(++++) WARM HEARTS AND MORE

Animal Rescue Friends. By Meika Hashimoto and Gina Loveless. Illustrated by Genevieve Kote. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

     Small, everyday adventures of children and animals are a natural way to engage young readers, and Meika Hashimoto and Gina Loveless certainly know how to create them – with Genevieve Kote’s pleasant illustrations capturing the moods of the five connected chapters in Animal Rescue Friends and helping differentiate the characters, who are otherwise rather flat and undistinguished. What makes the book as a whole a bigger success than it might otherwise be, though, is not the stories or the art, but what comes after the narrative.

     The tales themselves are simple ones. “Maddie and Boyd” starts with a girl named Maddie finding a stray dog – a pit bull, no less – who immediately takes to her, and she to him; she names him Boyd. But Maddie and her mom (there is only one parent, as is common in books for children nowadays) live in a no-dogs-allowed apartment, so Maddie cannot keep Boyd. She and her mom therefore bring the pup to Animal Rescue Friends, a place where animals of all types are cared for. Their owners are sought and, if they cannot be found, the animals are adopted out – a good deal more simply than this sort of thing is done in the real world, which is something parents should explain to young readers who enjoy this book and decide they will just go get a pet the way people do in the graphic novel.

     “Bell and Kiki” introduces a second girl and a just-given-up ferret named Kiki, who has had six kits and is very protective of them. There is some interplay between Bell (a fixture at the rescue) and Maddie (who has just started volunteering there), in addition to some brief insights into Bell’s home life to parallel the first-chapter ones into Maddie’s. The third chapter, “Mikey and Hopper,” features a very shy and sometimes bullied boy who encounters a rabbit whose ear infection causes him to keep his head tilted permanently to one side. Mikey not only speaks up for and adopts Hopper but also has to deal with bullies Jimmy and Noah and their shenanigans. Then comes “Noah and Pepper,” in which Noah turns out to be a good guy after all, rescuing an injured cat and turning out to be the only one who can handle him – with even Jimmy being won over at the end. Finally, “Maddie and Paxton” is intended to be bittersweet (but only slightly): Boyd’s owner shows up, identifies the dog as her Paxton, but comes up with a way for tearful Maddie (who, remember, cannot have a dog in any case) to spend a lot more time with the pup.

     This is all very sweet and nice, and the stories are pleasantly paced and, of course, packed with every bit of the multiracial multiculturalism that is de rigueur in today’s books for young people. Kids who read the five chapters and stop after the fifth will have a good time with Animal Rescue Friends and will likely hope for a sequel – which will be easy enough to create, given the already extensive cast of human and animal characters here. But kids who continue beyond the stories to the final two dozen pages of the book will get something extra that makes Animal Rescue Friends really special. Those 20-plus pages are an unusually detailed guide to today’s method of creating comics: what different types of comics are, who makes them, what roles are played by various people in the creative and publishing process, and more. Many adults will likely think of comics as drawings made by a single artist and, at least originally, published in newspapers – but that is a woefully out-of-date view of how many are made today. Yes, there are some traditionally created comics and cartoons still around, although even they use a modicum of electronic enhancement nowadays – everything from computer-aided design and color to computer-generated lettering (differences in hand lettering used to be some of the significant distinctions among comics). But when it comes to Animal Rescue Friends, and the vast majority of today’s graphic novels and comics and cartoons, creativity is a team effort.

     That is what the last part of this book explains and shows. The section has its own writer, Whitney Matheson, although Genevieve Kote is still the illustrator – which helps tie the explanatory material visually to the fiction. Called We Make Comics, this final portion discusses the many contemporary types of comics, including ones popular in Europe and Japan; explains the different elements of a comic book, comic strip or graphic novel; and then has a comic-style illustration of a real professional graphic designer say that “you have to be a team player to get things done on time.” How much of a team player? Using real people (drawn as comics, albeit very realistic ones) as examples, Matheson goes through the roles and expectations of the writer, penciller, inker, colorist, letterer, and editor – with characters from the first portion of Animal Rescue Friends participating in the presentations. The comic-style drawings of the multiple participants in this modern team-style cartooning world then urge kids to try creating their own comics; and then there is a glossary of comic-related words and terms. Of course, none of this is the point of Animal Rescue Friends, and it is unlikely that most young readers who pick the book up will be looking for or expecting anything like this final section. But it is this added, interestingly educational material at the end that takes a collection of some pretty straightforward kids-and-animals stories to a higher level and makes this book worth more than a once-over-lightly reading.

(+++) THE SOLUTION, YET AGAIN

Ending Parkinson’s Disease: A Prescription for Action. By Ray Dorsey, M.D., Todd Sherer, Ph.D., Michael S. Okun, M.D., and Bastiaan R. Bloem, M.D., Ph.D. Public Affairs. $17.99.

     Here is how we end the [scourge/tragedy/awfulness/societal shame] of [name your preferred disease]: 1) Change one or more things that are major and significant in everyday life – things that it would be extremely difficult to change; 2) Rely on government to become an even bigger part of everyday decision-making in the health field than it already is, and expect government officials to be knowledgeable, empathetic and even-handed; 3) Get members of the public to spend copious amounts of time and effort persuading the government to make the necessary efforts to eradicate/alter/reshape whatever needs to be eradicated/altered/reshaped; 4) Spend copious amounts of taxpayer money, either by redirecting it from elsewhere or by getting more from taxpayers through increased taxes, fees, or some other revenue-raising method.

     The underlying assumption here is that existing priorities, whatever they may be, are wrong, and so they must be abandoned/adjusted/altered to accommodate the need to end the [scourge/tragedy/awfulness/societal shame] of [name your preferred disease] instead of being used to end the [scourge/tragedy/awfulness/societal shame] of [something else].

     Here is how this formula is employed in Ending Parkinson’s Disease by its four authors, three of them academic neurologists at universities and one a neuroscientist who is CEO of a Parkinson’s foundation: 1) Ban a wide variety of pesticides and chemicals, speedily clean up disposal sites, and institute a number of efforts to protect people who may be exposed while all this is going on – all initiatives to be accomplished by spending a lot more money. 2) Switch all people’s food intake to the Mediterranean diet, and switch consumption to higher-cost organic foods, and significantly increase everyday exercise – most initiatives accomplished by spending more money, although for activity, “it does not matter what you do – tap dance, fly on a trapeze, weed your garden at top speed, do yoga on a mountain, or simply go out and take a brisk walk,” so long as you “avoid activities with a high risk of head trauma” and provide extensive additional protective equipment for such risky activities by spending more money. 3) Spend more money at the National Institutes of Health to study Parkinson’s. 4) Make pharmaceutical companies spend more money on medications for Parkinson’s. 5) Give more money to organizations advocating change on behalf of Parkinson’s patients. 6) Spend more money training Parkinson’s specialists and educating clinicians. 7) Spend more money expanding the availability and type of care for Parkinson’s patients. 8) Spend more money to “make dopamine-replacement therapy more widely available.” 9) Spend more money to reach out to people who have symptoms that may indicate the very earliest stages of Parkinson’s or may indicate something else entirely – symptoms such as loss of smell. 10) Spend more money ensuring “reasonable pricing of Parkinson’s drugs,” with “reasonable” determined by governments and advocates because “the price may have to be less than the cost to manufacture drugs.”

     It is important to understand that there is nothing wrong with the recommendations in Ending Parkinson’s Disease and that the authors appear quite sincere in their proposals and advocacy. It is equally important to understand that virtually identical proposals and advocacy could come, have come and continue to come from equally caring and concerned individuals who are equally devoted to the cause of eradicating other diseases. Being primarily academic in orientation, the authors of Ending Parkinson’s Disease cannot be expected to be particularly familiar with or concerned about market forces, government function (and dysfunction), or the extreme “micro” difficulty of implementing a fine-sounding “macro” idea such as widespread alteration of people’s approach to food. And since Parkinson’s disease is these authors’ cause, they are understandably uninterested in trying to balance their ideas, concerns and financial desires against those involved in other causes – such a balancing act is presumably to be left to a beneficent and knowledgeable government, even though much of this book notes ways in which the government has failed to address Parkinson’s-related issues to date.

     Parkinson’s is a horrible disease (one of many), and its neurological effects, with which the authors are familiar, can be devastating (as can the effects of other serious conditions). It is a disease whose incidence is increasing, although the specific reasons for this are not necessarily (or at least not entirely) the ones on which the authors focus, such as the use of pesticides and other chemicals. Like other significant diseases, Parkinson’s does deserve more attention, more funding, a greater governmental focus – in other words, it does deserve to be taken far more seriously, commensurate with its seriousness as a medical condition. To that end, the authors call their book “A Prescription for Action,” and certainly it is that. The problem is that this prescription is offered as if Parkinson’s is the only major, debilitating, increasingly common, highly serious disease to which the prescription should be applied. There is no context here – only advocacy. Given the provenance of the authors, that is understandable; but it vitiates the power of their message, since their clarion call for societal change and significantly increased spending on their particular cause is identical to the clarion calls of other, equally concerned and committed advocates whose focus is on their particular causes.

(++++) ELEGANCE ABOUNDING

Haydn: Symphonies Nos. 93-104. Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR conducted by Roger Norrington. SWR Music. $34.99 (4 CDs).

     Beautifully played, masterfully conducted, inartfully packaged and very peculiarly arranged on four CDs, the new SWR Music release of Haydn’s “London” symphonies is a mixture of delights and frustrations – in which, happily, the wonderful elements outweigh the irritating ones. These are not new recordings: they capture live performances from 2009. But they have lost not a whit of their charm and beauty in the last 12 years, and the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR sounds as poised and finely balanced as it always did until it ceased to exist in 2016 (when it merged with the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg). Roger Norrington, a longtime specialist in historical performance practice, conducts the symphonies with a sure hand, great sensitivity to individual instruments and to Haydn’s masterful juxtaposition of sections, and just the right level of attention to the composer’s rather puckish wit.

     Haydn’s music is full of surprises and unexpected turns of phrase. Admittedly, though, not all of them are clear to contemporary audiences, which cannot easily reset their ears to accommodate the expectations of Haydn’s time. Norrington knows how to accentuate elements of the scores to help today’s listeners appreciate what Haydn did. For example, the unexpected length of Haydn’s within-movement pauses – a major characteristic of his style – is played (or rather “silenced”!) beautifully here. And the frequent small-but-noteworthy bits of humor, such as the sudden bassoon exclamation in the Largo cantabile of Symphony No. 93, are, if anything, a bit overplayed, giving modern audiences just enough chance to wonder what they have just heard (Haydn’s original audiences would have picked up on the unusual elements much more quickly – and did, which is why he was so famous in his own time).

     Norrington’s and the orchestra’s excellence counterbalance some peculiar decisions made in the production and presentation of this set. The four discs are presented in individual sealed paper envelopes, a needless approach and an irritating one, since the sleeves’ glued flaps can easily be torn when trying to get to the CDs (especially if one is enthusiastic about what one is expecting to hear). More significantly, the layout of the symphonies is downright strange. Haydn created these dozen “London” works in two sets of six – the “six-pack” approach was common in music at the time, and Haydn had followed it with his six “Paris” symphonies, Nos. 82-87, and in many of his sets of string quartets. But instead of presenting the symphonies in numerical order, this recording separates the ones on each disc by the number four, for absolutely no discernible reason. That is, one disc contains Nos. 93, 97 and 101; the next, Nos. 94, 98 and 102; the third, Nos. 95, 99 and 103; and the fourth, Nos. 96, 100 and 104. The numbers of these symphonies happen to be accurate, and reflective of the way Haydn produced them, unlike arbitrary or uncertain numbers elsewhere in music of the time (when cataloguing his own works, Haydn was not quite sure which symphony was No. 1 – the first symphony he wrote may be the one now known as No. 37). So giving the “London” symphonies to listeners in this odd sequence is simply, well, odd.

     However, and it is an important “however,” Norrington’s stylistic acumen and his orchestra’s tremendous verve and stylish presentation make the recording well worth the trouble of repeatedly switching among discs if one wishes to hear the symphonies in their intended sequence. Of course, listeners who simply want to choose their favorites will have no problem doing so – and actually, any of these 12 works could certainly be anyone’s favorite. It is to Norrington’s credit that he appears to have studied each symphony as an independent whole, allowing each to establish its own mood; and he focuses with equal attentiveness on all 12, not only on the generally more-famous ones with names (No. 94, “Surprise”; No. 96, “Miracle”; No. 100, “Military”; No. 101, “Clock”; No. 103, “Drum Roll”; No. 104, “London”). The dramatic opening of the C minor No. 95, for example, is particularly well handled here, as is the intensity of the symphony’s third movement, which harks back to Haydn’s Sturm und Drang period. Furthermore, even in the best-known parts of the best-known symphonies, Norrington’s attention to detail is paramount: the Andante of No. 94, that being the movement mit dem Paukenschlag, is taken at a fast walking pace, and the exclamatory drumbeat is indeed a “wake up!” moment – but one that quickly passes as the movement continues on its jaunty way. And Norrington uses the timpani outburst in the symphony’s finale as, in effect, a recollection of the earlier surprise – a very nice touch indeed.

     Again and again, Norrington pays careful attention to what may be called Haydn’s “special effects” without overdoing or overplaying them: he puts them in context in a way that makes their out-of-the-ordinary nature clear but does not overstate their importance within Haydn’s extremely careful symphonic structure. This is as true with the delightful violin-and-continuo passage in the finale of No. 98 as it is with the use of “Turkish” percussion in No. 100. Furthermore, while allowing Haydn his position as the pinnacle of symphonic style in the pre-Romantic era, Norrington does not hesitate to bring out ways in which Haydn’s music, far from being hidebound, starts to look ahead to the not-too-distant future. Notably, Norrington again and again chooses Menuet tempos and rhythmic accentuation that render the movements quite undanceable and much more akin to scherzos than most conductors allow them to be. Beethoven is usually thought of as transforming minuet movements into scherzos, but Haydn himself used the term many times – for instance, in all six of his Op. 33 string quartets, four of which even place the movements second rather than third.

     For all the respect that Haydn now receives, for all the enjoyment his music now produces in an age so much later than his, he generally does not get sufficient credit as an innovator: he is thought of as perfecting and polishing forms, including those of the string quartet and symphony, rather than as being especially inventive with them. This is a gross misunderstanding and diminution of Haydn’s skills – and it underestimates the sophistication of the audiences, royal and otherwise, in Haydn’s time, whose respect and admiration for his works were founded largely on their exploratory and developmental elements. Norrington’s set of the “London” symphonies will not, by itself, show modern audiences just how exceptionally creative Haydn was, but it is a big step in that direction – as well as being, on the most basic level, a wonderfully engaging presentation of some thoroughly marvelous music.

(+++) VOCAL EXOTICA

Hildegard von Bingen: Ordo virtutum. Seraphic Fire conducted by Patrick Dupre Quigley. SFM (Seraphic Fire Media). $16.99.

Manifesto: Vocal works by Roger Treece, Timothy C. Takach, Ysaÿe M. Barnwell, David Lang, Libby Larsen, Joseph Gregorio, Sydney Guillaume, Paul John Rudoi, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and Dale Warland. Cantus. Signum Classics. $17.99.

Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate: Lowak Shoppala’ (Fire and Light). Richard Ray Whitman, narrator; Stephen Clark, baritone; Chelsea Owen and Meghan Vera Starling, sopranos; Lynn Moroney and Wes Studi, storytellers; Chickasaw Nation Children’s Chorus, Chickasaw Nation Dance Troupe and Nashville String Machine conducted by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Azica. $16.99.

     The long-lived (1098-1179) and now very famous Hildegard von Bingen was canonized as recently as 2012, but her place in music seems to have been quite firmly cemented and to be well-established not only for Catholics but also for concertgoers with particular interest in the ways in which music from nearly 900 years ago can still connect with listeners today. Ordo virtutum (which can be thought of as “The Play of the Virtues,” although the first Latin word has no real English equivalent) is a fascinating hour-long symbolic drama in which the soul calls on the virtues (Hope, Charity, Chastity, Obedience, etc.); invokes and is supported by the Queen of the Virtues, Humility; refuses and overcomes the temptations of the Devil; and eventually triumphs and has the satisfaction of seeing the Devil bound and rendered harmless. A new Seraphic Fire CD on the group’s own label proffers the first complete recording of Ordo virtutum (which is briefly introduced by an anonymous Introit), and is an exceptional experience for anyone interested in medieval church music, dramas of the Middle Ages beyond Passion Plays, and the history of choral writing and performance. Ordo virtutum is surprisingly modern in conception – or perhaps it is better to say that Hildegard von Bingen was exceptionally in tune with eternal verities and effective ways to present them. Being the leader of the nuns of an abbey, she wrote the music of Ordo virtutum strictly for female voices – but the Devil is indispensable to the material, and appears not only as the sole male character but also as the only non-singer: he speaks, even rants, but does not sing. Just as Shakespeare, much later, indicated the class of characters by assigning speeches of poetry to some while confining others to prose, so Ordo virtutum emphasizes constantly that the uplift of music is associated solely with God and virtue; indeed, for mainstream Europeans in the 12^th century, music had no purpose except spiritual elevation (a stance that provided fertile ground for the Goliards, of whom Hildegard von Bingen surely could not have approved). The topic of Ordo virtutum is scarcely one to which many people will gravitate in so one-sided a manner today, and the Latin of the drama is no longer a language that many people can understand, much less speak. But thanks to the genuine emotional strength that Patrick Dupre Quigley helps bring forth from Seraphic Fire, thanks to the sheer beauty of the vocal lines and the clever structure of the drama (including the introduction of each section by differently tuned bells), Ordo virtutum speaks with a universality and intensity that overcome language, cultural and social barriers to quite a remarkable extent. The purity and sincerity of the material transcend the specifics of the words and the drama, delivering a highly engaging experience that, while assuredly not for a wide modern audience, speaks directly to the heart for those inclined to listen to it.

     A smaller but equally skilled vocal ensemble, the all-male, eight-member group Cantus, offers some contemporary material in Latin and/or with a modern spiritual orientation on a new Signum Classics CD bearing the title Manifesto. Except for the equal excellence of the singing, this CD is something of the opposite of Seraphic Fire’s: the single intense focus of Ordo virtutum is nowhere to be found, with Cantus instead offering a variety of differing emotional touchpoints as explored and interpreted by 10 different composers. Four of the 10 works draw on a Cantus program called “The Four Loves,” those being the ancient Greek notions of romantic love (David Lang’s Manifesto, from which the CD gets its title), love between friends (Roger Treece’s Philia), love of family (Joseph Gregorio’s To My Brother), and divine love (Ysaÿe M. Barnwell’s Tango with God). But these four topically related works do not appear in sequence on the disc, so whatever their joint focus might have been in concept, it is missing here, leaving the audience to listen to them as individual pieces without any particular context. Or perhaps it is fairer to say that, to some extent, the original four-loves concept is expanded and deepened here, since Philia is followed on the disc by Timothy C. Takach’s Luceat Eis, whose Latin helps provide a sense of transcending time and bypassing modernity – in the service of a work to commemorate service members who died during the terrorist mass murders of September 11, 2001. The underlying sentiment here is from the gospel of John, wherein appears the idea that the greatest love one can show comes from laying down one’s life for one’s friends. It is in the emotional involvement that Cantus brings to Takach’s work – and to those by Lang, Treece, Gregorio and Barnwell – that the four tenors, two baritones and two basses show the quality of their expressive as well as musical abilities. Cantus is known for its multifaceted vocal programming, and that is certainly in evidence here, given the Greek “forms of love” material, the Biblical references and, in Libby Larsen’s case, Shakespeare: If I profane with my unworthiest hand… uses words from Romeo and Juliet. Throughout the disc, the overall impression is of vocal purity, even though the words of specific pieces are not always juxtaposed to particularly good effect. Thus, the last four works here are Gagòt by Sydney Guillaume (a Haitian Creole song about finding peace amid chaos); Song of Sky and Sea by Paul John Rudoi (an extended four-song cycle, the longest work on the disc by far, with texts from ancient Persian mystic poets); Psalm of the Soul by Sarah Kirkland Snider (about looking inward rather than out ward as a spiritual seeker); and Evening Stars by Dale Warland (based on poems by Sara Teasdale and focused on loss and eventual recovery). Ideally, listeners will piece together a narrative of feelings from their own experiences that will unite these works in ways that the sequence of pieces, on its own, does not. Another alternative is picking and choosing individual compositions based on one’s mood or thoughts at a given time – the smooth, nuanced sound of Cantus fits everything on the disc quite well, even if the disc itself does not quite fit together as a whole.

     A vocal experience of a different sort – one even more rarefied than anything from Seraphic Fire or Cantus – is to be had from an Azica Records release of a work by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate called Lowak Shoppala’ – which translates from the Chickasaw as “Fire and Light.” This is a very extended (80-minute) display of and cantata upon Chickasaw culture, directed entirely at listeners who wish to subsume themselves within the Chickasaw nation, its history and its customs, for a time. There is an underpinning here of religious/spiritual feeling quite different from that of Hildegard von Bingen but no less heartfelt in its own way – although perhaps somewhat more insistent, as its message is emphatically, even forcefully delivered by multiple speakers and with considerable solo, choral and instrumental involvement. English and Chickasaw narration and singing, chants and shouts and straightforward storytelling, are presented along with thoughts that seem calculated to provide meaningfulness – not as Cantus does, through beauty of expression, but instead with verbal insistence: “Once we hear, we can learn; once we learn, we can understand; once we understand, we are wiser; once we are wiser, we see clearly.” There are some interesting, brief portrayals here of individual clans: Chief, Bird, Alligator, Squirrel, Skunk, Panther and Raccoon. But they depend on descriptive words rather than bringing forth personalities musically – and indeed, Lowak Shoppala’ seems more like a sermon and history lesson than a musical experience, for all that it employs musical means at various points (and often to good effect). The sincerity of the composer and performers is clear, but the work engages more through its intent and its instances of exoticism of language and sound than through any strong attempt to pull a non-Chickasaw audience into understanding of and empathy with the Chickasaw nation. Although Lowak Shoppala’ is thoroughly modern, it does not make – and does not appear to seek – the level of spiritual/emotional connectivity with contemporary hearers that comes through from the almost millennium-old Ordo virtutum. Both works are admirable, and both are excellently performed (as indeed are the shorter pieces presented by Cantus). It is surprising, though, to find that in listening to both Ordo virtutum and Lowak Shoppala’, it is the newer work that seems to be more of a museum piece.