the who-is-the-pet issue wears thin long before the first book’s conclusion, but the humor – abetted by some of Mary GrandPré’s usual high-quality illustrations – bids fair to continue as the sequence does.

(+++) WAY OUT TO ONE SIDE

Hillary Rodham Clinton: Some Girls Are Born to Lead. By Michelle Markel. Illustrated by LeUyen Pham. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $17.99.

Hillary Rodham Clinton: Do All the Good You Can. By Cynthia Levinson. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $16.99.

Fight Like a Girl: 50 Feminists Who Changed the World. By Laura Barcella. Zest Books. $14.99.

     Hagiography during intense political campaigns is only to be expected. When books tell candidates’ stories exactly as the candidates would want them to be told, the authors are in effect making campaign contributions rather than contributing in any useful way to reasoned political speech. That is the case with two new works about Hillary Clinton, one for younger readers and one for somewhat older ones. Starting with their praise-to-the-sky subtitles and continuing in much the same vein from there, both books make it abundantly clear how much the authors admire, respect, care for, support and look up to their subject, treating her, if not quite with reverence, with a degree of admiration that is out of proportion to responsible biographical writing but is right in line with what any candidate would love to have as an endorsement. Michelle Markel’s book goes even farther out on a limb on Clinton’s behalf than Cynthia Levinson’s does. Markel’s is a picture book for young readers – the illustrations by LeUyen Pham are fine, although they are on the stodgy side and not among her best – and suggests that Clinton was a heroic figure from her earliest years: “Take that, 1950s! Some girls are born to lead.” In Markel’s narrative, Clinton could and did do no wrong, ever, raising money for the poor when she was very young; attending the right church at the right time to be inspired by a youth minister and by Martin Luther King, Jr.; doing “a startling thing” by criticizing a senator in a graduation speech; proclaiming what was right and proper and correct and worthwhile again and again, in rallies and newspapers and from stages and in debates and – she just did so much so well, according to Markel and Pham. And her political career? Well, it was just one success after another, even though she took some time along the way to marry “Bill, her law school sweetheart. The two of them loved politics as much as they loved each other.” Lest there be the slightest doubt how Markel feels about Clinton, on one page she specifically proclaims her “a superwoman” – yes, in bold type. So little ever went wrong for Clinton, who always did so much that was so good for so many people, that young readers will be extremely puzzled at one sentence, “Some people hated Hillary and her new ideas.” But they will be reassured that those bad new-idea-hating people could not keep Clinton down: the rest of the book shows her moving from success to success to success, loved and respected by everyone except those unnamed haters, because “all her life she’s fought for fairness and compassion.” What a shame that the readers targeted by this book are too young to vote: they would cast ballots for Clinton without a second thought. In fact, the whole book is designed to be sure there are no second thoughts about her.

     Levinson’s book is at least a touch more nuanced. The extent to which she backs Clinton personally, and presumably politically, is abundantly clear throughout, but the book at least includes (even if it glosses over) some of the many unsavory elements of Clinton’s life: the Whitewater accusations, her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and subsequent impeachment, the hard feelings between her and Barack Obama when they fought for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, and more. However, Levinson downplays all these and other negatives by showing each and every one to have been, in Levinson’s view, a learning experience for Clinton and one that made her an even better person than she already was. For example, when discussing how Clinton’s proposed overhaul of healthcare failed in 1994, Levinson asks, “What Went Wrong?” She then mentions multiple serious shortcomings – and quickly dismisses them. For instance, “Creating a task force. Other strategies were possible. For instance, Congress could have developed the plan. However, Hillary was determined to establish managed care and universal coverage, and Congress might have had other ideas.” Well, duh, a thoughtful reader might say here – Congress is charged with making laws, after all, not rubber-stamping the notions of an unelected task force assembled by the president’s wife. Another example from the same section: “Hillary’s Refusal to Compromise. …Hillary had made a pledge to the American people for universal health care. And she didn’t want to break her promise.” That is, her motives were 100% pure, 100% of the time. That is the underlying premise and argument of Levinson’s book: even when she made mistakes or things went against her, Hillary Clinton was pure of heart, pure of mind and pure of motivation. Readers who agree with Levinson’s viewpoint and enthusiasm will find here a book that confirms all the wonderful things they already believe. Readers who do not share Levinson’s attitude – who either oppose Clinton or are simply looking for information so they can try to make up their mind about her – will find this book sadly lacking. It is so one-sided that even its modest contemplation of negatives associated with Clinton must be taken with several grains of salt, because the author is so determined to show how everything in Clinton’s life was ultimately for the better – not only for her but also for the entire United States.

     Clinton makes a brief appearance in Laura Barcella’s Fight Like a Girl, too. All the biographies in this once-over-lightly book are short and positive, so there is nothing surprising in the fact that Clinton’s is as well. “Clinton has spent the last thirteen years as the Gallup poll’s most admired woman,” Barcella writes, flippantly adding that her popularity “was speckled with scandals too, but hey – that’s Washington.” But Barcella’s aim is not to boost Clinton’s candidacy, as is the apparent aim of Markel and Levinson: Fight Like a Girl is intended simply to celebrate 50 selected women who, in Barcella’s estimation, have had world-changing lives, with Clinton being #28 based on her birth year. Thus, #29 is Kate Bornstein, “née Al Bornstein, now Katherine Vandam Bornstein,” author of Gender Outlaw, who “celebrates her own ‘freak’ status with aplomb.” Only five of the women in this book were born before 1900, and except for Clinton, there are no politicians profiled at all: Barcella clearly believes that changing the world involves writing, art and stridency rather than any actual use of systems that can change things. True, a few women here are inevitable figures in a book of this sort: Marie Curie, Frida Kahlo, Rosa Parks. Others are commonplace if not 100% to be expected in a book celebrating women’s power: Shirley Chisholm, Maya Angelou, Jane Goodall, Sally Ride, Oprah Winfrey. More interesting than these are Barcella’s choices of various women whose names are unfamiliar or who might not be expected to turn up in a feminist-focused work: lawyer Anita Hill, who accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment; singers Beyoncé, Madonna, Queen Latifah, Kathleen Hanna and Poly Styrene (the book has quite a few pop entertainers in it, as if they are somehow world-changers); Mexican-American author Sandra Cisneros; fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson; artist Renée Cox; and others. Of course, personal selections of 50 people famous for anything are just that – personal – so there is no right or wrong list. Fight Like a Girl is a book for readers who believe that pop culture is really, really important; that change is almost entirely a modern (21^st century or at most late 20^th century) phenomenon; and that the whole concept of “change” largely revolves around artistic endeavors, popular entertainment and issues of racial and gender identification. For those who share Barcella’s predilections, the book offers clear but superficial portraits of those it names – not sufficient for a thorough exploration, but perhaps enough to encourage readers to look for more-in-depth material elsewhere.

(+++) THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA

First Entrepreneur: How George Washington Built His—and the Nation’s—Prosperity. By Edward G. Lengel. Da Capo. $25.99.

     It was President Calvin Coolidge who was quoted as saying, “The business of America is business” (actually a misquotation: he said “the chief business of the American people is business,” which is not quite the same thing). And it was that erudite musical mischief-maker and satirist, Tom Lehrer, who said, in a song called Smut, “When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.” Putting these two thoughts together – an admittedly unlikely combination – produces the notion that when correctly viewed, everything in America is about business. That even includes Edward G. Lengel’s notion of George Washington as an entrepreneur.

     This is a curious viewpoint, not because Washington was not creative in his business ventures (he was) and not because it is unattractive to think of Washington as more than a stodgy figurehead (it is), but because the whole notion of entrepreneurship has so little to do with 18^th-century farm-and-land-focused life. An entrepreneur is a business organizer who takes on substantial financial risk. This scarcely describes Washington, who, if not quite a gentleman farmer, did manage an estate that was already in his family – taking on the same sorts of risks encountered by farmers today, but not the types associated with modern entrepreneurial ventures.

     But even if this book’s title is a stretch, Lengel, director of the Washington Papers documentary editing project at the University of Virginia, is onto something here. Washington is usually seen as a military and political leader, but military and financial matters were as intimately interrelated in the 18^th century as they are today, and Washington had almost as much to do with one as with the other. Through a series of successes and reversals both in his military role and at the Mount Vernon estate, Washington was enmeshed in “the commercial rivalry between Virginia and Pennsylvania” in the 1750s even as he was honing his military skills and deciding for the first time that “British colonial authority [was] indifferent to if not actually opposing Virginia’s and his own financial prosperity.”

     Thus, Lengel argues, the seeds of Washington’s revolutionary leadership were intimately connected with his business concerns, and as time went on, he became more and more adept – despite his lack of formal education – in the discipline, hard bargaining and hard work that served him well both on the battlefield and at home. Lengel does a good job of showing how committed Washington was to fair financial treatment and appropriate compensation for duties performed, and also takes Washington as economic planner out of the shadow of Alexander Hamilton, who – Lengel argues – largely implemented and expanded policies that originated with Washington. “When it came to business,” Lengel writes, “Washington was no idle dreamer but a hard-headed realist.” This applied not only to his personal affairs but also to those of the new nation – setting a course, Lengel says, upon which the United States continues. What Lengel does not say is that this argument draws an important distinction between Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the polymath who, for all his far-seeing ways and cultivated instincts, was most comfortable viewing the United States as a self-supporting agrarian nation. Jefferson was thus a proponent of what would today be called “small, decentralized government,” while Washington, it can be argued, favored the “big, centralized government” model that has, for better or worse, persisted.

     Inevitably for a history book of the 21^st century, Lengel’s deals with Washington’s attitude toward slavery, looking at Washington’s late-in-life plan to sell enough land “to liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings.” In accordance with Washington’s business principles, the emancipation, Lengel states, was to be done “in a way that did the least harm either to the enslaved or to his estate.” The planned land sale did not go through, however, and it was eventually left to Washington’s widow, Martha, to free their slaves, in accordance with Washington’s will.

     Washington’s business savvy and hard-won knowledge of economic success and failure may not have constituted entrepreneurship in any modern sense, but Lengel does a good job of showing how the first president’s hatred of debt and concerns about poor public credit, inefficient government and an insecure currency helped shape the nation’s early policies in ways that Hamilton would fight to implement. And at the very end of First Entrepreneur, Lengel brings up something intriguing: “Emotion bound America to France, but interest bound it to Great Britain.” That sentence alone shows a great deal about Washington’s economic pragmatism and desire for fiscal stability, even if that meant closer ties with the nation’s onetime enemy and looser ones with the country that helped Washington win the Revolutionary War. This sort of traceable-to-Washington pragmatism, it can be argued, has long been the linchpin of American economic policy. But it follows, then, that if Washington could see the bloated and deeply debt-ridden federal government of the United States today, which spends so much time redistributing wealth and so little helping individuals find new ways to maximize it, he would be appalled.

(++++) STRINGALONGS

Beethoven: Sonata in A, Op. 47 (“Kreutzer”), transcribed for cello and piano; Artur Schnabel: Sonata for Solo Cello; Emánuel Moór: Ballade in E. Samuel Magill, cello; Beth Levin, piano. Navona. $14.99.

Violin Futura: 21^st Century Solo Violin Project. Piotr Szewczyk, violin. Navona. $14.99 (2 CDs).

Alex Lubet: Aria; Ein Keiloheinu; Slow Blues; Eliyahu Hanavi; Ma Yafeh Hayom; Maja Radovanlija: Macedonian Dream; Los Biblicos; Semi-Improvised Nostalgic Study. Alex Lubet and Maja Radovanlija, guitars. Big Round Records. $14.99.

     Whether bowed, strummed or plucked, stringed instruments provide a wide variety of opportunities for expressiveness, and composers have found a wide variety of ways to exploit strings’ potential. It has become something of a tradition to perform works written for one stringed instrument on another, sometimes to widen the repertoire for a neglected instrument such as the viola and sometimes simply to give performers a chance to play music that they find meaningful but that happens to have been created for a different musical range. The latter case explains the performance of the 1803 Beethoven “Kreutzer” sonata not on violin but on cello – but it should not be thought that Samuel Magill came up with this version for his own purposes. It was actually created in 1822 by famed pianist and Beethoven pupil Carl Czerny; as performed here, it incorporates material from first-rate Romantic-era cellist August Franchomme (1808-1884) and includes some passages restored from the work’s original manuscript. Whatever the provenance of this version, it proves highly convincing as Magill and pianist Beth Levin perform it. There is certainly no compromise in virtuosity, and the cello sound proves more suitable to Beethoven’s thematic material for violin than might be expected: the broad opening Adagio sostenuto and the second-movement variations both gain from the richer tone of the larger instrument, and the concluding Presto skips along with a winning combination of brightness and warmth. Magill follows this sonata with one for solo cello by pianist (and Beethoven specialist) Artur Schnabel (1882-1951), but the juxtaposition is rather unfortunate. Schnabel’s four-movement sonata does not sustain for 27 minutes and comes across as a potpourri of 20^th-century compositional techniques rather than a unified and fully thought-through work. It stops and starts repeatedly, recalls Schoenberg periodically, ventures into extreme chromaticism and atonality, and wears out its welcome long, long before its conclusion. A highly respected pianist, Schnabel shows in this sonata that he had little sense of how to sustain a solo sonata for a stringed instrument other than the piano (which uses strings but is really a percussion instrument). Techniques, themes and rhythms here become repetitious to the point of boredom, and there is little of the warmth – even in the Larghetto – for which the cello is so noted. On the other hand, the final work on this Navona CD, by another pianist, is an undiscovered gem – truly undiscovered, this being its world première recording. This is a Ballade by Hungarian composer, pianist and instrument maker Emánuel Moór, best known for creating a two-keyboard piano and for writing music that was often performed by cellist Pau (Pablo) Casals. This unpublished Ballade dates to 1913 and was dedicated to Casals; it was written for cello and orchestra and subsequently arranged by the composer for cello and piano, as heard here. Strictly Romantic in temperament and tonality, it is a work that appreciates and makes use of the cello’s unique sonic capabilities in all the ways that the Schnabel sonata does not. The instrument sings, emotes, pleads and celebrates, finding ever-new forms of expressiveness that enthrall the listener and carry through from start to finish of a rather extended (14-minute) work that proceeds at a deliberate pace but never seems to drag. Magill and Levin handle it with plenty of warmth and sensitivity, and while it would be overstating to call this a great piece – it is basically salon music with touches of additional depth – it is nevertheless a “find,” and a work that cellists seeking something different and captivating would do well to consider presenting.

     Neither length nor depth characterizes the 33 miniature solo-violin pieces collected and performed by Piotr Szewczyk on a two-CD Navona release called Violin Futura. The title of the release explains everything here: Violin Futura was a project created by Szewczyk in 2005, and all these works were written for him from 2006 to 2010. The works range in length from one to seven minutes and are designed simply to give composers – one of them being Szewczyk himself, who contributes First Coast Groove – a chance to show what they can do with short-form solo-violin music. The answer, not surprisingly, is that they can do pretty much whatever they wish, offering tonality and atonality, fairly rigid and very free-form composition, material that lies well on the instrument and material that extends and even strains it, pieces distinguished by lyricism and ones that sound harsh, items with classical poise and others with roots clearly in pop music, works that focus on the violin’s ability and ones that supplement the instrument by introducing poetry or even news articles. This is not so much a violin-future collection as it is a violin-present-day one, and it is very hard to imagine that any single piece from this (+++) release will even have much of a future. As Gertrude Stein once said in another context, there is no there there: these trifles impress neither individually nor collectively. If Szewczyk was seeking to assemble a collection of almost three dozen solo works that would collectively offer a portrait of contemporary composers’ handling of the violin, then it is possible to say that Violin Futura was a success. But it is not a musical success, at least in terms of involving listeners. There is nearly two hours of music here, and it is well-nigh impossible to listen to the material straight through – or to pick any particular sequence that makes more sense for these miniatures than any other. A few may suffice as encores from time to time, and some may work as études for violinists looking for technique-honing material beyond the traditional. But unless you are one of the composers represented here, an advocate or funder of Szewczyk’s project, or a fan of the violinist’s playing – which, it must be said, is strong and committed – there is simply no reason to give this recording as much time and attention as it calls for.

     The strings employed by Alex Lubet and Maja Radovanlija for a new recording on Big Round Records are those of the guitar – or rather guitars. The most interesting thing about this release is the variety of instruments it showcases. Lubet’s Aria and Slow Blues are for acoustic guitar; Ein Keiloheinu is for National Reso-Phonic Guitar (yes, there is such a thing) and classical guitar; Eliyahu Hanavi is for soprano ukulele (!) and prepared classical guitar; and Ma Yafeh Hayom is for acoustic guitar and classical guitar. Among the works by Radovanlija, Macedonian Dream is for acoustic guitar and classical guitar; Los Biblicos and Semi-Improvised Nostalgic Study are for classical guitar. There is a lot that is interesting in this music and a lot that comes across as trying too hard – the result being a (+++) rating for the CD. There are bits of blues here and bits of jazz – not surprising in any modern compositions – and there are elements of Jewish (Sephardic) traditional music in the Lubet works with Hebrew titles, although the composer’s sonic environment for those works takes them well outside tradition. There are elements of traditional Balkan and other Eastern European music here, and there is even a direct tie to older classical music in Lubet’s Aria, which is loosely based on Puccini’s O mio babbino caro from Gianni Schicchi. The improvisational sound of many of these pieces is quite deliberate: several of them, not only the one that Radovanlija describes as “semi-improvised,” mix written-down material with improvised elements. The sonic variety here is impressive, and the cleverness with which both composer/performers handle it is interesting, at least for a time. But although the disc lasts only 42 minutes, it seems longer, because for all the instrumental variety that Lubet and Radovanlija seek, for all their attempts to enliven the material through improvising and combining various forms and types of music, there is eventually a sameness to the sound and a repetitiveness to the compositional techniques that make the recording less than fully convincing. More interesting when heard singly than when listened to as part of a full CD, these works show the many ways in which guitars can be combined for sonic variety, but they also indicate the aural and stylistic limitations of doing so.

(+++) MUSICAL MIX-INS

Steve Reich: Mallet Quartet; Sextet; Nagoya Marimbas; Music for Pieces of Wood. Third Coast Percussion (Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, David Skidmore). Cedille. $16.

Roberto Sierra: Sinfonía No. 3, “La Salsa”; Beyond the Silence of Sorrow; Borikén; El Baile. Martha Guth, soprano; Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra conducted by Maximiano Valdés. Naxos. $12.99.

Joseph Koykkar: Panache; Interfacing; Inside Out; Keyboard Dances; Double Take; Streets and Bridges; Triple Play. Ravello. $14.99.

     Fans of vibraphones and marimbas, fans of the incessant beat of rock music, fans of minimalism, fans of slow-developing thematic material, fans of rhythm above harmony, will all be fans of the new Third Coast Percussion recording of Steve Reich’s music on the Cedille label. This is very definitely “fan” music, the entire CD making no attempt to reach out to anyone not already convinced that Reich’s way is the right way and that Third Coast Percussion’s blend of classical and pop sensibilities and performing styles is as good as it gets. The actual performance is excellent, the four percussionists handing off to or blending with one another with a smoothness that is almost intuitive. But the primary effect of the CD is of an hour of mostly the same thing. Reich’s pulsing rhythms, so repetitious that even telling the difference between the first movements of Mallet Quartet and Sextet (both marked “Fast”) is by no means easy, comes across in a kind of NewAge-y absorptive way, inviting contemplation by those committed to Reich’s techniques and boredom by those who remain unconvinced. Melodic lines have never much interested Reich, with the result that his music seems particularly appropriate for a percussion ensemble; and, again, the playing here is first-rate. But the music rarely goes anywhere – and when it does inch toward a goal, it does so in miniscule steps. This is exactly what Reich wants, and simply hearing the ongoing rhythmic beat of the percussion on this CD is a hypnotically involving experience. Yet the underlying sameness of the material eventually becomes a distraction: it is hard not to wonder, at some point, whether anything is going to happen beyond the repetition. As usual in Reich, something does happen, or some things do, but it takes a long time (measured experientially, not always by the clock) for occurrences to occur. Sonically, the most intriguing work here is Music for Pieces of Wood, which – despite overstaying its welcome – offers some blends and contrasts not heard in the other works. Reich has many fans, and Third Coast Percussion’s members are clearly among them. This CD will not likely create any new ones, but it will firm up the commitment of those already enamored of the Reich ethos.

     The musical blendings in the works of Roberto Sierra on a new Naxos CD consist partly of rethinkings of old forms and structures and partly of new uses of contemporary approaches, Reich’s included. It is easy to see some Reich influence in Beyond the Silence of Sorrow (2002), a setting of six poems by N. Scott Momaday for soprano and very restrained orchestra. The orchestra’s firm delegation to the background leaves it to Martha Guth to declaim the poems, which are really chants, and she does so quite well – to music that acknowledges its minimalist roots through the soprano’s repetitive melody as well as the fading-into-background nature of the accompaniment. The work itself is effectively lyrical, drawing parallels between the fecundity (or lack of it) of land and that of women, ranging from the opening Prayer to the Land through movements called About Me Like a Robe, To Tell You of My Love, A Cradle for This Child, Little Newborn and The Woman Who Walked Here. This is a cycle about love and loss, about fertility and barrenness, about growth and emptiness, the chanted nature of the material lending it an almost mystical aura. The sensitive playing by the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra under Maximiano Valdés helps frame the emotional content. The other major work here is Sinfonía No. 3, “La Salsa” (2005), and here there is some apparent influence of Astor Piazzolla, the Argentinian tango composer who worked both with the dance in its original form and with it in a transformative, concert-hall way. Sierra does something analogous here with a habanera, two danzas by Juan Morel Campos, and line dances from a celebration called the jolgorio. Taking some of the dances’ rhythms at face value while stretching and playing with others, Sierra offers a mixture of stylization and personal interpretation of the dance forms, with particular attention to the works’ rhythmic strength – nicely handled by the orchestra. The CD also includes two works that mix older classical forms with twists of various sorts. El Baile (2012) is a theme and variations based on Bach’s name (the notes B-flat, A, C and B natural) and including references to popular Puerto Rican dances – a rather odd combination that sounds a bit over-clever but has some affecting moments. And Borikén (2005) looks back to Bach’s time not for the composer’s name but for a form he used, the chaconne. The work’s title refers to the original name of Puerto Rico, and the music includes popular and folklike tunes laid atop the Baroque structure. Here too the mixture is a bit forced, but the sound of the work is pleasant and colorful and its overall effect is a positive one.

     Dances of mixed provenance are also among the works featured on a new Ravello CD of the music of Joseph Koykkar. Keyboard Dances (performed by pianists Todd Welbourne and Ilia Radoslavov) includes blues, rock and a bit of boogie-woogie. But Koykkar does more than mix musical genres: he expands them by incorporating computer-generated sounds, as in Triple Play and Interfacing (both featuring solo pianist Welbourne). The rhythmic intensity of Koykkar’s music is ever-present, if not especially distinctive; and the use of electronic or computer-generated sounds is also nothing really new anymore. But Koykkar strives mightily to use multiple techniques and sonic displays for carefully thought-out purposes – Streets and Bridges, for example, is a set of three piano pieces (played by Jeri-Mae Astolfi) intended to represent specific places in Milwaukee. Aside from the four piano works, this CD includes three for chamber groups. Panache, played by the Relâche Ensemble (Bob Butryn, clarinet and bass clarinet; John Dulik, piano; Chris Hanning, percussion; Jon Gaarder, bassoon; Michele Kelly, flute; Ruth Frazier, viola; Douglas Mapp, bass; Lloyd Shorter, oboe and English horn), is bright and upbeat, with distinct jazz rhythms and something of the feeling of a score for a TV show. Inside Out, performed by the Chicago Saxophone Quartet (Wayne Richards, soprano sax; Paul Bro, alto sax; Leo Saguiguit, tenor sax; James Kasprzyk, baritone sax) contrasts a bright, sometimes frenetic first movement with a warmer but still propulsive (if somewhat repetitive) second.  And Double Take, another Relâche Ensemble performance, combines a touch of swing with some film-music sensibilities and a variety of neatly managed percussive effects. Koykkar tries hard to be innovative and succeeds only intermittently, but much of his music is eminently listenable even if its combination of forms and influences is not especially novel.

(++++) SWEETNESS AND BEYOND

Plant a Kiss. By Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds. Harper. $7.99.

Lost & Found. By Brooke Davis. Dutton. $16.

     Small things and small people bloom and blossom in books for young readers and adults alike. Sometimes those books reach for meaning beyond their words, however simple those words (and accompanying pictures, if there are any) may be. Sometimes they find it, as occurs in Plant a Kiss, a lovely little board book in which Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s text is married perfectly to Peter H. Reynolds’ fairy-tale-like drawings to spin a charming little fable in which the phrase “plant a kiss” is taken literally – to very fine effect. “Little Miss/ planted a kiss./ Planted a kiss?/ Planted a kiss.” And the sweet Little Miss waters what she has planted, makes sure it has plenty of sunshine, greets it pleasantly day after day, and waits and waits for it to sprout. Which it does not. Hence: “Doubt./ Pout.” But then: “Sprout!/ SHOUT! SHOUT!” And the friends of Little Miss gather about to see a mostly shapeless golden speckled something-or-other weaving its way from the ground into the air. Little Miss is determined to share the joys of the kiss, despite the misgivings of her friends, and she does just that, sweeping it into a bright red bowl and bringing it to all sorts of people in all sorts of places, “To and fro./ High and low./ Rain or snow./ With a bow!” Until, at last, all is gone – and Little Miss returns to the place where she first planted the kiss – and then, wonder of wonders and delight of delights, the small golden sprout has spread to “endless bliss!” Golden tendrils of love and loveliness pour forth from the planted-kiss spot, leaving Little Miss at the end with plenty of love to spread wherever she may go – which is just what she sets out to do on the final, wordless page. A completely non-preachy way to suggest that love grows when tended properly, and grows even more when given away and shared, Plant a Kiss is everything a fable should be: short, simple, easy to read on a superficial level, yet concealing – barely below the surface – thoughts that go far beyond the words and pictures with which the story, on its most basic level, is told.

     Considerably longer and more elaborate, but still possessing at its core the sensibilities of a fairy tale and a desire to reach out beyond the basics of the story it tells, Brooke Davis’ Lost & Found has a “Little Miss” of its own as its chief protagonist. She is seven-year-old Millie Bird, a red-haired amalgamation of pluck and seriousness whose mother improbably abandons her one day in the ladies’ underwear department of a store. The notion of a child left alone to discover who he or she really is, with the help of (often magical) mentors, is a basic story arc of fairy tales and is the scaffolding on which Davis builds her novel – her first novel, a point worth emphasizing in light of some of the notable weaknesses that accompany the book’s notable strengths. Little Millie, after hiding for a time and discovering that her mum is not returning for her, sets off to find her on the sort of quest journey that is quite typical of fairy tales. She soon crosses paths with two quirky old people, the sort who would be trolls or spirit guides in other fairy tales. One is Karl the Touch Typist, who is 87 and mourning the death of his wife – and who has escaped from a nursing home. He is called Touch Typist because he constantly touch-types letters to his dead wife. The other is a widow named Agatha Pantha, who is 82, has not left her home in seven years, and spends her time shouting insults at whatever she can see from her living-room window. Her name is as descriptive as Karl’s, since in Australia, where Davis is from, Agapanthus perennials – large, flowering plants sometimes called “lily of the Nile” – are often considered to be weeds. Obviously the relationship among these three characters is going to be as symbolic as all get-out. Davis makes that all too clear by introducing oddity after oddity: the red gumboots that Millie always wears, the plastic sidekick named Manny with whom Karl travels, the constant shouting of the cranky Agatha. The purported plot has the three joining forces to search for Millie’s mother, who obviously does not want to be found but is going to be anyway, if these three have anything to say about it. The book is about the journey, however, not the destination, except insofar as the destination is greater understanding of life at the end than at the beginning. Really, the underlying topic of the whole book is less life than it is death: the novel begins disconcertingly and on an unpleasant note with Millie’s dead dog and her parents’ apparent indifference to it, continues as Millie assembles a list of dead things, and goes onward as one thing on the list turns out to be Millie’s own father; and of course there are the dead spouses of Karl and Agatha always in the background as character motivation (or, if not motivation, explanation). The fact that this is a first novel comes through again and again, sometimes gratingly, in Davis’ tendency to lay everything on too thickly: Millie’s repeated notes to tell her absent mother that she is “In here mum,” and Karl and Agatha’s increasingly childish (as opposed to childlike) behavior, all come across entertainingly and even charmingly for a while, but all are done to death – well, not quite to death, but certainly tending in that direction – as the book goes on. And on. It is actually a short novel, but it comes to seem longer through its tendency to belabor the obvious (notably in Davis’ portraits of the elderly characters: it is as if she has had very little contact with the real-life elderly). The total absence of reality in the book – recluse Agatha quickly becomes outgoing as she rapidly and without any real explanation intermingles her life with Millie’s and Karl’s, for instance; and no one ever really tries to track down and rescue the abandoned seven-year-old, for another example – is justified by its underlying fairy-tale structure. That structure also makes it sensible, or at least understandable, to have the three protagonists eventually give up their unsuccessful quest and go back the way they came, sadder and wiser and better connected to each other and all that. But the fairy-tale underpinnings are not enough to salvage the book’s ending, which is abrupt and rather peculiar, as if Davis understood that a book preoccupied with death has to end with something about death, but wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. Davis’ writing tends to be quaint and sentimental when she presumably wants it to be heartfelt, and some aspects of her presentation – such as putting words spoken aloud in italics in the middle of narrative paragraphs, an abrupt and jarring technique – come across as affectations, and irritating ones at that. There are enough charms in the book, especially in some of the characteristics of Millie, to garner it a (+++) rating, but it is scarcely as profound as it wants to be and certainly not as revelatory about the way life is (and the way death is) as Davis intends.

(+++) LOVE AND MARRIAGE

A Practical Wedding Planner: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating the Wedding You Want with the Budget You’ve Got (without Losing Your Mind in the Process). By Meg Keene. Da Capo. $19.99.

Worm Loves Worm. By J.J. Austrian. Illustrated by Mike Curato. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $17.99.

     They used to go together like a horse and carriage – does anybody even remember that song? – but these days, love and marriage seem to go together only incidentally, or for the purpose of “making a statement,” or as an affirmation of one’s faith (for marriages performed in religious settings) or declaration of independence from spirituality (for civil weddings, beach weddings, mountaintop weddings, etc.). This makes Meg Keene’s A Practical Wedding Planner a touch quaint with its naïve assumption that weddings are “all that,” even though Keene is smart enough to know that sometimes they are all that one needs to take the great leap into losing your mind (hence Keene’s subtitle). Keene posits that A Practical Wedding Planner will be used as an encyclopedia, not read cover-to-cover as a guidebook, and that is a good thing, since the sheer amount of detail and option discussion and expert opinion and “pro tip” material will quickly become overwhelming to anyone who tries to read the book straight through. In truth, not all of what is here is necessary for wedding planning, thank goodness. “If you have a wedding with every single element included in this book, you’re not having a wedding; you’re having some sort of three-ring circus,” Keene opines, and that is a highly useful perspective – except for the fact that some people want to have a three-ring circus of a wedding, and certainly the wedding industry does everything it can to encourage that mindset (it “is mostly trying to sell us more things” – well, duh). A Practical Wedding Planner is a highly useful and plainspoken guide to the intricacies of arranging your own wedding, with some very helpful checklists and spreadsheets in the back that can assist with everything from budgeting to a highly specific timeline for the event (“guests seated for dinner, 6:00 pm; first guests to buffet, 6:10 pm; last guests through buffet, 6:30 pm; toasts—four total, 6:30 pm; first dance, 7:10 pm” – and on and on for a total of 35 entries, each with four columns labeled “when,” “what,” “where” and “who”). There is material here on bridesmaid dresses (“the perfect dress that everyone will like does not exist”) and on buying a wedding gown from China: “Dress will generally be made from a cheap fabric. …Detailing will be sub-par. Workmanship will generally be a little shoddy. …But alright [sic] already! You’re a woman of daring and risk, and you want to give this thing a whirl! Here is what you need to know….”  And so on. And so on. And so on. Want to know what to expect of a DOC (“Day-of Coordinator”)? That’s here. Pluses and minuses of “officiants,” whether clergy, civil servants, officiants-for-hire or friends and family? Yes, that’s covered. Hiring a DJ and choosing music? Oh yes, that’s here – and it shows some of the predilections and prejudices with which Keene approaches wedding planning, with which it is important to be in sync in order to get value from this book. “The older crowd is going to be out in force for the early part of your set. Play some classics everyone will like early on, then work your way up to that old-school hip-hop after Nana has gone off to bed. ..Your average pop song is long…[so] cross-fade…before that eight-minute song has run its course. …Nobody’s gonna dance if you’re not dancing.” A Practical Wedding Planner strives mightily to be simultaneously up-to-date and sensitive to tradition – the section on addressing wedding invitations is a good example – and ends up being something of a mishmash; but then, encyclopedias always are. The book has a very thorough index, some of whose entries are themselves worth reading: “Colorado, self-solemnizing marriage in,” for example, and “botanical gardens wedding with 65 guests, budget pie chart example for,” and “mason jars, estimating amount of alcohol needed for serving in.” Anyone who thinks the whole wedding-planning concept is faintly ridiculous (maybe not so faintly) will have that impression confirmed here; anyone who takes the whole thing seriously enough to believe that a onetime party somehow has something to do with living with another person for an extended period – a notion right up there with the horse-and-carriage notion of being wed – will also find confirmation.

     And what about love? Oh yeah, that. Well, one would expect a level of charm and simplicity about the feeling in books intended for children, and one would often get it. But just as A Practical Wedding Planner tries to guide adult readers through and among the many intricacies and traps of the love-and-marriage maze, while subtly introducing its author’s own predilections, so some kids’ books seem designed to inculcate values even as they appear, on the surface, to be simple appreciations of love. Worm Loves Worm is one such – an unlikely-on-the-face-of-it advocacy book that families must be careful not to pick up unwittingly, but that some families will find a very useful story of what love and marriage mean in the contemporary United States. Worm Loves Worm looks like pretty much any recent picture book, and it reads that way at the start, too, with two worms deciding to “be married” because they love each other. In the absence of A Practical Wedding Planner, the worms take advice from various insects. Cricket, standing on hind legs, wearing a vest and glasses, and clutching a book, is clearly the right “someone to marry you.” In fact, “That’s how it’s always been done,” Cricket explains. Beetle offers to be “best beetle,” and the Bees say they will be “bride’s bees,” which is all well and good. But what about rings? Worms have no fingers! Well, “we can wear them like belts,” they decide, and since they do not have feet to dance with, they “can just wiggle around.” J.J. Austrian’s point, of course, is that love and marriage transcend the trappings of weddings – an unexceptionable message, to be sure. But then the book turns in an unexpected direction, as Worm and Worm say they both can be the bride and both can be the groom – they are, after all, identical in appearance – and even though Cricket reminds them that “that isn’t how it’s always been done,” Worm and Worm insist on getting married anyway, “because Worm loves Worm.” Somewhere along the way, a cute book about love and marriage has turned into an advocacy work about same-sex marriage, carefully structured by Austrian and illustrator Mike Curato – who himself is in a same-sex marriage – so that the primary message emerges slowly and even a bit slyly, well after all the marriage trappings have appeared in a forthright way. Same-sex marriage is now legal in the United States, but that does not obligate anyone to accept it, agree with it or give children books supporting and advocating it – opponents emphatically do not believe that the statement that “Worm loves Worm” supersedes “how it’s always been done.” Families that do believe in same-sex marriage will find Worm Loves Worm an enjoyably simple explanation of what proponents have said for some time, with pleasant illustrations that end with even the clergyman-like cricket smiling approvingly at the newly married couple. But families that pick up the book on the basis of its pleasant illustrations or the first few pages of text may find themselves surprised to be pulled into the middle of a legal decision that remains highly controversial and, to some people, highly objectionable. This is a book that parents should definitely read on their own before reading it to children or having children read it themselves: it raises issues that, wherever a parent stands on the sociopolitical spectrum, a child is likely to want further explained after the book is over.

(+++) ASSERT AND ADVOCATE

Women Who Changed the World: 50 Amazing Americans. By Laurie Calkhoven. Illustrated by Patricia Castelao. Scholastic. $8.99.

     Sixty-six women, actually: there are the 50 referred to in this book’s title and 16 others listed more briefly at the end. Women Who Changed the World is not really about women who changed the world – it is about women who, to at least some extent, changed the United States, or who at least accomplished significant things. The never-stated foundation of the book is the phrase “despite being women and being neglected or downplayed by male-dominated history books” – a typical redress-the-balance approach for a work avowedly aimed at 21^st-century girls who, Laurie Calkhoven clearly hopes, will grow up to do special things themselves: “Seemingly ordinary girls grew up to become extraordinary women! …[Y]ou, too, can grow up to change the world!”

     This is a bit over-the-top, but Calkhoven’s brief biographies and Patricia Castelao’s straightforward illustrations are solid enough – although some of the drawings of the women look little like the photographs that are also included, with Castelao going out of her way to make her subjects seem dynamic and intense even if, for example, her color portraits of Lucille Ball and Maya Angelou bear little resemblance to the inset black-and-white photographs.

     Most of the names here are de rigueur for books intended to inspire contemporary girls: Pocahontas, Harriet Tubman, Helen Keller, Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, and a slew of women born in the 20^th century (30 of the 50 in the primary list, unfortunately implying a paucity of female role models from earlier times). It is good to see some less-familiar names among the frequently mentioned ones: journalist Nellie Bly, photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, pharmacologist Gertrude Eliot, ballerina Misty Copeland. And it is good to have the book laid out in a readily accessible format, with a “Fact File” about each woman (birth and death years and locations, spouse if any, children if any) and a couple of specific facts of interest in addition to those contained in each brief biography. For example, the item about author Laura Ingalls Wilder talks about how much the children in Wisconsin in her time enjoyed roasted pig tail as a once-a-year treat; the one about athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias explains that she got her nickname after hitting five home runs in one baseball game, putting her on par with Babe Ruth in the eyes of her neighborhood friends; and the one about Nancy Reagan mentions her starring opposite Ronald Reagan in a film called Hellcats of the Navy.

     There are no profundities in Women Who Changed the World. That is not the purpose of a book intended as an easy-to-read work of uplift for 21^st-century girls who may be searching for role models. The specific women chosen for the main list and the subsidiary one at the end are arguable: Ella Fitzgerald makes the main list, but Marian Anderson does not, for example, and – genuinely strangely – Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor is in the main sequence while Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman ever to sit on that court, is not. The book also includes a rather odd 25-term glossary that contains the words “classify,” “eclipse” and “settler.” The word selection makes it seem as if the book is targeted at very young children indeed, but the writing itself is appropriate for somewhat older readers – up to age 10 or even 12. Girls who encounter a paucity of discussions of women in traditional school books – a less-common occurrence now than a generation ago – may find Women Who Changed the World a useful supplement to classroom reading. It is not a particularly entertaining book, and is not intended to be; but as a gateway to basic information on some women whose roles in United States history may be inspirational for young girls today, it is certainly a satisfactory work.

(++++) AMERICANA

Ives: Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4; The Unanswered Question; Central Park in the Dark. Seattle Symphony Chorale and Seattle Symphony conducted by Ludovic Morlot. Seattle Symphony Media. $16.99.

Copland: Billy the Kid; El Salón Mexico; An Outdoor Overture; Rodeo. Colorado Symphony conducted by Andrew Litton. BIS. $21.99 (SACD).

     There is something transcendental about the music of Charles Ives even a century after it was written. In one sense, this is scarcely a surprise, given Ives’ attraction to Transcendentalism. But in a different sense, it is nothing sort of astonishing. With a few very rare exceptions, such as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, how much music written early in the 20^th century still sounds ultra-modern, sit-up-and-take-notice modern, early in the 21^st? The Second Viennese School seems positively tame nowadays, the late Romantics and early neo-Romantics sound just as tied to the past as they wished to be, and the genuinely new thinking of composers such as Carl Nielsen no longer seems particularly revolutionary even though its subtleties and beauties remain impressive. But Ives’ music can still shock, can still force an audience to wonder what in heck the composer thought he was doing, and can still come across as a blend of seriousness and humor, of (on the one hand) old-fashioned techniques plus hymns plus folksongs and (on the other) extreme dissonance, polytonality and polyrhythms that even now are difficult to grasp. When Ives stopped writing music in the 1920s after saying that the notes would not do what he wanted them to anymore, the world lost the musical thoughts of a genuine American original, a composer so far ahead of his time that it is fair to suggest that his works will continue to delight, puzzle and outrage audiences for years to come. A generally excellent Ives CD from the Seattle Symphony under Ludovic Morlot, released on the orchestra’s own label, shows many facets of this multifaceted composer without ever leaving the impression that it has fully plumbed his depths or completely explored his heights. The highlight of the disc is an absolutely first-rate performance of Ives’ Symphony No. 4, one of his grandest, strangest and most confusing works, in which the ultra-radical and ultra-conservative sides of his output are displayed distinctly and clearly in succeeding movements (the second and third, respectively). Almost always presented using multiple conductors, as it is here (Morlot is assisted by Stilian Kirov, David Alexander Rahbee and Julia Tai), the work is in effect for multiple sub-orchestras, which need the additional conductors because they must often play without regard to each other but in such a way that their parts juxtapose (“blend” is not quite the right word) as Ives intended. Like many Ives works, this symphony raises philosophical questions without ever answering them, yet it can be enjoyed as absolute music without knowing anything of the underlying issues that Ives was exploring in it. The polytonality and intense dissonance make the symphony extremely difficult to absorb in a single hearing, and this recording well repays multiple performances: each time, something new in texture, melody or instrumentation comes through, and the work grows along with one’s understanding of it. There is one very unfortunate omission: the words for the first movement are not provided, and for all the fine singing by the Seattle Symphony Chorale, those words are needed. Listeners will gain much by looking them up before their first of many hearings.

     The remainder of the disc is not quite at this level, but both The Unanswered Question and Central Park in the Dark are excellent in their own way. These pieces form a bit of a pair – Ives thought of the first as a contemplation of something serious, the second as a contemplation of nothing serious – and their sonic environment, especially the handling of the strings, shows close parallels. The trumpet’s seven intonations of the question are beautifully handled by David Gordon, with fine breath control and an actual sound of inquisitiveness at the end of each phrase. The string background, as clear in its portrayal of a probably indifferent universe as are the sounds of “Neptune, the Mystic” in Holst’s The Planets, is also beautifully managed. However, the woodwinds, which “speak up” in varying ways and eventually seem to be mocking the repeated question, are not quite biting enough; still, the playing is excellent. It is just as good in Central Park in the Dark, where the quiet nighttime setting and the raucous outbursts provide just as much contrast as Ives intended. When it comes to the Symphony No. 3, “The Camp Meeting,” however, Morlot falls a bit short: this generally accessible three-movement work tends to drag here. It is neither as heartfelt nor as bright in its middle movement as it can be. Again, though, the orchestra’s playing is at a very high level, and the disc as a whole is a wonderful reminder – one among many – of just how much Ives still has to say and just how intriguing it can be to listen to him saying it.

     Aaron Copland aptly and pithily commented of Ives, “His complexities don’t always add up, but when they do, a richness of experience is suggested that is unobtainable in any other way.” That is about as good a summation of Ives’ music as anyone has offered – and it describes, to a certain, more-limited extent, the effect of Copland’s own music as well. That is, it refers to the totality of Copland’s music, which – like that of Ives – has elements of simplicity, naïveté and straightforwardness, and also has dense, complex and difficult-to-unravel portions. What is different in Copland is that he generally kept the simple and popular elements of his music separate from the complicated and intense ones, while Ives threw the different forms of communication together willy-nilly and without apparent concern for how confusing the result could sometimes be. In Copland’s case, it is the straightforward and more-popular works that, not surprisingly, became instant successes and have remained so. A new BIS recording of four of those works, featuring the Colorado Symphony under Andrew Litton, shows for the umpteenth time just why this portion of Copland’s production turns up again and again in the concert hall. The music is very well-made, with fine attention to instrumentation and excellent rhythmic and structural sensibilities. It is also comparatively unchallenging harmonically and thematically, in fact including folk-music elements in prominent ways that are quite different from those used by Ives with his frequent invocation of hymns and Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean. Copland’s two “Western” ballets, Billy the Kid (1938) and Rodeo (1942), are gems: eminently danceable, filled with short and hummable tunes, sprinkled throughout with lyrical and dramatic elements, and structured so their stories can be easily followed or can simply be ignored in the pleasures of the music. Litton and the orchestra play them with relish and appear thoroughly to be enjoying the experience – Litton, a fine pianist, even does a turn at the honky-tonk piano in the Ranch House Party movement of Rodeo, and makes the music about as rollicking an experience as it can be. The dramatic elements of both ballets, including Copland’s clever use of percussion, are particularly effective in this recording, but the lyrical material does not get short shrift, either: everything flows smoothly and with a fine sense of contrast between sections and among themes within sections. The two shorter pieces on the recording also come off quite well. An Outdoor Overture (1938) is bright and brassy, as befits both its title and its atmosphere. And El Salón Mexico (1933-36), whose title is the name of a nightclub in mid-1930s Mexico, has a sort of quasi-folk flavor and South of the Border flair even though it does not contain any actual folk tunes. The more-difficult, more-demanding works by Copland tend to be underperformed, while the ones on this release tend to be, if anything, over-performed. But there is so much enjoyment here, such a feeling of joie de vivre, that the popularity of these pieces is eminently understandable – all the more so when performances are as skillful and high-spirited as these.

(++++) OLD, BUT NEW AGAIN

Weill: Die Sieben Todsünden; songs from Berliner Requiem, Happy End, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, Die Dreigroschenoper. Gisela May, soprano; Peter Schreier and Hans-Joachim Rotzsch, tenors; Günther Leib, baritone; Hermann Christian Polster, bass; Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester Leipzig conducted by Herbert Kegel; other ensembles conducted by Henry Krtschil and Heinz Rögner. Brilliant Classics. $7.99.

The French Influence: Music for Trumpet and Piano by Honegger, Ibert, Henri Senée, Enesco, Jolivet, Eugène Bozza, Théo Charlier and Claude Pascal. Gerard Schwarz, trumpet; Kun Woo Paik, piano. Delos. $7.99.

     It is a rare pleasure to discover, or rediscover, first-rate performances that not only display and enhance the effectiveness of the music but also provide insight into the special qualities of the performers. And to find such performances at a bargain price is a particularly rarefied form of enjoyment – the form provided by new CDs from Brilliant Classics and Delos. The Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht collaboration The Seven Deadly Sins, created in 1933 and labeled a ballet chanté, is not heard very often – and not just because all Weill/Brecht works are very much of a particular time. This one is a difficult work to perform: it is indeed a dance piece that also includes singing, and to make matters more complex or confusing, its lead roles are named Anna I and Anna II, perhaps two sisters but perhaps two parts of the same woman -- a psychological twist that the words themselves suggest. A satirical work filled with the collaborators’ typical anti-bourgeois bitterness, it uses a prologue, epilogue and seven scenes to detail a twisted, modern version of Sloth, Pride, Anger, Gluttony, Lust, Greed and Envy. Anna I repeatedly admonishes Anna II – who says very little – not to behave morally, because real life allows no room for morals. For example, Anna II becomes angry at injustice – and Anna I tells her to be more self-controlled; Anna II is initially too proud to perform provocative cabaret dances, but Anna I says she must do so in order to please the clientele and make the money that is at the foundation of the entire work (to be used to help the family build a home back in Louisiana; the family consists of a four-man chorus). Longtime Brecht singer Gisela May, who spent 30 years in Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble, portrayed both Ana I and Anna II when she recorded The Seven Deadly Sins in 1966, and her smoky, burned-out voice (not really burned out, but sounding that way) fits the music exceptionally well: this is true cabaret singing, and while May does not quite match the incomparable Lotte Lenya, she has a solidity and intensity of delivery that are very nearly at Lenya’s level. Weill’s music remains as craggy and cutting as ever, and if Brecht’s words nowadays seem more like a jeremiad than a genuine social commentary, that means only that we have – perhaps – discovered a new set of deadly sins. May shows her versatility in this repertoire with a series of additional recordings of the same vintage. There are two excerpts from Berliner Requiem that were recorded in 1968, plus a series of 1967 recordings from Happy End, Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and The Threepenny Opera. The three songs from the last of these are the least satisfactory readings: neither Barbara-Song nor Seeräuber Jenny hits quite the right emotional pitch – they seem altogether too casual – although Song von de sexuellen Hörigkeit has the requisite level of sarcasm. The two Berliner Requiem excerpts and the two Mahagonny songs are fine, but it is in the excerpts from the almost forgotten Happy End that May really displays both her vocal prowess and her characterization abilities. One song from this failed musical is among its creators’ best-known pieces: Surabaya Johnny, which May delivers simply splendidly – here she really is on par with Lenya. The three other songs crackle and sparkle just as they should, too: Bilbao-Song, Was die Herren Matrosen sagen and Ballade von der Höllen-Lili. However, the one great disappointment of this release becomes apparent here: there are no lyrics given to any of the material, and no links to any online locations for finding them. The words of The Seven Deadly Sins are reasonably simple to locate, as are those of The Threepenny Opera, and Mahagonny can be tracked down with a bit of effort. But not so Berliner Requiem and Happy End, and anyone who listens to May’s splendid and pointed vocalizing and does not readily speak idiomatic German is going to believe, quite rightly, that he or she is missing a great deal of what is going on. There is so much to celebrate in this re-release that it is a shame to have to draw attention to its one great shortcoming; but it is nevertheless a wonderful recording by a singer whose handling of the material is absolutely top-notch.

     The material is far more urbane but no less involving in its own way on the CD entitled The French Influence. This is a revelatory disc for anyone who knows conductor Gerard Schwarz (born 1947) solely for his orchestral work. For Schwarz started out in music not on the podium but as a trumpeter – and a very, very accomplished one. Back in 1971, he and fellow Juilliard student Kun Woo Paik recorded some 40 minutes of material by French composers, all of it short and most of it very little known. It is this recording that has now been re-released, and it is a joy to hear. No one will confuse anything here with profound music: these are pleasantries, salon pieces one and all. Yet every one gives Schwarz an opportunity to display his expressive abilities, his virtuosity, his excellent breath control, his sensitivity to various styles, and his wonderful sense of rhythm. This last characteristic comes to the fore, for example, in Ibert’s very short Impromptu, one of the composer’s jazz-influenced works. Even shorter and even more virtuosic – at less than 90 seconds, the briefest piece here – Jolivet’s Air de Bravoure is instantly intriguing and is over all too soon. Honegger’s Intrada and Enesco’s Légende give Schwarz and Paik chances to explore the trumpet-piano connection at somewhat greater length, while Senée’s rather old-fashioned Concertino offers three charming movements and an interesting contrast with Charlier’s Solo de Concours, whose conclusion is more Russian than French and in comparatively unusual 5/4 meter. Bozza’s eight-minute Caprice and Pascal’s two-minute Capriccio also make for interesting contrasts: both require considerable virtuosity of technique but are more than simple display pieces, offering a really good trumpeter several chances to showcase the ability to vary the instrument’s sound capabilities in different sections. Schwarz brings pep and pizzazz to the music when appropriate, lyricism and lovely flow when they are fitting, and shows himself throughout the disc to have total command of his instrument and to be quite capable of having fun with it. Listeners will have fun here, too, not only with the music but also with the discovery – or rediscovery – of the earlier performing years of a musician who became far better known in a role very different from the one he fills on this CD.