(++++) VOICES FROM THE HEART

Handel: Cantata—Mi Palpiti il Cor; Rameau: Cantata—Orphée; Agostino Steffani: Cantata—Guardati O Core; Giuseppe Sammartini: Sonata in B minor, Op. 1, No. 6; Telemann: Quatuor No. 3 in G from “Nouveaux Quatuors.” Dominique Labelle, soprano; Musica Pacifica (Judith Linsenberg, recorders; Elizabeth Blumenstock, violin; Josh Lee, viola da gamba; John Lenti, theorbo and guitar; Charles Sherman, harpsichord). Navona. $14.99.

James Matheson: String Quartet; Violin Concerto; Times Alone, for soprano and piano. Color Field Quartet (Baird Dodge and Gina Dibello, violins; Weijing Wang, viola; Yi Xin, cello); Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen; Laura Strickling, soprano; Thomas Sauer, piano. Yarlung Records. $19.99.

Michael Slayton: Fantasy and Fugue for Two Pianos & Percussion—Hommage Á Bartók; Le Soir Tombe; Sursum; Sonate “Droyßig”; Sechs Miniaturen Für Das Meer (Six Miniatures for the Sea); Dreamers’ Meadows. Navona. $14.99.

Intersections: Music of Jeffrey Jacob, Heidi Jacob, Steven Block, Sergio Cervetti and Christina Rusnak. Ansonica. $14.99.

Ars Nostra—But Now the Night: Music of Eun-Hye Park, Lewis Nelson, Gerald Chenoweth, Paul Reller and Daniel Perlongo. Sang-Hie Lee and Martha Thomas, piano duo; Kyoung Cho, soprano. Ravello. $14.99.

     We tend to think of Baroque music as straitlaced, balanced and controlled, and are surprised to find examples that are anything but emotionally cool – doubly so when performers find ways to elicit the music’s underlying emotions while remaining true to Baroque style and historical performance practices. This is a tall order, but one that Musica Pacifica and soprano Dominique Labelle fill beautifully on a new Navona disc featuring three vocal and two instrumental works that have little in common except for their willingness to use Baroque structural formalities to capture emotions with unerring skill. Baroque music was far from monolithic – in particular, the German, French and Italian styles differed markedly and were sometimes seen as being in conflict with one another. The fact that works in these styles sound similar to modern ears means only that we now find their distinctiveness subtle, while Baroque audiences found it pronounced. One thing the performers here do particularly well is explore the important differences among the three cantatas (one in Italian by the German Handel, one in Italian by the Italian Steffani, and one in French by Rameau). Rameau’s work, based on the familiar Orpheus legend, is the most variegated, with nine recitatives and airs alternating to express feelings of love, loss and grace. The cantatas by Handel and the less-known Steffani (1654-1728) are more modest in scope, their five movements expressive but restrained at the same time – although Handel’s central one, the aria Ho tanti affani, is quite heartfelt. Labelle has a wonderful voice for this repertoire, clear and light but with plenty of staying power for the extended vocal displays; and the instrumental playing that backs her up is impeccable. Musica Pacifica shines on its own in the Sammartini and Telemann works that break up the succession of cantatas. Again, Baroque stylistic distinctions are much in evidence here, with Sammartini’s rather straightforward four-movement sonata being on the dark-hued side, while Telemann’s seven-movement work, with all movement titles in French, is in effect an orchestral suite scored for a smaller complement of players, and has a particularly happy balance of faster and more moderately paced movements. This is a lovely disc that bears the strong personal stamp of the performers: there is no inherent musical reason to create a CD featuring this particular grouping of material, but the musicians’ interest in exploring the emotional qualities of the compositions are more than enough rationale for the mixture.

     The musical language is far more modern, but the emotional underpinnings are just as important to the works on a new Yarlung Records recording featuring music by James Matheson (born 1970). Here too there is both vocal and instrumental material, although in this case the non-vocal elements predominate. But it is the vocal work, Times Alone, that is most immediately striking. It is a setting, in English, of five surrealist poems from the 1907 collection called Soledades, galerias y otros poemas by Antonio Machado (1875-1939). The emotional progression of the poems is handled particularly adeptly by Laura Strickling and Thomas Sauer: the first three poems are on the light, even playful side, but the last two become more thoughtful, serious and introspective, and the works’ imagery is well-reflected in Matheson’s nicely proportioned settings. Like the other works here, Times Alone was recorded live in performance – and in the case of the Violin Concerto, the performance heard here was the work’s 2011 première. The concerto was written specifically for Baird Dodge, principal second violin of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and he and the orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen take to the work with great gusto and a particular focus on maintaining the clarity of Matheson’s writing for soloist and ensemble alike. The concerto, in the standard three movements, makes for accessible listening and considerable virtuoso display by the soloist, although it is never quite clear what, if anything, it is trying to say. The opening movement, Caprice, is generally unsettled and has some particularly facile instrumental touches, notably a solo flute picking up a scurrying violin figuration that proves just as intriguing for a woodwind as for a stringed instrument. But the movement eventually drifts away, and the other two, which are shorter and played without pause between them, never resolve whatever question the first movement may be raising. Matheson says the slow Chaconne was inspired by the slow movement of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6, but the comparison does Matheson no favors: he gets the darkness and angst right without the underlying, compelling emotional connection – although the orchestral bleakness here does echo some of Mahler’s. The final Dance is a rather straightforward, lively, bright showpiece for the soloist, propulsive and pleasant to hear, but existing on an altogether different plane from that of the preceding movements. Indeed, Matheson seems to front-weight his music. The longest work on this CD is a dense and strongly rhythmic String Quartet whose first movement alone takes up more than half the piece’s 34 minutes. As in the Violin Concerto, this quartet movement seems always to be on the verge of asking substantial and substantive questions without ever quite clarifying what they are. Certainly it gives a workout to the Color Field Quartet (violinist Dodge and three other soloist-quality performers), and the central section, which brings each instrument to the fore in turn, shows just how good these players are. The sad and passionate slow movement goes through the right motions in search of the right emotions, and the finale is a real display piece for all four instruments – again, as in the concerto, seeming somewhat detached from the earlier movements. Matheson is a highly interesting composer whose work genuinely seeks to reach out to audiences, and this recording is as good an introduction to (or exploration of) the forms in which he works as anyone is likely to offer. It is also a particularly handsomely produced release, with a very extended booklet packed with information and fine color photos – not a reason in and of itself to own the CD, but a particularly nice bonus for purchasers.

     Matheson’s homage to Mahler is far from the only case of a modern composer looking backwards to produce something intended to communicate to a contemporary audience. A new Navona CD of the music of Michael K. Slayton is every bit as variegated as the recording of Matheson’s music, if not more so, and it opens with two movements tied explicitly to Bartók. The Fantasy and Fugue for Two Pianos & Percussion (performed by pianists Laura Berger and Jacob Rhodebeck and percussionists Ian Antonio and Russell Greenberg, the four being collectively known, rather quaintly, as “Yarn/Wire”) does not directly echo pieces such as Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta, but it has some of the same blend of acerbity and smoothness. Le Soir Tombe for soprano (Amy Jarman) and piano four hands (Melissa Rose and Jerome Reed) is a mildly atmospheric operatic aria. Sursum is a work for string quartet, commissioned by and here performed by the Kreutzer Quartet (Peter Sheppard Skærved and Mihailo Trandafilovski, violins; Clifton Harrison, viola; Neil Heyde, cello); the music seeks to emulate its title, which is Latin for “upward,” by striving toward higher notes as if in pursuit of transcendence, or perhaps evanescence. More emotionally compelling is the longest work on the disc, Sonate “Droyßig” for solo piano, which Evan Mack takes compellingly through its paces as a piece that negotiates familiar terrain – from darkness and depth through struggle to light – while also seeking to explore, impressionistically, the actual setting of the village of Droyßig in the Saxony-Anhalt area of Germany. Some of the same impressionism, also with a German accent, is offered in the series of attractive short pieces called  Sechs Miniaturen Für Das Meer (Six Miniatures for the Sea), performed by Joshua McGuire on guitar and Jennifer McGuire on piano. There is nothing particularly deep or even deep-water here – among the scenes evoked are ones of fog, morning, wind, docks, and night – but these short items, each bearing a German title, are pleasantly rhythmic. The final work here is Dreamers’ Meadows, a piano quartet featuring the Atlantic Ensemble (Wei Tsun Chang, violin; Seanad Dunigan Chang, viola; Kirsten Cassel Greer, cello; Jennifer McGuire, piano). Here the impressionism is somewhat strained – the work relates to hiking trails in West Virginia – but the three movements are well-constructed. The finale, Tramontaine, makes a suitably upbeat conclusion for this (+++) disc, on which the piano sonata is considerably more gripping than the rest of the material.

     A couple of new (+++) anthology CDs, from Ansonica and Ravello respectively, also offer well-made music that does not sustain interest at the same level throughout – but certainly does so intermittently. Intersections is a further exploration of the cross-cultural attractions made possible by rapprochement between the United States and Cuba – the same area explored, rather more consistently, on an earlier release called Abrazo. Those who enjoyed the previous issue will be prime candidates for this one, which offers similar cross-pollination of stylistic, harmonic and rhythmic musical elements. Jeffrey Jacobs is solo pianist in a performance of his Awakening for Piano and Orchestra, backed by the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba conducted by Enrique Pérez Mesa. Essentially a concert overture built around a lyrical melody, the piece also features bell sounds throughout that provide contrast with the flowing warmth of the primary melodic elements. The piano material is less interesting than the orchestral, having a distinct sound of lounge music.  Untouched by Morning, Untouched by Noon by Heidi Jacob is a suite of eight short movements for bass clarinet (Aiden Ortuño Cabeza), trumpet (Yasek Manzano Silva), trombone (Marisel González Valdés), baritone (Brian Church), and piano (Charles Abramovic). It starts with percussive sounds like those of the finger-snapping in West Side Story and continues through various strongly jazz-inflected gestures to a surprisingly gentle final movement with the ambiguous-in-this-context title of Distratta. Steven Block’s Puttin’ It Together, for drum set (Abiel Chea Guerra), alto saxophone (Jorge Sergio Ramírez Prieto), tenor and soprano saxophones (Carlos Alejandro Gonzales Guerra), and two double basses (Rubén Gonzales López and Liset Toppe Benítez), offers a clear melding of American jazz with Cuban music, including Cuba’s own version of jazz. The work is well-conducted by Enrique Pérez Mesa – it is complex enough to need a conductor – and makes an interesting juxtaposition with And the Huddled Masses by Sergio Cervetti, in which Pérez Mesa conducts an ensemble consisting of clarinet (Alden Ortuño Cabezas), two violins (Leonardo Pérez Baster and Luis Alberto Mariño Fernández), and cello (Lester Monier Serrano). Both Block’s work and Cervetti’s have clear political purposes, with Cervetti’s being more direct in its focus on the hopefulness of immigration to the United States (from Cuba and elsewhere: Cervetti himself moved to the U.S. from Uruguay). Strictly as music, Cervetti’s three-movement piece – the longest work on this CD – is more heartfelt and emotionally trenchant. The disc concludes with two choral works by Christina Rusnak, sung by Ensemble Vocal Luna conducted by Sandra Santos González. Both Dearly Beloved and Dearly Departed – the pairing is rather over-obvious – are intended to convey a sense of hope for Cuba’s future in a repaired relationship with the United States. Both are well-meaning, but neither is especially memorable despite some nicely balanced choral writing.

     The anthology called Ars Nostra—But Now the Night is held together, to the extent that it holds together at all, by the fact that all the music here is for piano duo. The target listenership seems to be duo pianists, or people simply wanting to hear the sound of two pianos rather than one as an aural exploration of what can be done with 176 keys instead of 88. The first work here, Chera in Nain (A Widow in Nain) (2009) by Eun-Hye Park, includes narration by soprano Kyoung Cho, but its primary content is percussive keyboard contributions that seem to exist independently of the words. The remaining pieces here involve only the pianists. Aber Jetzt Die Nacht (2013) by Lewis Nielson starts as an overlong exploration of dissonance and turns into an overlong use of modernistic techniques such as hitting the piano’s case and playing the strings inside the instrument. There is nothing genuinely new here – just a veneer of contemporaneity. Celestial Phenomena (2008) by Gerald Chenoweth is more intriguing in its exploration of Big Bang, Starshine, Black Hole and Night Sky—Dawn, but its use of two pianos rather than one seems arbitrary for most of the effects it produces (although its very beginning certainly has more clout on two instruments than it would on a single piano). Sonata for Two Pianos (2008) by Paul Reller is another of the innumerable contemporary compositions that seek to find something unusual in combining rhythms and stylistic elements from jazz, rock and pop music within a classical or pseudo-classical form. The stop-and-start nature of the music and its repeated forays into dissonance are less impressive than its occasional calmer moments. The final work here, Windhover for Piano Duo (2009) by Daniel Perlongo, has more calm, even lyrical moments than does Reller’s work and is less afraid to venture into tonality. As a result, it sounds less self-consciously “with-it” than the other works and more like a piece that seeks to reach out to an audience beyond that of pianists. The precise nature of the reaching-out is never quite clear, however, and the work ultimately comes across as more gestural than explicatory. Still, it is one of the highlights of a CD that features first-rate pianism in the service of music that, however well-constructed, generally seems to lack any powerful communicative reason for being.

(++++) IMAGINATION, THE ULTIMATE MAGIC

The Magic Word. By Mac Barnett. Illustrated by Elise Parsley. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $17.99.

Dinosaurs in Disguise. By Stephen Krensky. Illustrated by Lynn Munsinger. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $17.99.

     Everyone knows that “the magic word” when a child wants something is “please.” Everyone, that is, except Paxton C. Heymeyer, star of a hilariously offbeat “what if kids ruled the world?” jaunt by Mac Barnett and Elise Parsley. The scene opens in a super-messy living room, with Paxton jumping up and down on one end of the sofa, his toys scattered everywhere, while a bored and oblivious babysitter reclines on the sofa’s other end, reading a magazine. Paxton wants a cookie, but when the babysitter tells him to say the magic word, Paxton decides, for some unknown reason, to ask, “Can I have a cookie, ALAKAZOOMBA?” And – well, it turns out that that really is the magic word, because Paxton not only gets a cookie instantly but also, much to the babysitter’s annoyance,  uses the word again to ask for another cookie – and gets it. And a glass of milk. And “a walrus that will chase the babysitter up to the North Pole” after her annoyance erupts into one of those familiar “I’m going to count to three” moments. Yes, Paxton conjures up a North-Pole-bound walrus. He has really latched onto something here – and Parsley’s illustrations, which use perspective in highly striking and imaginative ways to convey the drama and amusement of Barnett’s hilarious story, show just what happens when the walrus shows up. Paxton certainly thinks big. By the time his parents return home, he has created a giant swimming pool in the living room, complete with waterslide, and when his parents are more than a wee bit annoyed, Paxton realizes that there are plenty of walruses around. Soon he is on his own again, happily munching cookies in a room that features a drum set, a couple of sharks swimming in an aquarium tank, a Segway, a big piece of modern art based on the first half of his name (“PAX”), and more. And “the next morning he got right to work,” Barnett explains, while Parsley shows the modest home at 23 Larch sprouting all sorts of Paxton-focused rooms and extensions and slides and flags and a roller coaster and – oh, it is all just too marvelous for words. Then Paxton, whose robot chef brings him cookies on demand, gets a visit from his friend Rosie, who is brought in by the butler just as Paxton and his elephant are playing in the pool. Rosie, however, is unimpressed, telling Paxton he is a terrible host, and Paxton certainly cannot stand for that in “his very own castle with a helipad and pink-lemonade moat.” One walrus later, Paxton is by himself yet again, but – well, at a certain point a surfeit of everything perfect becomes merely a surfeit, and Paxton is at that point. He brings everyone back – his parents’ and Rosie’s bemused expressions are nothing compared with the babysitter’s explosive one – and Paxton apologizes, realizing that there is no magic word to make Rosie accept the apology. As she explains, “You just have to mean it.” He does, and she forgives him, and all is fine. OK, almost fine. The babysitter is having none of this sweetness-and-light ending, and Paxton has not really reformed, at least not all the way, and – well, let’s just say that the walruses have the last word. And that word is ALAKAZOOMBA.

     There are no magic words in Stephen Krensky’s Dinosaurs in Disguise, but there is something magical in the book’s concept – and in the very funny drawings by Lynn Munsinger. The little boy who narrates the book explains that he just doesn’t accept the notion that all the dinosaurs died out long ago “after something really big crashed here from space.” No, he says, dinos ruled Earth for so long that he is absolutely sure “they could survive one fiery blast” – and in his imagination, the boy is riding atop a Triceratops as it and many other dinosaurs, running in a distinctly human-looking way and with human-looking expressions, flee the dangerous celestial visitor. The boy figures that what happened scared the dinosaurs so much that they went into hiding and “stayed hidden once some strange new creatures showed up” – and here Munsinger shows a bewigged, garment-and-boot-wearing T. rex helping a little caveboy figure out that a wheel really ought to be round, not square or triangular. “Hiding soon became a habit,” the boy narrator explains, on a page featuring laugh-out-loud portrayals of dinos as the Sphinx, a pyramid and a camel. The boy is quite sure that he can find dinosaurs here and there if he only looks closely enough – and Munsinger offers, among other disguises, one dino dressed as Santa Claus and another as the Statue of Liberty. The boy says he would really like to show dinosaurs all the conveniences of the modern world, including drive-up takeout food, supermarkets packed with good things to eat, cars to use to go visiting, buses and airplanes for longer trips, and TV and snacks for “just relaxing at home.” The pictures showing dinos fitting in (more or less) to the modern world are just wonderful – until they are not, as the boy realizes that contemporary society might make them uncomfortable (and Munsinger shows dinos struggling with everything from traffic to cell phones). Maybe, after all, this isn’t the right time for dinosaurs to reveal themselves to the modern world, the boy concludes. Maybe it is best they stay hidden for now – although he wants them to know, as the book’s final words put it, that “their secret is safe with me.” And there is the boy, cuddled in bed, sleeping peacefully with the stuffed dinosaur he carries everywhere and surrounded by a bevy of actual dinos cuddling him, standing nearby (disguised as a lamp), lying underneath the bed (and raising it well off the floor), and so on. A charmingly imaginative story, Dinosaurs in Disguise is sure to be a hit with dino-loving children – although parents should be prepared to explain that dinosaurs really are gone, no matter how many inventive and ingenious ways kids can come up with to explain that they must still be around somewhere.

(++++) CARTOON FANTASIES

Big Nate: Revenge of the Cream Puffs. By Lincoln Peirce. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

Cat vs Human: Fairy Tails. By Yasmine Surovec. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.

     Some cartoonists have come up with characters whose adventures seem to unfold naturally, so carefully have the characters’ personalities been established over the years. Big Nate and his friends in Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate comic strip are just everyday sixth-graders with few outlandish elements in their lives – the cats and dogs in the strip may not be totally realistic, but they do not talk or fly, and there are no supernatural characters or occurrences driving the action. Instead, the strip’s humor evolves naturally from the characters’ personalities and the kids’ interactions among themselves and, in particular, with Nate. There is nothing new in this approach to cartooning – Walt Kelly perfected it decades ago, and it even predates his unequalled Pogo – but Peirce uses this storytelling form particularly well, so that the episodes unfold in ways that seem inevitable. In the latest Big Nate collection, for example, Nate’s admiration for Brad Linsky, the artist who draws Nate’s own favorite comic, “Femme Fatality,” leads naturally to Nate wanting to use better materials for his own cartooning endeavors (which, unfortunately, get short shrift in this book and even within this specific sequence). Nate’s desire for self-improvement – which is at best intermittent, but does show up in this specific area – leads him to ask his feckless father to provide “a super heroine-ish nude model or two” for an anatomy study, and to discover that professional drawing tools are a lot harder to use than he thought. In another set of strips, Kim Cressly, the large and aggressive girl who has a crush on Nate – much to his annoyance – discovers that she has a bigger crush on the even larger and even more aggressive Chester Budrick, one of those comic-strip characters who are never seen but whose effects are quite apparent (an approach recalling Charles Schulz’ handling of adults in Peanuts). Elsewhere, Nate hatches one of his usual over-ambitious plans, this time to make a movie that will bring in as much money as The Hunger Games, and this means he recruits plump and gentle Chad to be transformed into a fearless warrior – although Chad would prefer to spend his time playing with “Andy the Acorn” and “Mr. Mushroom.” There is more to Chad than appears on the surface, as Peirce makes clear in a sequence in which Chad is the only remaining player on Nate’s unfortunately named Cream Puffs baseball team who can pitch, and manages to surprise everyone, including Nate, by winning the Little League championship game. None of these sequences is especially notable in terms of plot – what makes them work is the way they revolve around Nate, depend on his personality for their effect, and deepen Peirce’s development of his character. Peirce (pronounced “purse”) gives the supporting cast plenty of personality as well, but most of the non-Nate characters are comparatively one-dimensional: Nate’s friend Francis is a typical fact-spouting nerd; Nate’s older sister, Ellen, is a thoroughly typical foil for Nate, being as responsible and hardworking as Nate is lazy and inclined to cut corners; Nate’s rival, Gina, is the annoying school know-it-all; and so on. Nate himself, though, for all his lack of self-awareness and inflated sense of self-importance, has some genuine intelligence and ability beneath all the bluster – the way he beats Gina at chess in this latest collection is a perfect example. Walt Kelly once said that Pogo was the glue holding the Pogo strip together. In Peirce’s Big Nate, Nate is more like the sun around which all the other characters revolve – although it would be overdoing things to say that Nate casts light on the others in the strip. Heat, maybe, but not light.

     The central characters in Yasmine Surovec’s Web comic, Cat versus Human, are cats – well, duh. Humans are never the primary focus of a “versus” sort of comic. Surovec’s cartoon world is filled with the many-faceted perfections of felines – the opposite, in this way, of Nate’s world, since Nate is afraid of cats and constantly tries (unsuccessfully) to show that dogs are better. Unsurprisingly, the felines are the stars in Surovec’s collection, Cat vs Human: Fairy Tails, in which humans exist primarily to admire, feed, care for and dote on cats – making these stories not all that unlike the real world. In this version of “Rapunzel,” for instance, there is no witch – how Rapunzel got into the tower is never mentioned – and the prince who climbs up is looking for his cats, which he and Rapunzel  take back to his castle so everyone can live purringly ever after. In “Goldilocks,” the title character is a cat looking for a place to sleep and finding all the bears’ beds unsatisfactory – ending up happily resting in a cardboard box instead. “The Princess and the Pea” is another sleep story – the crown-wearing cat can finally fall asleep after finding the pea under a pile of pillows and eating it. “The Pied Piper” in this version gets the rats out of town and, after the chintzy mayor refuses payment, gets even by taking away all the town’s cats – so of course the rats return. “The Little Mermaid” wants to live on land and play with kitties – which turn out to be mer-cats, so she is unhappy until one comes back on land to stay with her. The prince in “The Sleeping Beauty” fails to wake the title character with a kiss and leaves in a huff, declaring the whole story “a waste of time,” but a kitty’s kiss awakens the princess successfully and proves that the cat is “her true love.” The variations on classic fairy tales here are predictable and in most cases mildly humorous, but the (+++) book will be fun for cat lovers – although of no real interest to anyone else. Surovec’s art is simple to the point of being simplistic, and while it is pleasant enough, it fits somewhat better on the Internet than between the pages of a book, where its lack of detail and much-simplified renderings and colors are appealing enough on first reading but do not invite many return visits. Cats have been Internet video sensations pretty much forever, and still are, but not everything feline translates perfectly (much less purrfectly) to the printed page.

(+++) THE MAINE THING

Jubilee. By Patricia Reilly Giff. Wendy Lamb Books. $16.99.

Moo. By Sharon Creech. Harper. $16.99.

     Some authors of books for preteens specialize in novels designed to evoke tears, an overall feeling of warmth, and a kind of gentle catharsis that comes from the protagonists learning something about themselves through events that readers may never experience but to which they can relate. For Patricia Reilly Giff and Sharon Creech, if the books can also include some sort of special feature, such as typography changes or illustrations integrated into the stories, so much the better. Jubilee fits this pattern perfectly. It invites readers to find it “touching” and “heartwarming” – typical adjectives for typical books of this type – through its story of a girl who stopped talking after her mother left her when the girl was small; who communicates through gestures and drawings; and who, eventually and inevitably, regains the power of speech. Despite the summary’s gloomy sound, this is really a book of pervasive happiness – in small things if not large ones (until the end, anyway). The protagonist, Judith, is cherished by the wonderful adults around her (they are all wonderful) and has as perfect a relationship with her dog, Dog, as with her Aunt Cora and the other humans here. There is a great deal of scene-setting intended to show the delights of living amid the everyday wonders of nature. The difficulties, so serious to Judith (who narrates the book), are much milder than in many books for preteens: there is no violence and little high-level angst, although there is, of course, the underlying mystery of why Judith stopped talking when her mother left – was it something Judith did then, or thinks she did? To the extent that there is any drama here, it lies in Judith’s departure from the small special classroom she has been schooled in, which is on an island off the Maine coast, and the need for her to establish some sort of communication within a mainstream fifth-grade class. Ultimately, the book is all about acceptance – Judith’s acceptance of difficult or bad choices in others’ lives (including her own and her mother’s); Judith’s acceptance of her inability to speak and the sounds and visuals she uses instead to communicate (her drawings, peppered throughout the book, include everything from cartoonish stick figures to greeting-card-like cuteness); the adults’ acceptance of Judith just as she is, which seems very easy for them; and so on. Judith’s care for Dog, who was abandoned, clearly parallels the adults’ concern for Judith herself, and indeed, everything here is designed to relate to everything else with the sort of sweetness and warmth so dear to authors of tearjerkers. The events in Giff’s book never approach the tragic, although the novel is steeped in pathos; and the natural setting, including the evocation of the Maine countryside, is as positive as the personalities of every single grown-up in Judith’s world. The kernel of the message here is spoken by Judith’s mother when Judith finally finds her: “Don’t worry about anything. We’ll work it all out.” Actually, there is never any doubt of that from the very beginning of Jubilee: it is the kind of book in which it is certain from the very first that everyone will work everything out.

     Moo is a bit less even-tempered, and even includes a sort-of-tragic twist toward the end (readers of Creech’s other books will see it coming: this sort of thing is part of her style). Here the special visuals are in the form of words typeset to indicate their meaning: “vibrating” has its letters at varying positions above and below the main line of text, “drip” is set vertically as if the letters are dripping, and so on. Some readers will find that this affectation wears thin quickly; others will accept the approach as integral to the storytelling. Much of the tale is in blank verse, and there is plenty of white space on many pages – this is, like Jubilee, a very easy book to read in one sitting. Also like Jubilee, it is set in Maine, which seems for both Giff and Creech to have the attraction of a distant and wondrous land where life is tied closely to nature and the everyday pace is a slow and steady one. “Little changes, day by day,” as Moo narrator Reena puts it at one point, are the stuff of life here – for Reena; her brother, Luke; their parents, who have moved to Maine specifically to get away from city life; and Mrs. Falala, the stereotypically cranky elderly neighbor whose stubborn cow Reena and Luke help prepare for a show. The story is basically as sweet as it is clichéd, leading to an eventual climax explicitly designed to tug at readers’ hearts. Of course the city kids must learn about country and farm life, and of course they must adapt to the way animals are handled Down East, and of course there is a touch of quirkiness in the characters (especially cantankerous-but-with-a-heart-of-gold Mrs. Falala, in case that was not clear from her name), and of course by the end the young people are sadder and wiser and more in touch with their caring side. Designed from the start to be touching, Moo is just that for readers who can ignore its many formulaic elements and the occasional plot points that go awry or never go anywhere (such as the virtual absence of attention to the farm animals other than the cow). The book is low-key throughout, the setting is as important here as it is in Jubilee, and Moo will be an easy and pleasant read for kids who are interested in yet another story of yet another family trying to adjust to yet another new set of circumstances and to learn in yet another way about their own innermost cares and concerns.

(+++) COLOR COORDINATION

Not Quite Black and White. By Jonathan Ying. Illustrations by Victoria Ying. Harper. $14.99.

Thankfulness to Color. By Zoë Ingram. Harper. $15.99.

     Cleverly conceived but drifting a bit away from its central premise, Not Quite Black and White, by the brother-and-sister team of Jonathan and Victoria Ying, starts out as a delightful way to show young readers about colors. The Yings’ idea is to take animals known to be black and white and introduce splotches of color when portraying them. So an anthropomorphic, cartoonish zebra, walking on two legs and carrying a basket of flowers, is shown wearing a pink-polka-dotted skirt. A scene of penguins includes one in yellow boots. A Dalmatian puppy sports a bright red cape. So far, so good in the illustrations – although there is already a bit of strain in the text, with the book’s very first entry reading, “Most zebras wear stripes, but this one does not./ She much prefers dressing in pink polka dot.” That really ought to be “dots” – the verbiage needs some added thought here. But putting that aside, the choice of animals starts to come a bit unglued after a while. Skunks in blue bathing suits are fine, but a half-black, half-white llama? Even when it is wearing a brown scarf, that coloration is more than a bit of a stretch. A black-and-white tiger? Well, it could be, although even young children surely know that tigers are normally black and orange. But then, all of a sudden, we get a horse (dressed as a traffic-control officer). There could be a black-and-white horse, but choosing that animal for this color scheme is less than obvious. The approach works for a panda and is justifiable for a cow and a kitten – cows and cats can be many colors – but a badger? Well, it is true that their heads are black-and-white, and that is all readers see here (this badger is wearing a spacesuit and posing on the moon) – but the choice of this animal in this specific color combination just seems rather strained. And right after showing the badger, the Yings change the tone of the book, trying to make a societal comment at the end by saying “we’re each pretty special, not quite black and white.” Well, that is an admirable sentiment, surely, but it is out of keeping with the rest of the book, which suddenly switches from amusing ways to illustrate colors to social commentary. However well-intentioned this conclusion may be, it is jarring. Kids will enjoy the portrayal of the various animals, even if they may need the specifics of the coloration explained to them, but the book’s conclusion, like the use of “dot” rather than “dots” for the text’s initial rhyme, just makes it seem that the Yings are trying a little too hard in their first picture book.

     Black-and-white illustrations are the centerpiece of a whole series of beautifully designed coloring books by Zoë Ingram, and Thankfulness to Color fits right into the Ingram parade. It is not, however, quite as enjoyable as other Ingram books in the same format – an approach that includes highly detailed black-and-white pictures (digitally scanned and enhanced after Ingram initially draws them in pen), with quotations or statements relating to the book’s theme on most pages. Thankfulness to Color is more limited than other Ingram books because it is tied so obviously to the Thanksgiving season, even though its subtitle, “Gratitude to live and color by,” makes it seem to be connected to the whole year. Many of the chosen quotations here, though, lack the attractiveness of those in other Ingram books, being on the pedestrian side. “Rest and be thankful. – William Wordsworth.” “My thanksgiving is perpetual. – Henry David Thoreau.” And the words from Ingram herself do not even try to go beyond the straightforward: “There is always something to be thankful for,” “Give thanks,” “Be kind,” “Be thoughtful,” and so on. The to-be-colored pages here are as carefully crafted as always, featuring a wide variety of leaves, fruits and vegetables, flowers, butterflies, and geometric designs, many of them being very pointedly seasonal. A lattice-topped pie on one page, for example, goes with a George Bernard Shaw quotation on the facing page: “There is no love sincerer than the love of food.” Thankfulness to Color is a pleasant enough book, and one that fans of Ingram’s intricate art – which always looks good even before color is added – will like. It is, however, a more thematically and seasonally limited book than some of her others, and families will likely enjoy it most if they find a way to use it as a harbinger of Thanksgiving or an element of their celebration of the holiday itself.

(++++) SONGS OF THEN AND NOW

Out of the Shadows: Rediscovered American Art Songs. Lisa Delan, soprano; Kevin Korth, piano; Matt Haimovitz, cello. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

                                                                                                

Richard Danielpour: Songs of Solitude; War Songs; Toward the Splendid City. Thomas Hampson, baritone; Nashville Symphony conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero. Naxos. $12.99.

Let Me Fly: A Celebration of American Choral Music. University of South Dakota Chamber Singers conducted by David Holdhusen. Navona. $14.99.

Aidan Andrew Dun: Honeyland. Adan Andrew Dun, spoken poetry; Lucie Rejchrtová, piano. Ravello. $14.99.

Cadence: New Works for Voices in Verse by David Kirtley, Joanne D. Carey, Timothy Kramer and Christopher J. Hoh. Navona. $14.99.

     It is always a pleasure to rediscover first-quality lost music – or music that has been misplaced, if not exactly lost. And that is just what the performers have done on a new PentaTone release offering 31 songs by 10 American composers of both the recent and more-distant past. One of the most affecting works here, and the longest single song, is the only original composition by a living composer on the disc. And interestingly, the material may be familiar to listeners even though the song itself probably is not. This is A Letter from Sullivan Ballou by John Kander (born 1927), whose text is a letter used by Ken Burns in his widely watched documentary about the U.S. Civil War. Kander gives the lengthy and deeply moving letter a straightforward yet evocative setting, allowing the words – in which Ballou expresses both his deepest love of family and his equally heartfelt love of country – to flow freely and to evoke listeners’ feelings effectively, without any knowledge of Ballou himself being necessary. Ballou was a Union Army officer from Rhode Island who was killed at age 32 at the battle called First Manassas by the South and First Bull Run by the North. His letter – found in his effects after he died – anticipates his likely death and places it in both a personal context and a societal one. The writing is eloquent in its straightforwardness and is not that of an uneducated man: Ballou was a lawyer and politician. Kander’s song and Ballou’s words are all the more touching at a time when the United States is so riven by 21^st-century divisions – some of which trace back to Ballou’s time and even before. Other living composers are also represented in very fine performances on this release – although their works are arrangements of existing material, not entirely new songs. David Garner (born 1954) contributes Auld Lang Syne in an arrangement for soprano, cello and piano; Gordon Getty (born 1933) offers Shenandoah for the same forces; and Jack Perla (born 1959) proffers Home, Sweet Home in a similar arrangement. The remaining works on this recording – all of them performed with very considerable sensitivity and attunement to the composers’ expressive intensions – are groups or song cycles. There are six selected songs by Paul Nordoff (1909-1977) and three by Randall Thompson (1899-1984), the four Blue Mountain Ballads by Paul Bowles (1910-1999), seven Songs of Love and Longing by Stephen Paulus (1949-2014), Songs on Four Poems by e.e. cummings by John Duke (1899-1984), and Three Songs of Adieu by Norman Dello Joio (1913-2008) – one of the best-known composers here, whose songs immediately precede Kander’s Ballou setting in a way that both leads into it effectively and gives it well-thought-out context. A number of the works here are première recordings or premières using a female voice, but the attractiveness of the release lies less in what has or has not been recorded before than in the overall high quality of all the settings and performances, and the skill with which the various composers evoke emotions of many kinds, each of them heartfelt in its own way.

     A new Naxos recording of music by Richard Danielpour (born 1956) includes two extended song cycles that are both world première recordings and that show yet another first-rate American composer turning thoughts and compositional skills to matters fraught with considerable emotional resonance. Danielpour’s five War Songs (2008) actually have a strong connection with Kander’s setting of Ballou’s letter: Danielpour here sets five texts by Walt Whitman, whose Civil War activities and poems are well-known, the most popular of them being the most conventional, O Captain! My Captain! That is not one of the poems chosen by Danielpour, and for good reason: although the words in War Songs are by Whitman and the cycle was written to commemorate the 150^th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, Danielpour’s motivation for writing the music was a conflict of the 21^st century: the Iraq War, and the young men and women whose lives it claimed. Thomas Hampson, whose Hampsong Foundation commissioned War Songs, performs the music with just the right blend of evenness and emotional intensity, and the effect of the final and longest song, Come Up from the Fields Father, which lasts half the length of the whole cycle, is especially affecting here. The accompaniment by the Nashville Symphony under Giancarlo Guerrero is nuanced and subtle throughout, fitting the music very well indeed. Hampson and Guerrero are also well-teamed for Songs of Solitude (2002), yet another of the many, many works written as a response to the terrorist murders of September 11, 2001. Danielpour manages to make his evocative six-song cycle stand out, however, because here as in War Songs, he chooses texts not directly related to the events that inspired the composition but fitting them closely and often in surprising ways. The poems here are by William Butler Yeats, and again it is the longest song of the cycle, The Second Coming, that comes across with greatest intensity and seems most strongly related to the overall theme (although here the climactic song is the penultimate one, before Epilogue). The CD concludes with the only work on it that has been recorded before, Toward the Splendid City (1992), an orchestral portrait of New York – again, something that has been done innumerable times, by many composers. Danielpour’s distinctiveness here comes from a somewhat acerbic take on the city, which, on the basis of this music, he seems to find fascinating, even enthralling, but scarcely an always-positive place to experience even in the decade before the terrorist murders.

     The songs are far more straightforward on a new Navona CD called Let Me Fly, which highlights the exceptional quality of the University of South Dakota Chamber Singers under David Holdhusen. The 18 works here collectively create a pleasing mixture of the secular and the sacred, albeit with some slightly jarring transitions from one to the other. James Erb’s version of Shenandoah on this disc makes a very interesting contrast with Gordon Getty’s, since the original lyrics are the words of a man, while Getty gives the song to a female voice and Erb arranges it for chorus. The simple harmonic beauty of the song stands out in each case. Other traditional pieces – especially Dixie (arranged by Norman Luboff) and Go, Tell It on the Mountain (arranged by Stacey Gibbs) – are also especially attractive as handled by the 40-member South Dakota chorus. Stephen Chatman’s setting of the World War I song, In Flanders Fields, is also very emotive. But there is lighter material here as well, including a kind of crossover-to-pop song, Someplace by Jocelyn Hagen, and Ward Swingle’s pleasant and lively arrangement of Country Dances. It would be exaggerating to say that there is profundity in these choral works, but there is certainly emotion, considerable pathos if little tragedy, and many opportunities for this well-balanced, well-conducted choral ensemble to show its ability to handle American works ranging from folk and gospel material to light and bouncy fare.

     Matters are considerably more rarefied and intellectual – and less emotionally telling – on a (+++) Ravello CD featuring poetry written and spoken by Aidan Andrew Dun. This is material that strives to show how offbeat (sometimes literally) and unusual it is, insisting that it is special rather than showing how special it is in a more-modest way. Dun tends to draw attention to himself to a greater extent than to his poetry, wanting to emphasize to the audience how poetic he is through titles such as Her Feet as Two White Swans and Invitation to the Golden Quatrain. In striving for a new way to present material – for reasons that are never particularly clear – Dun comes up with something akin to old-fashioned melodrama (words spoken over music) with an overlay of Sprechstimme. Essentially, what he does is to recite words over keyboard accompaniment that, despite the more-than-dutiful playing of Lucie Rejchrtová, has a distinctly subsidiary role that often involves simply repeating rhythmic material again and again – although Rejchrtová’s periodic use of electronic enhancements is occasionally intriguing. Dun’s expressiveness is quite conventional as poetry (“the sadness of my disconnection,” “the heaviness radiates out of my disenchanted being,” “monstrous stratifications of ugliness,” etc.), although some of his evocations of specific places or states of being come through tellingly (Insomnia, for example). This is not so much a recording of music as it is a spoken-word poetry disc whose appeal will be exclusively to those who find Dun’s verbiage attractive and his emoting convincing.

     A (+++) Navona anthology CD called Cadence is also of limited appeal – although in this case, the inclusion of material by four composers with some significant differences in style increases the likelihood that listeners not already familiar with the material will find at least some of it congenial. Certainly there is poetry on this disc that is far more involving than Dun’s rather maundering work: poems by William Blake and Carl Sandburg are among those set by the composers here. However, the fact that these poets’ works are well-known and have often been set to music before puts a high burden on contemporary composers’ use of the material – a burden borne here with varying degrees of success. Joanne D. Carey offers sophisticated settings of Blake’s The Lamb (performed by the Stanbery Singers under Paul Stanbery) and The Tyger (performed by Vox Futura under Andrew Shenton), but Blake’s mysticism and use of straightforward language to communicate multifaceted and multilayered concepts does not meld particularly well with Carey’s dissonances and insistent rhythms. As for Sandburg, five of his works are set by Christopher J. Hoh in a cycle, is also performed by the Stansbery ensemble, called Remembering All: Five Sandburg Poems. Here the music is generally fairly effective at elucidating or underlining the emotions of the words to Joy, Monotone, Under the Harvest Moon, I Sang and Follies. The existential simplicity of the works’ settings is nicely reflected in music that, even at its most upbeat, retains a veneer of lyricism that fits the material well. The five Haiku Songs of Karigane by David Kirtley are set in a way that is not always in accord with the material but sometimes manages to deepen it. Kaoru Karigane’s haiku follow the familiar syllabification of these three-line miniatures, and soprano Jennifer Bird and pianist Mutsumi Moteki together extract a sense of open sparseness from the material as Kirtley sets it. But there is rather a lot of openness here, with three of the five settings lasting more than four minutes apiece and the others two minutes each. The compression of thoughts that makes the haiku form so distinctive is here subsumed within pieces that spin out long piano lines – sometimes not even lines but singular, distinct notes that just happen to occur one after the other – in a way quite foreign to the underlying form and intent of the poetry. On the other hand, some of the poems’ implicit lyricism is here made explicit, and that results in occasional instances of quite striking warmth and beauty, even though the cycle as a whole does seem vastly overextended. Interestingly, the shortest work on the CD, Lux Aeterna by Timothy Kramer, produces some of the emotional impact of haiku even though the words (sung by the Kühn Choir conducted by Marek Vorlíček) represent only part of a traditional Mass. Kramer’s harmonies are not consonant in an old-fashioned sense, but neither are they self-consciously dissonant; and the composer’s sense of the meaning of individual words leads him to emphasize them convincingly without appearing to overdo their message. This work shows that however up-to-date a setting may be, it is likely to have the greatest impact if it stays as true to the spirit of the material as composers of yesteryear strove to do.

(++++) DELIGHTS OF THE DISTINCTLY NON-DIGITAL

2017 Calendars: Wall—Alice in Wonderland; Mini-Wall—Edward Gorey Practical Cats; B. Kliban Cats; Engagement—Charley Harper. Pomegranate. $14.99 (Wall); $7.99 each (Mini-Wall); $15.99 (Engagement).

     Yes, yes, everyone’s life is supposed to be 100% digital now, and carrying around anything with only a single function is hopelessly outdated and ridiculously old-fashioned – I mean, who could possibly want a watch that merely tells time or a telephone that simply makes calls (and what exactly are “calls” in this age of texting, and, for that matter, what is texting with words in this age of emoji, and so on and so on and so on?). Everyone knows that if you want to check the date, you glance at your phone, and if you want to check appointments, you call them up electronically, and if you want to remember special days, you set electronic reminders that alert you both with sounds and with computer-generated voices, and if you want to look at art, you do so on a screen, and, again, so on and so on and so on.

     Poor world. Indeed, the world is poorer to the extent that we digitize everything and lose sight, often quite intentionally, of the chance to disconnect and to contemplate the passage of time – not merely snippets of it, but days and weeks and months – in strictly analog ways; that is, if we turn the page on a day or week or month by literally turning a page, and look at the expanse of time before us as if it were an actual, physical expanse.

     Thank goodness not everyone thinks purely digitally when it comes to the passage of time, because if everyone did, there would be no place for the beautifully designed, stylish and visually delightful calendars produced with remarkable consistency by Pomegranate. Those calendars show no sign of going away, and none of declining in quality, for 2017. Oh yes, there are updates and changes here and there. A marvelous full-size wall calendar featuring John Tenniel’s superb illustrations for Alice in Wonderland turns on its head the famous first verse of Austin Dobson from the 1907 Heinemann edition of the tale: “Enchanting ALICE! Black-and-white/ Has made your deeds perennial;/ And naught save ‘Chaos and old Night’/ Can part you now from Tenniel.” But Lewis Carroll’s story is, after all, about many things being turned topsy-turvy, so if the Tenniel illustrations appear on this calendar in color rather than black-and-white, who shall gainsay the decision? (Well, all right, it can be gainsaid, but that would just be petty.) The 12 illustrations chosen for this lovely calendar will delight fans of Alice throughout the coming year, and a few of them look particularly good in their new, dressed-up hues: the White Rabbit suitably bedecked for court, the playing cards painting the rose bush, and the shower of cards raining down on Alice are all particularly striking in this gussied-up guise. The other scenes chosen for the calendar benefit less from being colored, or colorized, but there is a certain beauty to the Cheshire Cat’s tree-limb pose and the scene of Father William balancing an eel on the end of his nose that makes the color versions noteworthy in their own right. Pomegranate specializes in artistically attractive and vibrant calendars, and it is worth remembering that the long-lived Tenniel (1820-1914) was knighted by Queen Victoria for his artistic work, most of which appeared in Punch magazine. Seeing some of his most famous Carroll illustrations month after month cannot but connect lovers of Alice’s adventures and Victorian sensibility with a world whose distinctly old-fashioned elements seem all the more attractive as they fall all the more hopelessly out of date.

     The Cheshire Cat as imagined by Tenniel is a progenitor of many, many other artistically rendered felines, including some connected, as Tenniel’s cat is, to literary works. There are, for example, the cats from T.S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, as imagined by the ever-wonderful Edward Gorey (1925-2000). Pomegranate offers a wide variety of Gorey art, and the small-size 2017 wall calendar showcasing the cats of Eliot’s amusing poetic work is a particularly enjoyable example. This is a calendar suitable for hanging in an office cubicle or a small kitchen or bedroom space, or perhaps even a bathroom – anywhere that you would like to be amused by the Jellicle Cats dancing beneath the Jellicle Moon, the upper-crust antics of “Bustopher Jones: The Cat about Town,” and the incredible complexity of “The Naming of Cats” (complete with a book called Nomines Felarum). Gorey’s illustrations are both picture-perfect and pitch-perfect: Eliot’s erudite British amusements meld beautifully with Gorey’s American-yet-Victorian drawing style, so rich in cross-hatching and so filled with a sense of a time period somewhat askew as well as long past (actually more Edwardian than Victorian, but why quibble?). About the only flaw in this marvelous 2017 calendar is that it is strictly for people who know and love Eliot’s book – although, really, any cat lover will likely enjoy the unlikely poses of these poseur felines.

     However, cat fanciers who are not Eliot fans may prefer a different dose of calendar felinity for the coming year, and Pomegranate has a mini-wall offering for that purpose as well: the offbeat, odd, peculiar, plump felines of B. Kliban (1935-1990). Kliban’s cats are without any literary pretensions, although one may occasionally be seen perusing some reading material (as one is in this calendar). Kliban cats are curiously catlike while being not catlike at all: in one scene here, they march in a parade, giving the lie to the notion that it is impossible to herd cats; in another, a cat dressed in a beaklike false proboscis and make-believe wings sits determinedly on a tree branch, clearly waiting for a nearby bird to make just one false move – and if cats could dress up this way, surely they would dress up this way. In every scene here, whether a cat is “up against the wall” and being frisked or is bundled in appropriate winter garments and is ice skating on a pond, the Kliban cats are recognizably Kliban and recognizably not-quite-real-but-maybe-in-some-other-universe. Cat lovers who cannot find joy in either the Kliban calendar or the one featuring Gorey’s cats just aren’t trying.

     But of course not everybody is a cat lover. For that matter, not everybody favors wall calendars, which after all provide only a dozen pieces of art to enjoy throughout the year. For some people, pleasures come not from cats-as-birds but directly from birds. And Charley Harper (1922-2007) was a master of crafting birds in flat-looking drawings whose deliberate unreality somehow makes characteristics of the animals he portrayed seem more real. Harper’s art appears for 2017 in an utterly charming Pomegranate engagement calendar, a style in which the book is designed to sit on a table or desk or other flat surface, is spiral-bound to open flat, but is neither as large nor as formulaically laid out as a traditional desktop calendar/planner. In other words, not every page features a Harper illustration: sometimes there is indeed one on the left, with a week of dates on the right, as in a traditional desktop planner; but at other times a week at the end of a month faces a page giving the entirety of the next month; or two weeks of a month face each other without illustrations. The unpredictability of the page layout in this calendar is actually one of its charms. The main source of enjoyment, though, is Harper’s art. There is a wonderful whimsicality to these stylized, flat-looking, elegantly colored drawings. One called “Birdie” features two distinctly angry-looking birds staring defiantly out at the viewer; there is a golf ball between them, inches from a hole in which there are three eggs whose colors match those of the birds themselves. Uh-oh. Another drawing, “Tailgator,” shows a beautifully colored duck swimming in dark brown water, having just cleared a patch of greenery from which the unmistakable snout of a beady-eyed alligator sticks out, only inches from the duck’s tail. Uh-oh again. But some art here is full of sheer joy. “Provocative Plumage” has a bird hanging upside-down and displaying just that for a right-side-up bird that seems duly appreciative. And “Pelican Pantry” shows a pelican whose overstuffed beak is being used as a larder by a seagull that is raiding it for a fish. Harper also did marvelous things with animals other than birds. “Armadittos” has four baby armadillos suckling their upside-down mother – the babies all created from parallel lines, the mother from circles and triangles. “Early to Rise” offers a crowd of ladybugs bustling every which way. “Watermelon Moon,” one of the most delightful images here, features a huge semicircular slice of watermelon through which one large and three small raccoon faces peer at the viewer after the raccoons have obviously eaten their way through the fruit. And there is even a cat here, “Purrfectly Perched” and peering straight up at the viewer as autumn leaves fall straight down, apparently from the viewer’s position above the page. The many pleasures of Harper’s art make 2017 a year to look forward to, and in fact all these Pomegranate calendars do something similar. They not only follow the year but also make of it an anticipatory delight – in a way that no hyper-efficient but ultimately soulless electronic tracking mechanism is able to do.

(++++) PRESENTATION FASCINATION

Animals by the Numbers: A Book of Animal Infographics. By Steve Jenkins. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $17.99.

I Am a Story. By Dan Yaccarino. Harper. $17.99.

     Sometimes it’s not just what you say that matters – it’s how you say it. And sometimes both what is said and how it is communicated are significant. That is the case in both these books, whose forms are unusual and whose messages will be fascinating and meaningful to young readers and adults alike. Steve Jenkins’ Animals by the Numbers is packed with all sorts of intriguing comparative facts – but it is the way Jenkins presents them, not just the facts themselves, that makes this book so attractive. Infographics are a burgeoning form of communication in which striking visuals are used to make statistical information clear. Jenkins employs them here with considerable skill. For example, one page explains how many hours per day various animals sleep, and the numbers themselves are interesting enough. But to show and compare them clearly, Jenkins offers a series of circles, each with an animal shape in the middle; the “awake” hours are shown as yellow arcs and the “asleep” ones as purple. Thus, readers can see words explaining that squirrels sleep 15 hours a day and elephants only three-and-a-half – and can visually compare the colors of circles indicating how much time each animal spends awake and asleep. The whole book is arranged this way. To show just how big some animals are (and how large extinct ones were), Jenkins places a human silhouette in a small circle and splashes silhouettes of the animals, on the same scale, across two pages – not only showing that, for example, Tyrannosaurus rex is clearly about six times as large as a human, but also indicating that the blue whale of today is about four times bigger than the famous dinosaur. The infographics are used in genuinely striking ways. One section of the book estimates the biomass of various animals, using circles of different sizes to represent total weight – thus showing with great visual impact that all humans on Earth weigh about 350 million tons, while Antarctic krill have a total weight of 400 million tons and termites a total biomass of 700 million tons. Jenkins uses humor from time to time to complement his graphic presentations. For example, one part of the book is about animal tongues, showing in bar graphs that the giant anteater’s (24 inches long) is longer than the chameleon’s (21 inches) – while also showing that the anteater’s tongue is “only” half its body length, while the chameleon’s is one-and-three-quarters times its body length. The champion tongue length compared to body size belong to the Morgan’s sphinx moth, whose tongue is three times the length of its body – which means, Jenkins explains, that “if your tongue were as long as this moth’s, you’d be able to lick an ice cream cone that’s on the other side of a room.” The fascinations of Animals by the Numbers are nearly endless. One fan-shaped graphic shows how loud the sounds made by various animals are – and reveals that a bulldog bat’s cries, at 140 decibels, are as loud as the sound of a jet plane taking off, but are inaudible to us because they are too high-pitched for our ears. And then there is the armadillo flow chart, showing graphically how a three-banded armadillo makes the quick decisions needed to help it stay safe when another animal approaches – that is, how it decides whether to run, stand perfectly still, ignore the approaching creature, dig a hole, curl into a ball, try to swim away, or leap straight into the air to try to startle its possible enemy. Make no mistake: the basic facts here are themselves captivating (e.g., “bees kill twenty times as many people as sharks”). But the presentation method doubles down on the information so effectively that Animals by the Numbers is a book to which children and parents alike will return time and again.

     Dan Yaccarino’s I Am a Story is far more straightforward visually and is thought-provoking in a different way. It is a “meta” story – a story about a story – and is also a circular tale, beginning and ending at a campfire. But the concluding campfire is a contemporary one, while the opening one occurs in the very distant past, at a time long before writing, when (Yaccarino assumes) families gathered around to hear stories of various kinds. Yaccarino traces the whole notion of “story” over millennia, starting with oral transmission and then moving to cave paintings, clay tablets, hieroglyphics, writing on papyrus, and so on – a compendium of the ways in which a story, any story, was or could have been told over many ages. Each scene includes people known to have used a particular form of story transmission – Chinese women creating ink and woodblocks, for example, and medieval European knights standing at attention in front of tale-telling tapestries. Most scenes have both adults and kids in them, although a few are historically accurate in omitting children (a monk creating an illuminated manuscript does, however, have a cat for company). The march of storytelling through the ages goes right on to “vast private libraries,” thence to “public libraries open to everyone,” and from there to some of the amazing places where books can be found today: in bookmobiles, vending machines, and being carried from place to place by camels and elephants. Then Yaccarino deals with the effects of stories, subtly weaving in three famous science-fiction-related scenes from the past that young readers will surely not know and most parents may not understand, either: Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds radio broadcast from 1938; Georges’ Méliès’ famous 1902 film, A Trip to the Moon; and Steven Spielberg’s 1982 movie, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. And then Yaccarino shows what has been done to stories – censorship, banning, burning – before concluding that none of the attacks succeeded: a story does not die and “will live forever.” This is a well-thought-out, well-designed book that raises some tricky questions toward the end, after providing a nicely paced and historically informed lesson in idea transmission. Its winning combination is an unusual one combining history, drawings with artful touches (look for the small red bird in various guises throughout), and subtle thoughtfulness.

(++++) FUN BY AND WITH DESIGN

Neon Chalk Lettering: Draw Letters with Personal Style. By the editors of Klutz. Klutz. $18.99.

Design Your Dream Room. By the editors of Klutz. Klutz. $19.99.

     The folks at Klutz create “books-plus” products rather than straightforward books: yes, books are involved, but these clever supplies-included packages are really crafts projects, in which the books are guides to what to do with the crafts materials provided, and how to do it. There are plenty of chances to follow instructions for those so inclined – and also plenty of opportunities to expand one’s horizons beyond the basics of what Klutz offers. The “learn and go beyond” approach is especially clear in two new Klutz offerings that teach different elements of design and encourage kids ages eight and up to go beyond the basics after absorbing them. Neon Chalk Lettering combines a spiral-bound, lie-flat 64-page book with four neon chalk markers, a white pencil for highlighting and other tasks, a black pencil for adding shadows or drawing over extraneous marks, and a ruler to help make guidelines for letters. To make those guidelines, kids supply their own pencil and eraser, and a few other supplies that are likely to be readily at hand are suggested as well. What Klutz includes here, as usual, are the items you would not likely have at a desk or in a toy box. Neon Chalk Lettering can become a guide for creating anything from posters to computer fonts. The instruction book explains what different letter styles are used for – condensed ones for getting longer words into smaller spaces, expanded ones to do the reverse, drop-shadowed ones to heighten impact, and so on – and shows what to do to make the different types of letters. From the beginning here, the book urges kids to “think of letters as starting with a bone structure, like a skeleton,” and then being built into all sorts of different appearances depending on how they are “dressed up.” There are some basic design tips: in block letters, for example, the crossbar in capital A is low, and the one in capital F is lower than the one in capital E. There are explanations of serifs, high-contrast and low-contrast letters (ones in which thicks and thins are very different or are close in weight, respectively), bubble letters, overlapping, italics, and more. On the page facing each discussion of an aspect of lettering is a page on which to use the included drawing materials to try things out. There are some interesting hints here ( for instance, to make script letters look like calligraphy, “the trick is to make the downstrokes all thicker”); and there are some excellent layout tips, including suggestions on ways to make specific words stand out (through size or color, by drawing on a slant or curve, etc.). Neon Chalk Lettering gives very specific instructions on how to do everything being discussed, plus places to practice – and dotted lines on the practice pages so kids who like the way they come out can cut them out and display them. Letters will never look the same again when kids have finished Neon Chalk Lettering and learned just how many elements a set of letters can contain. And the whole point of the book is to take the learning and find other places to apply it, using the neon markers on labels, notebooks, chalkboards and other places suggested at the end – or places that kids discover for themselves. The entire book is an invitation to creativity.

     So is Design Your Dream Room, but in a very different way. Here the spiral-bound instruction book (78 pages this time) comes with five fold-out paper rooms, hundreds of punch-out paper accessories and decorations, a batch of pattern papers, and a tape sheet from which kids peel off small bits that they use to stick paper pieces into the book. The book is essentially a practice area for learning the techniques to use when designing the five fold-out rooms. And there is a lot in the book – plenty of participatory material as well as instructions. There is a full page of tiny swatches, for instance, to be torn out and used to figure out which room colors go together in ways you like. There are quizzes to help kids discover what their own personal room style is likely to be, with questions such as, “My dream business would be having my own: A. art gallery; B. cupcake bakery; C. vintage boutique; D. dance studio; E. doggy daycare.” There are seven of these questions, and the pattern that emerges from them leads to room patterns that the book suggests kids with those answers will like – and they can check that easily by turning to specified pages. But there are other ways to approach Design Your Dream Room. There are all sorts of cutouts, colors and furnishings to be used in room creation, and suggestions on when to use specific approaches: “Bright colors create energy and excitement in a small room.” The sheer amount of personalization here is immense, and may even be overwhelming – kids will do well to get into the book gradually and create parts of rooms carefully instead of trying to do everything at once (or, heck, just do everything at once, throw it all out and start over!). The spaces to design here include a “cozy nook” in which “to hide away with a good book, listen to music, or just daydream;” a “study in style” location as “a place to inspire and motivate you;” and so forth. The fold-out rooms, which are made of stronger paper than the rest of the book, are labeled “Modern,” “Princess,” “Vintage,” “Glam Rock” and “Boho Chic,” but there is nothing to stop kids from taking elements that seem best for one of the rooms and putting them in a different one – for extra personalization, deliberate clashing of styles, or just for fun. In fact, Design Your Dream Room is, um, designed, like Klutz books-plus offerings in general, to be fun: kids will learn a lot here about space, proportion, colors, and other elements of style, and will find a wide variety of ways to express themselves spatially. And then – this is really the point of the whole thing – kids can take the lessons learned here and find ways to apply them in their own real-world rooms, honing their own sense of style and adapting the Klutz elements to their everyday life. The whole setup is empowering – and just the sort of education kids do not get in school but can get from books. Or, more accurately, from books-plus.

(+++) SHRINK RAPT

How Does That Make You Feel? True Confessions from Both Sides of the Therapy Couch. Edited by Sherry Amatenstein. Seal Press. $17.

     An anthology is, by definition, something of a mishmash. An anthology of short essays about people whose lives are something of a mishmash is a kind of meta-mishmash. And that is How Does That Make You Feel? It is important to understand that “both sides of the therapy couch” have mishmash lives – the most-valuable lesson to be gleaned from a book that is by turns overwrought and maddeningly superficial. Editor Sherry Amatenstein, trained as a licensed clinical social worker, titles her brief introduction to the book “We’re All Crazy,” and that is the underlying message here: therapists’ patients, by definition, have a wide array of psychological problems – but so do therapists themselves. Whether this is supposed to be reassuring or not is never quite clear.

     There are 34 brief entries here. Amatenstein’s own, “Therapist Without a Clue,” offers a fair sample of the approach taken by therapist contributors, starting with an explanation that it is her birthday and she is spending it “seeing nine patients in a row. Boom, boom, boom, boom – assuaging other people’s hurt while I bury my own.” Nine pages later, Amatenstein has achieved a tiny bit of closure for herself by deciding to go out for her birthday after all. This is pretty much the pattern for the therapists’ entries in How Does That Make You Feel? “I Really, Really Hate You” by Beth Sloan (a pseudonym “for obvious reason,” Amatenstein says, but so much for being open and aboveboard) is about one of this therapist’s sessions with a woman who bemoans getting only $2,500 a week from her husband, is constantly having plastic surgery, insists on showing Dr. Beth her breasts, and causes the doctor to need repeated puffs on the inhaler that she has used since developing asthma as a result, she says, of being abused by fellow junior-high-school students. The patient’s behavior reminds Dr. Beth of her own mother’s insistence that giving birth caused “my [vaginal] lips” to be “hanging down like cow’s udders” and of her mom telling the child who would become Dr. Beth, “You made me ugly down there.”

     If revelations like these – there are lots of them – make it seem as if the therapists are the ones who ought to be in therapy, readers will be gratified to know that they are: the vast majority of people who practice what is now called “talk therapy” have therapists of their own. Becoming a patient, it is believed, makes the whole therapeutic process easier to understand and the concerns of patients easier to accept with sympathy and empathy.

     Does this work? It depends on what “work” means in this context. The therapists who write here are functioning professionals,  but they often seem barely to be keeping things together either personally or professionally. If this is true in general, it may help explain why therapists at times cross the line, sometimes egregiously so, as is clear from some patients’ essays. “Therapy Undercover: Satin Shirts and Sex Talk” by Estelle Erasmus, for example, is about the child psychologist whom Erasmus saw when she was 16 – a man preoccupied with getting Erasmus turned on, or at least getting her to say she is turned on, even though she tells him she is not attracted to him: “My answer never changed, though he campaigned constantly as if one day it could.” Abusiveness by therapists is a recurring theme of the patients’ contributions to How Does That Make You Feel? In one of the shortest essays, the three-and-a-half-page “The Therapist Who Shouldn’t Be One,” Patti Davis talks about the mistake she made in seeing the same therapist who was treating her boyfriend – apparently the two men behaved toward her in much the same way, because, she says, “after about eight months of this, I finally woke up to the fact that I was being bullied and torn down by both of them.” Brief though this entry is, it makes an appropriately pithy point about this whole anthology when Davis writes that “even though someone has a degree in psychology and a list of patients, he can still be manipulative, toxic, and probably more ill than most of the patients he claims to treat.”

     Perhaps not “more ill,” on the basis of the tales here, but “just as ill” seems to fit. Yet it is hard to know whether these stories are typical or whether they exist on the outskirts of the therapeutic world. For one thing, only six of the 34 are written by men; this could point to gender bias of some kind, or simply underline the fact that the book’s publisher calls itself “a forum for women writers and feminist issues,” but it would be nice to know which. For another thing, Amatenstein makes no real attempt to provide context for the essays, simply describing them as “no-holds-barred” and saying they will “humanize” therapists “but will not trivialize the process.” But they do trivialize it – by reducing it to a set of short, pointed, occasionally very moving but often merely bad-tempered and superficial commentaries on a form of mental-health treatment that by definition is profoundly unsettling and, also by definition, is practiced by some people who would be better off doing other things. The intimacy of “talk therapy” is very different from that of other, physical forms of medicine. Most of the essays in Amatenstein’s  book are enough to make one wonder why anyone would want to be involved in it – on either side of the therapy couch.

(++++) THE VOICE IS THE THING

The King’s Singers Christmas Songbook. Signum Classics. $17.99.

Michael Nyman: The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Matthew Treviño, bass; Rebecca Sjöwall, soprano; Ryan MacPherson, tenor; Nashville Opera conducted by Dean Williamson. Naxos. $12.99.

Maximilian Steinberg: Passion Week. The Clarion Choir conducted by Steven Fox. Naxos. $12.99.

Heaven and Earth—A Duke Ellington Songbook. Danielle Talamantes, vocals; Henry Dehlinger, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.

     Sometimes the sheer vocal quality of a recording is enough to raise it to excellence even when the material being sung is on the thin side. That is the case with the latest King’s Singers CD, a seasonal celebration from Signum Classics that mixes well-known American carols with some from “the other side of the pond.” The result is a blend that, if not quite as seamless as the blending of the singing group itself, is every bit as smooth as a perfectly prepared cup of hot cocoa, and just as warming. This 16-song release is the final recording featuring longtime King’s Singers countertenor David Hurley, whose distinctive voice, high but never shrill, contributed a great deal to the group’s overall sound. But as always, this is a release in which the whole ensemble, not any individual singer, is the focus. The exceptional adaptability of the King’s Singers is shown in the handling here of songs as different as Santa Claus Is Coming to Town and White Christmas, either of which could easily be a throwaway and neither of which is. The group’s beautiful melding is apparent in different ways in numbers such as The First Nowell and Silent Night. Also offered here are It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas, Carol of the Bells, It Came Upon the Midnight Clear, Ding Dong! Merrily on High, Sleigh Ride, The Little Boy That Santa Claus Forgot, Winter Wonderland, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, and a curiosity in the form of Frosty vs. Rudolph: The Re-boot. And if We Wish You a Merry Christmas is the inevitable final track here, the British carols In the Bleak Midwinter (well-known to lovers of the music of Gustav Holst, but likely not to Americans in general) and Still, Still, Still provide some unexpected touches in this beautifully presented seasonal compendium. The King’s Singers simply have a way of bringing joy to the world.

     Much more serious, much less seasonal, and much more of an intellectual experience than an emotionally visceral one, Michael Nyman’s 1986 chamber opera, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, gets a first-rate performance from Nashville Opera on a new Naxos CD. Based on the eponymous case study by Oliver Sacks, and with Sacks himself as one of the three librettists (with Christopher Rawlence and Michael Morris), this three-singer work explores what it would be like for music itself to be a lifeline for someone whose illness deprives the world of visual meaning. This is a rarefied concept and a more-complex topic than is usual in opera, and Nyman’s approach to the material is equally cerebral: he uses songs by Robert Schumann as the basis for a series of variations that collectively represent the mental decline of the character Dr. P (Matthew Treviño). The primary song Nyman uses is the seventh from the Dichterliebe cycle, Ich grolle nicht (“I bear no grudge”), whose association with the topic of the opera (and the underlying case study) is clear. Because Dr. P is a music professor, the use of music as a way to reach out to him and a way for him to understand the world, or at least get by in it, makes sense. Dr. P’s centrality to the story is maintained throughout, as Mrs. P (Rebecca Sjöwall) and an unnamed-in-the-opera investigating neurologist (Ryan MacPherson) explore the situation, trying to make sense of it and find a way to manage it for their own sakes as well as that of Dr. P. The music is minimalist and, stripped of the stage action, would not likely be to many listeners’ taste were it not for the fact that its constant dissolution and re-formation so effectively reproduce Nyman’s imagined workings of a mind at odds with itself. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is more melodic than is usual in minimalism and more dramatic as well, and the story pulls in listeners through its oddity and emotional implications despite the lack of typical opera-style drama or melodrama. Few contemporary operas are as conceptually intriguing as this one, which succeeds in part because of its limited cast and short duration (under an hour). The Nashville Opera recording under Dean Williamson is a very fine one, with the clarity of orchestral playing particularly noteworthy – the music both underlines and provides balance to the lack of certainty of what is happening in Dr. P’s mind, and it is satisfying (and ultimately understandable) that music should become a portal of sorts through which Dr. P is able to enter, or re-enter, the world occupied  by his wife and the neurologist.

     A vocal work of broader conceptualization and considerable historical interest – but limited musical attractiveness – is Passion Week (1923) by Lithuanian-born Russian (later Soviet) composer Maximilian Steinberg (1883-1946). A co-student with Igor Stravinsky of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Steinberg never adopted more-modern compositional techniques and approaches as Stravinsky did, Steinberg’s music remaining so conservative that even under Soviet dictates, he was able to continue composing without difficulty – he was already creating the sorts of works that the authorities favored, and had little trouble adapting to the requirements of more-nationalistic themes as they were increasingly mandated. Steinberg remains well-regarded as a pedagogue, but his music is nowadays little heard, and indeed tends to sound a bit like generic warmed-over late-Romantic Russian material – although Steinberg was a skilled orchestrator, and his instrumental use is noteworthy. Passion Week is a bit of a mystery, having been composed after the Bolshevik Revolution, at a time when Orthodox Christian works were no longer acceptable to perform and were not even supposed to be created. The work languished in Steinberg’s lifetime and for decades thereafter, receiving its world première complete performance as recently as 2014. The music, not surprisingly, is redolent of Rimsky-Korsakov, who was not only Steinberg’s teacher but also became his father-in-law (Steinberg’s Symphony No. 2 of 1909 is titled “In memoriam Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov”). Passion Week also recalls in some ways the All-Night Vigil of Rachmaninoff from 1915 – but is even more closely related to Aleksandr Grechaninov’s 1912 Passion Week, composed on 13 Old Slavonic texts. Steinberg’s work’s text differs from that used by Grechaninov in ways mainly important to students of Russian Orthodox Christianity. Grechaninov used texts heard throughout the period of Great Lent; Steinberg chose only ones directly tied to Holy Week. And unlike Grechaninov, Steinberg based all but one movement of his work directly on traditional chant – the foundation of Russian church singing. Steinberg’s work here is less opulent than in much of his other music, with a degree of mild dissonance and a sense of objective narration paralleled in the musical material. The Clarion Choir under Steven Fox performs this nearly hour-long work with sensitivity, style and a sense of emotional involvement. But the work does not reach out either in text or in music to an audience beyond that of the Russian Orthodox believers for whom it was intended. The Naxos recording is quite fine, and certainly Steinberg’s Passion Week represents a significant addition to the Russian religious choral repertoire of its time. But this (+++) release is one of very limited appeal, its extended choral material of interest to singers, vocal ensembles, and followers of Russian Orthodoxy and large-scale compositions within its traditions – but not likely to generate much enthusiasm beyond those groups.

     There is also somewhat limited appeal in a (+++) MSR Classics release called Heaven and Earth—A Duke Ellington Songbook. There is a bit of a religious connection here, too, with tracks called Come Sunday, Heaven, and Almighty God Has Those Angels. But this CD is primarily for a secular audience interested in Ellington’s music as interpreted in what is essentially art-song format, with soprano Danielle Talamantes and pianist Henry Dehlinger presenting a dozen Ellington tunes in a variety of arrangements. The disc includes Imagine My Frustration, In a Sentimental Mood, Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me, Prelude to a Kiss, Don’t Get Around Much Anymore, Sophisticated Lady, I’m Beginning to See the Light, Solitude and Meditation – that is, a blend of highly familiar and somewhat less familiar Ellington, with everything very well  sung and played if perhaps without quite as much “swing” as one might wish for in a recording blending jazz-originating material with arrangements and performances drawn from more of a traditional classical vocal recital. “Crossover” music is nothing new anymore, but this is more of a crossover performance: the music itself comes firmly from the jazz world. The settings – by Larry Ham, Caren Levine, Marvin Mills and Dehlinger – are all nicely done, and Talamantes looks for and often finds considerable emotional resonance in this music. But her voice is too effectively operatic for these ultimately rather slight tunes: she often sounds as if she is holding back from the sort of full-throated expressiveness that opera and other classical forms demand. There is pleasant camaraderie, a kind of mutual respect and enjoyment, in her musical interactions with Dehlinger: the best part of this recording is the sense it gives of listening in at an intimate friends-only gathering of Ellington aficionados. Strictly on a musical basis, though, the material is rather thin – an enjoyable aural sojourn for Ellington fans, but not one likely to be preferred to the singing of his music by less vocally skilled but more idiomatically adept performers than Talamantes.