(+++) TOWARD THE END OF THE ROAD

Let’s Talk about Death (Over Dinner): An Invitation and Guide to Life’s Most Important Conversation. By Michael Hebb. Da Capo. $26.

     Sincere to the point of being simplistic, well-meaning to the point of being naïve, Michael Hebb’s Let’s Talk about Death (Over Dinner) is an anecdote-packed attempt to enliven (pun intended) the American avoidance of direct discussion of death – one’s own and that of others. It is in part an advocacy book for Hebb’s own businesses: he is the founder of an organization called Death Over Dinner and of the New Age-y sounding “Convivium, a creative agency that specializes in the ability to shift culture through the use of thoughtful food-and-discourse-based gatherings.” Not surprisingly, Hebb is from Seattle, where descriptions of this sort are taken very seriously indeed.

     In the United States, however, Hebb argues, we tend not to take death seriously – or rather, we take it so seriously that we practice avoidance of the topic. That means we speak of people “passing” rather than dying or say they “went to heaven” or “exited this life” – or any one of a variety of other euphemisms. So the first thing we need to do is use the words “death” and “dying” so we can confront their inevitability.

     So far, so good. But this is difficult for Americans and many other Westerners because, as one of the many counselors and educators quoted by Hebb states, “Western medicine tends to think it can beat death.” Really? Yes, says Hebb, and this means “it’s as if we’re heroes in an action film, squaring off with an evil foe, and everyone knows the good guy wins in the end. …If it’s us versus death, we will come out victorious.”

     To say this is an oversimplification is to understate. On one level, it rings true, as do many of Hebb’s comments. But on another, it ignores deep-seated cultural imperatives and foundations that cannot simply be swept away with a nice dinner. The counselor whom Hebb quotes grew up in Hong Kong, and Asian cultures have multi-thousand-year histories of ancestor worship, respect for elders, family structures geared to protect the elderly and usher them gently out of life, and much more. Although some of those cultural elements have become a bit faded recently, the point is that they are deep-seated and rooted in hundreds of generations of practice. Contrasting them with American culture, and speaking as if action movies are somehow the cultural imperative for American medicine, is barely to skim the surface of the difficulties underlying “the American way of death” – to uote the title of Jessica Mitford’s famous 1963 study of funeral-industry abuses.

     Hebb never mentions Mitford, but he does briefly discuss Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, whose insights into death and dying are now classic. In fact, Hebb briefly discusses a great many death-related things: Let’s Talk about Death (Over Dinner) jumps around quite a bit, mentioning planning for our own death, how we are affected when people we know die, how our own death may affect others, how different cultures handle death, and much more. There are numerous topics to which he gives short shrift, bringing them up and then dropping them just as they become intriguing. One is “death shaming,” of which Hebb writes, “None of us can say until we get there how we will feel as we stare down our own death, and there are no ‘shoulds.’ …Shame drips into every part of our lives, and death has some of the richest waters for it to dissolve [in].” But there is little more than this on the topic; indeed, there is little enough on any topic here (or subtopic, given that death is the overall subject). Hebb moves quickly from methods of giving comfort to examples of religious and nonreligious  thoughts of and responses to death; he discusses the death-with-dignity movement and what a “good death” looks like to various people; he even attempts, far too briefly, to explain reactions  when someone commits suicide (not within a death-with-dignity setting). Let’s Talk about Death (Over Dinner) is weakest when the topics are most intense: Hebb’s few pages on the death of a child cannot help being heart-wrenching for any parent, but they are far too surface-level to offer structure, guidance or any sort of closure.

     What is valuable in Let’s Talk about Death (Over Dinner) is simply its basic suggestion that death is as good a dinner topic as anything else – that people can and should (yes, a “should”) get together, on their own if not through one of Hebb’s businesses, to talk about their feelings regarding death, their experiences of it, their reactions to others’ deaths, and their anticipation of their own. And then – well, what? Hebb several times comments that the death-dinner discussion is meaningful to participants, providing insight and comfort with the topic. But he never quite explains what people can or should (another “should”) do after the dinner. Have another one? Have them regularly? Have them whenever someone close to the participants dies? Have some other sort of “refresher course” in death and dying? The last two sentences of Hebb’s book are, “Death walks with us through our entire life. The best thing I can suggest is that we all get better acquainted with our constant companion.” That is at best a very partial and rather wan conclusion. Readers may find other approaches to death and dying far more congenial than this: perhaps the writings of Kübler-Ross, perhaps the portrayal of Death by Terry Pratchett in his Discworld novels, perhaps reading (hopefully re-reading) Shakespeare’s gloomily poetic lines about “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” All these examples offer more insight than is to be found in Let’s Talk about Death (Over Dinner). But Hebb does deserve credit for suggesting a venue where some level of conversation about death and dying can potentially take place.

(++++) UNEXPECTED COMBINATIONS

Brahms: Clarinet Quintet; Elliott Carter: Clarinet Quintet; Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux. Mark Lieb, clarinet; Igor Pikayzen and Regi Papa, violins; Katarzyna Bryla and Colin Brookes, viola; Alice Yoo and Caleb van der Swaagh, cello; Anna Urrey, flute. Navona. $14.99.

Prokofiev: String Quartet No. 2; Janáček: String Quartet No. 1 (“Kreutzer Sonata”); Mendelssohn: String Quartet No. 6; Osvaldo Golijov: Tenebrae. Calidore String Quartet (Jeffrey Myers and Ryan Meehan, violins; Jeremy Berry, viola; Estelle Choi, cello). Signum Classics. $17.99.

Mozart: Violin Sonata No. 21; Brahms: Violin Sonata No. 1 (“Regensonate”); Tartini, arr. Kreisler: Violin Sonata “The Devil’s Trill”; Alois Hába: Hudba—Music in Quarter-Tones for Violin Solo. Auerbach-Pierce Duo (Dan Auerbach, violin; Joshua Pierce, piano). MSR Classics. $12.95.

Blues Dialogues: Music of Black Composers. Rachel Barton Pine, violin; Matthew Hagle, piano. Cedille. $12.

     Except for being written for the same instrumental combination, the clarinet quintets by Brahms and Elliott Carter have virtually nothing in common. As a result, they are almost never heard in juxtaposition – a fact that makes a new Navona CD featuring clarinetist Mark Lieb all the more fascinating. Interestingly, the violist and cellist in the Brahms and Carter quintets are different, probably just a matter of musicians’ availability but in a sense underlining the extreme disparity between these works. Brahms’ quintet, which was one of his last works even though he lived six years after composing it in 1891, is full of the sound that is usually called “autumnal” (although Brahms actually used it throughout his compositional life), and it is a work of gorgeous warmth and deeply felt emotion throughout. Lieb and colleagues play it with understanding and considerable depth, bringing out the unison passages in such a way as to provide strong contrast with the ones in which the clarinet emerges from the ensemble to shine forth alone. There is a burnished feeling to the whole performance, a sense of polish in the pacing that fits the music very well indeed. Carter’s quintet is also a very late one for this exceptionally long-lived composer (1908-2012): Carter wrote it in 2007. It is for the most part a dense and very modern-sounding work, and it uses the clarinet in a way just about opposite that of Brahms: Carter emphasizes the distinction between clarinet and strings, while Brahms focuses on blending them. The result in Carter’s work is that when the instruments do come together, as happens from time to time, their “musical agreement” is all the stronger. Yet Carter does allow some lyricism to creep into his quintet, primarily in the middle of the work, whose five movements are all short (the fourth and fifth each last less than two minutes). While Brahms keeps the clarinet mostly in the middle and lower registers, where its beauty and sonorousness are clearest, Carter uses its full range more of the time, notably in a Presto fourth movement whose conclusion goes so high that the clarinet almost sounds like a flute. It is not entirely flutelike, though, as is clear from the inclusion on the CD of Carter’s amusing 1985 trifle, Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux. The flute and clarinet, nominally here performing as a duo, in fact have little to do with each other (to an even greater extent than the clarinet and strings in the later quintet). Flute and clarinet occupy the same physical space while performing, but not the same expressive one, with neither dominating the other but neither paying much attention to the other either. The contrast of rough and smooth, implicit in the work’s title, is beautifully conveyed by Lieb and flutist Anna Urrey, and the placement of this little piece between the two quintets on the CD serves neatly to set off the many differences between Brahms’ and Carter’s handling of the combination of clarinet and strings.

     The inclusion on a new Signum Classics CD of quartets by Prokofiev and Janáček is scarcely a surprise, but adding to them the final quartet by Mendelssohn is somewhat unexpected – and combining the three works with a piece by Argentine composer Osvaldo Golijov (born 1960) is definitely unusual. Yet the disc has a well-integrated feeling about it, thanks in part to the excellent ensemble playing by the Calidore String Quartet and in part to the underlying thematic elements that, to some extent, unite all the music. Prokofiev’s String Quartet No. 2 is a wartime work that is, to some extent, reflective of the chaos all around the composer during the German invasion of Russia in 1941– which had led to Prokofiev being evacuated to a safer area of what was then the Soviet Union. Sensitive to his surroundings as well as to a time of war, Prokofiev incorporated some folk melodies and rhythms from his temporary location (the Kabardino-Balkar Autonomous SSR, about 900 miles south of Moscow) into this quartet. The work was actually written at the behest of a Soviet official, who insisted it include regional folk themes, but it still sounds very much like Prokofiev and seems, at least retrospectively, to reflect the turmoil of the times. The first quartet by Janáček reflects turmoil of a different sort: this is frequently wrenching music born of unrequited love and a feeling of inner isolation, written when the composer was in love with a younger woman while trapped in a loveless marriage. The frequent overlap of comparatively lyrical, long-line elements with angular, dissonant ones makes this work from 1923 sound modern even today, and the emotional discord of the feelings underlying it remains quite clear in this performance. The quartet is called “Kreutzer Sonata” after the Tolstoy novella of 1889, whose title in turn comes from Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No. 9. The Tolstoy work, about a husband’s murder of his unfaithful wife, who at one point in the story performs the Beethoven sonata with her lover, is filled with the drama that also permeates the quartet. The foundations of the Janáček and Prokofiev pieces are thus quite different, but the Calidore players bring forth the depths that the woks have in common. They do the same for the Golijov, which dates to 2002 and which Golijov says was inspired by seeing violence in Israel and, a week later, taking his son to a planetarium, where they saw the beauty of Earth as viewed from space. The string-quartet-only version of Tenebrae (which is the second version of the work: the first was for soprano, clarinet and string quartet) effectively contrasts the overview of a beautiful planet with the “on closer look” elements, in which deep pain is present. But this is not done through any obvious technique: the piece as a whole is slow, meditative, thoughtful, the painful elements appearing more as an undercurrent of sadness than as an explicit lament. In this, the Golijov is emotionally closer to the Prokofiev quartet than to the Janáček work; and it stands in the strongest possible contrast to the Mendelssohn quartet that concludes this CD and is by far the most intense piece on it. This quartet, Mendelssohn’s final piece in the form, is the composer’s last major work and was labeled by him as “Requiem for Fanny,” a reference to his deeply loved sister, who died in May 1847. Mendelssohn wrote the quartet four months later, and himself died two months after that. The Sturm und Drang of this work, the incredible intensity of the feelings it expresses, can make the piece actually painful to experience, no matter how well it is played: it is a cry of anguish whose occasional elements of nostalgic joy and tender memories are never enough to overcome grief so deep that it feels insurmountable. The Calidore String Quartet is especially effective in this work, offering ensemble playing of strength and drama that makes the music into a heart-wrenching experience that is beyond anything else on the disc, but is clearly related to the other works.

     There is less of a relationship among the works on a new MSR Classics CD featuring the Auerbach-Pierce Duo, but this too is a disc that combines material in unanticipated ways – although in this case the exact reason for doing so is somewhat elusive. Dan Auerbach and Joshua Pierce first present a moving but thankfully not overstated version of Mozart’s only minor-key violin sonata, No. 21 in E minor, K. 304, written shortly after his mother’s death and perhaps an attempt (within Mozart’s usual refined musical approach) to express grief at her passing. Auerbach and Pierce successfully tread a delicate line between having the sonata seem straitlaced and blowing it out of proportion into something from the Romantic era; the poised performance fits the music very well. The Brahms sonata that follows is not quite as successful: Pierce’s pianism is very fine here and clearly establishes the importance of the piano in the work, but Auerbach is a touch too reserved. This is music of considerable warmth, and it is music of underlying sadness, too, with a kind of funeral-march rhythm within the middle movement; but Auerbach is rather matter-of-fact about the whole work, which comes across as a touch too thin for effective emotional expression – although Auerbach’s actual playing is first-rate. The CD concludes with Giuseppe Tartini’s notorious “Devil’s Trill” sonata, and here Auerbach’s virtuosity and clarity of tone fit the music perfectly. He and Pierce neatly and effectively build up to the notorious trill itself through the snippets of it provided earlier in the work by Tartini, and when the trill finally does appear, it proceeds with masterful clarity. The Tartini does not really fit very well with the Mozart and Brahms works, however; yet it is not the primary instance here of something unexpected. That distinction goes to the work that appears after the Brahms and before the Tartini: the world première recording of Hudba—Music in Quarter-Tones for Violin Solo by Moravian composer Alois Hába (1893-1973). This is nonmelodic, nonthematic music using intervals smaller than the usual semitones, and it seems to be more of an intellectual exercise than anything else. The work is laid out in four movements whose tempo indications suggest a slow second movement and energetic third-movement Scherzo between traditional opening and closing movements. But the music mostly just sounds strange, like a demonstration of a way in which music can be written rather than a piece that is fully realized in its own right. Auerbach is a specialist in microtonal music, and Pierce’s longtime association with John Cage is only part of his commitment to far-reaching techniques and new interpretations of what music means and what it can do. So the performers’ comfort with Hába’s work cannot be gainsaid. But it is a different matter for listeners, who will likely listen for something to hang onto in aural terms – and will find neither emotional connection nor melodic presentation here. The rhythms are strong, and Hába deserves credit for even including a touch of humor here and there, but ultimately Hudba sounds more like an experiment in microtonality than a fully realized piece that just happens to be written using microtones.

     Unexpected material for violin and piano is offered throughout a new Cedille recording featuring Rachel Barton Pine and Matthew Hagle: very few of the composers heard here are familiar, and even fewer of the works presented. World première recordings appear throughout the CD. They include A Set of Dance Tunes for Solo Violin by Noel Da Costa (1929-2002); the four-movement version of Blues Dialogues – also for solo violin, despite the title – by Dolores White (born 1932); Incident on Larpenteur Avenue, a single-movement sonata by Billy Childs (born 1957); an arrangement by Wendell Logan of In a Sentimental Mood by Duke Ellington (1899-1974); a 2018 revision of Filter for Unaccompanied Violin by Daniel Bernard Roumain (born 1977); and the violin version of A Song without Words by Charles S. Brown (born 1940). But not all the pieces here are previously unrecorded. The CD also includes Blues (Deliver My Soul) by David N. Baker (1931-2016); two solo-violin pieces by Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson (1932-2004), Blue/s Forms and Louisiana Blues Strut (A Cakewalk); the Suite for Violin and Piano by William Grant Still (1895-1978); Levee Dance by Clarence Cameron White (1880-1960); and Woogie Boogie by Errollyn Wallen (born 1958). The unifying principle of the disc, as its subtitle says, is that the composers are all black; but that is a poor reason for hearing this music, more a matter of identity politics than one of musical quality. What does matter is the way in which the works use versions of the “blues” for its expressiveness, its ability to connect viscerally with contemporary audiences in the 20^th and 21^st centuries in ways very different from that in which Mendelssohn and Mozart did in earlier times. The basic concept of “blues” may be of something sad and downbeat, but these composers show again and again that there is nothing unidimensional about the form. The three parts of Perkinson’s Blue/s Forms, for instance, view the blues from three entirely different vantage points, while Still’s three-movement sonata – the movements all suggested by works by African-American sculptors – manages to combine bluesy elements with dance rhythms in a way that stays firmly within 20^th-century classical traditions. Pine and Hagle show considerable sensitivity to the nuances of all the music on the disc, whether jazz-inflected, distinctly danceable, warmly overdone in pop-music style, evocative of gospel, or redolent of the Harlem Renaissance. There is enough variation within and among these works to present Pine and Hagle with plenty of chances to showcase a variety of styles, and there is plenty for listeners to gravitate to as well: every track of the 23 is short (only two last more than five minutes), giving the entire recital the feeling of a hop, skip and jump from style to style and sensibility to sensibility. The sum total is exhilarating, a combination of inward-looking emotion that stops well short of the depressive with periodic outbursts of celebratory exuberance.

(+++) STRETCHING AND SEEKING

Songs without Words: Torchsongs Transformed. Les Délices (Debra Nagy, baroque oboe; Mélisande Corriveau, viola da gamba and pardessus de viole; Eric Milnes, harpsichord). Navona. $14.99.

Ted Coffey: Works for Dance. Ravello. $14.99.

David Rosenmann-Taub: Piano Music. David Rosenmann-Taub, piano, bongo and synthesizer. MSR Classics. $19.95 (2 CDs).

     There is nothing new about musicians looking for and exploring connections between works of the Baroque and those of modern times. Musicologist, keyboardist and conductor Joshua Rifkin’s The Baroque Beatles Book of 1965 remains a classic of the type because of its unique combination of simple joy with careful scholarship – and because the Beatles’ music partook, more than that of any other rock group of the time, of classical elements. So Songs without Words, a Navona release featuring performances by the period-instrument trio Les Délices, builds on a rather deep foundation, even though it comes at its material from a different angle. Interested in what might have been the earliest, now-lost works for Baroque woodwinds, dating to before 1700, Les Délices managed by a rather circuitous route to explore some very old repertoire in combination with jazz standards and pop music from recent decades – played on very old instruments or modern reproductions of them, and in a style in accord with Baroque practices (including A tuned to 392 Hz rather than the 440 Hz standardized since 1936). The sequence of the 19 tracks is sufficient to show just how varied the material is: A Flower Is a Lovesome Thing by Billy Strayhorn, arranged by Aidan Plank; Pourquoi, Doux Rossignol by Jean-Baptiste de Bousset; Emily by Johnny Mandel; Prelude in A Minor by Marin Marais; Tomorrow Is My Turn by Charles Aznavour; Crazy by Patsy Cline and Willie Nelson; D’un Feu Secret by Michel Lambert; Folies d’Espagne by Marais; La Foule by Edith Piaf; J’avois Juré and Allez Bergers by Joseph Chabanceau de la Barre; Les Voix Humaines by Marais; Tristes Apprêts by Jean-Philippe Rameau; Michelle by Lennon and McCartney; Récit de la Beauté by Jean-Baptiste Lully; Misty by Errol Garner; De Mes Soupirs by Jean-Baptiste De Bousset, after Jacques-Martin Hotteterre; Vos Mespris Chaques Jour by Lambert; and Autumn Leaves by Joseph Kosma and Johnny Mercer. Despite the inclusion of one Beatles song, this recording by Les Délices bears virtually no resemblance to its distant relative from half a century ago. Instead, it is a disc featuring excellent, sensitive and elegant playing on instruments with which pop-music fans will likely be totally unfamiliar – instruments that give the simplistic and straightforward pop tunes a level of resonance and beauty that they do not otherwise possess (despite the popularity they have from their easy-listening quality). The audience for this CD is a bit difficult to discern: fans of jazz and pop music will not gravitate to it, nor will listeners focused on historically accurate performance of the music of 300-plus years ago. The disc is essentially an experiment in sonority and in uniting disparate musical forms in an attempt to find out whether they are at some level compatible. It is very interesting to hear, although listening to the full hour of music straight through is a bit much. The CD is a curiosity, for listeners as curious about musical interrelationships as are the performers of Les Délices.

     The sound on a new Ravello CD featuring musical assemblages by Ted Coffey is much more ordinary, in a modern computer/electronic sense. There is, however, one bit of Baroque connection in the material here, through the use of gamba recordings as an element within a piece called Sonatina.  That title and the titles of the other works here have little structural significance and point in no particular aural direction: the other pieces are called Petals 1, Petals 2, Petals 3, Petals 8 and One Note Solo. Coffey says Petals 8 was inspired by medieval Japanese court music, but listeners will be hard-pressed to discover the connection through the many entirely typical electronic sounds here. The works on the CD are actually intended for dance performances, but there is nothing rhythmic or evocative of body movements in them. Coffey clearly reaches out to a very specific and very limited audience through his rather pedantic approach to sound generation. For instance, One Note Solo is built, more or less, around the note C, but the note is obscured rather than elucidated or expressed by the elaborate use of tuning forks, clusters, the inevitable synthesizers, the usual electronic humming and thrumming, and rhythms intended to relate to speech but difficult to distinguish from a kind of sonic mumbling. There is certainly a very specialized audience for material of this sort, and there would be something intriguing about seeing the dance moves associated with this collection of sounds – although even in a visual performance, the 20-minute duration of Petals 8 would likely be a bit much. In strictly aural terms, what Coffey produces is a rarefied form of music that stretches the definition of the word “music” itself even as it uses now-common sound-manipulation methods to transform electronically or acoustically generated notes into elaborate and multifaceted sequences.

     The material on a new two-CD set of piano music by David Rosenmann-Taub is elaborate in a different way. Rosenmann-Taub (born 1927) is a distinguished Chilean poet and artist as well as a musician; he has lived in the United States since 1985 but is still considered a Chilean national treasure and, in some circles, the most important contemporary Spanish-language poet. The MSR Classics release featuring Rosenmann-Taub as both composer and performer offers a lot of his music – nearly two-and-a-quarter hours – and is really for listeners already knowledgeable about and interested in his musical thinking. The pieces are well-constructed in a comparatively straightforward modernist style that often pushes the boundaries of the piano’s sound and sometimes expands them through the inclusion of other instruments. Like Coffey, Rosenmann-Taub sometimes uses electronic techniques, for instance by employing multi-tracking to create works including as many as six pianos. Rosenmann-Taub’s music comes across as less gimmicky than Coffey’s, however. For instance, the synthesizer in Salomé is put at the service of what is essentially a slow habanera, giving that dance form a kind of evanescent quality. Some of the pieces here have titles that are contemporary in the extreme: B1, G1, Z3 and G2, for instance. Others have titles intended to be evocative, but in those cases, such as Primavera sin fin, there is little apparent relationship between a piece’s name and its musical content (Rosenmann-Taub’s “endless spring” consists largely of near-constant atonal dissonance in multiple rhythms). Adding the bongo and/or voice, as in La soledad plena, allows Rosenmann-Taub a greater range of effects, many of them percussive, without noticeably expanding the emotional connectivity of his music – and indeed, emotional connection with listeners scarcely seems to be Rosenmann-Taub’s primary interest. These works vary enough stylistically to show that the composer is exploring techniques of communication without necessarily seeking to say anything very specific to audiences. Again like Coffey, Rosenmann-Taub sometimes creates music that can be danced, even if not originally intended that way: both Salomé and Mensaje a Pedro Humberto Allende have been choreographed. Listeners interested in modern Chilean music and in Rosenmann-Taub’s importance to that nation’s culture (musical and otherwise) will welcome this release. Others will likely find it less attractive: the works, although well-crafted, are not especially distinctive in what they present or how they present it.

(++++) PARENTING 101 AND 201

Adult Time: “Baby Blues” Scrapbook 35. By Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott. Andrews McMeel. $18.99.

Dance Like Everybody’s Watching! A “Zits” Treasury. By Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman. Andrews McMeel. $18.99.

     It has often been said that kids should come with instruction manuals – but never by fans of Baby Blues and Zits, which are instruction manuals. They won’t make it any easier to conceive children (that’s biology) or decide to have them in the first place (that’s sociobiology), but they sure as heck will make it easier to keep child-rearing in perspective (that’s necessity). There is something both deeply knowing and charmingly subversive about these comic strips, which have two very distinct styles even though both are written by Jerry Scott, who is apparently some sort of parenting polymath. In the latest Baby Blues collection, Adult Time, the three MacPherson children – Zoe, Hammie and Wren – are definitely aging a bit, not so much in appearance as in interactivity. This is most pronounced in Wren’s case: she has Zoe’s (and father Darryl’s) red hair and some of Hammie’s mischievous personality, and “has now become a force to be dealt with,” as Rick Kirkman comments in one of the many notes that he and Scott provide throughout the book. Kirkman’s drawing of toddler Wren fits her into the family just perfectly, and it serves the big siblings right when Hammie is forced to say, “Wren can defend herself,” and Zoe to reply, “The free ride is over!” So it is, but then it was never much of a free ride for Darryl and Wanda, who have had to contend not only with three high-strung (if adorable) children but also with some of the largest noses in comic strips. As Scott points out at one point, “It’s always a logistical problem having Darryl and Wanda directly facing each other. Somebody’s nose always has to overlap.” True, and if you think that is an issue, check out the strip here that leads Kirkman to say “sometimes I creep myself out” – the one in which Darryl and Wanda imagine starting to look like each other, complete with internasal exchange. Creepy indeed, but hilarious. Thankfully, most of the material here is hilarious without being creepy, such as Hammie joining Wanda and Zoe in a sewing class and doing exceptionally well there, explaining why to Daryl: “You just grab some fabric and shove it under a razor-sharp needle that’s stabbing up and down about a million times a second.” (OK, maybe that’s a little creepy, especially in light of Hammie’s expression when he says it.) The homespun adventures here all have the usual Baby Blues twists to them, such as the dinnertime trip to “Mr. Giggles’ Funtime Family Zone,” which caters to kids through games and crowds and noise and to parents through “twenty-four beers on tap and free earplugs.” Business opportunity! And it is actually just one such: there is also the notion of getting some relaxation at the gym by having a nice, comfortable seat for Wanda while Wren, suitably protected, engages in her frequent run-as-fast-as-possible activity on a treadmill. What could be better for parents than all this? Well, it depends on the age of their children. One strip here contains an ominous hint, akin to the red button on the control console in the film Inside Out (a movie that parents and potential parents should definitely see). The Baby Blues version of the button is a set of loud complaints by Zoe that lead Darryl to say, accurately, “Puberty preview?” Oh, yes.

     And that brings us to Zits, wherein puberty is ever-present in all its hormonal glory. Walt and Connie Duncan may have a few pointers for Darryl and Wanda MacPherson, but it won’t matter much, since by the time the MacPherson kids are in their mid-teens, like Jeremy, all the rules will have changed. Including the rule that there aren’t any rules. There are no creator comments with the strips in the latest Zits collection, Dance Like Everybody’s Watching! (Which, by the way, should be called “Dance as if Everybody’s Watching,” for all the grammarians out there.) But there is a blend of writing and art that is quite different from what Baby Blues has to offer. One Zits strip shows Jeremy and friend Pierce about to engage in a medieval-style joust using riding mowers as steeds and a mop and broom-handle-with-boxing-glove-attached as weapons, as an exasperated Walt asks, “Have you thought this through?” Jeremy’s reply perfectly encapsulates the strip: “About as much as anything else.” (Oh, and yes, the guys are wearing helmets – a perfect touch, one of many here.) Jim Borgman’s art exaggerates and enlivens Zits very differently from the way Kirkman’s illustrates Baby Blues. The Zits strip in which Walt and Connie handle routine morning matters while listening to an unseen Jeremy complain about pretty much everything is a classic, ending as it does with Connie’s observation that Jeremy is “just in one of his moods.” At this point, Jeremy does appear, loudly asking, “And what mood is that??” And Borgman draws him as a gigantic crab. Perfect! Borgman also draws a great Tolstoy caricature – yes, that Tolstoy – showing him as a little Russian-speaking man whose foot repeatedly smashes against Jeremy’s rear end as Jeremy explains that when it came to his reading list, “Proust and Kafka weren’t too bad, but Tolstoy is kicking my butt.” Even the renditions of Jeremy all by himself have touches of brilliance: in one, he is seen scaling a gym’s climbing wall, whose three sections are labeled “Calculus,” “Economics” and “Chemistry.” And just when he negotiates those, there is a huge blank space on the wall, with nothing to grab or hold onto, at the top of which is a single handhold labeled “Finals.” Got that, parents? Then get this: even when teenagers behave like incipient adults, you will not believe them. Zits shows why – for instance, in a strip in which Jeremy offers to help with yard work and his parents are so suspicious of his motives that they ground him, leading him to explain to Pierce that his crime was “attempted maturity.” But don’t worry, parents of teens or teens-to-be: there is not too much of that in Zits or, for that matter, in real life (which is a lot like Zits and Baby Blues, only not as funny). In fact, in another apparent-helpful-behavior setting, something is indeed afoot, as Walt observes, while Connie dons her bicycle helmet and says, “Buckle up. We’re being taken for a ride.” This turns into a sequence about an unsupervised weekend trip by Jeremy, Pierce and Hector to Hector’s family’s lakeside cabin, where girlfriends Sara, Autumn and D’ijon show up for one day – and no, there is no significant hanky-panky (an old-fashioned word quite appropriate for the old-fashioned notions perpetuated by comic strips, because they are created for the old-fashioned medium of newspapers). The reason there is nothing overly hormonal happening is quite up-to-date: the hovering parent-controlled drone seen in the last panel of the series. Got that, parents? Tips on using modern conveniences to cope with the age-old inconveniences of raising children – what more could you want from a “how to” book? Or two of them?

(+++) SPORTING LIFE AND MORE

Scholastic Year in Sports 2019. Scholastic. $9.99.

Scholastic Book of World Records 2019. By Cynthia O’Brien, Abigail Mitchell, Michael Bright, and Donald Sommerville. Scholastic. $12.99.

     Every year, Scholastic gives young readers fascinated by sports a chance to relive some of the top moments of the first eight months of the year during the year to come. This means that Scholastic Year in Sports 2019 actually covers only events through August 2018 – the same time period covered by each annual release in the series, because, after all, it takes a while to put a book together. For kids focused on the specific material covered in the book, that time span will be just fine. The latest volume, like its predecessors, is a slam-bang, picture-heavy, statistics-laden celebration of sports events and sports figures of all kinds. And some of the pictures really are delightful, such as the one of the U.S. women’s hockey team posing with its gold medals, on which many of the team members are biting (a traditional method of determining whether something is real gold). The usual lists of winners, suitably updated, are all here: all 52 Super Bowls, college football rankings dating back to the list’s start in 1936, World Series winners going all the way back to 1903, World Cup winners back to 1930, and many more. There are also plenty of lists and photos focusing on single-year honors, not only in professional and college football, professional and college basketball, major league baseball, and other top sports, but also in NASCAR, the 2018 Winter Olympics, and other fields. The “Sudden Stars” section features players such as Saints running back Alvin Kamara, a third-round draft choice who scored 14 touchdowns; Sung Hyun Park, who won the 2017 U.S. Women’s Open during her first year on the LPGA Tour; and NHL rookie Mathew Barzal, who had three five-point games for the Islanders – the first time a first-year player had done that since 1919. The most-followed sports get most of the pages here, but there is also room at the back of the book for horse racing, including Justify’s Triple Crown performance; lacrosse; and even bass fishing. Many young readers will be especially interested in the choices of the year’s Top 10 Moments in Sports, trying to decide whether or not they agree with the picks. No. 2 here is given as the upset of Virginia by the University of Maryland—Baltimore County in the NCAA basketball tournament – the first time ever that a 16^th-seeded team had beaten a top seed. The No. 1 event given here was France’s victory in soccer’s World Cup – the biggest sporting event in the world, although one that is still not as popular in the United States as it is just about everywhere else. Scholastic Year in Sports 2019 is neither comprehensive nor unarguable in what it shows and how it ranks events, but as a once-over-lightly look at games and players that preoccupy sports fans throughout the year, it is packed with facts and filled with photos that will help fans relive many favorite moments.

     There are sports elements in Scholastic Book of World Records 2019 as well, but this book – although it looks very much like the one featuring sports records, with its strong visual appeal and very short paragraphs of information – is more of an overview of popular culture. The sports section is the last of nine, the others being “Music Makers,” “Stage and Screen,” “On the Move,” “Super Structures,” “High Tech,” “Amazing Animals,” “Incredible Earth,” and “State Stats.” Some of these are not really tied to the year 2019 (or 2018) at all: the koala is the world’s sleepiest animal in any year, the smelliest bird continues to be the hoatzin, the Chihuahua is still the smallest dog, Alaska still has the most pilots per capita of any state because of its size and the remoteness of its settlements, Tennessee still makes the most MoonPies (all of them, in fact), and the Sahara remains the world’s largest hot desert. These facts, although interesting, are essentially filler items for a book aimed primarily at young readers eager to find out about the pop-culture world. That means they will more likely focus on finding out who the top-earning actress was in 2017 (statistics for 2018 not yet being available): Emma Stone, with income of $26 million. They may care about the top-grossing animated-film franchise: Despicable Me, whose films have taken in more than $3.5 billion. They can read about the world’s fastest bumper car, which can go 100 miles per hour – 20 times as fast as usual – and was created for the TV show Top Gear. They can find out that Saturday Night Live won nine Emmy awards in 2017, the most ever for a TV show. They can find out about the completion in 2017 of the massive transformation of an inner-city highway overpass into a public walkway, a project that began in 1970. They can see the largest sandcastle ever built, constructed in 2017 in Duisburg, Germany. There is much more like this, some of it occurring as recently as publication deadlines allow and some of it having been true for a very long time and continuing to be true in 2018 and 2019. Scholastic Book of World Records 2019 is, like previous entries in the series, a hodgepodge of largely unrelated facts, and does not pretend to be anything more than that. It is an assemblage of mostly trivial information that young readers can enjoy looking through pretty much at random pretty much anytime. Parts of the book will likely no longer be accurate by the time the year 2019 actually comes around, and other records will surely be supplanted during the coming year. But some of the featured material has stood the test of time for a very long period indeed and will surely continue to show up in the book’s versions for 2020 and beyond.

(+++) REDEFINING LOSS

Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief—A Revolutionary Approach to Understanding and Healing the Impact of Loss. By Claire Bidwell Smith, L.C.P.C. Da Capo. $26.

     Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor Claire Bidwell Smith, a specialist in helping people deal with loss and the grieving that comes with and after it, offers in Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief a series of stories, including personal ones from her own life, plus clinical notes on the cases she discusses, and exercises for the reader to help him or her get in touch with his or her feelings about the various circumstances. Essentially that is the whole book: a series of stories, notes and exercises. Smith uses the format to indicate how widespread anxiety is after a deep personal loss. Indeed, she suggests that the five stages of grief, enumerated by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, M.D., in a book intended for the terminally ill rather than for survivors, do not tell the whole story. Those stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – and to Kübler-Ross’ credit, she correctly observes that there is nothing linear about the stages: individuals may experience one, then another, then go back to the earlier one, then onward, and so forth. The goal of counseling, then, is to help people find their way, in their own fashion, to the final stage of acceptance. In counseling for survivors of loss, this means people can get on with their refashioned lives.

     Smith acknowledges, and even emphasizes, the ways in which life changes when a loved one dies, and suggests that society’s current preoccupation with speed in so many things creates a “get over it” mentality and pressure that in turn produce anxiety when people find they cannot “get past” a major loss easily or completely. Certainly there is considerable truth to this: external societal pressures are often incompatible with inward feelings, and our current move-on-to-the-next-thing-quickly attitude, so prevalent in so many areas, affects loss and grieving as well. Whether this, in and of itself, leads to anxiety, is not quite so clear-cut, however, and whether anxiety is a separate stage of grief or a response to another stage is not clear-cut, either.

     What mattes, though, is not whether Smith has made a significant “stage discovery” but whether her descriptive approach generates prescriptive behavior that can help readers of her book handle loss-caused stressors in their own lives. The answer to this question is: it depends. The basic notion that anxiety is a normal, natural and to-be-expected response to a deeply felt loss is certainly reassuring, and that alone carries benefits for people experiencing the death of a loved one – or, for that matter, deep grief of another sort, such as the descent of a parent or spouse into advanced Alzheimer’s disease, although Smith does not acknowledge this. But Smith’s approach to handling the anxiety is very much a New Age-y, California-ish one (her counseling practice is in Los Angeles): mindfulness, meditation and yoga. As a generalized prescription, this is, not to put too fine a point on it, nonsense. Some people, those predisposed to engage in meditation and other guided forms of inward-looking behavior, will surely benefit from what Smith suggests. But turning these rarefied, distinctly leisure-class pursuits into a panacea for the deep anxiety associated with loss of a loved family member is at best naïve, at worst disingenuous. Of course, Smith draws her clients from the geographical area where she lives and the societal class to which she belongs, so the fact that she wears blinders regarding alternative possibilities is scarcely surprising, however disappointing it may be.

     What is valuable in Smith’s book is her acknowledgment that the death of a loved one leads to permanent changes in a survivor’s life and worldview, and that this is normal; and, furthermore, that the anxiety provoked by the death itself and by the disconnect between societal expectations and internal feelings is real, understandable and, again, normal. The ultimate goal of moving through grief is learning to live with it, since the alternative is not living with it, which means either not living at all (therapists are well aware of the frequency with which long-married couples die within months of each other) or repressing the elements of grief in a way that creates long-term negative emotional and behavioral effects. To the extent that Smith’s book explores an element of grieving that is not always clearly identified as such, it does a considerable service for readers striving to cope with the losses in their lives. On the other hand, to the extent that Smith’s approach involves example after example, story after story, exercise after exercise, it is dull to read and difficult to get through from start to finish. And her one-size-fits-all lifestyle-modification approach to overcoming anxiety is presented in a way that is irritatingly self-assured. Smith comes across as a genuinely empathetic and concerned grief counselor, no doubt thanks in part to her own experiences after the deaths of her parents. But for readers who do not have direct, personal access to her office and her treatment, Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief is likely to seem both repetitious and facile.

(++++) MUSIC OF LIFE AND THEREAFTER

Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde. Magdalena Kožená, mezzo-soprano; Stuart Skelton, tenor; Symphonieorchester des Beyerischen Rundfunks conducted by Sir Simon Rattle. BR Klassik. $16.99.

Samuel Adler: Choral Music. Gloriæ Dei Cantores conducted by Samuel Adler. Paraclete. $19.99.

Leo Sowerby: Sacred Songs. Gloriæ Dei Cantores conducted by Richard K. Pugsley. Paraclete. $29.95 (2 CDs).

     A Jew who converted to Catholicism for professional reasons, Gustav Mahler soon discovered within himself a deep resonance with his adopted religion. From his Symphony No. 2 (“Resurrection”) on, Mahler’s tremendously intimate yet exceptionally large-scale works deal again and again with the meaning of earthly life in the context of what may – or may not – come afterwards. Mahler, iconoclastic in so many things, never made a firm musical affirmation of any traditional life after death: even the “Resurrection,” whose words come mainly from Klopstock, contains emendations and additions by Mahler that skew traditional thinking in non-traditional directions. By his Symphony No. 8 (“Symphony of a Thousand”), Mahler was looking at religion and faith (not the same thing, certainly not for him) in an exceptionally unusual way, combining the thousand-year-old words of the Veni, creator spiritus with the puzzling, problematical final scene of Goethe’s Faust. Where to go after this vast symphony/cantata? Mahler’s answer was: to a very different type of symphony/cantata, Das Lied von der Erde. There is no heaven here, despite the haunting final seven-times-repeated word ewig. And there is, indeed, little beyond the earthly, although earthbound life is rendered somewhat exotic (by Western standards) through settings of poems translated into German from a Chinese collection. Where the Symphony No. 8 is filled with choruses and depends on them for its overwhelming effects, Das Lied von der Erde has just two voices, a tenor and mezzo-soprano or baritone; it is therefore a less universal, more personal and more human-scale work than its immediate predecessor. First-rate performances of Das Lied von der Erde emphasize the universal human elements underlying poetic imagery whose lack of reality ranges from the fairy-tale delicacy of a jade-and-porcelain pavilion to the grotesquerie of an ape howling in a graveyard. The live BR Klassik recording featuring the Symphonieorchester des Beyerischen Rundfunks under Sir Simon Rattle gains its power from just this human connection. The two soloists come to this music from different backgrounds that, individually and together, make for an intriguing mixture: Stuart Skelton is a fine Wagnerian Heldentenor, accustomed to mythic figures in larger-than-life dramas, while Magdalena Kožená has a firm grounding in historical performance practices of music much older than Mahler’s and designed to connect with audiences in a very different way. The two find common ground under Rattle’s direction and the orchestra’s typically excellent playing: warm, firm, rhythmically assured and finely balanced. To Skelton fall the two different yet related drinking songs: the exceptionally dramatic opening Das Trinklied von Jammer der Erde, in which Earth’s sorrow is humanity’s sorrow and the thrice-repeated line, Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod, contains all the fear and despair that religions are intended to ameliorate; and Der Trunkene im Frühling, a defiance of light, warmth and beauty in the name of looking inward but discovering within no respite from worldly care. Kožená sings the concluding Der Abschied, that ambiguous farewell (made from two very different poems conjoined by Mahler) of one friend to another and of at least one of the two to life and the world – in a journey ever outward to an uncertain destination. There is nothing explicitly religious or, indeed, even spiritual in Das Lied von der Erde, yet the whole work resonates, when handled as well as it is here, with the grand questions of this life and the life (if any) to come. These are the questions that preoccupied Mahler through so much of his work and that had become more pointed than ever when he received the diagnosis of the heart ailment that would kill him at age 50 – a diagnosis he got not long before creating Das Lied von der Erde.

     Mahler never fully integrated his thinking about Judaism and Christianity: his uncertainty, his attempts to understand and unite, are in large part responsible for the enormous power of his music. His constant striving stands in the starkest possible contrast to the tremendous peacefulness of Samuel Adler (born 1928), who was also born Jewish and who has spent much of his six-decade career exploring these two great religions’ common elements. Paraclete’s re-release of recordings of music composed by Adler during a 35-year time period offers a moving and unusually meaningful chance to contrast Adler’s form of acceptance and unification with Mahler’s constant turmoil and uncertainty. Mahler, who died in 1911, wrote a small number of works and used numerous then-new techniques in his music, while Adler, whose works number more than 400, uses those now-established approaches and many others in the service of choral pieces whose affirmation and plainspokenness are not to be confused with naïveté or emotional simplicity. Atonal and serial elements coexist in Adler with dance rhythms and folk tunes; yet Adler is quite capable of Handelian gestures, such as the opening of Psalm 74, and equally capable of unresolved dissonances in Verses from Isaiah for choir, organ, brass, and handbells. He calls for handbells also in the bright Let Us Rejoice, where the voices are solely those of a women’s choir; and he uses voices alone to communicate delicacy and appreciation of the divine in I Think Continually of Those. Unlike Mahler, Adler at times directly acknowledges his Judaism: L’chah Dodi and Mah Tovu use words from the Jewish liturgy. Adler is a strong conductor of his own music, his skill particularly noticeable in Transfiguration: An Ecumenical Mass, which contains the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus and Agnus Dei but not the Credo – a clear expression of universal love of and appreciation for the divine, the Latin words made deliberately non-exclusionary. This CD, originally released in 2004, was the first recording of Transfiguration; other works on the disc have been heard before and/or since, although there are few vocal ensembles capable of delivering this music with the skill and sheer beauty possessed by the 40-voice Gloriæ Dei Cantores. The disc certainly justifies the group’s title, “Singers for the Glory of God.”

     Gloriæ Dei Cantores is equally outstanding on another Paraclete re-release, this one a two-CD set from 1994 featuring music of Leo Sowerby (1895-1968). The music of Sowerby, which is very well-known in church circles and makes no particular attempt at ecumenicism, consists largely of music for choir and organ (this is especially so in his later works). It requires excellent blending of vocal sound, clarity of diction, and a clear understanding of the underlying emotions that Sowerby seeks to elicit. Gloriæ Dei Cantores provides just what this material needs, to especially fine effect in some of the more old-fashioned-sounding material here, such as Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis and O God of Light from Songs of Faith and Penitence. In addition to his skill with vocal material, Sowerby had considerable abilities in instrumental music, which figures rather largely in his 500-plus works. His Canon, Chaconne, and Fugue for organ solo shows this quite clearly, as do Prelude on “Were You There” and three pieces of Festival Musick for organ and brass: Fanfare, Chorale, and Toccata on A.G.O. This re-release opens with one of Sowerby’s best-known works, Great Is the Lord, and contains a very well-chosen combination of vocal and instrumental material that shows, throughout two-and-a-half hours, why Sowerby was deemed the “dean of American church music” in the early-to-mid-20^th-century. Sowerby’s forthright expressiveness has none of the intensity and conflict-ridden feeling of Mahler, none of the reaching out across longstanding religious barriers of Adler. Sowerby’s work is firmly rooted in tradition, certain in its assertiveness of and appreciation for the divine, uplifting and affirmative both vocally and instrumentally, and quite clearly the creation of a man who is sure of his own faith and eager to communicate that surety to all with voices to sing and ears to listen.

(++++) A PENCHANT FOR PIANO

Dvořák: Eight Humoresques; Reger: Five Humoresques; Rachmaninoff: Humoresque, Op. 10, No. 5; Schumann: Humoresque. Daria Rabotkina, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.

Kenneth A. Kuhn: Prelude No. 3; An Alpine Song; Fantasia on a Folk Theme; Prelude on a Hymn Tune; Impromptu No. 1; Ode to Memories; Song of the American Frontier. Chiharu Naruse, piano. Big Round Records. $14.99.

New Music for Piano Four Hands—Works by Donald Wheelock, Lewis Spratlan, John LaMontaine, Daniel Asia, Matthew St. Laurent, and David Sanford. Dana Muller and Gary Steigerwalt, piano. Navona. $14.99.

Jeff Morris: Interfaces—Jazz Meets Electronics. Jeff Morris, live sampling; Karl Berger, vibraphone and piano; Joe Hertenstein, drum set and tabletop percussion. Ravello. $14.99.

     Robert Schumann invented the humoresque, but the term quickly came to mean something very different from what Schumann made it into in his Humoresque, Op.20. This work – which appears last, not first, on a new MSR Classics CD featuring pianist Daria Rabotkina – is a very elongated fantasy, lasting nearly half an hour, in which small elements are extended and combined into larger sections that in turn merge into each other in a kind of expansionist mode that simply goes on and on without giving listeners any significant structural underpinnings onto which they can hold. The work is very challenging to play for this very reason: in addition to technical complexity, it is organizationally sprawling and requires a pianist to pay close attention to its many individual elements while also clarifying, indeed almost imposing, a sense of larger structure on the tidbits. Rabotkina takes the full measure of the work, and indeed has a very clear handle both on its small and lovely touches and on its complex virtuosic requirements. It is a piece during which a listener’s attention can quite reasonably wander as long as the pianist brings the audience back repeatedly to the emotional (rather than structural) foundation on which Schumann built the work. This Rabotkina does with skill and understanding, resulting in a performance that, all on its own, renders this disc worth owning. But there is considerably more here, with the balance of the CD showcasing the “humoresque” concept in the way the term is more commonly known: as a short character piece expressing a touch of emotion, a bit of commentary, a trifle of expressiveness. The Eight Humoresques by Dvořák, for example, collectively last nearly as long as Schumann’s work, but these are eight self-contained pieces with little to connect them except the personalization of feeling that each seems to express. Actually, Dvořák unites the pieces structurally through his choice of form and tempo, but Rabotkina downplays the underlying similarity of structure in favor of expressing the differing moods that the composer highlights, from amusement to sadness to sweetness to gentleness. Also on the CD is Rachmaninoff’s sole Humoresque, which is the fifth of his Morceaux de concert. An early work, it uses the same basic ABA form favored by Dvořák, enclosing a lyrical central section within two much livelier ones. The surprise on this disc is Max Reger’s Five Humoresques, Op. 20, because Reger is generally thought of as a rather stodgy and somewhat formidable composer, scarcely given to lightness of mood or expression. Indeed, those familiar with Reger’s music but not with this work may be surprised that he wrote it: it is dramatic, humorous, and highly virtuosic, the pieces’ contrapuntal elements (which would be expected from Reger) counterbalanced by freely composed sections, and even some perhaps rather sarcastic dipping into forms with which Reger is scarcely associated – No. 3 seems to start as a waltz. It is hard to think of a performer having fun with Reger, so thoroughly is the image of a serious composer attached to him, but Rabotkina does seem to enjoy these little pieces (the set of five lasts only 12 minutes), and listeners will, too.

     The word “humoresque” appears nowhere on a Big Round Records release of piano music by Kenneth A. Kuhn, but several of the pieces played by Chiharu Naruse partake of some of the same sensibility found in the miniatures played by Rabotkina. Kuhn’s music here, although written between the 1970s and 2016, is defiantly tonal, even backward-looking in its structure and the expectations it imposes on the performer – but it is above all communicative music, conveying snippets (sometimes more than snippets) of emotion to the listener in much the way that humoresques do, albeit with less of a light touch than those works tend to possess. The straightforwardly expressive Impromptu No. 1 and the tranquil, gently emotive An Alpine Song seem especially to partake of the spirit of humoresque, but in truth, every work here is something of a “characteristic piece” that conveys an emotion or a set of them to very fine effect. Prelude No. 3 contrasts drama with slightly overdone lyrical expressiveness, the virtuoso sections – very well handled by Naruse – making a particularly strong impression. Fantasia on a Folk Tune, the most extended work here at 14 minutes in length, feels like a set of shorter pieces, because its five sections contrast with one another so clearly and effectively. The themes sound like the music of an earlier, simpler time, although modified to bring out with clarity such basic emotions as sadness and happiness. This work’s structure and striving for expressive connection are very similar to what Kuhn brings to the two other more-extended works on the disc, Ode to Memories and Song of the American Frontier. The first of these strongly contrasts happy and sad sections, dramatic and inward-looking ones. The second, although not employing folk music directly, uses themes with a folklike quality and is overlaid with a feeling of nostalgia for the largely imaginary innocence and pleasantry of the past. The clarity and simplicity that Kuhn brings to all this music is especially evident in Prelude on a Hymn Tune, which begins just about as simply as a piano piece can and which progresses steadily, in stately and reverential mode, throughout. Kuhn’s music will not please listeners who think that contemporary composers should, indeed have to, push the bounds of tonality and the sounds of the instruments for which they write: this is middle-of-the-road music, at times somewhat resembling material for films while at others being quite content to remain within emotional and tonal boundaries set many years ago. Thus, it is determinedly old-fashioned, and for that very reason engages listeners’ feelings in ways that much recent music does not.

     The works by six composers on a new Navona CD titled New Music for Piano Four Hands are more overtly modern in sound and more contemporary than Kuhn’s in the way they try to illustrate specific emotions and feelings rather than evoke them in listeners. But they are no less fascinating, and indeed the piano-four-hands sound itself, not very commonly heard in today’s classical music, is a major plus for the CD. Each composer here uses the abilities of Dana Muller and Gary Steigerwalt in different ways. Donald Wheelock’s Mind Games (2017) is a set of five very specific humoresque-like pieces called “High Expectations,” “Panic,” “Cogitation,” “Reflection,” and “Abandon.” Although “Reflection” is somewhat underwhelming, the remaining movements are neatly illustrative of their titles and give the performers plenty of chances to excel as a duo – especially “Panic,” the most-dissonant of them all, and the perpetuum mobile “Abandon.” Lewis Spratlan’s Dreamworlds (2015) is a highly intriguing attempt to elucidate the possible dreams of three figures who are as different as humans can be: St. Francis of Assisi, Hitler, and a nameless bureaucrat. The first movement includes some birdlike interjections along with fragments of Gregorian chant; it is obvious but effective. The second is even more obvious in its turmoil, misplaced power, and quotations from Beethoven and Wagner. The third is the most interesting, using a deliberately trivial theme, plus occasional chordal interjections of frustration, to limn the dream of a bureaucrat who cannot stand the repetitive work requirements of the job but must do them nevertheless. John LaMontaine’s 1965 Sonata for Piano, Four Hands is the “purest” music here, in the sense that it is the work least illustrative of anything specific. It is a short work, three movements in 10 minutes, that gives the pianists plenty of chances to display their prowess in techniques ranging from Baroque-style polyphonic writing (the finale is a fugue) to jazz and serialism. Daniel Asia’s Iris (2017), also a three-movement work that is sonata-like although not labeled as such, invites the pianists accurately to reflect the movement titles: “Jauntily,” “Slow, ethereal,” and “Impetuously.” But the music goes beyond those titles, and Muller and Steigerwalt are well aware of this. The first movement, for instance, repeatedly seems about to grow darker, and the second actually is on the dark side, although not so much depressive as it is thoughtful. The third is energetic and requires the pianists to pay close attention to each other’s movements and hand positions – and it lapses into occasional slower sections that interrupt the flow just long enough to get it going again. Matthew St. Laurent’s Overture to a Lucid Dream (2017) is intended to be descriptive of an experience in which, aware that one is dreaming, one can control and modify the dream as it occurs. There is nothing especially dreamlike in the piece, but its increasing complexity may be taken to indicate the dreamer’s growing control over the dream world, and the quiet ending is an effective way to show awakening. David Sanford’s The Silent Hearth (2018), which ends the CD, is an unusual and unusually evocative work. Based very loosely on Schubert’s overture to Fierrabras, harmonically although not in terms of tunes, it delves deeply into the piano’s lower register in an attempt to interpret a story about an old concert hall in Boston that is no longer used but remains, in disrepair, beneath a piano showroom. Whether the piece reflects its underlying story will depend on whether listeners know that tale. But heard strictly as a musical experience, the work is intriguing in its repeated use of extended silences juxtaposed with music that seems to arise from the depths and return there. This CD as a whole is fascinating both for the variety of ways in which the composers explore four-hand piano music and for the high level of skill with which Muller and Steigerwalt interpret the material.

     The piano is a bit of an also-ran on a (+++) Ravello CD featuring 10 works by Jeff Morris, who is front-and-center himself as the primary purveyor of the electronic sounds that dominate the disc. Even when the piano does appear, it is overshadowed by the technological elements that Morris pulls into these works, whose jazziness is sometimes quite evident (as in A Solo Is the Nth Melody) and sometimes largely invisible (as in Upzy). The sampling technique employed by Morris is pretty much old hat at this point, and the electronic sounds, scratches, squeaks, squeals and such have all been heard many times before. The primary attraction here is the way in which those very common nonmusical sounds (ranging from feedback loops to a kind of balloon-rubbing) blend and contrast with the material performed by Karl Berger and Joe Hertenstein. The entire production is hit-or-miss, with the occasional in-the-clear sounds (as of piano in Rondo, for example, and vibraphone in Into and Three at One) coming and going without any particular rhyme or reason. The titles of the works provide no real guidance to what they are about or how the acoustic and electronic elements will interface: In Which, Unwind, Clocksays, Inderneath and Dot (Dot Dot) are all interchangeable in terms of titles, although not in the specific sounds they use. Music of the sort that Morris creates and performs does not come across particularly well in recorded form, where it tends to sound repetitious and self-referential. In a live performance, with the added visual element of the participants and with a chance to see what they are doing as well as hear the results, it would likely have greater and more-positive impact. This disc, though, is simply one of a great many in which a contemporary composer uses well-worn ways of going beyond the traditional sounds of instruments to try to create a new sonic environment – but actually comes up only with a series of aural experiences that are very similar to those produced by plenty of other modern and modernistic composers with essentially the same goals and methods.

(++++) THE AGES OF SILLINESS

The Adventures of Superfish and His Superfishal Friends: The Twenty-Third “Sherman’s Lagoon” Collection. By Jim Toomey. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.

Penguinaut! By Marcie Colleen. Illustrated by Emma Yarlett. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $17.99.

     Incongruity is fun at any age. Of course, the word itself is best not used when addressing children – or some adults, for that matter. But the concept makes sense, in different ways, for people of all ages. Jim Toomey, who has been writing and drawing the Sherman’s Lagoon comic strip since 1992, is well aware of this. His central character, Sherman the endearingly dim and un-self-aware shark, is surrounded by fellow underwater denizens who have changed little over the years and who share with Sherman all sorts of ridiculous characteristics – to which they periodically draw attention. For instance, in The Adventures of Superfish and His Superfishal Friends, Fillmore, the green sea turtle and resident intellectual of the strip, finds an article about a scientific study showing that fish can recognize differences between human faces. Part of Sherman’s Lagoon, a distinctly adult part, is its periodic inclusion of real scientific (often environmental) information, and this happens to be a real study. But Toomey has his cartoon creations use it in consistent-with-their-character ways, which means that when Sherman mentions the article to Ernest – a kind of teenager-ish fish and computer hacker who, improbably, wears glasses despite lacking anything for earpieces to attach to – Ernest says he saw the story already, “which, I believe, is even more impressive.” Sherman wonders what Ernest means, and Ernest replies, “That fish can read.” And there you have one example among many of Toomey “breaking the fourth wall,” letting readers in on the notion that the characters in Sherman’s Lagoon are well aware of how silly, not to mention impossible, their antics and activities are. Much of what happens in the strip is distinctly for adults, yet is handled in ways that even children will enjoy. Hermit crab, lagoon mayor and all-around schemer Hawthorne, for example, is constantly involved in one mildly nefarious money-making plot or another. That is certainly a grown-up sort of activity – and adults will likely think of Hawthorne types they have encountered over the years. But the specific ways that Hawthorne tries to swindle people have a level of childlike amusement about them. For instance, in The Adventures of Superfish and His Superfishal Friends, Hawthorne at one point decides to get Sherman to take up professional wrestling, with Hawthorne as his manager. “It’s all a show, you know,” says Hawthorne. “How well can you act?” Sherman responds with another of Toomey’s breaking-the-fourth-wall comments: “Are you kidding? I act in this comic strip every day.” But then matters move along, and Hawthorne books Sherman to fight a variety of opponents who seem blissfully unaware that everything is just an act – leading Hawthorne to encourage Sherman at one point by saying, “Keep bleeding. The crowd loves it.” No real blood is shed in the making of the strip, of course, not even when Sherman goes up against “The Masked Marauder,” who turns out to be his wife, Megan. That is a kind of traditional situation-comedy plot, and even kids too young to know how traditional it is – or just what a situation comedy might be – will appreciate it. Toomey manages to be engaging for readers of many ages – and the way he occasionally slips some real science and environmental awareness into the strip means that people of all ages have a chance to benefit from, not just laugh at, Sherman’s Lagoon.

     Toomey often plays with matters of his characters’ size, as when Hawthorne asks Sherman what he does “besides being huge” and Sherman, looking down – way down – at the hermit crab, responds, “I put up with little jerks.” Marcie Colleen and Emma Yarlett play with size issues as well in Penguinaut! But since this is a picture book for very young readers, there is no snappy dialogue here and no attempt to mingle adult-oriented and child-focused material. “Orville was small,” the book starts, showing the little penguin in his habitat at the zoo. “His friends were BIG,” the text continues, showing Orville at play with an elephant so large that only part of it fits onto a two-page drawing. And then Colleen and Yarlett get to the point of Penguinaut! They show the big animals having big (and clearly imaginary) adventures, such as flying through the air and deep-sea diving – and have Orville decide that even though he is small, he will have a big adventure of his own. He plans to go to the moon, possibly by learning to fly, using a really long ladder, or building a super-springy catapult. His much-larger friends think the whole idea may be too much for the little penguin, but “Orville flippered out” at being diminished, writes Colleen; indeed, Orville decides he does not need the encouragement or support of anyone else, and is determined to make the journey all by himself. After multiple failures, Orville manages to make a spaceship from old cardboard boxes and other discards, powering it by shaking “a half-filled soda bottle,” and sure enough, he takes off all by himself “through clouds, over stars, and straight to the moon.” But once there, Orville realizes that being all alone on his adventure is not really very much fun. So he imagines his friends are with him – Yarlett’s portrayal of the animals as constellations is an amusing and wholly suitable touch – and soon Orville returns to the zoo, where “the proud Penguinaut felt BIG, too.” Lessons learned: small stature does not mean small thinking; it is possible to accomplish things alone, but they are more fun when done with friends; and, as the final page of the book says, “being together was out of this world.” That last page shows a new cardboard spaceship labeled “Together,” containing lots and lots of the zoo animals, and just about to blast off for who-knows-where. The basic message here is that the “where” does not matter as long as you go wherever-it-is with good friends – and while the message is delivered in an age-appropriate way for young children, it is certainly one from which adults can benefit as well.