(++++) ONE FOR ALL AND ONE FOR SOME

Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Sleigh! By Mo Willems. Union Square Kids. $18.99.

Cinderella and a Mouse Called Fred. By Deborah Hopkinson. Illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky. Anne Schwartz Books. $18.99.

     The huge-eyed-and-weird-eyed pigeon created by Mo Willems has been around for 20 years now, ever since Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! But it feels as if he has been around forever: he just seems to fit so well into the notion of a tantrum-prone 21^st-century child who demands things that he really can’t and shouldn’t have and that really make no sense for him to want. But what does sense have to do with it? Willems’ demanding pigeon has proven adaptable to all sorts of problems, complaints and frustrations: school, a bath, a puppy, a cookie, a roller coaster, staying up late, and more. And now, in anticipation of a certain winter ho-ho-holiday, he is back to his original preoccupation with driving in Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Sleigh! Like the bus driver in the original Pigeon book, Santa appears at the start of this one, explaining that he has to go wrap some gifts and leave his sleigh unattended – and it is not to be pigeon-driven. Of course, as soon as Santa walks off the page, the Pigeon appears, wearing a jaunty red-and-green tasseled hat and wishing readers “festive feathers & peaceful plumage” – then asking to drive the sleigh in the name of “holiday spirit” and “a Christmas miracle.” Getting nowhere with these and other seasonally seasoned appeals, the Pigeon descends glumly into “Bah. Also humbug.” And he sets about showing how well he can “do Santa stuff” such as eating cookies, delivering presents and being jolly. To prove how easy sleigh-driving is, he storms off to show readers the simplicity of it all – only to realize that he cannot find the clutch “or the steer-y thing” anywhere. “And phew! what is that smell?” he wonders. He soon finds out what propulsion method Santa uses – the two wordless pages of his realization are hilariously drawn – and away from the sleigh he races, even dropping his seasonal hat. Having quieted down, he then, like any resilient toddler, says he has “better things to do than drive some sleigh.” So he shifts his holiday focus – offering a basket of brightly colored eggs and, on the inside back cover and facing page, imagining himself hopping happily along wearing bunny ears and scattering the eggs everywhere. The Pigeon is so much fun because he is so over-the-top and also so relatable: he features an adorableness factor mixed with an amusement factor, all combined with a total lack of self-awareness that makes his inevitable frustration silly and funny and in no way mean-spirited. That is why he fits into the Christmas season, or the Easter season, or the school-bus season, with equal felicity.

     The Pigeon has not been around long enough to qualify as a fairy-tale character, but that may be just as well, since his personal characteristics are firmly established and not likely to be subject to societal whims. The situation is very different with a character such as Cinderella, who has been a part of tale-telling since at least the sixth century B.C. Back then, there was a story of a courtesan named Rhodopis whose shoe was stolen by an eagle and dropped into the lap of an Egyptian king – who took it as a sign from the gods, tracked down its owner and married her. Some 1,500 years later, a Chinese fairy tale from the ninth century A.D. has a young girl named Ye Xian granted wishes by magical fishbones: the fish is a guardian spirit sent by her dead mother. Ye Xian endures the cruelty of her stepmother and spoiled, lazy sister – and when they go to a festival, she wishes for and receives a beautiful gown and tiny golden slippers, one of which she loses before returning home. The shoe ends up with a king who eventually tracks down and marries Ye Xian. The pattern is already established. Indeed, Cinderella appears in literally hundreds of guises in many cultures, including a grim Grimm version called Aschenputtel that uses golden slippers like Ye Xian’s and includes scenes in which the wicked sisters cut off parts of their feet and birds peck their eyes out. Milder and better-known is the Charles Perrault version from 1634, which includes glass slippers, a transformed pumpkin, and a fairy godmother. What virtually all the Cinderella versions have in common is the notion of overcoming hardship and an unloving family, and marrying into a better social class. Deborah Hopkinson and Paul O. Zelinsky will, however, have none of this. The title of Cinderella and a Mouse Called Fred, and Zelinsky’s amusing cover art, imply a big role for the mouse, who on the cover is about to be transformed as the fairy godmother waves her wand while Cinderella throws up her hands in joy and smiles a big happy smile. In fact, it looks as if Cinderella is going to develop a very close relationship with Fred – who, after all, shares the book’s title equally with her. But this is also not what Hopkinson and Zelinsky are after. What they want – and this is not revealed until the very end of the book – is an LGBTQ+ version, for children, of the Cinderella story.

     This is decidedly strange. Hopkinson creates memorable-for-kids interpretations of the fairy godmother (who is decidedly cranky) and Fred the mouse (whose transformation into a horse, to pull the coach that is changed from a pumpkin, is one of Zelinsky’s most-amusing illustrations). Throughout most of the book, the story follows the Perrault version with amusing female-empowered twists, including Ella’s enjoyment of gardening (but the prince hates dirt) and her strong dislike of the uncomfortable glass slippers (the second of which she deliberately breaks after leaving the first behind at the palace). Ella hides as the prince and royal courtiers seek the slipper’s owner, and they pass out of the story. The smashed pumpkin (the one formerly morphed to a coach) produces seeds that Ella eventually uses to grow a prize-winning pumpkin – and then, without warning or buildup of any kind, in the last couple of pages of the book, Ella falls in love with the young woman farmer with whom she competed in the pumpkin contest, and they “got married and moved to a small farm,” so it “was a fairy-tale ending after all.” It is also, unfortunately for families that may not want very young children reading books extolling gay marriage, a rather dishonest way to introduce the topic. Nothing in the earlier part of the book indicates that Cinderella has any interest in marrying another woman: she quite willingly goes to the palace ball, after all. And although Fred remains in the book at the end – he lives on the women’s farm – he slides into insignificance as the real point of the book, the assertion of female-female marriage as “a fairy-tale ending,” is pulled to the forefront.

     The whole approach would have worked if Hopkinson, a prolific author who knows how to create believable plots, had hinted anywhere in the book about its eventual outcome. “Cinderella wasn’t sure she even wanted to go to the tacky palace, much less dance with the arrogant prince or any of the other stuck-up men there,” or something like that, would have helped. But by springing the female-female marriage on readers at the book’s very end, Hopkinson invites disappointment (and possibly anger) from the far, far more common families that are not led by gay couples. In the U.S., 0.6% of adults are married to same-sex spouses (Gallup poll using data from 2020 surveys), and that includes male-male as well as female-female marriages. So the potential audience for Cinderella and a Mouse Named Fred would likely be a very, very small one if its plot twist were revealed or even hinted at early in the story. It might well be a teachable-moment book for families of any sort in which the adult or adults would want to use the conclusion to make a societal point. But that would not likely expand the book’s potential audience very much unless, again, Hopkinson were to have hinted in some way about the direction the story would eventually take. Cinderella and a Mouse Named Fred turns out not to have the focus its title suggests; nor does it take up the themes of innumerable prior Cinderella tales and give them a 21^st-century twist. Or rather, it does give the story a contemporary twist, but in a way that constitutes virtue signaling more than anything else, and that comes across as if the book is designed to make families uncomfortable unless they are part of a specific limited demographic – or are strong advocates for a particular point of view on society, marriage, and happily-ever-after. The small audience that will applaud the unexpected, unprepared-for twist ending and its underlying advocacy will deem this a (++++) book; the much larger one that will consider itself misled and preached to will give it a (++) rating at best, and then solely for the amusing elements and illustrations that precede the ill-considered leap to the conclusion.

(+++) HOW GRAPHIC?

Link + Hud: Heroes by a Hair. By Jarrett Pumphrey and Jerome Pumphrey. Norton. $8.95.

Elemental: The Graphic Novel. Adapted by Steve Behling. Random House. $12.99.

     Graphic novels have gone from a subgenre to a genre of their own that spawns subgenres. Nominally, they are extended comic strips: books that tell their stories entirely through comic-strip panels and extended comic-strip narrative techniques – from actual narration (typically above-the-panel boxed information) to dialogue. In practice, however, the boundaries of graphic novels are being constantly refined and redefined, to such an extent that it can be difficult even to understand whether or not something is a graphic novel. Take, for example, the case of Link + Hud: Heroes by a Hair. Most of the story is told through traditional text, which would make this simply a novel. But the text frequently contains pictures that show specific scenes or advance the story – so, all right, it is an “illustrated novel.” But several pages are entirely or almost entirely filled with illustrations, to a greater extent than in what would usually be considered an “illustrated novel.” And whole sections of the book are told as extended comic strips, so those sections are graphic-novel portions – but does that make the whole book a graphic novel? It is true that this sort of defining and word play is ultimately unimportant if the young readers at whom brothers Jarrett Pumphrey and Jerome Pumphrey aim their book enjoy the story. But the question is still germane, because those young readers (or their parents) may be more or less likely to pick up Link + Hud: Heroes by a Hair based on whether it is a novel, illustrated novel, graphic novel, or something else. The reason is that young readers’ interest in books varies so widely: some may thumb through the traditional-narrative parts of this book and decide not to read it, while others may open it to a graphic-novel section and decide that is not their preferred form of tale-telling. The book itself is aimed at readers ages 7-10 and is typical for a work intended for young preteens: older brother Link and younger brother Hud are inveterate mischief-makers whose constant forays into realms of their imagination have unexpected-by-them real-world consequences that lead, among other things, to the dismissal of every single teenager brought in to keep an eye on them (babysit, if you will) while their parents are out doing things. Their father is a doctor whose practice is run by their mother, so the two parents tend to be away at exactly the same times. And it is pretty obvious that these boys – full names Lincoln and Hudson, so they are apparently named after automobiles – need some level of babysitting so their parents can be reasonably confident that their house will still be standing and inhabitable after office hours. Teenagers having proved useless, the boys’ parents arrange for them to be watched by Mrs. Joyce, who has a gold tooth and who tells Link and Hud, “Listen, I done raised fifteen brothers and sisters, six of my own kids, thirteen grandbabies, a great-grandbaby, and sixty-two nieces and nephews. You ain’t gotta say a word for me to know what you thinkin’ – you want me gone.” True! The boys worry that Mrs. Joyce may be able to rein them in, and that would simply be unacceptable. So the rest of the book is mainly about the boys trying to get Mrs. Joyce fired – even though she gives them positive reinforcement, treats them well, and gets them to help with mindless-but-necessary chores by letting them watch mindless-and-unnecessary TV shows. The graphic-novel parts of the book, in which the boys have imaginary adventures in outer space, a magical kingdom, a mysterious island lair, and elsewhere, are its most amusing elements – and the way in which it turns out that those flights of fancy have real-world effects is the most innovative part of the story. The rest, though, does not work as well. The reference to “hair” in the title has to do with a side business that the boys’ parents are trying to start for no discernible reason. It involves hair products called Au Salon, which eventually turn out to be unsuitable for hair but highly useful for other purposes – as revealed in the rather abrupt turn of events that leads to the book’s conclusion. The whole “hair products” subplot seems tacked-on and does not really work, although the book’s target readers will likely enjoy the one almost-full-page illustration in which, during an Au Salon presentation, Hudson accidentally shows up naked. The back-and-forth between the boys and Mrs. Joyce is all right for a time, as she goes out of her way to make the boys look good to their parents (while all the other babysitters make them look bad – understandably). But when the boys decide that Mrs. Joyce’s positive attitude toward them means she must be a “bad guy,” and set out to prove it, the story starts to seem forced. Will any of this matter to readers ages 7-10? Will the question of what sort of book this is matter to them? Maybe not: there is enough amusement in Link + Hud: Heroes by a Hair to keep things entertainingly superficial, even if the book is not entirely sure what sort of book it is, or wants to be.

     There appears to be little question about what sort of book Elemental: The Graphic Novel is. After all, it says “graphic novel” right there in the title. But that is not really a full description of this adaptation of the Disney/Pixar movie Elemental. Yes, the basic structure is that of a graphic novel: top-of-panel boxes give narrative information while the boxes themselves focus on characters, scenic views, dialogue and action. But the point here is not so much to tell a story as to re-tell it: the book is designed more as a souvenir of the film, and a chance for fans to revisit it, than as anything likely to be picked up for its own sake. As such, this for-print adaptation follows the movie’s script carefully, which means it glosses over weaknesses that have somewhat limited the appeal of Elemental and that a full novelization (rather than graphic novelization) might have clarified. The movie’s premise is “what if the four classical elements of Air, Earth, Fire and Water had feelings?” This is a standard Pixar approach, previously used for toys, cars, emotions and more. But the “element” concept is a bit tricky. One premise of the film is that Fire elements are somehow looked down upon and even discriminated against. Why? No one ever explains. Another premise is that elements keep to themselves and do not generally interact. But when two characters, Bernie and Cinder, arrive in Element City, Bernie restores Cinder’s flame by feeding her wood – clearly a piece of an Earth element – in a scene that is glossed over and, again, never explained or given context. Furthermore, the film is pervaded, especially early on, by notions of the immigrant experience; and portions of that (such as words in the “Firish” language) are part of the story throughout. But while this could have been a rich vein of humor and pathos to mine, it is given short shrift and for much of the movie, and much of this book, is dropped altogether. For all these reasons, Elemental: The Graphic Novel is better thought of as a “novelization” of the movie, a transfer to paper of its scenes and dialogue but not really an exploration of its themes or characters in any way beyond those in the movie itself. Of course, there is nothing wrong with this, provided that the book is seen more as a souvenir of the film and a chance to revisit it than as a viable story in its own right. The colors are bright and rather garish, the pacing pretty much matches that of the film, the characters on the pages look like the ones on the screen, and if there is nothing in Elemental: The Graphic Novel that will likely inspire young readers to want to see the movie if they haven’t seen it already, there is also nothing in it that will cause them to recall it in any negative way. As an on-paper adaptation of an on-screen story, Elemental: The Graphic Novel makes an enjoyable memory aid and memento, and the exact genre or subgenre into which the book fits does not really matter.

(+++) STRINGS ALONE AND COMBINED

Bach: Sarabandes from Cello Suites Nos. 1, 2 and 4; Gaspar Cassadó: Suite for Cello Solo; Elisenda Fábregas: Danses de la terra (Catalan Dances); Marin Marais: Les Voix Humaines; Marc Migó: Variacions sobre el nom de Casals; Traditional Catalan Song: El cant dels ocells. Roger Morelló Ros, cello. IBS Classical. $16.

Gerald Cohen: Voyagers; Playing for our lives; Preludes and Debka. Cassatt String Quartet (Muneko Otani and Jennifer Leshnower, violins; Ah Ling Neu, viola; Elizabeth Anderson, cello); Narek Arutyunian, clarinet and bass clarinet; Colin Williams, trombone. Innova. $15.

Daron Hagen: Dante Fragments; Brian Holmes: There Was an Old Man; Hilary Tann: …Against the Shore; Stacy Garrop: The Solitude of Stars; Michael Scherperel: Merciles Beautè; Edgar Girtain: Three Appalachian Folk Songs. October Sky Ensemble (Brian Thorsett, tenor; John Irrera, violin; Alan Weinstein, cello; Annie Stevens, percussion). MSR Classics. $14.95.

     An interestingly conceptualized tribute to the great cellist Pau (Pablo) Casals (1876-1973), a recent IBS Classics release featuring Roger Morelló Ros (born 1993) offers excellent playing by a cellist who, like Casals, was born in Catalonia. The actual musical presence of Casals on the disc is, however, confined to the arrangement of a traditional Catalan song and Variacions sobre el nom de Casals by Marc Migó (born 1993). The arrangement of the song, whose title translates as The Song of the Birds, is actually by both Casals and Morelló Ros, and it is warm and heartfelt and thoroughly cognizant of the cello’s communicative power. The Migó work, which is in two contrasting movements, focuses as much on techniques such as pizzicato and spiccato as on the musical line, and determinedly uses the higher register of the cello to make some of its points. The connective tissue of this recital, though, is the music of Bach, whose solo sarabandes from three of his cello suites serve as punctuation points for the rest of the music: they are the second, fifth and eighth-and-last offerings on the CD. All are played with warmth and an attractively understated sense of emotive elegance that, however, is somewhat at odds with the forms of expression of some of the other music on the disc. The CD opens with the three-movement Suite for Solo Cello by Gaspar Cassadó (1897-1966); the work’s opening Fantasia and bright concluding Danza are particularly attractive. Speaking of dances, Danses de la terra (Catalan Dances) by Elisenda Fábregas (born 1955) are strongly rhythmic and nicely accentuated by Morelló Ros. The bouncy-but-expressive Dansa de rondalla amorosa is particularly attractive. These dances are followed, rather oddly, by Morelló Ros’ arrangement of Les Voix Humaines by Marin Marais (1656-1728), a work originally written for viola da gamba. The gentle beauty and understated elegance of Marais’ work are highly attractive, even if the piece does not quite fit with the more-modern cello works heard here. The playing on the CD is exemplary throughout, but it is really necessary to know about the works’ connections to each other and to Casals to get the disc’s full effect: for instance, Migó’s work is based on the prelude (not the sarabande) from Bach’s first cello suite, and Cassadó was a Casals pupil. Cellists and aficionados of Casals will find considerably more of interest here than will more-casual listeners.

     The music of Gerald Cohen (born 1960) on a recent Innova release uses the cello, and other strings, both on their own in quartet form and in combination with additional instruments. Cohen uses the wider tonal palette thus made available for three works of widely varying purpose. Voyagers is a four-movement piece for string quartet with clarinet and bass clarinet, inspired by the audio included on the so-called Golden Record carried by the two Voyager spacecraft that were launched in 1977. The audio on that record is quite varied and so, as a result, is Cohen’s work. The first movement, based on Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 13, combines Ivesian “vastness” elements with more-energetic material. The second movement is generally quiet and thoughtful; the third is bouncy and rhythmic (it is based on a Renaissance dance); and the fourth is a kind of recollection of the first three, with the emphasis on the first and its evocation of the vast expanse of space. Strings alone are the vehicle for Playing for our lives, which was written for the Cassatt String Quartet and designed as a memorial to composers who were interned in the Theresienstadt concentration camp during World War II. Pervaded by themes used by composers kept in the camp or by music associated with those composers or their circumstances, the three-movement piece opens, unsurprisingly, with intensely dissonant chords, then moves through a wide range of themes, pacing and emotion, with the second movement, Brundibar, being especially warm and expressive in a manner reminiscent of Dvořák (the movement’s title refers to an opera performed by children that was very popular in Theresienstadt). The finale, again unsurprisingly, is called Dies Irae. It includes excerpts from Verdi’s Requiem and is intended as a defiant message aimed at the Nazis – but that is a “meta” commentary on the concentration camp rather than anything actually expressed there. The quartet is certainly well-meant and heartfelt, and the performers’ intensity is welcome here as it is throughout the disc. But the music consists mostly of expected gestures and commentary on a gigantic atrocity that has been explored many, many times before. It is worthy material but does not really have anything to say that has not already been said. Preludes and Debka, like Voyagers, expands the string complement, this time with a trombone. It is an intriguing single-movement, four-section work focusing on the debka, a Middle Eastern dance. From its mysterious opening to its final variations on the debka tune, the work is engaging – lighter than either of the other pieces on the CD, but all the more effective because it is less fraught with attempts to convey specific meanings through the music. All three pieces on the disc are carefully structured and well-thought-out, and all contain memorable elements. But only Preludes and Debka, the least-self-important of them, sustains well from start to finish.

     The trombone-and-strings combination is an unusual one, but the mixture on an MSR Classics release is even more so: this CD consists entirely of world première recordings of pieces for tenor, violin, cello and percussion. The sound world created by the instruments – the voice is best thought of here, in most cases, as an instrumental component – is intriguing, although the six works performed by the October Sky Ensemble are very much a mixed bag. Dante Fragments by Daron Hagen (born 1961) consists of three quietly melancholic songs, the third of which uses percussion to especially good effect. In strong contrast, There Was an Old Man by Brian Holmes (born 1946) includes no fewer than eight Edward Lear limericks in a total time of less than eight minutes. The musical structure here is voice-plus-violin; the words are more crucial than in some other works on the CD; and the humor of the verbiage is well-complemented instrumentally throughout. The plucking associated with “There was a Young Lady whose chin” is especially apt and especially funny (this young lady has her chin sharpened so she can use it to play the harp); and the falsetto opening of the particularly silly “There was an Old Person of Wick” is a highlight. The next work on the disc, …Against the Shore (the ellipsis is part of the title) by Hilary Tann (1947-2023), is much more extended (11½ minutes) and considerably more serious, indeed somewhat overly serious, in its setting of words by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The Solitude of Stars by Stacy Garrop (born 1949) has some of the same otherworldly feeling as Gerald Cohen’s Voyagers, with percussive expressiveness the dominant effect here. Much more down-to-earth are the three settings of Chaucer in Merciles Beautè by Michael Scherperel (born 1947). The Middle English words, delivered in less-than-straightforward fashion, will be difficult for most listeners to fathom, but there are several well-done musical effects here, such as the unusual rhythmic use of the cello in the second and third songs. The disc concludes with Three Appalachian Folk Songs by Edgar Girtain (born 1988) – a work whose plainspoken modern words provide a strong contrast to those of Chaucer. Girtain sandwiches a very extended setting of Barbara Allen (a full 10 minutes long) between two much shorter songs (each under three minutes) – a structure that comes across as somewhat unbalanced, although it gives the instruments more opportunities for scene-setting and underlining the words in the longest song. Art songs in general, never mind ones for unusual instrumental groupings, are something of an acquired taste, and while the notable contrasts of mood on this disc keep it from becoming tedious, it turns out that Brian Holmes’ light and silly settings provide the most consistently engaging experience.

(+++) FOCUSED DUETS

Edward Cowie: Where the Wood Thrush Forever Sings. Anna Hashimoto, clarinet; Roderick Chadwick, piano. Métier. $18.99 (2 CDs).

Music Composed and Transcribed for Flute and Harp. Nicole Esposito, flute; Çağatay Akyol, harp. MSR Classics. $14.95.

     The third Bird Portraits assemblage by Edward Cowie (born 1943) is so sprawling and extensive that it does not fit on a single CD: its 89 minutes require two discs (sold at single-CD price on the Métier label). There are no fewer than 24 works, arranged into four six-piece Books, within Where the Wood Thrush Forever Sings, and only one (the second in Book 1) is actually about the wood thrush. The rest deal with other birds of the Americas – the two prior collections, Bird Portraits and Where Song Was Born, focused on the avian worlds of Great Britain and Australia, respectively. In his new work as in the prior ones, Cowie is at pains to incorporate actual birdsong sounds, not flights of fancy based on them, and thus to bring listeners into close aural contact with the immense variety of sound worlds generated by birds. There is more here, too: Cowie adds to the imitative elements a variety of musical materials drawn from the same geography as the bird sounds, which means that he here includes jazz material, indigenous Native American music, and more. The result is a very long set of brief works (most in the three-to-four-minute range) in which Anna Hashimoto and Roderick Chadwick present self-contained, impressionistic-but-largely-accurate aural portraits of the sounds of the belted kingfisher, greater roadrunner, great horned owl, blue jay, mockingbird, red winged blackbird, Northern cardinal, turkey vulture, bald eagle and many others. There is nothing actually formulaic about Cowie’s portrayals of the birds, but the whole enterprise has a sameness to it that eventually becomes tedious (except perhaps for ardent bird fanciers), since the sonic compass of the two instruments remains the same throughout and the various avian portraits all proceed in more-or-less the same way for more-or-less the same duration. Listeners willing to dedicate considerable time and attention to individual elements of Where the Wood Thrush Forever Sings will find surprises here and there, as in the calls of the broad-tailed and blue-throated hummingbirds, the gentle swaying of the portrayal of the yellow crowned night heron, and the chordal quietude associated with the Virginia rail. In fact, anyone inclined to listen to this music with the same attentiveness that Cowie brought to its creation will find a great deal of diversity of sound and approach within the basic similarity of timing and instrumentation. Most potential audiences, though, will have a far more casual interest than this in the material – and on that basis, this carefully made but highly rarefied bird study will prove very appealing to a very small group of listeners.

     The sonic world of an MSR Classics disc featuring Nicole Esposito and Çağatay Akyol is also a limited one that stretches through a lengthy recording (71 minutes). The delicacy of the flute-and-harp mixture on this CD is placed at the service of music that, through its association with Turkey, incorporates both Eastern and Western influences. The composers here are scarcely household names; their works reflect their time period (mostly the 20^th century) as much as their geographic locations and concerns. The disc starts very well: from Adrian Shaposhnikov (1888-1967) comes an impressive three-movement Sonata for Flute and Harp that uses the instruments intelligently and expressively, offering a nearly angelic sound at times and pervasive lightness throughout. After this, Kemal Günüc (born 1961) offers Anatolian Colors: Four Small Pieces for Flute and Harp, which sometimes waft through gentle sonic eddies, sometimes are presented with stronger rhythmic emphasis than might be expected from these two instruments. The transcriptions that make up the rest of the disc are not quite at the level of the first two pieces on it. Günüc ‘s piece is followed by a work by Fikret Amirov (1922-1984), 6 Stücke für Flöte und Klavier, in a transcription by Esposito and Akyol. The comparatively strong rhythmic elements of Amirov’s six pieces show their flute-and-piano origin and do not transfer entirely successfully to flute-and-harp duet, but the expressiveness of the material comes through quite well. The gentle Wiegenlied (Lullaby), pleasantly upbeat Tanz (Dance), and sweetly pastoral In den Bergen Aserbaidschans (In the Mountains of Azerbaijan) are highlights. Next on the disc is another transcription, the short and pretty Melody by Arno Babadjanian (1921-1983); and then yet another, 10 Pieces for Flute and Piano by Assen Karastoyanov (1893-1976) transcribed by the performers. Karastoyanov’s is the most-substantial work on the disc, lasting nearly 26 minutes – but because its individual elements are short and well-contrasted, it does not feel overextended. However, the ability of the harp to underpin and emphasize the flute is less than that of the piano, and although the piece is very well played – as, indeed, are all the others on this disc – the similarities of sound between flute and harp (principally in the matter of loudness and comparative quiet) make the work less than engaging throughout. Individual movements do, however, have considerable charm, especially the bustling Spinstress, the well-interwoven Ratchenitza, and the sweetly somnolent Lullaby. The CD concludes with Three Old Istanbul Songs, one each by Santuri Etham Bey (1855-1926) and Kevser Hanim (1880-1950) and one anonymous, all serving to give listeners a greater focus on the Turkish elements of the disc than most of the other works provide. The pleasant mingling of flute and harp throughout the CD gives these unfamiliar offerings a pleasant, easy-to-hear sound that results in most of the material sounding more like background music than like anything commanding foreground attention or attentiveness. The very last of the 27 tracks on the disc, though – the song by Hanim, Nihavent Longa – provides a quick, bright and enthusiastic conclusion to the recording.