(+++) DRAMEDIES FROM ALL OVER

Welcome to Wonderland, Book 1: Home Sweet Motel. By Chris Grabenstein. Illustrated by Brooke Allen. Random House. $13.99.

Dreidels on the Brain. By Joel ben Izzy. Dial. $17.99.

Max Helsing No. 2: Max Helsing and the Beast of Bone Creek. By Curtis Jobling. Viking. $16.99.

     The mixture of the funny and the dramatic with the rather unfortunate descriptive name of “dramedy” is part and parcel of novels for preteens and young teenagers. Various writers make the mixture in different ways, some focusing more on the intense elements (but not too intense), some on the amusing (and often crude, but not too crude) ones. Emphases aside, the books otherwise share a great deal in terms of plot and characters: there is a protagonist, there is a sidekick, there are clueless and barely described one-dimensional adults, and there are nefarious doings about that the adults cannot handle but the bold, innovative and perceptive young people can (if the adults do not get in their way). Chris Grabenstein has handled this formula with particular skill and verve in his two books about Mr. Lemoncello’s library, but his other uses of it creak a bit – including his latest, the start of a series called Welcome to Wonderland (sometimes, depending on where you look in the book, spelled “WonderLand”). The protagonist here is P.T. Wilkie, full name Phineas Taylor Wilkie, named for the famous/notorious showman P.T. Barnum and therefore, of course, sharing some of the same instinct for showmanship and stretching the truth. Clever rather than bright, P.T. lives with his mother – he never knew his father – in his grandfather’s seedy Florida beachfront motel, which Grandpa Walt unfortunately opened just about the same time another Florida attraction, named for another Walt, opened near Orlando and sucked all the life out of Wonderland. Imagined competition with Disney World aside, Grandpa Walt has come up with a series of schemes to keep the motel going, and the careful financial management of P.T.’s mom has been crucial as well. But now the balloon payment on a mortgage is due in a month, to the tune of $100,000, and the motel is doomed – or would be if this were not the start of a middle-grade series. Since it is, there has to be a rescue afoot, and P.T. has to orchestrate it. What luck! To the motel comes Gloria Ortega, who is P.T.’s age and really is smart, and highly knowledgeable about business, too. Her dad is the local TV weatherman, complete with brightly shining teeth, and is a widower – Gloria’s mom died years ago, in a place her dad remembers by the call letters of the station where he was working at the time (yes, he is that thoroughly typecast). A budding romance between P.T.’s mom and Gloria’s dad is inevitable, and duly occurs with suitable laid-back modesty. But wait! There’s more! Not even the business savvy of Gloria and P.T.’s mom can save the motel, although there are some funny money-raising schemes orchestrated by P.T. with the aid of his irrepressible grandfather (old folks who are not cranky and bitter are inevitably irrepressible in books like this). The motel needs a lot of money, after all, and needs it quickly. Enter the jewel thieves! Yes, Grabenstein brings in two elderly brothers, jewel thieves whose huge heist decades earlier was never found – both are fresh out of prison and heading for Wonderland because the third member of their little gang, a woman long since dead, may have hidden the stolen loot somewhere at or near the motel. And that’s not all! There is also an unscrupulous private detective on the trail of the missing jewels, for whose return there just happens to be a reward of – wait for it – $150,000. There’s the money that has to find its way to the bank holding the motel’s mortgage! It is no surprise at all that everything ends quite happily here, with some modest danger overcome with little difficulty and everybody nicely settled into and around the old motel, awaiting the next book in this series. Home Sweet Motel is lighthearted fun, with some amusing Brooke Allen illustrations to keep things frothy, and it is a perfectly fine series opener, although it lacks the cleverness, unusual twists and subtly communicated intellectual heft of Grabenstein’s better books. It is, in fact, something of a “beach read.”

     Joel ben Izzy’s Dreidels on the Brain is for a different season – Hanukkah season (sometimes, depending on where you look in the book, spelled Chanukah or in one of several other ways, this being a running theme that is supposed to be amusing). This book too has its roots in the 1970s. In fact, it is set in the 1970s, specifically 1971, where a 12-year-old would-be magician named Joel Buttsky, the only Jew in his school, is dealing with his mortifying family and issues whose seriousness ranges from that of Houdini to that of the Holocaust. Joel (“I hate my last name, and don’t want to talk about it”) is having a crisis of faith, and looking for a Chanukah miracle to convince himself to stop having it. That is the serious/dramatic part of the book, whose climax is not some grandly amazing event but a chance meeting between Joel and an old man on a bus – a man who survived the Auschwitz concentration camp thanks, he says, to an orange he once had at Chanukah. It is hard to convey the emotional clout that this scene has, or is supposed to have, without reading everything that comes before, including much that is amusing and a good deal that is explanatory: the story of what Chanukah is and what it means has to be worked into the narrative, and what a dreidel (a type of spinning top) is and why it is important to Jews, and a good deal more of cultural/religious material without which the story would have no resonance at all, and not much humor. The old man’s last words to Joel are the core of the message here: “‘Remember, young man,’ he said. ‘Remember the sweet things in life.’” And Joel wonders at the end of the book whether the old man might have been an angel, and thus perhaps the very miracle that Joel was looking for. The question is unanswered. But the miracle, if that is what it was, follows some difficult times for Joel as well as some amusing incidents. The most difficult is the magic show that he is overjoyed to be invited to put on at the nursing home where his grandmother lives: the show is a disaster, thanks in large part to Joel’s grandmother, whose loud irrationality spoils everything that Joel does not manage to spoil on his own. Yet Dreidels on the Brain is not, despite everything, a depressing book – although lighthearted it certainly is not. Its biggest flaw for many readers – and biggest pleasure for others – is the extent to which it is steeped in what it means to be Jewish at Chanukah time, which is also Christmas time. That element of the book is constantly appearing or about to appear. For instance, in a brief scene involving girls singing Christmas carols, Joel mentions that “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” was written by “a Jew named Johnny Marks. Then they sang ‘Let It Snow,’ by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne, both Jewish. …[T]he choir sang only one Christmas song that wasn’t written by a Jew, and that was ‘O Tannenbaum,’ which is German for ‘O Christmas Tree.’ But even that’s Jewish, because Tannenbaum isn’t just a Christmas tree, it’s also a name, and as Jewish as you can get.” Dreidels on the Brain is not overtly intended to be read only by Jewish preteens, but that is certainly the audience most likely to find it appealing.

     The “sidekick” angle is not especially prominent in Dreidels on the Brain, but it is there – Joel has a buddy/assistant/crush named Amy O’Shea. This angle certainly does matter in Curtis Jobling’s Max Helsing and the Beast of Bone Creek, the second book in which Max carries on the monster-hunting tradition of his family. Max’s main mystery-solving helper is Syd Perez, a Latina who – like Grabenstein’s Latina, Gloria Ortega – is smarter than the protagonist himself but not as deeply involved in all that is going on. There is, in fact, a lot going on in Max Helsing and the Beast of Bone Creek. It is set during Max’s first-ever vacation, a class camping trip to a supposedly haunted-or-something part of New Hampshire where actual supernatural creatures do in fact keep turning up, their main purpose apparently being to give Jobling an excuse to show illustrated and rather intricate field-guide pages that are often more entertaining than the part of the story they are designed to illuminate. There is considerable humor early in the book, including Max being forced to share a room with the principal, who is scarcely one of his fans, and the overall appearance of the rundown lodge where the class is staying (seemingly another parallel of sorts with Grabenstein’s book and its seedy motel, but really just a trope of many dramedies for this age group). The drama here comes in when some campers disappear and clues point to Bigfoot, setting Max on another monster hunt and also drawing the attention of other hunters, including Max’s British rival, Abel Archer, who eventually turns up in the right place at the right time to do Max a very good turn indeed. The distinctly unpleasant creature who turns out to be behind the evildoing here is only a so-so villain, not as horrifying or potent as might be expected, although certainly violent enough. More intriguing than Max’s eventual escape is his thinking at the end of the book about a mysterious reference to “The King in Yellow,” a phrase with some resonance: it refers to a dark, forbidden play that brings madness to those who read it in Robert W. Chambers’ book of the same title. In the epilogue to Max Helsing and the Beast of Bone Creek, however, it turns out that the phrase refers to a creature, a deeply evil and genuinely frightening being with an eye out for Max – a matter sure to be explored in future books, and likely with greater dramatic tension than Jobling produces in most of this one.

(++++) PIANO PROWESS

Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsodies for Piano (complete). Vincenzo Maltempo, piano. Piano Classics. $24.99 (2 CDs).

Liszt: Grande Fantaisie Symphonique on Berlioz’ “Lélio”; Totentanz. Daria Telizyn, piano; Kyiv Symphony Orchestra conducted by Igor Blazhkov. Claudio. $16.99.

Berlioz: Symphonie fantastique; Wagner: Tannhäuser Overture; Liszt: Orpheus. Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Daniele Gatti. RCO Blu-ray Disc. $42.99.

     Liszt’s 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies, 15 written in 1848-1853 and collected by him as a set, and four added much later (1882-1885) as a kind of afterthought or postscript, are a prodigious achievement for any pianist to negotiate – and nonetheless have had a bad reputation for years because of an underlying error in their provenance. Liszt got the foundational assumptions of this music exactly backward: he based it on Romany (Gypsy) tunes that he heard and that he believed to be authentic folk music from which later Hungarian music derived, when in fact the Romany had picked up and adapted existing Hungarian tunes and made them their own. The error, which Liszt wrote about at length in a far-reaching but completely wrongheaded book, soured many in Hungary at the time, when there was considerable nationalist fervor (in which, indeed, Liszt participated). It also led, in more-recent times, to dismissal of the Hungarian Rhapsodies as mere display pieces. Display pieces they surely are, but “mere” they certainly are not. They require prodigious technique that, in a really fine performance, must be engaged strictly in elucidating the music’s structure (typically a slow/fast one) and exploring the rhapsodies’ fascinating rhythms and complex harmonic lines – not just showing off the pianist’s ability to get through the works in the first place (although displays of proud virtuosity are certainly not out of place). What makes Vincenzo Maltempo’s readings for the Piano Classics label so engrossing is that Maltempo genuinely thinks about these works in musical terms – he explores them rather than exploiting them, which in this repertoire is no small feat. The six rhapsodies that were orchestrated by Franz Doppler (with revisions by Liszt) – Nos. 14, 2, 6, 12, 5 and 9 – show Maltempo’s thoughtful approach particularly well. Now much better known in their orchestral guise, the works here sound fresh and exude a mixture of charm and intensity – yes, even the thrice-familiar No. 2. Maltempo, whose name is one of those delicious ironies of the music world, is judicious in selecting the speeds of the slow and fast sections, never exaggerating the slower portions of the works so as to make the contrast with the faster ones more emphatic. He understands that the music as written contains quite enough thematic and rhythmic contrast without the pianist over-engaging in rubato or drawing overmuch attention to this detail or that. Indeed, although rubato is inherent in the design of this music, Maltempo uses it with such care that it seems part of Liszt’s original structure rather than a deviation from it (even an appropriate one). Similarly, Maltempo’s cadenza for No. 2 – Liszt recommended that pianists create their own – fits the music very well while still bearing the performer’s own stamp; and that is exactly what a cadenza should do. Maltempo also does a fine characterization job in the three short, late works, Nos. 16-18, which are redolent of a style very different from that of the earlier pieces (and from that of No. 19) and can be difficult to fit into the set as a whole. Maltempo makes them an extension of what has come before, not an appendix to the earlier works – evidence yet again of his thoughtfulness as well as virtuosity. Listeners who know the Hungarian Rhapsodies only through the six in orchestral form are missing a lot. This release shows just how much more there is to these pieces, however mistaken their academic provenance may have been.

     Liszt was an inveterate arranger, expander and advocate of the music of other composers, sometimes creating out-and-out display pieces – a performance necessity for the greatest piano virtuoso of his time – and sometimes treating others’ work surprisingly gently and even with something approaching devotion, if not quite reverence (as in his Wagner transcriptions). Many of Liszt’s arrangements are quite well-known and are part and parcel of the repertoire of modern virtuosi. Some of his flights of fancy, however, are almost completely unheard and unheard-of, such as the one he created for piano and orchestra based on Berlioz’ Lélio, or the Return to Life. Berlioz’ work is itself rarely heard: it is the successor to his Symphonie fantastique and is a stage play with melodrama and interspersed songs, an innovative format but an awkward one. And Liszt’s Grande Fantaisie Symphonique, which was not published until 1981, contains questions of provenance: it is by no means certain that Liszt himself did the orchestration or even worked on it, as he did on Doppler’s. Despite all this, a Claudio re-release of a 1990 Ukrainian recording of the work is fascinating and very much worth hearing for the rarity of the repertoire and the skill of the pianist. She is Daria Telizyn, a highly talented Canadian of Ukrainian descent who died in 2005 just before what would have been her 45^th birthday. Telizyn had quite a way with Liszt – her 1987 performance of the Sonata in B minor remains outstanding – and she had plenty of technique to handle the half-hour Grande Fantaisie Symphonique, much of which is based on a brigands’ song that takes up little time in Lélio but provides all the vigor Liszt needed for a grand display of pianistic technique. Telizyn gets good, if scarcely outstanding, backup from the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra under Igor Blazhkov, which falls short of matching the pianist’s intensity but handles the material well enough. The pairing of pianist and orchestra, and their slight mismatch, is equally clear in the Totentanz that fills out this short (47-minute) recording. Telizyn goes after this familiar work with intensity and abandon, while Blazhkov keeps things more mannered and even-tempered. This is nevertheless a very fine performance that stands as a tribute to a top-notch but little-known pianist as well as offering a chance to hear some Liszt with which very few listeners will be familiar.

     Liszt appears as well on a new Blu-ray release from the usually superb Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, on the orchestra’s own label. Here his Symphonic Poem No. 4, “Orpheus,” gets effective if rather middle-of-the-road treatment as directed by the Concertgebouw’s new chief conductor, Daniele Gatti. There are no revelations here, and the orchestra does not really sound its best – perhaps a result of the recording, which is not up to the usual standards of Blu-ray releases. The issue is not the quality of the Blu-ray process itself but that of microphone placement, which seems to have been rather distant: the Concertgebouw, so notable for the fullness of every section, here sounds rather thin. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that the entire recording was made at live performances – but such recordings, of the Concertgebouw and other orchestras, need not sound compromised with the use of modern equipment, and this one does, if only a bit. Similarly, in Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture, the chorale-like elements lack the fullness of which the Concertgebouw is capable; and Gatti’s overall approach, while certainly workmanlike and effective, sheds no new light on anything in the music. And then there is the Berlioz work that is intended as the primary attraction here. The familiarity of Symphonie fantastique leads to some excesses in its performance – and sometimes, it seems, to some holding back to avoid such excesses. Gatti handles this music with poise more reminiscent of the Classical era than would be expected or appropriate for an ultra-Romantic piece like this one. Here the somewhat thin sound is harnessed in the name of clarity, suggesting that Gatti as much as the engineers wanted the Concertgebouw to come across as it does here. The symphony’s first movement is on the cool side, emphasized by the highly refined playing; the succeeding waltz is uninspiring; and the central Scène aux champs is simply disappointing – the whole movement is shapeless, and the gathering storm seems almost incidental. The succeeding Marche au supplice is more plodding than dramatic, and the finale is too controlled to convey any sense of abandon – with bells that seem barely there at all. Gatti has a fine reputation that led the Concertgebouw to bring him aboard, but this (+++) release shows little that would justify the orchestra’s decision. There is nothing really major wrong here, but nothing inspiring, either. And when a work is as familiar as the Symphonie fantastique, it is not unreasonable to hope for something inspirational to justify yet another recording of the music.

(+++) IN SEARCH OF UNUSUAL SOUNDS

Tartini: Violin Sonata in G minor, “Devil’s Trill”; Locatelli: Capriccio for Solo Violin, “Il Labirinto Armonico”; Paganini: Sonata a preghiera, traditional and unabridged original versions; “Nel cor più non sento”—Introduction and Variations in G; Adagio from Violin Concerto No. 3; “Le Streghe”—Variations on a Theme by Franz Süssmayr. Luca Fanfoni, violin; Luca Ballerini, piano. Dynamic. $19.99.

Shostakovich: Sonata for Cello and Piano; Paul Lustig Dunkel: Quatre Visions pour Quatre Flutistes; Tony Moreno: Episodes for Flute and Percussion; Tamar Muskal: Sof; Mechanofin. Paul Lustig Dunkel, flute; Peter Basquin, piano; with Laura Conwesser, alto flute; Rie Schmidt, flute; Tanya Witek, flute and piccolo; Tony Moreno, drums. MSR Classics. $12.95.

Guy Klucevsek: Teetering on the Verge of Normalcy and Other Works for Accordion. Guy Klucevsek, accordion. Starkland. $14.99.

Vanishing Point: Music for Saxophone and Organ. Allen Harrington, saxophone; Lottie Enns-Braun, organ. Ravello. $14.99.

Romantic Journey: Music for Violin and Piano by Manuel Ponce, Grigoras Dinicu, Massenet, Ysaÿe, Gluck, Paganini, Rimsky-Korsakov, Wieniawski, Fauré and Sarasate. Haoli Lin, violin; Hai Jin, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.

     The presumed devilishness that supposedly gave Paganini his outstanding abilities on the violin was a marketing ploy in a time before “marketing” was a known profession – and it is one that still has power today, as evidenced by a new Dynamic recording titled Of Witches and Devils and featuring, in the main, works by Paganini. The slight frisson of fright associated with super-difficult music predates Paganini, though, as evidenced by Tartini’s sonata “The Devil’s Trill,” to which the composer himself gave that name – he said he wrote it in 1713 in a vain attempt to recapture details of what he heard in a dream in which he sold the Devil his soul. The story is somewhat undermined by scholarship suggesting that the piece was actually written decades later, around 1740, based on its style – but of course, it could simply be that it was really written in 1713 and that Tartini’s style gradually evolved in his other music to the level shown in this sonata. This sort of thing is what makes music scholarship fun, but it is wholly irrelevant to the sonata itself, which continues to impress, some 300 years after it was composed, with the exceptional difficulty of violin writing that is very much in service to the form of the music. This is no mere “display piece” but a serious sonata that genuinely extends the range and capabilities of the violin – or at least stretches them pretty close to their limits as then known. Nor was Tartini alone in creating such a work. His contemporary, Pietro Locatelli, produced in 1733 (there is no doubt of that date) a set of 12 sonatas called L’Arte del Violino, and the last of them is a work of prodigious difficulty. Locatelli nicknamed it “Labyrinth” and gave it a heading, facilus aditus, difficilis exitus, that translates as “easy to enter, difficult to leave.” The written-out cadenzas in these 12 Locatelli sonatas, known as capricci, are all exceptionally difficult, but those in the Labyrinth sonata are surpassingly so, and continue to astonish today with their violinistic flair and sheer complexity. Luca Fanfoni tosses off both the Tartini and Locatelli works with dynamism and enthusiasm – but his tone quality, surprisingly, is variable and often short of beauty, a shortcoming accentuated by the uneven technical quality of the recording. Luca Ballerini provides a solid pianistic foundation that remains suitably unobtrusive except when, rarely, called to the fore; but the balance of piano and violin is not always as good as it could be. Furthermore, the piano is not the best bass accompaniment for music of Tartini’s and Locatelli’s time, although in light of the exceptional degree to which these pieces focus on the violin, the combination works well here, or would if the engineers had done a more-consistent job. This matters especially when it comes to the pieces on the CD that are not by Tartini or Locatelli but by Paganini. Several of these are flat-out remarkable. The Le Streghe variation set is the work that first brought Paganini’s supposed devil-spawned technique to international attention, and the variations on Nel cor più non sento from Paisiello’s 1788 opera, L'amor contrastato, ossia La molinara, are even more extended and every bit as filled with fireworks and self-imposed technical difficulties. Paganini could write gentler, Rossinian music to provide some respite from his usual intensity, and Fanfoni shows that side of the composer by offering a violin-and-piano version of the slow movement from Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 3. But the most interesting work here is the Sonata a preghiera, heard in two separate versions, one of which includes recently rediscovered opening sections and is played in Paganini’s own 1743 ‘Cannon’ Guarneri ‘del Gesù’ violin. The quality of the instrument shines through, and certainly Fanfoni proves again and again that he has the technical prowess needed to impress listeners with the extreme virtuosity of these works. Thus, the CD should have been an out-and-out success both for its programming and for its playing. But the persistently variable tonal quality and the less-than-excellent sound make this a recording of highly interesting material whose execution, both musical and technical, falls somewhat short.

     There are no technical shortcomings on a new MSR Classics CD featuring flutist Paul Lustig Dunkel, and there are some very interesting sounds to be found here. This is, however, something of a specialty release for fans of Dunkel and fans and players of the flute, since the musical material, with one exception, is not likely to bear up well on repeated hearings. The exception is Dunkel’s own Quatre Visions pour Quatre Flutistes, a world première recording that is genuinely fascinating. The work definitely gives the lie to the notion that all flutes sound similar and all music for them has a similar character. Dunkel and three colleagues take their flutes through so many sounds, so many techniques, so many emotional ups and downs – from the deeply lyrical to the flat-out funny – that the work needs repeated hearings simply to ferret out all (or at least most) of what it contains and figure out (or try to figure out) how Dunkel obtains the effects that flow with such charm from one measure to the next. Certainly difficult to play, the work is by no means difficult to hear: it has complexities aplenty, but they lie naturally on the instruments and flow with equal naturalness into listeners’ ears. Unfortunately, the rest of the disc, while equally well-performed, is of considerably less interest. Dunkel’s transcription of Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata is filled with rapid tonguing, trills and other techniques that are natural to the flute but deeply at variance with the cello and thus with the sonic environment that the composer created here. The extreme difference between the flute’s high and comparatively limited range and the cello’s deeper, richer and far wider one comes through again and again, and not to the flute’s advantage. It is certainly understandable that a flutist as skilled as Dunkel would like a Shostakovich sonata to play, and it is a shame that there isn’t one, especially in light of the composer’s fine handling of flute passages in his symphonies. But this transcription, although interesting to hear for those who already know the cello sonata, has little staying power and is not really in keeping with the heft of the music. The contemporary music that fills out the disc is not particularly engaging, either. Episodes for Flute and Percussion by Tony Moreno (born 1956), despite some intriguing matching and contrast in the instrumentation, is mostly a sequence of tired modernistic compositional techniques, ranging from an extended drum solo to a section based on the Fibonacci Sequence. Sof by Tamar Muskal (born 1965) is an arrangement of a song about tragedy leading to hope – the title means “End” in Hebrew – but offers nothing very compelling musically or emotionally. And Muskal’s Mechanofin, whose title combines “mechanical” with “end,” goes on and on and on, often in a metronomic way, for longer than Dunkel’s own four-movement suite and to much less interesting effect. Everything here is played very well, but only Dunkel’s piece is likely to stay with listeners and encourage them to return to the disc repeatedly.

     In contrast, a new Starkland release featuring the music and playing of Guy Klucevsek is fascinating in almost every possible way. Klucevsek is an accordionist, and while that may be an immediate turnoff to some listeners, it shouldn’t be in this case. This CD is pretty much everything that “crossover” releases ought to be but rarely are. Klucevsek’s music moves effortlessly among genres, never figuratively hitting listeners over their heads by announcing that it is now doing one thing and now another – it simply flows from genre to genre in combinatorial ways that, again and again, sustain and heighten interest. That includes emotional interest: Klucevsek’s accordion is an emotive instrument about as far removed from a producer of beer-barrel polkas as it is possible to get. Klucevsek makes the accordion sing, and if the unanticipated beauties of its voice do not always sustain especially well over an entire piece, they manage to emerge again and again in often-unexpected ways, to the point of producing sounds that it is hard to believe are coming from an accordion. Only four of the 18 pieces here are accordion solos; seven are for accordion and violin (Todd Reynolds); two are for piano (Alan Bern); and the other five are for varied groups, from accordion-and-piano to quartet size. Klucevsek’s compositional style is equal to all the combinations, and has an unforced wit that occasionally turns into outright humor but is also just a step or two away from tenderness much of the time – several works here are dedicated to friends who have died in recent years. The names of the pieces show just how variegated and wide-ranging Klucevsek’s imagination is: Moose Mouth Mirror, Hungarian Hummingbird, Hymnopedie No. 2 (for Erik Satie), Roundabout Now, Haywire Rag (for Joseph Franklin, on his birthday), The Day the Snow Fell Upwards, Song of Remembrance, Shimmer (in memory of William Duckworth), Bob Flath Waltzes with the Angels, Little Big Top (in memory of Nino Rota), Three Quarter Moon (in memory of Kurt Weill), The Swan and the Vulture, Ice Flowers, Riding the Wild Tangaroo, The Asphalt Orchid (in memory of Astor Piazzolla),Waltzing at the Edge of Dawn, and For Lars, Again (for Lars Hollmer) – plus the title track. The “remembrance” pieces tend to be slow and tender, and those reflective of other composers show a solid understanding of those composers’ music and a readiness to adapt it to Klucevsek’s way of thinking and the way he uses his instrument. It is true that more than an hour of accordion music, even when mixed with music from other instruments and even when the material is as intriguing as it is here, is rather a lot; and some listeners may simply be unable to get past the traditional-accordion sounds on which Klucevsek calls from time to time, with the result that the unusual aspects of his playing may not come through clearly. But even those who do not love accordions ought to consider hearing this accordion as played by this musician in this music. The experience is a salutary one, unexpected and bracing.

     The combination of unusual sonorities is surely the purpose of a new Ravello CD featuring saxophonist Allen Harrington and organist Lottie Enns-Braun. But unexpected sonic combinations can carry a release only so far. The instruments’ combined sound here has much to recommend it – although, as with the accordion, it is a bit much to hear nearly an hour of this mixture – but the quality of the music is as variable as would be expected on an anthology disc. The shortest works here, arrangements of two traditional religious Norwegian folk songs by Frederick Hemke (born 1935), are pleasant enough; two slightly longer pieces that also have religious themes, Angel Tears and Earth Prayers by Augusta Read Thomas (born 1964), also come across effectively. So do a Gregorian-suffused setting called Clémens Rector by Guy de Lioncourt (1885-1961), and a lovely little lullaby called Chanson à bercer by Eugène Bozza (1905-1981). However, the other three pieces here, which are the longest on the disc by virtue of being in multiple movements, fare less well. Partita Breve by Tom Verhiel (born 1956) and Sonate I by Denis Bédard (born 1950) both take forms from Baroque and Classical times (menuet, gigue, barcarolle, etc.) and interpret them in modern terms – but this has been done many times by many composers, and neither of these works shows significant originality in handling the material, apart from both composers’ skillful blending and contrast of the sound of the two wind instruments. The last work on the CD, Vanishing Point by Leonard Ennis (born 1948), is comparatively bold and only loosely tied to structures of the past. It has a mostly speedy opening movement, a slow and peaceful second one (marked, rather obviously, “Slow, :Peaceful”), and an even slower conclusion that ends calmly, presumably at the vanishing point of the title. But here the unusual sound of the instrumental combination works against the effectiveness of the music. The work goes on much too long – 20 minutes, all but three of them slow. There is not enough tonal variety here to sustain a piece this long – a fault of the music, not the instruments, since both organ and saxophone are certainly capable of engaging listeners for considerable periods of time on their own. In this case, the combined instruments’ sound is less attractive than their individual ones. The CD has a number of memorable moments, but not quite enough for its totality to be as appealing as some of its parts.

     The sound sought on a new MSR Classics release featuring violinist Haoli Lin and pianist Hai Jin is a frankly Romantic one – and although here, too, not all the individual works are equally successful, the CD as a whole does come off well, thanks to the consistently fine performances by both players and the quality of the two Gagliano violins that Lin uses (one from 1732, the other from 1750). The recital offers pleasantry rather than profundity and never claims to be particularly meaningful – these are just-for-enjoyment pieces, one and all. The disc starts with two Jascha Heifetz arrangements, of Estrellita by Manuel Ponce (1882-1948) and Hora Staccato by Grigoras Dinicu (1889-1949). Then there are short, mostly very familiar pieces by Massenet (Meditation from Thaïs), Ysaÿe (Ballade from Violin Sonata No. 3), Gluck (Melodie from Orfeo ed Euridice), Paganini (Caprices Nos. 1 and 21), Rimsky-Korsakov (Song of India from Sadko), Wieniawski (Polonaise de Concert), and Fauré (Après un Rêve). And finally there is Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy, just the sort of bang-up ending that virtuoso violinists have long favored for their “display” recitals. There is nothing missing here either technically or sonically, and it is sometimes fun to set aside all notions of profundity and deep expression and listen to music that is, in effect, nothing but encores. Some of this material, heard out of context, comes across as a trifle vapid – the Ysaÿe and Paganini works in particular; also, the opera excerpts have long since lost their connection with the stage for most listeners. But if this is a surface-level recital, it is one whose sound, Romantic sensibility, fine playing and sense of enjoyment – which seeps through the interpretations – add up to considerable pleasure, even though this extended snack of greatest hits will likely make some listeners long for at least a modicum of more-substantial musical fare.

(++++) WATCH YOUR WALL, WATCH YOUR DESK

2017 Calendars: Wall—Anne Geddes: Timeless; Coffee: The Daily Grind; Cats We Love; Cats in Color; Downton Abbey; Desk—Dilbert; Peanuts. Andrews McMeel—$14.99 each (Anne Geddes; Dilbert; Peanuts); $15.99 each (Coffee; Cats We Love). Universe/Andrews McMeel—$15.99 each (Cats in Color; Downton Abbey).

     One of the pleasures of living in a video-saturated age is ignoring the video saturation. The absolute insistence from devices of all kinds – on people’s wrists, desks, walls and practically everywhere else there is a more-or-less flat vertical or horizontal surface – that everything changes constantly and must be instantaneously up to date and watched unceasingly lest something of some sort somehow slip by…well, that gets old really quickly, and anyone who does not realize how much stress it causes is just not paying attention. Probably too stressed to notice. But as our increasingly frenetic lives move inexorably toward a new year that seems destined to be even more frantic than the current one, there is at least a small, partial corrective to the watch-everything-change-all-the-time approach to cardiovascular and psychological ruin. It lies in using vertical and horizontal surfaces for printed calendars that do a perfectly good job of showing the month, day and date and an even better one of bringing a touch of beauty or humor to each day’s occurrences. No power outlet required.

     What makes this possible is the fact that printed wall calendars can be large enough to make a real statement to anyone seeing them – no squinting at a screen here! Andrews McMeel makes and distributes so many different wall calendars that it is almost impossible not to find one or more that will bring you a touch of respite from the ever-demanding scurrying of everyday life in 2017. Take the new Anne Geddes calendar, for example. Its very title, Timeless, flies in the face of the notion that we have to do everything lickety-split (now there’s an old term!), without ever pausing to look at where we are and what we are doing. Geddes is known for the fanciful illustrations she creates using real babies, and this calendar serves up a year of them. There are the three little ones in flowered caps, each child neatly placed in a flowerpot, the whole scene done in bright and appealing red polka dots on a yellow background – quite ridiculous and quite adorable. There are two babies wearing pumpkin caps, looking out at the viewer from the middle of a giant pumpkin. There is an infant snuggled neatly into the top of a Christmas stocking. There are three happily ensconced in lily pads, looking like, well, water babies. The cuteness overflows here, but it is mixed with sufficient amusement to bring a smile as well as an “awwwwww” to anyone’s face. A picture may no longer be worth a thousand words, but each of these is surely worth a thousand frames of Internet video.

     If you need something more word-and-design-oriented to get you up and going in the morning, and keep you doing what needs to be done all day, Dan DiPaolo’s Coffee: The Daily Grind wall calendar may be just the thing. Each month features a graphically striking coffee-related message, the sort of thing that just might hang in the window of a (what else?) coffee shop. February and July have the same theme, expressed visually very differently: the former says, “All You Need Is Love and Coffee” (with a central heart within which a steaming cup of java appears); the latter gets right to the point with the phrase “Coffee = Love” above two attractive polka-dotted mugs. A similar sentiment appears in December in the message “Me & You and a good cup of coffee” – a recipe for warmth at a chilly time. There is also an “Espresso Chart” (October) showing six different variations, and an up-and-at-’em message for April: “Good to Go! Coffee First – Then Awesome.” And lest you wonder whether all this caffeination (or decaffeination, if you prefer) is designed to keep you focused on everything you need to get done, you can simply turn to the design for May, which reads: “The Daily Grind. Fresh.” Actually, the whole point here is to make daily activities less of a grind.

     That is the same aim, at least as far as cat lovers are concerned, built into calendars featuring the art of Sueellen Ross (Cats We Love) and Sebastiano Ranchetti (Cats in Color). Cats are a major source of Internet enjoyment, true, but nothing on a screen compares with the ones seen here. Ross portrays cats in entirely realistic mode, showing them engaging in just the kinds of behavior that endear them to the humans with whom they deign to share space. One cat here simply walks across a Persian rug, toward the viewer. Another lies luxuriantly on a similar rug, staring right out of the middle of the picture. And then there are the two lying in parallel on an elegant, old-fashioned chair, beside a fireplace in which flames flare attractively. There are outside cats here, too, exploring some flowers that are about to be planted, sitting regally and looking back toward the viewer, and more. These are cats of all colors and sizes, and all of them seem to interact with human observers through the calendar in ways that, as cat lovers know, are not particularly common in real cat-and-human life. No matter: there is nothing standoffish about these felines, and every one of them is a charmer.

     The Cats in Color illustrations are bolder, brighter and more impressionistic than realistic. These are cats whose bodies and personalities are distilled to their basics and whose colors range from striking black to black so dark it looks blue to some appearances not found in nature, including purple and bright red. All Ross’s cats seem to look out from the calendar, but few of Ranchetti’s do: these colorful felines have more interesting things to do than pay attention to human viewers. The real-world expressions common to cats are wonderfully captured and accentuated here: notably, that sometimes-unnerving stare with which cats look intensely at the world is captured particularly well. These are cats of all types, from a striking Persian to an open-mouthed, tail-erect black cat looking like the perfect Halloween symbol (helped in that role by the orange background). It is tempting to describe the cats here as more real than reality, but in fact they are both more and less real: the strongly emphasized poses and looks are quintessential felinity, while the colors transport cat lovers to a world where beauty comes in many shades of strange.

     Beauty in a not-quite-real world was one of the major attractions of Downton Abbey on TV as well. Highly popular on both sides of “the pond,” the “upstairs/downstairs” story of the aristocratic Crawley family and its servants has now come to a conclusion that both British and American viewers found generally satisfying – except for the fact that there would be no more programs (or programmes). Into this void comes a handsome 2017 calendar featuring a dozen scenes from the final season  of Downton Abbey – scenes that fans of the show will immediately recognize, whether what is shown is a wedding or the advertisement for an Open House “in Aid of Downton Hospital Trust.” The period costumes – always a major attraction of the show – are displayed to particularly good effect here: the hats alone are worth more than one look, from the many elegant women’s styles to the men’s bowlers to the kitchen servants’ kerchiefs. This calendar is a perfect example of what static, non-electronic calendars can do in our hyperactive, video-oriented age: like Downton Abbey itself, the calendar can freeze 21^st-century viewers in time, allowing them to contemplate at length a distant era that, if scarcely better than the modern one in many ways, certainly did possess an air of elegance that is notably absent in our current time frame.

     Wall calendars are not the only defiantly not-up-to-date trackers of the year out there, by any means. When it comes to keeping up with appointments, meetings and planned events at both business and home, there is still no substitute for spiral-bound, open-flat planners that spend the year on a desk or table. This may sound counterintuitive – after all, electronic calendar planning lets you enter and change appointments and schedules on the fly, quickly and easily, and you take your schedule with you everywhere you go. This is true – but it is not the whole truth. Try using an electronic device to scan your entire week’s outlook: it can be done but is scarcely easy or ideal. Now try checking ahead for appointments in, say, two or three weeks, or looking a month or two down the road. This is doable but very definitely not simple when using electronic devices – it remains much easier to scan a week at a glance or flip pages to next month or several months from now by using calendars such as the Dilbert and Peanuts desktop ones. And ease of use is only part of the attraction here: seeing first-rate comic strips opposite all your planned activities is another element. If you have to work in a cubicle, or even an office, there is something motivating, in a weird way, about tracking your schedule using a Dilbert desk planner. The big-company misadventures of Dilbert, Wally, Asok, Alice, the Pointy-Haired Boss, the bullet-headed CEO, plus Dogbert and Dilmom and Ratbert and all the others in Scott Adams’ skewed-but-eerily-accurate world, provide a wonderful balancing act for the inanity of some of the scheduling you will undoubtedly be doing in your own work year. And the 2017 calendar has an unintended bonus: a printing error resulting in the final panel of the January 2 and January 9 strips ending the same way. So, for fun, get the collection called I Sense a Coldness to Your Mentoring, find the correct concluding panel for the second strip, and copy and paste it in the appropriate place – you can’t do that with electronic appointment tracking!

     If you have Dilbert in the office, you may well want Peanuts at home to keep an eye on family-related events – the Charles Schulz strip was, after all, much more family-oriented, albeit in some rather weird ways. There are occasional instances in which Peanuts shows its age now that Schulz has been gone for more than 16 years: one strip in the 2017 calendar refers to Sandy Koufax retiring, an event that is unlikely to have any meaning whatsoever for many people now, and another has Snoopy thinking, “Bobby Hull envies my slap-shot.” On the other hand, there are so many timeless qualities to Peanuts that the occasional bit of datedness is a small matter indeed. The strips chosen for 2017 include several with Snoopy in his “World War I flying ace” guise; one in which he draws insulting pictures of cats because “when you live alone, you have to learn to amuse yourself”; one in which Charlie Brown brings him his food on a tea cart and another in which Snoopy enjoys choosing food from multiple dishes because he “always wanted to eat in a cafeteria”; one encapsulating Lucy’s crush on Schroeder through her use of a feather duster; a philosophical discussion of suffering in the context of the latest losing baseball effort; Linus wanting to catch a fallen star, put it in a pail, and take it home; and Charlie Brown consulting Lucy at the five-cent-psychiatric-help booth because he wants “to be a special person” and “to be needed” – a consultation that goes about as well as could be expected. The wry humor of Peanuts stands up beautifully even when the topical references do not, and the use of Peanuts strips to complement the daily, weekly and monthly planning space in this calendar simply cannot be matched in any electronic tracking device. So by all means continue to absorb video, track life electronically, and become more and more hyper about activities as the new year progresses, if you must. But spare some time for occasional glances at the wall, desk and tabletop where printed calendars reside: they will pull you in, slow you down, and bring you more pleasure than you will get from the latest iteration of any artificially generated voice-response mechanism residing in the gadget-of-the-day.

(++++) HECK AND DARNATION

Lost Gods. By Brom (Gerald Brom). Harper Voyager. $27.99.

     Vast, sprawling and pretentious, determined to be Dantesque but at its best when it settles for grotesque, Lost Gods by Brom (who uses only one name professionally) is packed with everything from the standard (a fallen-but-basically-admirable hero, an evil creature driven entirely by destructive urges) to the distinctly non-standard (an angel besotted by lust, a dead-but-still-fighting leader of Civil-War-era commandos). Enlivened, if that is the word, by Brom’s suitably gothic illustrative renderings of various characters, Lost Gods sprawls and oozes beyond itself and periodically trips over the feet of its own plot, and if that sounds like a mishmash of a metaphor, it is right in keeping with Brom’s extravagant writing style, which overreaches as often as it reaches for (and sometimes finds) a strong human connection with readers.

     Aside from the fact that its protagonist is dead, this hefty novel (almost 500 oversize pages) is in essence a traditional quest tale. Chet Moran, a minor-league criminal, has decided to turn his life around and do right by his pregnant girlfriend, Trish – who, however, is in the clutches of her father, an Alabama judge right out of the Old South, who reigns supreme in his jurisdiction and would just as soon see Chet dead. He never knows that he gets his wish. Chet claims Trish and flees with her – in a scene that involves an inadvertent killing-by-car that figures in the plot later, rather unnecessarily – and the two head for the only place where Chet thinks they may be safe: Moran Island, South Carolina, his ancestral home. There are some signs that not all is well there, including demon-spawn former children, various magical wards, and the fact that what was left of Chet’s family got out of there years ago as quickly as it could. But Chet and Trish have nowhere else to go, so they find their way to the home of Chet’s grandmother, Lamia. Bad move. Lamia turns out to be the lamia, an ancient evil spirit who soon dispatches Chet and makes decidedly unwelcome advances toward Trish’s unborn child. Chet, his protective instincts in full flower despite the fact that he is, after all, dead, is determined to find a way through the underworld/afterlife to protect Trish and the baby. And so he sets off on a quest – on which he is sent by an angel so enthralled by Lamia that his angelic powers are fading and being used for decidedly non-angelic purposes. The angel, for reasons of his own, gives Chet a bag of coins and a knife with special powers – quest heroes always have objects of some sort to take with them and learn how to use – and it is these that initially help Chet get into Purgatory so he can seek a way to protect those he has left behind.

     The ins and outs of Brom’s Purgatory are the main attraction of Lost Gods, whose title refers to the fact that “old gods” of various kinds continue to exist, rather dimly, in Purgatory, kept active only by the devotion of their now-dead followers and losing power both through follower desertion and through attacks by roving bands of souls determined to overthrow the gods’ rule and be free to live life, or live death, in their own way. Actually, the motivations make little sense, and the idea of death-within-death (souls, already dead, can be made really dead by being separated into ka and ba and blown away by a whirlwind) is rather silly. And any possible philosophical considerations of rule-by-gods vs. rule-by-humans vs. rule-by-oneself are wholly ignored: there is no profundity here. There is, however, plenty of action. And Brom conjures up some exceptionally interesting subsidiary characters to interact with Chet. One is Yevabog, a spider goddess in whom no one believes any longer, who nevertheless retains some powers and is periodically able to wield them to useful effect; another is the soul of a man whose life was so miserable that he genuinely enjoys being in Purgatory for the short time that his soul remains in one piece; another is a giant golem, a sort of monstrous moving furnace that, properly fueled, leads the followers of one of the old gods on a trade-and-worship mission. Throughout his encounters with these and other outré characters, Chet manages to remain focused on Trish and the baby back up above, seeking a mystical key that is supposed to set things right on Earth but that the fallen angel, Senoy, will use to cement his and Lamia’s nefarious purposes if Chet follows instructions and brings it back.

     It in no way diminishes the power of the story to note that Chet, of course, does eventually get the key – with the help of one of his own ancestors, a known bad guy who, not surprisingly, turns out to have considerable good in him after all. And Chet does, of course, bring it back to Earth. But he uses it in his own way – another “of course” occurrence – and while there are limits to what he can do (he cannot bring himself back to life, for example), he can more or less set things more or less right and open the way to a better future for Trish after he himself returns, as he must, to the underworld. Brom’s imaginative view of Purgatory, which includes snippets from various belief systems as well as his own vivid imagination, is the central pleasure of this novel, which never seeks profundity but provides a grand roller coaster of a story. The essentially one-dimensional grotesqueries described in Brom’s prose and shown in his illustrations all have, at bottom, comprehensible emotions and motivations, and Chet’s encounters with them are believable if rarely surprising. Chet himself is a recognizably heroic/anti-heroic Everyman, wandering through a world not of his own making and one he comes only slowly and partially to understand. It is the chance to join him on his quest and undergo its trials and triumphs that will pull readers into Brom’s Purgatory and interest them in encountering even the most enigmatic and unpleasant of the Lost Gods.

(++++) FROM UPBEAT TO LOW-KEY

Penguins Love Colors. By Sarah Aspinall. Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. $17.99.

The Little Elephant Who Wants to Fall Asleep. By Carl-Johan Forssén Ehrlin. Illustrated by Sydney Hanson. Crown. $16.99.

     The things kids can learn from books are many and varied, and the ways they can learn them are equally multifaceted. There are plenty of books about colors for early readers and pre-readers, but few have the bright intensity of Sarah Aspinall’s Penguins Love Colors. And few have an equally clever premise: Aspinall sets the book in the black-and-white world of the South Pole, using six color-loving baby penguins and an appreciative and highly mess-tolerant penguin mother to show human kids most of the colors of the rainbow. Aspinall pleasantly carries her black-and-white-vs.-color theme throughout the book: even the title page has the words “Penguins Love” in black on a white background and the word “Colors” in the six colors that she will present. The penguins are subtly distinct from each other on the title page, as parents may want to show children: each has slightly different head-topping fur. Within the main part of the story, though, the six are distinguished only by the different colors of the hats they wear. The penguins’ names reflect those colors: Tulip’s hat is red, Tiger Lily’s is orange, Dandelion’s is yellow, Violet’s is purple, Bluebell’s is blue, and Broccoli’s is green. The little penguins decide to make a surprise for their color-loving mother, who is the one, after all, who named them. For each color, Aspinall shows a two-page spread with a big, big splotch of the color next to the penguin that uses it, and with the name of the color in the color (“red” is printed in red, “orange” in orange, and so on). The bright, clear illustrations make the colors abundantly clear, and the different positions of the penguins painting with them keep the story interesting – as do the different sorts of messes that the little ones make. By the time the present for Mama is finished, each penguin is completely covered in its particular color, but Mama does not care – she just loves the colors appearing all over the white snow. So the paint-smeared little penguins are happy, and so is their mother, who takes them off for a bath that shows their different head-top fur and leaves the tub a six-color mess, after which all the little ones cuddle up to Mama for a much-needed nap. The little penguins are so endearing that the huge mess they make seems a small price to pay for enjoying the story and learning so clearly about six different colors – but parents should make it clear to their little ones that, however much they love them, they would not appreciate things getting as messy as they do in Penguins Love Colors.

     The little penguins fall asleep happily and easily after their painting adventure, but bedtime is not always easy for many children – or parents. That is why Swedish behavioral scientist Carl-Johan Forssén Ehrlin self-published a book called The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep, which was so successful that he has now created a similar, professionally published one called The Little Elephant Who Wants to Fall Asleep. Ehrlin’s book is as quiet, slow-moving and dimly colored (by Sydney Hanson) as Aspinall’s is loud, fast-paced and bright. And Ehrlin’s work is really an instruction set for parents and children, disguised as a story – a circumstance that some families will likely find off-putting. Still, the lesson is worth trying to learn if one is dealing with a child who has significant problems at bedtime. Parents definitely need to go through the book before reading (that is, using) it as a sleep aid. Ehrlin explains that it is “specifically for the time when your child needs to go to sleep, and therefore I don’t want the book to be too exciting, as it will have the opposite effect and it will take longer for your child to fall asleep.” Exciting it certainly is not – and there are specific instructions for parents on how to read it. Text in bold is to be read emphatically; text in italics should be read as soothingly as possible; the many times that “[name]” appears, parents should say the child’s name; and when “[yawn]” is shown in the text, parents should yawn. There is a very great deal of verbiage in the book, much more than in most books aimed at young children – but this one is aimed at them in a different way from others. All that happens in the story is that a little elephant named Ellen walks through a magical forest to the place where she likes to sleep, meeting several sleep-inducing creatures along the way: Snoozy Mole, Snoring Sophie the kind little forest troll, Dozing Daniel the parrot, and so on. Eventually Ellen reaches her sleeping spot, where her father is waiting for her, and she falls asleep – as, presumably, does the human child listening to the story, although Ehrlin structures the tale so that there are many places where a child may fall asleep, and it is not necessary to read the story all the way through. The writing style here is curiously stilted – whether that is because of Ehrlin or because of the translation by Neil Smith is uncertain. A typical paragraph: “Ellen the Elephant says to you, ‘I think we should go right and fall asleep twice as quickly and deeply now, how comforting. That path will also help us to fall asleep more and more quickly every evening, [name], and sleep well even without this story. It always works for me.’” Purposely writing a book that is boring, or at least sleep-inducing, is actually a clever way to try to help children who simply cannot relax enough to fall asleep. But there is a real question whether they will sit still long enough for The Little Elephant Who Wants to Fall Asleep to have its effect. Kids who are trying to sleep but cannot may benefit from the use of this book as a bedtime story; ones who are just too full of energy to sleep will not put up with its repetitiousness and lack of action. Because it is of limited usefulness and is presented more as a lesson for parents (who in turn make it into a falling-asleep lesson for children) than as a pleasant, warm bedtime story, the book gets a (+++) rating: it is essentially a “go to sleep” lecture. It may very well work under certain circumstances, and is definitely worth trying for a child who tries and tries and tries to sleep but simply cannot. For most children, though, there are many more-interesting, comforting, warm and caring books that will better serve as bedtime tales.

(++++) SHORT AND SAD, SHORT AND FUNNY

The Poet’s Dog. By Patricia MacLachlan. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins. $14.99.

Laugh-Out-Loud Christmas Jokes for Kids. By Rob Elliott. Harper. $5.99.

     For most families that consider a once-a-year holiday-themed trip to a classical-music venue, the usual choice is Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker, which is set at Christmas and packed with wonderful music and a slight, upbeat story with only a modicum of danger in a fantasy setting. Much, much less well-known is Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1, which is known as “Winter Dreams” because the composer called its first movement “Dreams of a Winter Journey.” But it is the feeling of that symphony, a darker and more moody work than The Nutcracker even though the symphony has an eventual triumphant ending, that best fits Patricia MacLachlan’s The Poet’s Dog. This is very much a wintertime fantasy, and it is a sad story – despite the uplift of the conclusion – that may well be too intense for the age range of 6-10 for which it is ostensibly intended. The whole story is about a wintertime journey, and the dreamlike elements here are many. To start with, the journey is interrupted by a car accident, after which kids named Nickel (who is almost 12) and Flora (who is eight) are left in the car while their mom goes to a nearby house to get help. But their mom is gone a long time, and it starts to snow, and soon there is a blizzard, and the kids get scared and leave the car – putting a note on the front seat so their mom will know they are safe. This setup is not particularly believable, and it does not particularly matter, because this is a rescue tale with a difference. The kids are rescued by a dog, an Irish wolfhound named Teddy – and he can talk. However, he is able to be understood only by children and poets – he was himself a rescue once, adopted by a poet, and the poet read so much to him that, as Teddy (who narrates the book) explains, “I saw how words follow one another and felt the comfort of them.” This is a very short book, at 88 pages barely a novella, but it is as packed with the warmth of love inside as with the chill of winter outside. Bit  by bit, Nickel and Flora learn why Teddy is no longer living with the poet, Sylvan – adults will know the name means “woods,” and of course the house where Teddy takes the kids is deep in the woods and is cut off from the outside world: “‘No phone,’ I said. ‘Sylvan didn’t like phones.’” The morose but gentle story – it soon becomes clear that Sylvan has died – is all about the budding relationship between Teddy and the children. After a while, Sylvan’s friend Ellie helps get the kids back together with their father, who has been searching for them. And he, it turns out, was Sylvan’s student – Sylvan had sent him a poem in which he celebrated his, the poet’s, dog. So the love and lessons of Sylvan are passed on, and of course Teddy is adopted into a new family that will love him devotedly – and any adult reading the book to a child in the target age range who does not tear up at the heartwarming conclusion is thoroughly lacking in holiday spirit. The Poet’s Dog is a poetically written fantasy, a dream of a winter journey at the end of which there is a wonderful, if bittersweet, destination.

     As light, silly and frothy as The Poet’s Dog is sensitive and heartfelt, Rob Elliott’s Laugh-Out-Loud Christmas Jokes for Kids is the author’s latest (+++) seasonal collection of mildly amusing bits of silliness. There is nothing profound here – just funny little entries designed to elicit a smile or two, and perhaps an occasional outright laugh. There is the knock-knock joke in which “who’s there” is Les, as in “Les go caroling and get some hot chocolate.” There is the question about what the basil said to the oregano: “Seasoning’s greetings.” There is the elf who had to stay after school because he forgot his gnome-work, and the cat that took a long time to wrap Christmas presents because he wanted them to be purr-fect. There is an answer to the question of what you call a snowman who vacations in Florida: “A puddle.” And to the query about where crocodiles keep their eggnog: “In the refriger-gator.” And there are appropriate Christmas presents: for a baboon, “a monkey wrench,” for a wasp, “a bee-bee gun,” for a hyena, “a Snickers bar,” and for a rabbit, “a hare-brush.” Some of the jokes here are wintry rather than Christmas-focused: “Why did the mittens get married? It was glove at first sight.” But all the material has at least a slight holiday-ish focus, and all of it is mildly amusing enough to be shared with kids of all ages – and with adults who are willing to laugh politely rather than groan. Well-intentioned but scarcely of any real significance, Laugh-Out-Loud Christmas Jokes for Kids is best thought of as a stocking stuffer: it is small enough to fit into a Christmas stocking, thin enough to be looked through even in the midst of holiday merriment, and just funny enough to keep the mood warm and light despite any chill outdoors.

(++++) SOLOISTIC THINKING AND RETHINKING

Change of Keys—One Piano, Three Keyboards: Music of Haydn, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Debussy and Bartók. Carol Leone, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.

Chopin: 24 Preludes, Op. 28; Kirk O’Riordan: Twenty-Six Preludes for Piano. Holly Roadfeldt, piano. Ravello. $19.99 (2 CDs).

Early Musings—New Music for Violin. Davis Brooks, violin and electric violin. Navona. $14.99.

Pièces de Concours—Virtuosic Romantic Works by French Composers 1896-1938. Jutta Puchhammer-Sédillot, viola; Élise Desjardins, piano. Navona. $19.99 (2 CDs).

     Students of music history are well aware that the modern piano is nothing like the early fortepiano; many also know that even when instruments began to be called simply “pianos,” they bore little resemblance to what we think of as a piano today – and frequently little resemblance to each other, so different were their cases, spans and actions. Historically informed performances of piano music have become reasonably common, and the use of original instruments – or carefully made replicas – is on the rise. What is missing in all this attention to the cases, strings and sounding boards, however, is any focus on the keyboards and keys. Pianists routinely do stretching exercises to allow their hands to span the greatest distance possible, and famous pianists of the past are known to have had huge hands that enabled them not only to play the most difficult music of their time but also to write new music that they themselves could perform but that few others, if any, could manage. Thus, a pianist with ordinary-size hands is hard-pressed to perform much of the music of the Romantic era and beyond. Carole Leone is one such pianist – but she has found a way to do something about it. More precisely, she has tapped into such a way: Canadian pianist Christopher Donison and Pennsylvania engineer David Steinbuhler have created special keyboards that have smaller octave spans than the now-standard one of six-and-a-half inches. By using two different DS keyboards plus a standard Steinway one for the same instrument, Leone is able to focus her performances on a new MSR Classics CD on the music she is playing, not being distracted by simply trying to manage the works’ technical requirements. This is such a marvelous advance from a pianist’s viewpoint that it is a wonder it has not been done before – although the technical requirements of building alternative keyboards are certainly not straightforward. From a listener’s viewpoint, of course, the means by which the music is performed is and ought to be transparent; what matters is simply the quality of the performance. And that is uniformly high here: Leone is a sensitive, careful and thoughtful interpreter of all six works on the disc. Whether the smoothness and evenness of her articulation is partly due to her use of different keyboards for different pieces is, for listeners, wholly irrelevant. What matters is that she offers a set of works that showcase piano sounds and techniques from the 18^th century to the 20^th, and she plays all the pieces with understanding and fine articulation. She starts with a Haydn sonata in C, HOB. XVI: 50, which has plenty of lightness and precision, and then offers one of Beethoven’s final sonatas, No. 30, Op. 109, whose expressiveness is substantially beyond that of Haydn – this is a work right on the cusp of Romanticism. Two short Romantic works follow: Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 and Schumann’s “Widmung” as arranged by Liszt; and here the warmer sound sought by Romantic composers is very much in evidence. Next is a brief foray into Impressionism with Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse of 1904, and finally – bringing the piano into the modern era, if not the postmodern one – there is the 1926 sonata by Bartók, which he actually wrote for a piano with 97 rather than 88 keys (an Imperial Bösendorfer). Interestingly, this sonata has numerous essentially classical (that is, Haydn-era) traits, remaining tonal despite its considerable dissonance, and it thus in a sense brings this fascinating recital full circle. Each performance here is carefully calculated and played in a stylistically apt way, presumably made easier for Leone by her use of differing keyboards to make the varying demands of the works easier to meet. She meets them all splendidly, in any case, and thus offers a recording of considerable value both to everyday listeners and to her fellow pianists.

     There is also a “project” feel to a new Ravello two-CD set featuring pianist Holly Roadfeldt. The concept here is exceptionally intriguing: accepting the notion that Chopin’s 24 Preludes were designed to usher Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier into a new age, what would escort the Chopin work itself into contemporary times? The question would be merely an intellectual exercise if it did not involve an actual set of preludes by a contemporary composer – but this release includes one: a group of 26 by Kirk O’Riordan (born 1968). Roadfeldt plays all 50 pieces with finesse. Her Chopin is light, warm, speedy, stretched-out, agitated and songlike as appropriate, and although she allows each independent little piece to encapsulate its own particular mood, she also provides a sense of continuity-through-contrast when that is appropriate – for instance, between No. 13 in F-sharp and No. 14 in E minor. If this release were simply a recording of the Chopin, one among a great many, it would still get a top rating for the effectiveness of Roadfeldt’s handling of the material. But the inclusion of the O’Riordan material provides a bonus – even though, and this is no insult to O’Riordan, the contemporary preludes are nowhere close to the quality of Chopin’s. O’Riordan’s musical language is a mainstream modern one, and without a focus on harmonic (tonal and key-based) structural tools, his pieces lack any significant organizing principle. Also, unlike Chopin’s, they do not demonstrate any particularly new pianistic techniques, any way of using the instrument that differs from the contemporary norm. So they emerge as essentially a sequence of self-contained contrasting encores: one is “floating, with trepidation,” and the next is “hushed, with energy”; one is “hypnotic, distant,” the next “energetic, exuberant”; and so on. This setup works well enough, and Roadfeldt certainly takes it to heart in her performance, which gives O’Riordan’s music every opportunity to excel. It never quite does, but neither does it disappoint in any significant way. The whole thing is workmanlike, well put together, clearly created by a knowledgeable composer familiar both with piano writing and with standard expressive techniques in today’s context. What O’Riordan’s material lacks is a certain sense of emotional thrust, a feeling of inevitability and expressiveness driven by internal factors. It comes across more as an exercise than as a work written from a compelling sense of desire – intellectually satisfying but otherwise rather dry. And perhaps in that very way it fulfills its purpose of showing how the prelude concept today differs from that of Chopin, for better or for worse.

     There is no attempt to connect with the past to any significant degree on a new Navona CD called, rather oddly, Early Musings. This is simply an anthology disc of solo-violin works by a variety of contemporary composers; like other such recordings, it is decidedly a mixed bag that will appeal primarily to violinists, or to listeners whose primary interest is simply in the instrument’s sound rather than any profundity of thought it might convey. There is more technique than emotional communication offered by the 10 composers on this (+++) offering. None of the material here is likely to be familiar. Those seeking the most modern-sounding work will gravitate to Davis Brooks’ performance of Derek Holden’s Break Off the Aubergine Crystal Skin, one of many contemporary works seeking to sound profound through a title rather than through anything as old-fashioned as musical content. This work is written for electric violin with added electronics, and it has all the squeals and squeaks and percussionistic effects so dear to composers for whom traditional instrumental sounds are passé. The remaining pieces use a standard violin, although not always in expected ways. The most extended and ambitious of them is Solitude, a five-movement work by Tyler Jones that is supposed to portray different aspects of a sleepless night (“Meandering and Restless Thought,” “Three Chimeras,” “Sullen Introspection,” “Nostalgia,” and, finally, “Catharsis”). The most playful piece is Caper Fair by J.R. Speake. The remaining works explore various aspects of violin performance and listener attention. They are Ride by Balee Pongklad, Otherworldly Shimmer by Tyler Entelisano, …Of the Mind and …Of the Eyes by Corey Fant, Shroud, the Shadow by J.M. Smith, The Reflections of My Introverted Sneakers by Thomas L. Wilson, Drama of the Dirt by Kilian Afzalirad, and Unknown Conversations by Jared Bradley Tubbs. The chance to hear some of what today’s composers consider communicatively apt for the violin is actually a welcome one, and listeners who are fond of contemporary music in general will likely find at least a few of the works here intriguing. But there is little in these pieces that has staying power, except perhaps for violinists seeking new works for their recitals. Audience communication simply does not seem to be a high priority here, except in the thoroughly modern way in which people mistake “friending” on Facebook for actual friendship.

     Emotional connection was a much higher priority for Romantic composers and post-Romantic ones continuing to operate in a Romantic idiom. Indeed, the excesses of emotional outpouring of Romanticism were largely responsible for the rebellion against it of the Second Viennese School and other groups. Many composers used Romantic style to create pleasant enough but relatively insignificant pieces, a kind of salon music that was the “easy listening” of its day. Some produced music of this type that also had interesting virtuoso components – perhaps for a string instrument, perhaps for piano, perhaps for both. It is works of this sort, many originally written for the final examinations for viola students at the Conservatoire Supérieur de Paris, that are rediscovered by Jutta Puchhammer-Sédillot and Élise Desjardins on a new two-CD, two-and-a-half-hour Navona release. Nothing on this (+++) recording is music of great significance, but the pieces give violist Jutta Puchhammer-Sédillot  and, to a lesser extent, pianist Élise Desjardins ample opportunity to showcase soloistic virtuosity and, in the process, give listeners a wide variety of mostly pleasant auditory experiences – easier on the ear than the works played by Davis Brooks, if ultimately not much more musically significant. The only familiar composer among the 18 represented here is George Enescu (1881-1955), whose Concertstück proffers the pleasing virtuosity of a minor but very well-made display piece. The other works are Appassionato by Henri Büsser (1872-1973); Ballade by Philippe Gaubert (1879-1941); Concertino Romantique, Fantaisie de Concert and Allegro Appassionato by Paul Rougnon (1846-1934); Concertino by Hans Sitt (1850-1922); Morceau de Concert by Léon Honnoré (1868-1930); Concertino by Léon Firket (1874-1934); Poème by Eugène Cools (1877-1936); Romance, Scherzo et Finale by Gabriel Grovlez; Arioso et Allegro de Concert by Stan Golestan (1875-1956); Thème Varié by Georges Hüe (1858-1948); Fantaisie de Concert by Hélène Fleury-Roy (1876-1957); Concertino by Heinrich Arends (1855-1924); Chaconne by Henri Marteau (1874-1934); Concertstück by Réné Jullien (1878-1970); and Caprice by Charles-Edouard LeFebvre (1843-1917). The inclusion of three pieces by Rougnon does not mean his works are of higher quality than the others here, only that Rougnon was particularly adept at creating music of this type. The titles of the various pieces point to their less-than-grand intent, and that is quite fine: not all music needs to be heaven-storming in order to please and engage listeners. So although there is nothing of particular significance or importance here and few of these pieces will repay repeated careful listening, this is nevertheless a pleasing collection, the sort of music that can be heard when in a light mood, or when one wishes to have pleasant sounds in the air without needing to think too deeply about meaning or emotional intensity. Their lack of profundity explains why these works – and their composers – are obscure, but this music nevertheless has many charms that make the pieces, which are played very well indeed, a highly enjoyable listening experience, if scarcely a deeply moving one.