(++++) EARNING THEIR EXCLAMATIONS!

Hooray for Today! By Brian Won. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $16.99.

Move Over, Rover! By Karen Beaumont. Illustrated by Jane Dyer. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $7.99.

You Had One Job! By Beverly L. Jenkins. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

     There is nothing unusual in the use of exclamation points to make a book’s title seem more emphatic or intense. The exclamatory approach can be overdone, of course, but sometimes it just seems to fit a book’s theme particularly well. For instance, Brian Won’s story of a little owl that wakes up and wants to play with all the other woodland creatures is aptly called Hooray for Today! The title reflects the eyeglasses-wearing owl’s upbeat feelings as she leaves her home in a tree and pulls along a red wagon laden with all sorts of things for playtime, from books to balloons. The only problem is that “today” for an owl is “tonight” for all the other animals. And there is quite an assortment of animals here – this is not just a typical forest full of birds, chipmunks, squirrels and the like. The very first animal whose home Owl, wearing a party hat, approaches, is Elephant, who is sleepy and cannot play when Owl wants to – so Owl cooperatively tucks him in and wishes him good night. The second animal is Zebra, for whom Owl blows a blast on her trumpet. But Zebra too wants to sleep, “so Owl tooted a lullaby” (which Zebra, holding hoofs over her ears, appears not to find very restful). And off Owl goes to find Turtle, the third friend to whom she says, “Hooray for Today!” in big, multicolored letters. But Turtle is not tempted to play by the balloons that Owl brings – he wants to sleep. Owl helpfully ties the balloons around his shell to raise him a bit into the air, then pushes him gently back and forth, as if on a swing. Unfortunately, Owl’s upbeat helpfulness does not bring her anyone to play with – not Giraffe, not Lion, not anybody. Eventually Won shows a wordless silhouette scene of Owl, her wheelbarrow empty except for the party hat and her eyes wide open, standing on a rock all by herself, with nobody else there. She walks sadly back home as the sun rises – and then, of course, all the other animals wish her good morning and now want to play. But now Owl is too sleepy to have fun, and – of dear, how will Won ever end this happily? The answer is that Owl decides simply to take a nap, not to sleep the whole day away, so the very last page of the book has her and her friends wide awake and enjoying themselves. And the book’s final words are suitably exclamatory: “Hooray! Let’s play!”

     Playtime is not the issue in Karen Beaumont’s Move Over, Rover! In this book, everyone wants to sleep at the same time. The problem is that all the animals want to sleep in the same place as well: Rover’s doghouse. The book actually starts with Rover alone in his doghouse, wishing for someone to play with, but then a big storm begins and Rover is just glad to have a nice, cozy place to sleep until the rain ends. The doghouse gets a mite too cozy as time goes on, though. First Cat comes by, looking for a place to stay dry, and accommodating Rover gladly makes room. Then Raccoon needs a warm place to rest while the rain comes down, so both Rover and Cat scoot over. Next comes Squirrel, and then Blue Jay, and then Snake (who can slide in pretty easily), and then Mouse – but now Beaumont’s narrative explains, “Tight fit. Might split./ Sorry, Mouse, Full house!” Indeed, Jane Dyer’s delightful illustrations, which give each animal a personality, clearly show the increasingly tight quarters into which the would-be sleepers cram themselves. Then, all of a sudden, everyone rushes out into the rain! Why? It turns out that one other animal needs a warm, quiet place to stay for a while: Skunk! And so the animals scurry about as the storm comes to an end – and when it does, they all look for Rover, who, it turns out, has gone back to his now-vacated doghouse all by himself to have some well-earned, if interrupted, rest. Originally published in 2006 and now available in paperback, Move Over, Rover! is as enjoyable a decade later as it was when it first came out, with the simple, simply told story having just as much charm and the illustrations being just as winningly expressive.

     Intended not for kids but for adults – perhaps that should be “for kids of all ages” – Beverly L. Jenkins’ compilation of “Hilarious Pictures of Jobs Gone Horribly Wrong” (as the subtitle has it) certainly deserves both its exclamation-point title and the word emphasis within it: You Had One Job! This is one of those books that capture evanescent Internet scenes and give them a kind of permanence between old-fashioned paper covers. The scenes here are ones so self-evidently wrong that Jenkins’ captions are usually unnecessary (although sometimes quite amusing). There is the packaging of a child’s plastic tea set, for which a copy writer clearly unfamiliar with English has produced the promotional line, “Happy tea time to argue!” There is the supermarket display of ears of corn labeled “bananas,” and the individually wrapped bananas that are individually labeled “whole apple.” There is the back-of-a-school-bus sign that reads, in its entirety, “This Vehicle Does Not.” There is a neatly lettered store sign directing patrons to “Restooms,” and another – this one in a parking garage – telling people to “Pay Your Parking Fee Before Existing.” There is the sign on a repair department – you know, where you go to have things fixed – that reads, “Maintenanc.” Also here are the Thanksgiving-themed item misprinted as “Give Thinks,” the be-careful road warning that you are approaching a “CSOHOL” (with the “C” backwards, too), the picture of a big-eyed and child-friendly snail labeled as “sanil,” and the carefully identified utility label (actually cut into concrete) in the California capital city of “Sacarmneto.” The retail industry proffers a display of “ZzzQuil” nighttime sleep medicine with a big sign saying “Feminine Creams” and a bounteous display of lipsticks on the front of which hang coupons for $1 off cheese. There is a Staples-brand calculator whose 12 numbers read, in groups of three, “7-8-9,” “4-5-4,” “1-2-1,” and “0-decimal point-0.” There is a colorful display of butane lighters labeled “Pregnancy Test.” There is a “one way” street sign pointing to the left and, just below it, a “no left turn” sign. There is a well-made, very professional-looking sign in a coffee shop that offers the slogan, “Every coffee freshly is ground to order, just for you.” And there is a bookstore whose “Self Help/Reference” section proudly displays Dr. Seuss books. Come to think of it, that last one makes sense. The rest of the entries in You Had One Job! don’t, but the job of this book is clearly to make people laugh at the foibles of the world around us, and that job is one it does well, and with exclamatory enthusiasm.

(++++) FOR THE LITTLEST ONES

You Are My Cupcake. By Joyce Wan. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $12.99.

I Love Hugs and Kisses. By Sandra Magsamen. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $7.99.

How Do Dinosaurs Go to Sleep? By Jane Yolen. Illustrations by Mark Teague. Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. $6.99.

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell! By Lucille Colandro. Illustrated by Jared Lee. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $6.99.

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Turkey! By Lucille Colandro. Illustrated by Jared Lee. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $6.99.

     It is never too early to get kids interested in reading, or at least in the concept of books as sources of enjoyment. That is a large part of what board books are all about – yet even they are not designed for the very youngest babies. For an age group that might be called pre-pre-readers, there are some truly adorable cloth books, basically book-shaped toys that they can crush and hug and hold and cuddle and, oh yes, open and shut just like books – and can hear read aloud to give them their first taste of the notion of words, pages and stories. Joyce Wan’s You Are My Cupcake is a delicious (sorry about that) example of this subgenre of kids’ books. On the cover, the book’s title is also the first line of the text, and Wan’s illustration shows a very simple, broadly smiling cupcake with multicolored dots sprinkled on top. The next page has the words “my sticky little gumdrop” and a picture of a smiling purple gumdrop – speaking of which, parents will be happy to know that the cloth book wipes clean with a damp cloth when a child inevitably falls in love with it and cannot resist gumming or teething on it. Then come the words “my mushy little sweet pea,” with a smiling yellow pea peeking (or pea-king) out of a green peapod. And then “my oven-baked cutie pie” with, yes, a pie, whose crust is all smiles and whose whipped topping looks a lot like a swirl of a baby’s hair. One more page turn, and there is the back cover, with the words, “Baby, I could just eat you up!” And the picture here is again of the happy cupcake, now with a slightly different expression. So few words, such simple pictures, and yet there is clearly a story of sorts here – one that the very youngest potential readers will gravitate to immediately, even if the book itself doesn’t taste quite as good as the goodies Wan has created for it.

     Board books get slightly more complicated than this, but the ones for the littlest children have much the same theme. Sandra Magsamen’s I Love Hugs and Kisses simply gives an example of the former on each left-hand page and the latter on each right-hand one, with suitably snuggly pictures. “Hug me when we’re in the car,” the book starts out; “kiss me when we’re under a star,” it continues. The first page shows big and little foxes, the second big and little frogs, none of the animals being at all realistic but all of them being doggone cute. Later pages feature owls, ducks, monkeys, pandas, bears, and rabbits, each time in large-and-small pairs and each time hugging or kissing – with red hearts decorating every picture. Simple to page through and fun to read to a very young child, I Love Hugs and Kisses is made sturdily enough so kids can grab and play with it – which they will want to do because of the cover, which features a panda with a big smile and fun-to-touch ears and arms made of felt. The cover identifies this eight-inch-square volume as a “heart-felt” book, which it certainly is both in theme and in cover design.

     Some smaller-size board books go farther into storyland and feature a lot more words. The Jane Yolen/Mark Teague How Do Dinosaurs Go to Sleep? is only six inches across and seven inches top to bottom, but it is packed with words – not only in Yolen’s rhyming story but also in the accurate labeling of the dinosaurs that Teague draws with such expertise here and in other entries in this delightful and unusual series. This really is a sequence unlike any other, using accurately rendered dinosaurs to stand in for kids being disobedient early in each book and behaving properly later on. Yolen reasonably asks whether a dinosaur, at bedtime, will “stay in the closet?/ Behind a closed door?” And there we have the very toothy, highly horned head of a wide-eyed estemmenosuchus peeking out of the closet. Yolen asks whether bedtime is the time to scream “NO NO NO!” at one’s mother, and Teague shows a brilliant-yellow, blue-striped, birdlike enigmosaurus doing just that (and disobediently pointing a claw at mom, too). A few pages later, though, in the “proper behavior” part of the book, there is a hilarious picture of a Tyrannosaur-like majungasaurus about to use one of its very small forelimbs to brush a great many teeth – using a teeny-tiny (definitely child-size) toothbrush. Still later there is an in-bed picture of “bear on his left side,/ and cat on his right,” which happens to feature a dragon-like sauropelta looking lovingly at the stuffed animals. The disparity between the huge, fierce-looking dinosaurs and their human parents and surroundings is what gives all the books in this series so much visual interest. Kids who do not yet know these books can start with any one of them, and are sure to want more of what they get in How Do Dinosaurs Go to Sleep?

     Other multi-book series are somewhat less inventive – fun in their own way, but a bit overdone. Lucille Colandro’s There Was an Old Lady… sequence is amusing enough as it revisits, updates and plays around with the old song about the old lady who swallowed a fly (and many other things) and “perhaps she’ll die.” No one ever dies in Colandro’s books, neither the old lady nor all the creatures she consumes and inevitably disgorges at each book’s conclusion. The latest of these books have holiday themes  but otherwise follow the expected formula. There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bell! was originally published in 2006 and is now available as a board book. There is never really any mystery as to why the old lady is swallowing the bell and some bows and some presents and a gigantic sack – one reason these books are not quite as intriguing as some others for this age group and get (+++) ratings. Much of the fun here is in Jared Lee’s always-appropriate illustrations, which get especially amusing in this volume when the old lady swallows a sleigh (Lee needs two pages to show that bit of consumption). Colandro’s text is more uneven than Lee’s pictures, the words often lacking rhythm and meter and not always offering particularly clever rhymes: “There was an old lady who swallowed some reindeer./ They were in full flight gear, those soaring reindeer.” The Christmas theme of the book will make it enjoyable for kids, though, and Colandro wisely avoids having the old lady swallow Santa – he simply waits for her to give him a ride in the sleigh she has just coughed up. Kids who already enjoy this series will have fun with its holiday orientation here – and will also enjoy the Thanksgiving-focused There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Turkey! This one is not a board book, but text and illustrations are right at board-book level, and it is easy to imagine a board-book version showing up at some point. What is important to note here is that the old lady does not eat a turkey: she swallows a turkey, which remains very much alive and eventually emerges from the old lady’s stomach along with everything else that has been swallowed (a football, a huge balloon in the shape of the old lady’s ever-present and long-suffering dog, a rowboat, and more). As usual, Lee’s exuberant illustrations make up for some of the deficiencies of the text: “There was an old lady who swallowed a horn of plenty./ She could’ve swallowed twenty horns of plenty.” Kids looking forward to Thanksgiving and Christmas will find these seasonal offerings enjoyable if they have already made the old lady’s acquaintance and are curious about just what she will swallow next, and how she will look when doing it.

(+++) SPOOKY STUFF

Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom. By David Neilsen. Illustrated by Will Terry. Crown. $16.99.

Shadow House #1: The Gathering. By Dan Poblocki. Scholastic. $12.99.

     David Neilsen cleverly opens his debut novel with the 17^th-century nursery rhyme about disliking Dr. Fell but not knowing why (“I do not like thee, Dr. Fell….”). That becomes, in effect, the plot of Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom, except that after a while, protagonists Jerry and Gail Bloom and Nancy Pinkblossom know full well why they do not like Dr. Fell. They just do not quite know who, or what, he is. Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom is a self-contained novel (although the ending hints of possible sequels) in which the creepiness is occasionally leavened by humor and the style is engaging, if somewhat uneven, throughout. It starts when an abandoned brick house on Hardscrabble Street, which has stood empty for a generation, is sold to Dr. Fell and thus removed as a play area for neighborhood children, who have been having a grand time in what any self-respecting parent would have forbidden them to visit (it’s long-unused, after all, and who knows what dangers there might be?). Dr. Fell apologizes to the children for buying the house and thus removing their play area, and promises to make amends, which he does by building a genuine playground that is filled with all sorts of marvels and wonders. Dr. Fell is a kind of anti-Willy Wonka: he is elderly, stooped, dressed all in black, and wears a purple top hat. That is, he starts as an elderly man, but as strangeness follows strangeness in Neilsen’s book, he seems to grow – younger. Now, you might think this involves something nefarious, some sort of damage to the children. But not so: all that happens is that as more and more kids play in Dr. Fell’s playground, they inevitably have accidents, and Dr. Fell quickly cures their hurts and returns them to play and everyday life. What could possibly be wrong with that? Well, a lot of things, as it turns out. Dr. Fell does take something from the children when he heals them, but Jerry, Gail and Nancy only gradually come to understand what it is and why he must be stopped. The three central characters have a fair amount of personality. Gail and Nancy are best friends; Jerry is two years younger than his sister and possessed of a quick, facile intelligence. Nancy barely tolerates him – she insults him at every turn – but her courage, especially as things get complicated, makes up for a great deal. As for Gail, she holds the modest middle ground among the three, being quiet and risk-averse, but with a core of solidity that stands her in good stead. The differentiation of the three protagonists helps make their team effort to stop Dr. Fell more exciting, giving readers three different sorts of characters with whom to identify. Certainly young readers will not think much of the feckless parents and other adults here, since they are pretty much useless – with one exception, as Jerry, Gail and Nancy eventually discover. Actually, the parents are worse than useless, because they soon come under whatever spell Dr. Fell is casting and begin acting strangely – to such a degree that in the book’s dénouement, one of them is left to wonder, “Honey, do you have any idea why I’m carrying the turkey baster?” This seems to lay things on a bit too thickly, and that is the primary failing of Dr. Fell and the Playground of Doom: it tries a little too hard to be clever. For example, Dr. Fell speaks in elaborate sentences the first time he says anything (“I imagine you are in a great deal of severe pain at this particular moment, my fine young rapscallion”); then he generally translates himself afterwards – and while this is a nice bit of characterization at first, it grows old quickly and very old as it goes on and on. Also, as the plot deepens, or at last thickens, Neilsen tries to have it turn on one of those insatiable-bloated-darkness beings from a world where the geometry is somehow wrong – a distinct touch of H.P. Lovecraft that fits at best uneasily onto what has come before. Preteens will enjoy the three central characters here and some of the initial buildup of the plot, including the specifics of some of the attractions of Dr. Fell’s playground. They may even like to read yet another book in which the ultra-clueless adults must be saved by their quick-thinking kids. But Neilsen simply overdoes the attempt to combine humor with scariness, managing to diminish both in the process. Will Terry’s illustrations do enliven the book, but do not really make it any more atmospheric.

     The illustrations are a big part of the effect of The Gathering, the first book in a series called Shadow House, but saying that they “enliven” the proceedings would be stretching things. The vintage-looking photos are genuinely creepy, and neither they nor anything else in this book even tries to be funny. Dan Poblocki goes entirely for the dark side here. Poblocki sets up a series of different story lines involving children who end up together in the house of the series title. Poppy, living in an orphanage, gets a letter inviting her to live in her great-aunt’s mansion. Marcus is invited to a music school. Azumi is invited to a school as well – in her case, a prestigious and academically challenging one. Brothers and sitcom stars Dash and Dylan are invited to film a horror movie. And so all five kids end up in the same house, which of course is not as it has been described to any of them. Kids in old-fashioned outfits pursue them as all the usual horror-book (and horror-movie) effects are trotted out, from moving hallways to disappearing doors. The five kids try to figure out what is going on, and readers will be kept guessing, too, but may end up even more confused than the protagonists are. Unlike Neilsen, Poblocki does not make any real attempt to flesh out the characters – they remain types as he focuses entirely on what sort of scare he can come up with next. And the narrative changes point of view often, sometimes in the middle of a chapter, to a degree that can be confusing. Poppy eventually finds papers that say an ancestor of hers ran an orphanage where he abused children, and somehow Shadow House is tied to that, but readers hoping for even a glimpse of what all this means or who is behind it will be distinctly disappointed, because there is no trace of that in The Gathering. In fact, the ending of the book, which quite explicitly sets up the sequel, is not at all satisfying: nothing is concluded or explained, and while this is to some extent inevitable in the first book of a series, Poblocki takes the arrangement to an extreme that comes across as more a cheap trick than a genuine cliffhanger. The peculiar illustrations – the damaged dolls, the shambling boy in a dog mask, the letter-bearing balls mysteriously spelling out “let’s play” – pull readers into the story more effectively than much of the text. In fact, the book’s very clever cover is quite a come-on: a plastic overlay creates a ghostly effect for the head of a girl who seems to be holding up a mirror – then, opening the cover reveals the girl herself looking completely normal, except that there is the shadow of a mysterious, long-fingered, long-nailed hand on the wall behind her, apparently about to grab her hair or head. Shadow House tries to replicate some of the approaches used so successfully by The 39 Clues: images and sigils in the book tie to a free app that readers are encouraged to download and interact with. That will be fine for anyone wanting additional hauntings, but it does nothing to make the formulaic elements and non-ending of The Gathering any more satisfying.

(+++) IDEALISM AND REALITY

Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with Your Child. By Ross W. Greene, Ph.D. Scribner. $26.

     In the sweetness and light of a fully rational and emotionally balanced world, parents with an infinite amount of time and no stressors outside the home will joyously affirm and implement child psychologist Ross W. Greene’s inspirational child-rearing model, Collaborative & Proactive Solutions. Practicality and Pollyanna-ism are at constant war in this extremely well-meaning, very well-written handbook, in which Greene tries to reorient child-rearing for an increasingly collaborative and interconnected future. His basic approach is to simplify methods of raising kids into Plan A, Plan B and Plan C. The first, the traditional method, involves parents’ unilateral imposition  of solutions, and is the one against which Greene has set up Plan B – which is the idea that all people, including children, want to do well and will do well if they are able to and are given the chance. Plan C is not a middle ground but a holding back, the temporary avoidance of an unsolved problem until a better time, and the decision to see whether a child can handle it on his or her own; the problem, if and when it must be dealt with later, is then managed using Plan B.

     Like economists assuming that all economic decisions are inherently rational, Greene assumes that all parent-child interactions inherently involve understanding, mutual respect and a joint desire to do what is best. Communication, constant and at length, is the core of Greene’s Plan B, whose three steps involve empathy, defining adult concerns, and capital-I Invitation, which means mutually agreeing “on a solution that (a) is realistic, meaning both parties can actually do what they’re agreeing to do, and (b) will address the concerns of both parties.” The foundational argument here is that such solutions can always be found.

     Beware of “always.” Greene cogently and intelligently argues that parents should not react to a child’s poor behavior as if it is a problem, because it is in fact a reaction to a problem that parents and children must identify and solve together. This is often true, but not always true. He argues that children, even ones as young as, say, five, can understand collaborative problem-solving and can, when exposed to it, use it beneficially so that they eventually grow into the sorts of human beings parents want them to become. This is often true, but again, not always true. The simple reality is that some adult concerns – notably ones involving safety, a word that does not even appear in this book’s index – are not matters for collaborative, cooperative problem solving, which in fact would abrogate parents’ underlying need to care for children until they are able to care for themselves.

     Greene presents lots of real-life situations and narratives to support his Plan B approach, and his question-and-answer segments, of which there are many, will be very valuable when things progress in real life as he predicts that they will. They often will, but not always. There is so much reasonableness here: “Remember, unsolved problems are shared by you and your kid. Your energy, effort, and persistence alone won’t solve them. You still need your partner.” That is really what Raising Human Beings is all about: the notion of children as partners in a family. Readers who can accept that concept will find a wealth of implementation assistance here. Those who cannot – well, Greene is not always helpful in answering some of the many questions he sprinkles throughout the book. He has a tendency to bend words and evade direct responses. Take the matter of actions having consequences, for example. He provides the question, “So adult-imposed consequences are out of the parenting mix completely?” This invites a “yes,” “no,” or “yes, in one sense, but no, in another,” response. What Greene does, however, is say, “The big question is whether you really need adult-imposed consequences.” A bit later, he moves on to, “Don’t you think it’s important for kids to be held accountable and to take responsibility for their actions?” Again, “yes, but not in the traditional sense of accountability,” or something along those lines, would be a reasonable thing to say. Instead, Greene writes, “Too often, the phrases hold the child accountable and make him take responsibility are really codes for punishment.” Parents who read Greene’s many responses along these lines may be forgiven for wanting to say, “Doggone, answer the question already!”

     At least one hopes parents may be forgiven. There is not much forgiveness in Greene’s formulation for parents who may fall short of the ultra-reasonableness that lies at the core of Plan B. “Maintaining your perspective is crucial to keeping your anxiety under control,” Greene writes, which means that parents having anxiety in trying to handle their children under Plan B are suffering from a failure of perspective. Again and again, Greene indicates that parents who do not follow Plan B are heading for trouble of their own making, since the basis of Plan B is the notion that children are inherently rational and desirous of doing well: “Kids do well if they can – if your kid could do well, he would do well, because doing well is preferable” (italics in the original). Measuring up to Greene’s ultra-rational child-rearing method will be a tall order for many parents, especially ones who head single-parent households, work two jobs to keep food on the table, work long hours under stressful conditions, have adult-to-adult difficulties with partners or work colleagues or other family members, or simply have significant time limitations that make the no-shortcuts approach to every parent-child interaction impossible or, at best, extremely difficult (and, yes, stress-provoking and anxiety-producing). Greene’s Plan B is an admirable concept and an enormously worthy goal, and his attempt to provide specific implementation advice in Raising Human Beings is equally admirable. But there is something utopian about the notion of adults using Plan B throughout the child-rearing years. Just as “Homo Economicus” allegedly has an infinite ability to make rational economic decisions, so Greene’s Plan B parents have infinite patience, time and verbal ability for rational family discussions and decisions. A goal of using Plan B, at least to the extent possible, is a very worthy one. An expectation of using it is a recipe for parental self-doubt and fear of falling far short of the “right” way to raise kids.

(+++) LATIN TOUCHES AND OTHERS

Havana Moon. TransAtlantic Ensemble (Mariam Adam, clarinet; Evelyn Ulex, piano); Liana Gourdjia, violin; J.P. Jofre, bandoneón. Steinway & Sons. $17.99.

Ferdinando De Sena: Spalding’s Bounce; Deceptive Clarity; Pulsonic Turn; Art Market; Lasting Virtue; Eyes of Resurrection; Anima Mea; The Wind from the Fire. Navona. $14.99.

Miguel Chuaqui: Confabulario; Saturniana; Trance; Blues en el Corazón. Ravello. $9.99.

MODES: Society of Composers, Inc., Volume 30. Navona. $14.99.

     It has become commonplace for contemporary “classical” composers to produce music that is often not recognizably “classical” in any meaningful sense. Instead it is “crossover” music, with a shape and heritage of its own – or rather multiple heritages, since it draws on some mixture of “world music” (that is, non-Western, non-European material), jazz, popular tunes, rock, blues; the list goes on and on. Listeners attracted to this sort of musical blend have a great many places to find it: one of the issues with the style (for composers if not necessarily for an audience) is that it sounds so similar no matter who has put a particular set of influences together. There is generally very little distinctive about blended music by Composer A vs. that of Composer B, and this can actually be good for listeners, who can seek out works by unfamiliar composers with some assurance that they will find the style congenial. But it can be off-putting for listeners not (or not yet) enamored of the combinatorial approach, who cannot be quite sure where to turn for samples of this type of music. Some releases do try to make it easier to approach musical blends. Havana Moon from Steinway & Sons, for example, mixes a couple of short, evocative, authentically Latinate piano works by Heitor Villa-Lobos (Skyline of New York and Valsa da Dor) with Latin-influenced pieces by three contemporary composers. The three are Paquito D’Rivera (born 1948), who contributes The Cape Cod Files (four movements), Habanera, Contradanza and Vals Venezolano; Miguel del Águila (born 1957), whose Tango Trio, Nocturne and Silence are heard here; and bandoneón player J.P. Jofre (born 1983), whose works on this CD are Sweet Dreams and Primavera. Several of the pieces are world première recordings, and all are quite well handled by performers who are clearly comfortable playing “fusion” music whose Latin traditions blend with a mellow jazz sound and, frequently, pleasantly rhythmic dancelike melodies. The Villa-Lobos miniatures are pleasant enough, but it is D’Rivera’s The Cape Cod Files, two movements that open the CD and two that close it, that offers the widest variety of moods and the most interesting instrumentation. The remaining pieces here are pleasant enough but rather forgettable, with little sign of compositional distinction among the works or their composers.

     Despite his Latin-sounding name and his longstanding association with the University of Miami School of Music, Ferdinando De Sena was actually born in Brooklyn, New York. The Latin influence and orientation of his chamber music is nevertheless quite pronounced, as are elements taken from pop music: De Sena was a pop/rock vocalist and keyboard player in the 1970s and 1980s. A new Navona CD showcases De Sena’s compositional versatility in eight short works for varying instrumental combinations. Spalding’s Bounce features Philipp Staeudlin on tenor saxophone, Javier Caballero on cello, and Karolina Rojahn on piano; it has a kind of bebop flair and is intended as homage to jazz bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding. Deceptive Clarity, for flute (Diedre Viau) and guitar (David Ross), blends overtly Latin guitar elements with other styles, including jazz and pop. Pulsonic Turn features Maria Wozniakiewicz on violin, Rane Moore on clarinet, and Rojahn again on piano, in a meandering, gestural atonal stylistic mixture. Art Market is electronic music, with De Sena himself producing the synthesizer sounds that he combines and recombines into six voices. Lasting Virtue for flute (Viau) and viola (Peter Sulski) is interesting mainly for the sonic contrast between the instruments. Eyes of Resurrection features contrasting sound worlds as well, here between violin (Julia Okruska) and harp (Molly McCaffrey). Anima Mea goes in a somewhat different aural direction, using the subtle differences in sound between flute (Sarah Brady) and alto saxophone (Philipp Staeudlin) to good effect. And The Wind from the Fire seeks an impressionistic interpretation of its title, using the unusual combination of mandolin and mandola (Rafael Ramirez) with guitar (Jorge Gomez Abrante). De Sena’s music is more clever than emotive, its evocative sound worlds showing the composer’s interest in various compositional forms but not being particularly focused on communication with listeners.

     Chilean-American composer Miguel Chuaqui has a stronger focus on emotional connection in the four works on a new Ravello CD. Confabulario, written in 2012 for wind quintet, takes the traditional notion of chamber music as conversation to an extreme. Its first movement, “Rapsodia,” focuses on the differences among the participating instruments, while its second, “Concertación,” seeks confluence if not exactly harmony, and eventually attains it. It is well-presented by Lisa Byrnes, flute; Robert Stephenson, oboe; Lee Livengood, clarinet; Stephen Proser, French horn; and Lori Wike, bassoon. The other pieces on the disc are all solo works, although electronics figure in them as well. Saturniana (2009) is for bass trombone (Donn Schaefer) and sounds almost like a parody of contemporary music in its determination to take the instrument to the extremes of its range so that at times it barely sounds like what it is. Trance (2010) does something similar with cello (Madeleine Shapiro): it is a work showcasing this warmest of strings as a percussion instrument. Blues en el Corazón (2009) is less self-involved and more artful, its three movements for piano (Marilyn Nonken) straddling various harmonic techniques and producing frequently intriguing dips into traditional blues writing in contrast to other sections that play with and at times deliberately forsake the blues model. There is some emotional as well as intellectual heft here.

     Chuaqui’s overt forays into Latin music are only occasional, and such approaches are even less pronounced on the latest Navona CD featuring works from the Society of Composers, Inc. The one genuinely Latinate piece here is within the Five Songs of Love by Arthur Gottschalk: the final song uses words by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. The cycle features mezzo-soprano Karol Bennett with the Gotham Quartet (Quan Jiang and Lun Jiang, violins; Sheila Browne, viola; Cheng-Hou Lee, cello). The setting for voice and string quartet is an interesting one, and the five songs have some intriguingly different poetic voices (the first four are by Langston Hughes, Shel Silverstein, Malcolm Brodwick and Mina Loy). Gottschalk’s piece is the highlight of a disc that otherwise seems designed to show listeners just how contemporary “contemporary” can be. As Far as Possible by Karen Keyhani, with Elena Schwarz conducting a chamber group called Ensemble MATKA, shows the Iranian composer’s fluidity of style and interestingly incorporates the Persian santour. Robert A. Baker’s Valence III for oboe (Howard Niblock), cello (Miyoko Grine-Fisher) and percussion (Alexy Rolfe) explores the instruments’ varying sounds but not their expressive capabilities. Nolan Stolz’ Princess Ka‘iulani (he mele ho‘oipoipo) is a work for solo flute (Melanie Chirignan) that produces sounds by having the performer sing and speak Hawaiian words and phrases into the instrument; the result is merely odd. Melodía sin melodía (stereo mix) by Benjamin D. Whiting is one of those self-directed electroacoustic mixes of interest primarily to other makers of electroacoustic mixes. A Mournful Cry by Yip Ho Kwen Austin features Chiu Tan Ching on guzheng, mixing that ancient zither with poetry from China’s Song Dynasty of the 10^th to 13^th centuries. And Acoustic Field by Chin Ting Chan, performed by a group that calls itself “Nonsemble 6/Melos Music,” uses techniques developed by Olivier Messiaen to extend modernity even farther, largely for its own sake. Like many CDs of this type, this disc seems designed primarily for the composers themselves, their colleagues and friends and families; the music tends to be defiantly insular, making no attempt to reach out to a general audience or in any way persuade potential listeners that there is something worth hearing here. These are mostly technical explorations rather than attempts at any sort of emotional connection – works that are crafted rather than felt, no matter what their provenance may be.

(++++) WEIRD OR CUTE, YOUR CHOICE

Draw It 3D: A Seriously Easy Step-by-Step Guide to Mind-Melting, Eye-Popping Art! By the editors of Klutz. Klutz. $16.99.

Make Paper Lantern Animals. By the editors of Klutz. Klutz. $19.99.

     Klutz project books are not what they used to be, but they are still a cut above other arts-and-crafts project assemblages. Often more than a cut above. Klutz is now a Scholastic line, no longer a scrappy West Coast publisher with distinctly odd tastes and concepts (the firm once named a secondary line “Chicken Socks”). But bits of oddity continue to creep into some Klutz offerings, such as Draw It 3D. The spiral-bound, lie-flat instruction book offered here manages to include a fair amount of technical information about both art and science (since the way we see things, including art, is a matter of science) – all while showing young readers how to create three-dimensional-looking squid-fights-ape drawings, space sharks, photos in which zombies seem to crawl out from under grass, anamorphic drawings (ones that are only visible from specific angles), and more. In addition to all needed art materials for creating various, well, creations – that is, a mechanical pencil, pen, ruler and block eraser – Draw It 3D offers tear-out pages from which you punch out figures such as a UFO, a soccer ball and a TV set, then photograph the figures in such a way that they seem three-dimensional. There is also a genuinely fascinating object to be created here: a stereoscopic viewer, also called a 3D viewer, which lets your eyes see two slightly different pictures so your brain does the work of combining the views and, as a result, shows the two-dimensional scenes in what looks like 3D. The science behind this is straightforwardly explained: “The two pictures are printed side by side and look almost identical. But when the photos are separated by a special viewer, your brain has to do the work to put them together.” This is different from the way 3D movies work – and the book explains the difference. Also here are pages of “isometric grid” paper, “a special kind of graph paper made with triangles. All the triangles are measured at a precise 30 degrees.” This paper makes it easy to keep lines straight and angled the same way – so drawings look as three-dimensional as possible. But Klutz clearly explains, and shows, that for effective 3D creation, not all lines need to follow the grid: there is a dramatic example of a huge dragon looming over a castle, with the building following the grid and the dragon being off it but still appearing three-dimensional. Draw It 3D is a treat for budding artists (no significant prior art ability is needed to follow the directions); it is also great fun for would-be monster makers and future video-game designers – video games use the same isometric perspective in creating their worlds that artists such as M.C. Escher used to create “impossible” drawings whose puzzling features continue to amaze viewers. Kids seeking to create their own amazement will find a guide to it here.

     Matters are gentler and certainly less outré in Make Paper Lantern Animals. But this too is a Klutz everything-you-need-is-included offering. Attached to the back of a clearly written book of instructions is a box containing six mini paper lanterns, glue, tissue paper, facial features (eyes, noses, mouths), ribbon, stencils, and “pretty pattern papers.” What to do with all this? The idea is to make lantern-like objects to hang from walls and ceilings – but definitely not ones to illuminate anything, since they are, after all, paper: “Never, ever use a candle inside or around your lantern. Make sure to keep the paper away from flames or hot lightbulbs.” This is not a project for kids who tend to be on the clumsy side: the lanterns are delicate and rip easily. However, Klutz helpfully offers suggestions on what to do it a rip does occur: cover it with a decoration, glue on tissue paper in a matching color, or simply tell everyone you made the rip on purpose (the lantern-maker’s version of computer programmers’ “it’s not a bug; it’s a feature”). There is a certain charm to the instructions on how to assemble the lanterns: “Stretch the lantern and slide the rings over the pointy bits on the frame thingy, one at a time.” The illustrations actually make all this quite clear, and the “ingredients list” for each possible lantern makes it easy to assemble exactly the right parts for a specific project before starting it. There are 20 possible creatures here, so kids can choose their six favorites. Among the possibilities, in addition to the expected puppy, kitten, mouse and bunny, are a bat, flamingo, sea turtle, koala, toucan, walrus and others. The last and most-difficult project is a unicorn, and here the instruction book helpfully notes, “This one takes a little time, but what do you expect? Unicorns don’t come easily.” True enough – but Klutz continues to make crafts projects as easy as they can be, and as much fun as they can be, too. Klutz is not what it once was, but it remains something special: a producer of crafts projects that are not only enjoyable but also can be genuinely informative.

(+++) IF ONLY…..

I Wish My Teacher Knew: How One Question Can Change Everything for Our Kids. By Kyle Schwartz. Da Capo. $19.99.

     This is a kind of Kids Say the Darndest Things for a much, much darker time. Far from being cute and “aww”-inducing like the comments children made in Art Linkletter’s day, the things kids say in Kyle Schwartz’s book are deeply troubling and often cringe-worthy. It all started when third-grade teacher Schwartz asked the students in her class to fill in the blank after the phrase “I wish my teacher knew ______________.” Although some results were amusing, most were anything but: kids wished their teachers knew about pain and hunger, grief and anger, broken families and lives on the verge of ruin. This being the Internet age, Schwartz was soon sharing the students’ comments online, and soon enough other teachers and other students were contributing, and the eventual result was this book.

     If this were primarily a collection of what young children wish they could tell their teachers, perhaps with brief connective commentary on where the students attended school or what circumstances lay beneath their remarks, this would be a deeply insightful book that would enable adults, whether parents or not, to have a better understanding of the personal and societal traumas through which kids today are trying to live and learn. Schwartz, though, refuses to let the children’s worlds speak for themselves or even almost for themselves: much of the book involves her interpreting the remarks and setting out her context and her feelings about the world, schools, education and children’s lives. She is certainly entitled to handle the material this way – this is her book, after all – but a great deal more of the children and a great deal less of Schwartz’s distinctly adult viewpoint would have resulted in a great deal more insight.

     For instance, one child writes, “I wish my teacher knew that my mom got divorce [sic] 3 times.” Another writes, “I wish my teacher knew that I got kicked out of the house because of my mom’s girlfriend, and now I don’t have a relationship with my mom because of it.” A chapter filled with comments like these would provide tremendous insight into contemporary family structures and the way kids respond to them. But in fact there are only these two examples and two others in the chapter called “All Families Count.” The rest of the words are from Schwartz, who tells readers that “we owe it to our students to allow the realities of their lives to be represented in their learning. Like the American family itself, our thinking can evolve. It is worth the effort to include families because all students, all families, can be powerful forces in a child’s education when they feel they are accepted and included.” There is nothing really wrong with this formulation, although it is rather pat and smacks of a “PC” mentality. But the words are far less emotionally gripping and therefore far less meaningful than what the children themselves have to say.

     The whole book is like this. A chapter on grief and grieving includes, “I wish my teacher knew my dad died this year, and I feel more alone & disconnected from my peers than ever before,” and “I wish my teacher knew that my mom might get diagnosed with cancer this week and I’ve been without a home 3 different times this year alone.” Beside forthright and deeply troubling words like these, those of Schwartz herself come across as pabulum: “These are difficult conversations [about grief], but resist the urge to avoid them.” “When a child experiences a loss, their [sic] emotional and physical stability can be disrupted, but as they [sic] ask questions and get honest answers, they [sic] are able to process and understand a tragic event.” “Teachers do not necessarily need to provide private grief rituals for students, but we should accommodate them.”

     A big part of the issue with I Wish My Teacher Knew is that it is unclear to whom Schwartz is writing. Is it in fact to other teachers? To parents who are seeking to understand the world in which their children live? To policymakers, whose decisions can have significant impact on what goes on in classrooms but who may understand very little about what goes on in the minds of the students in those classrooms? Schwartz veers from audience to audience, seeming sometimes to address one, sometimes another. As a result, there is no consistent tone to her book beyond a personal one: readers will certainly understand how she feels about a variety of matters, but that may not help them understand how they can better handle the extreme difficulties faced by so many students today. Certainly Schwartz tries hard to accept the darkness of the modern world: chapters focus not only on nontraditional families and grief but also on fear, trauma, the difficulty of developing ethical/moral standards, the importance of “building gritty students,” and more. What a bleak world Schwartz describes and, apparently, lives in! She tries continually to project optimism and to show ways she and other teachers (whose experiences she often presents as counterparts to her own) have helped students manage the tremendous difficulties of their everyday lives, both in and out of school. She is resolutely optimistic – a characteristic without which it is hard to imagine anyone continuing to teach young children – yet again and again, even when presenting matters in an upbeat form, she writes things such as, “Our nation’s schools face a brutal reality. More than half of the children in our nation’s schools are living in poverty. Our schools are more segregated by race and socioeconomic status than they were before the Civil Rights Movement.” There are no citations for these statements, which are, on their face, difficult to believe (more than half of all schoolchildren in the United States live in poverty?). But, accurate or not, they represent the way Schwartz sees the world and the background against which I Wish My Teacher Knew must in turn be seen. There is wisdom as well as pain in the fill-in-the-blank responses that Schwartz shares with readers – often more wisdom, and perhaps more pain as well, than her adult perceptions and analyses present. The insights here come more from the students than from those hired to instruct them; the solutions, while unexceptionable, have far less motivational power than the children’s own presentations of the issues that caring teachers and families alike need to find ways to address.

(+++) ODYSSEYS OLD AND NEW

Argos: The Story of Odysseus as Told by His Loyal Dog. By Ralph Hardy. Harper. $16.99.

Anatomy of a Misfit. By Andrea Portes. HarperTeen. $9.99.

The Fall of Butterflies. By Andrea Portes. HarperTeen. $17.99.

     The Iliad and The Odyssey continue to enthrall modern readers even though the original oral-tradition poems, steeped in Homeric similes and a plainspokenness for their time that has become complexity and pretentiousness in ours, are very difficult for non-classicists (and even some classicists) to read. The underlying stories, though, of the Trojan War and of the 20-year postwar meanderings and adventures of Odysseus, still have tremendous narrative power. The question is how to make the tales meaningful, or at least understandable, to modern readers. Ralph Hardy has an intriguing idea for retelling The Odyssey to young readers: give the story from the viewpoint of an invented, ever-faithful dog named Argos, waiting patiently and longingly for his master’s return and learning something about Odysseus’ deeds and perils from birds that can cross Poseidon’s waters far more readily than Odysseus can and thus bring news back to Ithaka. Inevitably in a book for young readers, this is a sanitized version of The Odyssey, with violence downplayed (although scarcely absent) and sexuality missing. Yet the highlights of the tale are here and are well told, and the well-known faithfulness and devotion of dogs neatly mirrors the faithfulness and devotion of the long-suffering Penelope, awaiting her husband’s return year after year while fending off increasingly demanding and distinctly unpleasant suitors seeking her hand, status and property. To interest young readers further, Hardy makes Telemachos, Odysseus’ son, a major character in the story: “Now in his thirteenth spring, Telemachos has turned even more inward, for there is no man about to teach him the ways of the hunt, as boys learn at this age.” Argos becomes Telemachos’ tutor as well as his companion, with Hardy at one point having Argos remark, “one day Telemachos will be a king. Burt now he is a boy who misses his father.” The boy-dog relationship provides continuing interest in the events in Ithaka even as Argos learns from bird after bird about the wanderings of Odysseus in distant lands. Hardy bends the reality of dogs’ lives by having Argos, a very large dog who claims to be “bred of a wolf and a bear,” live almost to the end of his master’s story, but also manages a touching transition to a new generation by having Argos pass on his knowledge, beliefs and concerns to another dog when he himself can go on no longer – a well-thought-out parallel to the notion of a human father passing on knowledge to a human son. Argos communicates with many animals in addition to birds – bats, for example, and a hedgehog. And he has plans of his own to make: his clever plotting of the destruction of a marauding wolf pack leads an admiring magpie to comment, “You have your master’s cunning.” But The Odyssey is a story about times when cunning is enough and times when it is not, and some flavor of this comes through even in Hardy’s simplified version. Parents who know and love The Odyssey may find Argos rather thin gruel, with so many scenes focused on Odysseus’ homeland and family and with the reports of his encounters on his long trek being given mostly in bare-bones fashion. Yet readers who do not know The Odyssey – and it is they, after all, for whom Hardy wrote this book – will find this a fine, rousing story of a bold dog and his family, a story that intersects with but is not (until the very end) part of the story of The Odyssey itself, but that will hopefully whet young minds and imaginations for a later encounter with the original. And hopefully that encounter, for those not versed in ancient Greek, will be with a translation of sufficient skill and heft to bring across the amazing variety within Odysseus’ story and the grandeur and life lessons integrated into it.

     There is nothing grand, much less grandiose, in Andrea Portes’ teen-focused novels, Anatomy of a Misfit (originally published in 2014 and now available in paperback) and The Fall of Butterflies. These are intended as odysseys of a sort different from the ancient one: they are stories of inward journeys and interpersonal connections, not ones of grand events and world-spanning travels. There is humor rather than wit here – nothing like Odysseus’ brilliant identification of himself to the Cyclops as being named Nobody, so that when he blinds the man-eating monster, the Cyclops howls, “Nobody is hurting me.” Instead, Portes creates protagonists who are street-smart and plainspoken in thoroughly modern language that it is quite certain that no one will care much about a few thousand years hence: “I know you probably think Shelli bones all those guys because she’s in love with them, but here’s the funny thing, I don’t think that’s it. I think she just does it to spend time with them. …I know I couldn’t do it. Especially ’cause I’m totally petrified of contracting some grody disease. You never know with these guys. Some of them look like they are like straight out of juvie.” The words are those of Anika Dragomir, central character in Anatomy of a Misfit and third-most-popular girl in her school. Portes labors mightily to make Anika with-it, up-to-date, contemporary, and just “the coolest raddest hottest girl in the US of A” (actually Anika’s description of someone else). Reader reactions to this book will depend totally on their response to Anika, who is either delightfully offbeat or dismayingly unidimensional. Certainly the characters around her are all types. Anika’s father is Romanian, which means he looks like a vampire and lives in a castle-like house. Anika’s parents are divorced and her mother has remarried, so that means her stepdad, being a typecast stepfather, weighs 300 pounds and “never talks to us,” the “us” being Anika and her sisters. The sisters, who are “sluts” (there are lots of those in Anika’s world), spend their time “talking on the phone to more guys who don’t like them.” But guys do like Anika, which is surprising, since she considers herself “hideous,” which by her more-or-less-objective description she certainly is not: “blond hair, blue eyes, pale skin” and “a boy jaw, like a square jaw, and cheekbones you could cut yourself on.” On and on and on this goes, with Anika’s world eventually intersecting with that of Logan, one of two guys who especially have the hots for her (the other is the one everyone in school wants, but he may be, like, you know, a player). Logan and Anika become a couple after he tells her he is going to kiss her and she is going to like it, and he does and she does. But Logan is unacceptable in the Queen Bee world of Anika’s school, so the relationship has to be kept secret, or maybe has to end, or something. The way it does eventually end is supposed to be both climactic and deeply tragic, but it is so abrupt and so out of keeping with everything that has come before that the likeliest reader reaction to it is something along the lines of, “Wait. What just happened?” It is almost as if Portes tags the end of one book onto the initial 90% of another. That first 90% means well in its own way, but that way is distinctly peculiar. For instance, it is against racism – but includes putdowns of homosexuals, Christians and other groups, so this is not exactly PC-ism run riot. Ultimately, Anatomy of a Misfit is about the bad things that happen when you care too much about the opinions of the wrong people. And that is a trope of teen-focused novels that may not be as old as The Odyssey but seems even more formulaic.

     The Fall of Butterflies takes much the same approach, but here the downside of life is in the form of drugs rather than sex. Again there is a snarky protagonist whose narration either works for readers or does not: “If you ever want to see a bunch of people look like idiots, go to an audition. Any alien from Andromeda Galaxy beamed down into this auditorium would assume he had just blasted his way into the funny farm. Trust me.” This time the main character, whose name is Willa Parker, goes (at her mother’s insistence) to a fancy boarding school across the country from her home in What Cheer, Iowa, where Willa deems herself the 646^th and least popular resident. Willa ends up with a haunted bathroom (an element of the book that is either oddly endearing or ridiculously overdone, depending on your point of view) and a new friend who is rich and wonderful and everything that everybody wants to be except that she is, you know, drug-doomed to destruction and may pull Willa (whom she befriends, not very believably) along with her. Like Anika, Willa makes what are supposed to be clever comments and observations that are really kind of mean: at the very start of the book, for instance, she denies some classmates any human names and refers to them only as Peanut Allergy Boy, Headgear Girl and OCD. This is not quite the same as calling multiple girls sluts, but the objectifying comes from the same place and is scarcely an endearing characteristic. Portes makes some effort to have Willa become self-aware of the destructiveness of the drugs in which she and her friends indulge, but in the voice she has created for Willa, the looking inward comes across as whiny and formulaic: “I can’t help but wonder, what’s the price this time? What’s the price for this ride?” Eventually there is enough talk of suicide and enough free-floating angst so that Willa actually lapses, apparently unknowingly, into a snippet of Shakespeare: “oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown.” And that is about as “classic” and as close to The Odyssey as this particular troubled-teens odyssey ever gets. Clearly Portes’ intent is to reflect the real world of teenage girls today – some of them, anyway – and to create a kind of gritty and insightful coming-of-age story or two. But there is so little originality in the plots of Anatomy of a Misfit and The Fall of Butterflies, so little sense that they are anything other than teen-girl-targeted “poor me” genre novels, that the attempt to draw readers in through snarkily offbeat narration quickly comes to seem like manipulation to take the place of character development, or rather to draw attention away from its absence. It is certainly possible to enjoy the snide sarcasm of these books’ narration, but on the whole, readers will find more wit and even wisdom in Argos the canine than in all the cattiness of Portes’ central characters.

(++++) SOME ROADS LESS TRAVELED

Bruckner: Symphony No. 7; Wagner: Das Liebesmahl der Apostel. Men of the Czech Philharmonic Choir Brno, Dresden State Opera Chorus, Sinfoniechor Dresden, Czech National Choir Prague, MDR Radio Choir Leipzig, Philharmonischer Chor Dresden and Dresden Chamber Choir, and Staatskapelle Dresden conducted by Christian Thielemann. Profil. $33.99 (2 CDs).

Stravinsky: Petrushka; Debussy: La boîte à joujoux. Seattle Symphony conducted by Ludovic Morlot. Seattle Symphony Media. $16.99.

Granados: Dante—Symphonic Poem; Goyescas—Intermezzo; Danza de los ojos verdes; Danza gitana; La nit del mort. Gemma Coma-Alabert, mezzo-soprano; Jesús Álvarez Carrión, tenor; Lieder Càmera and Barcelona Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pablo González. Naxos. $12.99.

Vivaldi: Six Violin Sonatas and Trios, Op. 5. L’Arte dell’Arco (Federico Guglielmo and Elisa Imbalzano, violins; Francesco Galligioni, cello; Roberto Loreggian, harpsichord and chamber organ). Brilliant Classics. $7.99.

     The coupling of a familiar work with an unknown one is nothing new in concert programs – it is in fact a standard way of introducing audiences to contemporary or otherwise unfamiliar music, on the basis that they might not pay to hear such music on its own but will listen to it if it is served with more-familiar pieces. Such couplings are less common on recordings, however. But at times they can work very well indeed. For instance, the issuance of a two-CD Profil set of Bruckner and Wagner works makes considerable musical sense: Bruckner’s adoration of Wagner is well-known, and his almost literal obeisance to the man he considered his master is reflected especially well in his Symphony No. 7, whose slow movement Bruckner started composing in anticipation of Wagner’s death and completed afterwards. The live 2012 recording of the symphony by Staatskapelle Dresden under Christian Thielemann is an exceptionally fine one, statuesque and deeply moving, structurally assured, dramatic and highly emotive throughout. Thielemann uses the 1944 Haas edition of the symphony rather than Nowak’s from a decade later; this is one Bruckner symphony in which arguments can be made either way – neither Haas nor Nowak is fully satisfactory, and unfortunately the 1883 original survives only in one modified copy and is unpublished. What matters most here is a conductor’s ability, in whatever edition is chosen, to achieve both the architectural aims and the emotional impact that Bruckner sought in his Seventh, and Thielemann does a first-rate job on that basis. Climaxes soar, quiet passages whisper, the orchestra plays beautifully throughout, and the work as a whole has sweep and grandeur and some glorious sound, thanks to the acoustics of the Semperoper. The Wagner work here was recorded elsewhere, and the location matters a great deal: this is a live 2013 performance heard at the Frauenkirche, the exact venue for which Wagner wrote the piece. Das Liebesmahl der Apostel, a half-hour-long work for huge male chorus and large orchestra, is almost never heard anymore, and it is inarguably minor Wagner – to the extent that any of his grandly envisioned works can be called “minor.” It takes the men of seven different choruses to make up the 200-plus voices heard in this recording, yet Wagner wanted far more: 1,200 men plus a 100-piece orchestra. The voices’ placement is crucial to the work’s effect, with some of the men placed above the audience in an arrangement made possible by the layout of the Frauenkirche – truly, Wagner’s piece fits this particular venue as carefully as a typical church organ fits the building into which it is built. The piece’s title translates as “The Holy Supper of the Apostles.” Wagner, as was his custom, wrote the words himself, and they have some of the forthright religious character of Parsifal although they lack that opera’s subtlety of expression. Wagner shows himself a theatrical master even in this avowedly religious work: the climax of the piece involves an address to the large chorus of disciples by Christ’s 12 Apostles – all of whom are basses. The sound of a dozen deep male voices, declaiming words of encouragement for the spreading of the Gospel in the sonic environment of the Frauenkirche, is remarkable and, indeed, unmatched anywhere else even in Wagner. How this piece must have resounded and echoed with the full complement of forces for which Wagner created it in 1843! Even without all that heft, though, it is a piece of great historical and lesser but still significant musical interest, a work intimately bound up with the location for which its composer made it and performed there with assurance and stylistic sensitivity by top-notch musicians and a conductor of very considerable sensitivity.

     The conducting is also first-rate on a new recording of Stravinsky and Debussy by Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony, on the orchestra’s own label. This CD offers a chance to hear two somewhat childlike scores, one with strange undercurrents and the other forthright and pleasantly attractive. Morlot is quite cognizant of the balletic elements of Petrushka, and this performance is danceable as well as dramatic, with hint after hint of something slightly otherworldly going on. The realism – surrealism, really – of the Shrovetide Fair as portrayed here comes through to good effect, and there is a definite feeling of playfulness against which the darker tale of Petrushka and the menacing Blackamoor is set. Morlot keeps the music moving at a brisk but unrushed pace, and the orchestra plays for him with subtlety and notable clarity in the inner voices. The well-known Petrushka makes a good contrast with Debussy’s naïve and often cute La boîte à joujoux (“The Toy Box”), which dates to 1913 but was left unfinished at the composer’s death – the orchestration was very skillfully completed by Debussy’s friend André Caplet. This is a work of childhood and of childlike magic and affection – not affectation – and Morlot handles it with an appropriately light touch, keeping its tableaux almost frothy, with plenty of warmth and playfulness. Petrushka, it is worth remembering, dates to 1910-11, just about the same time as La boîte à joujoux (although the Stravinsky is inevitably heard in its 1947 revision). It is especially intriguing to realize how differently the composers portrayed the somewhat unreal worlds of these pieces at a time when it is possible to see, of course only in retrospect, that the great convulsion of World War I was on the horizon.

     One of the many victims of that war was Enrique Granados (1867-1916), whose music – except for Goyescas, both for piano and as a one-act opera – remains so little-known that three of the five works on a new Naxos CD are world première recordings. Balancing them is the Intermezzo from Goyescas, Granados’ most-often-heard composition, which the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra under Pablo González plays with all the warmth and beauty it deserves. There is drama as well as passion in the symphonic poem Dante, which Granados intended as an impressionistic four-movement suite but for which he completed only two parts. The first is attractively orchestrated and suitably intense; the second, which includes a part for mezzo-soprano, is soft and warm and rather on the delicate side, except for one instance of passionate intensity. Many listeners will inevitably compare it with Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini, to which it really does not hold a candle either for evocation of physical love or as a portrayal of the endless winds to which Paolo and Francesca’s doomed love condemned them. Still, Granados’ very different treatment of the story has a kind of soft loveliness that is quite effective. The three other pieces on the CD are the ones that have not been recorded before. Two short, well-made dances written for the stage show rhythmic clarity and a firm command of flamenco style. And La nit dl mort, for tenor, chorus and orchestra – the earliest work here (1897) and the one most firmly in Romantic style – is a suitably dark and eerie tone poem in which a girl is warned of the coming death of her lover in battle. Singers and orchestra alike are thoroughly comfortable with all this music, and this CD, the second in a series presenting Granados’ orchestral works, offers listeners a second impressive sampling of the composer’s music.

     But what could possibly be out-of-the-way when it comes to Vivaldi? One answer appears on a new Brilliant Classics CD featuring the superb historically informed playing of Federico Guglielmo and his ensemble, L’Arte dell’Arco. Very few listeners are likely ever to have heard Vivaldi’s Op. 5, an unusual mixture of works that was apparently assembled by a publisher and may not even have been approved by the composer, although there is little doubt that all six pieces here are by him (something that was not always the case in later assemblages attributed to Vivaldi). Op. 5 is further confused by the fact that it was presented as a continuation of the 12 violin sonatas included in Op. 2; thus, the four sonatas and two trio sonatas here are numbered I-VI (Roman numerals) within this set but also 13-18 (Arabic numerals) as follow-ups to Op. 2. The confusion surrounding the numbers and the provenance of the set notwithstanding, there is plenty of delightful and distinctly Vivaldian music to be discovered here – although this is a brief disc by modern recording standards (48 minutes). The playing, here as in other recordings by members of this ensemble, is revelatory and makes the CD a worthwhile addition to the collection of Vivaldi lovers. Guglielmo’s tone, phrasing and dynamics bring this music to life in a way that has rarely been heard before in any recording, and his colleagues in this highly collegial enterprise perform at very nearly the same extremely high level and with very much the same clarity of expression and perfection of intonation. There is nothing in the four violin sonatas and two trio sonatas of Op. 5 that could be called outstanding Vivaldi, but there is nothing here that is unworthy of at least occasional performance – although it is hard to imagine everyday string players bringing as much bounce and brilliance to this music as L’Arte dell’Arco offers here.

(++++) JOURNEYS IN TIME AND SOUND

Viva Italia: Sacred Music in 17^th Century Rome. Duke Vespers Ensemble, Mallarmé Chamber Players, and Washington Cornet & Sackbut Ensemble conducted by Brian Schmidt. MSR Classics. $12.95.

Hymns from King’s, arranged by Stephen Cleobury. The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, conducted by Stephen Cleobury; Tom Etheridge and Richard Gowers, organ. Choir of King’s College. $14.99.

Robert J. Martin: Embrace the Wind! Enkidu String Quartet (Erik Rohde and Samuel Rudy, violins; Benjamin Davis, viola; Lars Krogstad Ortiz, cello). Ravello. $14.99.

Brian Wilbur Grundstrom: Contentment, Poem for Orchestra; Jubilation! Dance for Orchestra; Suite for Chamber Orchestra; American Reflections for Strings and Harp; Chenonceau. Omega Studios Orchestra conducted by Erik Ochsner; Millennium Orchestra conducted by Robert Ian Winstin. Navona. $14.99.

     The excellence of a new MSR Classics recording featuring the Duke Vespers Ensemble lies only partly in the quality of the performance and only partly in the individual pieces performed. It lies as well in the totality of a recording whose 10 works effectively transport 21^st-century listeners 400 years into the past, to a time of musical ferment occurring in the midst of doctrinal arguments and changes that may seem abstruse or irrelevant to many modern audiences but that led to some significant devellopments in the music of the time. The singers, who perform regularly at Duke University during school terms and also at various early-music festivals, offer beautifully blended sound to which the instruments of the Mallarmé Chamber Players and the Washington Cornet & Sackbut Ensemble, under the direction of Brian Schmidt, add just the right melding of period performance practice and instrumental foundation for the voices. The result is music in which the vocal lines, abetted by the performers’ unusually clear diction, soar convincingly and meaningfully above the instruments while being neatly complemented by them as well. The brief opening plainchant, Deus in Adjutorum Meum Intende, is followed by Charpentier’s Dixit Dominus (Psalm 110) and then two pieces, Ave Regina Caelorum and Salve Regina, by Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611). Then there is a short O Dulcissimum Mariae Nomen by Giacomo Carissimi (1605-1674) before the longest and most intriguing of all the works here, the world première recording of Missa Sancta Maria Magdalenae by Giovanni Felice Sances (1600-1679). Sances, famed in his time but very little known today, was an early opera singer as well as a composer, and although his own works (including cantatas, oratorios, two Stabat Maters and more) are not often performed nowadays, they show a sure sense of workmanship and a genuine concern for communicating the underlying emotions of the words. High points of Missa Sancta Maria Magdalenae include the carefully balanced and restrained Gloria and a Credo in which the vocal lines are handled with particular skill. After Sances’ work on this very well-recorded CD, another Marian piece keeps the focus in the same place from a different perspective. This is Palestrina’s thoughtful and very moving Alma Redemptoris Mater. Then there are two shorter Sances pieces, Ave Maris Stella and Vulnerasti Cor Meum, and finally another piece by Tomás Luis de Victoria, Regina Caeli. Indeed, the Marian emphasis of the entire recording is pronounced, with the composers’ devotional displays differing in sound but having equal warmth and weight. The overall feeling of Viva Italia is one of peace and tranquility, of polyphony in the service of spiritual nourishment.

     If Viva Italia involves travel to a specific place and a time long ago, the new Choir of King’s College, Cambridge release on the ensemble’s own label casts a wider but no less strongly spiritual net. The 20 hymns here, all arranged for voices and organ by the choir’s excellent director, Stephen Cleobury, are still in use today worldwide, and collectively span the entire church year. There is, it has to be noted, a certain sameness in the arrangements, so that even though the words are, of course, different, there is a sense of repetitiveness from hymn to hymn. And Cleobury tends to favor comparatively slow tempos, even in hymns with a bit more brightness to them, such as Glorious things of thee are spoken. However, it is certainly possible to argue that these are, after all, hymns, and intended for church use and thus for a deliberate pace; and while there is much the same form of communication in all the works, that is just what is intended in pieces whose purpose is to praise God in many ways and at all times of the year. In reality, no church service would ever use all 20 of these hymns; they are specifically intended for different times and purposes. Hearing them one or a few at a time creates a much better and stronger effect than hearing all 20 in a row for a full 70 minutes. And the singing is uniformly excellent, lending further credence, if any is needed, to the notion that this choir is one of the world’s best. Because there is a certain sameness to the sound of the music throughout the disc, listeners who are not predisposed to enjoy and be inspired by the words of the hymns will appreciate the singing but will find this a (+++) CD; however, those to whom traditional organized religion is highly meaningful and to whom the hymns speak directly and in a heartfelt way will give it a (++++) rating.

     There is world-spanning and time-spanning intent as well in an extended and ambitious quartet cycle by Robert J. Martin called Embrace the Wind! This includes 16 elements: nine quartets and seven interludes scored as solos or duets. The idea is to celebrate the importance of wind (using, however, strings), from the supposedly pure Native American relationship with it to its importance as sustainable energy for contemporary society. This is a lot of sociopolitical and philosophical baggage to load onto an hour and a quarter of music for a small complement of instruments; unsurprisingly, the results are uneven. Some pieces here are deliberately hypnotic in an industrial context (such as Wind Turbines and Sliding Gears); others are intended as evocative of a spiritual relationship with wind (the opening The Four Navajo Snake Winds); there is a touch of lightness here and there (Whirligig of the Relentless Dancing Bears); and the final, longest piece, Mobile Turning in the Wind, represents power and a dramatic sense of what wind can do. The underlying philosophy, necessary for full enjoyment of the musical sequence, is weak, including everything from the “noble savage” fallacy to the notion that wind energy – which is intermittent and must be carried from the places where it is generated to the places where it is needed by using infrastructure to which self-proclaimed environmentalists vehemently object – is somehow a solution to sustainability. This Ravello CD is nevertheless a (+++) release, because the musical material is sufficiently varied and interesting to overcome the weaknesses of the underlying program of Embrace the Wind! The Enkidu String Quartet certainly embraces the music: the playing is assured, with strong ensemble work and very effective contrasts between the quartet elements and those for single or dual instruments. There is some repetitiveness in Martin's tone painting, but there is also undeniable skill in some of the ways that he uses string techniques to provide effective portrayals of different wind qualities, such as biting, stinging and chilling. This is an interesting work whose ambition gets ahead of itself, but even though it is not fully effective as spiritual exploration or polemic, it has much to recommend it from a strictly musical standpoint.

     There is much of interest as well on a new Navona CD of the music of Brian Wilbur Grundstrom – a release bearing the title, “An Orchestral Journey.” The travel here seems more to be personal for Grundstrom than connected directly to the audience: the five works on the disc, composed over a period of a decade and a half, show the composer exploring differing moods, styles and techniques. The works are arranged chronologically and provide some insight into Grundstrom’s changes in compositional emphasis, although the overall sound of the music is similar enough among the five pieces to indicate that Grundstrom has his own voice that recurs from piece to piece. The earliest work here is Contentment, Poem for Orchestra (1999), and it is a transformative tone poem in the tradition of, say, Richard Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration. However, what evolves here is mood rather than anything grandly philosophical. Jubilation! Dance for Orchestra (2000) is written in much the same mood throughout, although its rhythmic and thematic explorations eventually lead it to an even brighter and more upbeat conclusion. Suite for Chamber Orchestra (2002) is more emotionally varied than either earlier work, almost a “stages of grief” exploration, with tragic elements giving way to what sounds like acceptance and eventually to an expression of joy that seems, in light of what has come before, somewhat overdone. The work’s three movements make its progress clear: “Before the Fall,” “Avalon” and “Celebration.” But the finale, although it certainly provides a sense of relief, seems somewhat too bright after the first movements’ depth of feeling. American Reflections for Strings and Harp (2009) sounds like film music, energetic and nicely scored but somewhat superficial in its forthright evocation of varied feelings. Chenonceau (2013) is at something of an opposite pole, a subtle work using skillful orchestration and interesting instrumental combinations to provide contrast between strings and woodwinds. The title refers to a historic 16^th-century castle in the Loire Valley of France that is known for its garden maze and the way it actually spans the River Cher. The quality of this piece is evident from the fact that it is not necessary to understand its title or know what referents it contains for a listener to be able to enjoy the work purely as music. This is a (+++) CD that, while it may not appeal to all listeners and does not offer material of uniform interest, shows a great deal of compositional skill and provides some very fine and sensitive performances of works by a contemporary composer whose solid craftsmanship offers much to be admired.