(++++) ELIXIR OF LAUGHTER

Donizetti: L’Elisir d’Amore. Virginia Opera production conducted by Joseph Walsh. Director: Dorothy Danner. Scenic Designer: Eduardo Sicangco. Lighting Designer: Ruth Hutson. Presented at George Mason University Center for the Arts, Fairfax, Virginia, December 5, 2008.

     Virginia Opera really stages its productions. This is not a company that focuses so intensely on singing that it forgets the other elements of effective opera: scenic design, choreography, and plenty of hustle and bustle. There is always a lot happening onstage in Virginia Opera productions – which makes an opera’s quiet, heartfelt scenes stand out all the more clearly. This approach is particularly effective in Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore.

     Start with the scenery: the opera is staged within an enormous picture frame. Projections at the rear of the stage change from time to time, but the gigantic gold frame – equipped at one side with a vine that performers can and do occasionally climb – remains throughout. This storybook arrangement, reminiscent of many classic Disney movies that began with a book being opened before the animated characters started to move, captures the fairy-tale nature of librettist Felice Romani’s story nicely. So do the costumes, which are stylized rustic and stylized military: they identify characters clearly without intruding overmuch into the audience’s perception. Clever lighting – notably including an excellent tableau near the end of the first act, in which everyone on stage freezes while spotlights make the two principal characters stand out – adds to the effectiveness of the staging. So does the fact that there is so much going on: two soldiers’ rifle-twirling acts, some competitive hat tossing, and plenty of byplay among the principals that adds to their characterizations rather than distracting from them.

     None of this comes at the expense of the music, but this is a production that succeeds on classic operatic terms, by being a stage play as well as a showcase for bel canto singing and some of Donizetti’s liveliest and loveliest tunes. The four principal singers play well off each other in addition to presenting most of their music with style and joy. Jane Redding is a wonderful Adina, flirtatious and flighty and clearly a stylized character at the outset, gradually revealing herself capable of love in the second act: her “Prendi, per me sei libero” clearly shows her trying to become worthy of Nemorino’s unselfish adoration. Redding’s voice is not quite equal to two full acts of Donizetti’s vocal acrobatics, becoming slightly shrill at the top near the end of the opera. For the most part, though, she is bright, lively and thoroughly charming, mixing warmth (even heat) in some lines with playful insouciance in others.

     Joshua Kohl looks like a complete bumpkin as Nemorino, and unfortunately sometimes sounds like one, too, with some breathiness in his delivery and some less-than-elegant first-act vocal decorations. He warms up by the second act, though, delivering "Una furtiva lagrima” with such genuine feeling that the famous aria seems to belong in an altogether more serious opera (Romani actually worried that it would not fit the mood of L’Elisir d’Amore, but Donizetti insisted on including it – thereby permanently broadening the definition of a comic opera).

     Adina and Nemorino outgrow the comic conventions from which their characters derive, but the other two principals, Sergeant Belcore and Dr. Dulcamara, remain firmly within the opera buffa tradition – and Stephen Hartley and Todd Robinson, respectively, play them just that way. Hartley is entirely surface-level in appearance, mannerisms and straightforward vocal style, strutting and preening at every opportunity. The “recruiting” duet, in which he tells Nemorino about all the women available to a soldier (while anachronistically showing him a wallet-style foldout of pictures), is especially effective, because Belcore’s popinjay pronouncements contrast so well with Nemorino’s heartsickness. And Hartley gets Belcore’s eventual acceptance of the Adina-Nemorino relationship just right, giving Adina a “who needs you?” look as he reminds himself of all the other available women.

     As the quack doctor, Robinson is constantly busy, not only with his patter songs (wherein he sometimes slurs the words, although it scarcely matters) but also with his constant interactions with two supernumerary assistants, a young boy and elderly man who carry Dulcamara’s potions, collect his money, help land and secure the balloon in which he arrives, and provide needed props – notably the labels that Robinson slaps on bottles of cheap Bordeaux so he can peddle them as the love potion of the opera’s title. Robinson is big, bluff and overbearing – a fine characterization.

     In the small but important role of Gianetta, Allison Pohl is bright, bubbly and silly, with a lovely light soprano voice that fits the character well.

     Conductor Joseph Walsh keeps the action moving at a brisk pace, which is a good idea: speed covers the many plot holes. Walsh occasionally swamps the singers with some overenthusiastic orchestral fortissimos, but for the most part supports them admirably.

     There are a few flaws in the presentation, such as the use of a piano rather than a harpsichord and the selection for one rear projection of a huge, rather weird picture of a woman carrying produce, with only the lower part of her face and her basket visible. By and large, though, Virginia Opera’s new L’Elisir d’Amore (its first staging of this opera in a decade) gives the audience what it ought to have in this opera – a combination of attractive staging, lovely music, fine singing and comic byplay that can be summarized in a single word: fun.

(++++) DILBERT DOES DECADES

Dilbert 2.0: 20 Years of Dilbert. By Scott Adams. Andrews McMeel. $85.

     You got that right: 85 bucks for cartoons. And it’s worth every penny. It’s even a bargain. Why, it costs $150 in Australia! (Of course, those are Australian dollars. And it’s still a bargain.) Scott Adams’ Dilbert strips are the latest beneficiary of Andrews McMeel’s extremely clever idea of packaging top-notch comics in huge, heavy, handsome hardcover volumes, selling them as coffee-table books or tomes worthy of bookshelf places of honor alongside, say, Shakespeare and Chaucer. Except that you’ll probably read Adams’ work more often (along with the hardcovers of The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes, previously released this way).

     The 2,000 or so strips reproduced in Dilbert 2.0 are only part of the book’s attraction. It also includes a CD with thousands of other strips – more than 6,500 in all. And the book offers some really wonderful history of the strip, including Adams discussing his early years (starting with his birth) and reproducing a formative letter from a TV host named Jack Cassady, whose early encouragement was a seminal influence on the budding cartoonist (the book is dedicated to Cassady).

     Dilbert 2.0 is a fascinating and very worthwhile historical document: Adams takes the strip through four stages that he calls “The Early Years,” The Boom Years,” “The Dot-Com Bubble” and “The Modern Era,” showing how the characters developed and how his themes changed over time. And on a lot of pages, Adams has nothing whatsoever to say – which is just fine. The strips on those pages speak for themselves, usually saying something like, “Ha ha.” This should not be ignored. The strip’s tremendous commercial success (it is carried by more than 2,000 newspapers), its international appeal, the controversies it has generated (about everything from the quality of Adams’ art to some managers’ insistence on banning the strip for being, ahem, bad for morale), and its influence on other strips (through its three-panel format and Adams’ inspiration of Pearls Before Swine creator Stephan Pastis, for example) sometimes obscure the fact that Dilbert is hilarious, day after day after day. Yes, the early strips tended to flail around at times as Adams looked for a focus – he himself discusses this. Yes, some of strips wander off track – it is possible for a three-panel strip to be too long if the joke is over by the second panel, as happens occasionally. But in the vast majority of cases, Adams – abetted by his readers, who constantly send him Dilbert-worthy examples of corporate behavior from their own firms – manages to hit the proverbial corporate nail on its proverbial corporate head (or some other part of its proverbial corporate anatomy) time after time.

     Dilbert 2.0 fills in some background in genuinely interesting ways. It is no surprise that Adams was influenced by Gary Larson’s The Far Side, for example, but it is a surprise to find out that his early strips contained very little in the background because of time pressure, not lack of artistic ability: “During this period I was working my day job at Pacific Bell. I woke up at 4 a.m. every workday and completed a comic in pencil before heading for my other job. …I worked every weekend, and every holiday, for the first ten years. That’s why I rarely drew background scenery. I literally didn’t have the time.”

     It is also interesting, in a different way, when Adams shares his intentions in certain strips: “Does the doorway to the bureaucracy look like a sphincter muscle? That’s what I was shooting for.” And the contrast between some strips as Adams originally conceived them and as they were eventually allowed into newspapers is also worth seeing: apparently syndicate and newspaper editors have problems with talking babies looking at women’s chests, a would-be “boss’s pet” doing “the thing on my leg,” and an engineer finding “porn” on the boss’s computer (“smut,” however, was deemed an acceptable word). Oh – and let’s not forget the ongoing insights into Adams’ thought processes. For example: “Few things make me prouder than finding the perfect word for a sound effect.” And: “I’m always looking for the ultimate exaggeration. Spitting at a product until dying of dehydration is one of my better efforts.”

     At the end of Dilbert 2.0 – that would be oversize page number 576 – Adams tells readers, “It has always been a challenge to put more absurdity in Dilbert than you might find in a typical workplace.” This book shows how successful Adams has become at exaggerating real-world work life – if, in fact, he is exaggerating it at all, rather than merely illustrating it. Either way, in this season of gift-giving, Dilbert 2.0 makes a wonderful present for that special put-upon someone who toils day after day in a large, bureaucracy-choked, soul-stultifying corporation. If that describes you, you owe the book to yourself.

(++++) BYWAYS OF HISTORY

Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek: A Tall, Thin Tale (Introducing His Forgotten Frontier Friend). By Deborah Hopkinson. Illustrated by John Hendrix. Schwartz & Wade. $16.99.

Stitchin’ and Pullin’: A Gee’s Bend Quilt. By Patricia C. McKissack. Illustrated by Cozbi A. Cabrera. Random House. $17.99.

     A tremendously cleverly told story that feels like an Old West “tall tale” but has its basis in fact, Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek is the story of a day when seven-year-old Abe might well have drowned had it not been for his “forgotten frontier friend,” Austin Gollaher. Deborah Hopkinson bases her story on historical accounts of Abe’s Kentucky childhood and the boy identified in several sources as his “playmate.” But the exact happenings that momentous-in-retrospect day at Knob Creek are not known, and that is where John Hendrix comes in with some of the most wonderful illustrations in any children’s book this year. Hendrix pulls himself, as artist, into the story: his right hand is seen drawing Knob Creek and its surroundings at the beginning; he inserts arrows and other highlights to emphasize dramatic parts of the narrative; he creates a huge display sign for Hopkinson’s mid-narrative interruption at the moment when young Abe falls, or might have fallen, into the rain-swollen creek; his brush appears at the far right of the page, drawing the rough water, as the narrative resumes in a different way; and much more. The book becomes a marvelous author-artist collaboration, as when Abe is seen falling into the creek and the next page shows nothing much but trees, with Hopkinson’s words to her collaborator, “Wait. Where’s Austin? Now, John, don’t let him wander off to chase a partridge…” And then we see Hendrix illustrating various ways Austin might have helped Abe out of the creek (since no one is sure what he actually did); and we see Hendrix picturing grown-up Austin with President Lincoln, but that never happened, so we see the picture in the process of being erased, and...well, Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek is a succession of astonishments, each one better than the last, and it is certainly one of the cleverest and best-structured books for ages 4-8 to come along in quite some time. And its moral – about the importance of people who do not necessarily make it into history books – is a simply wonderful one.

     Stitchin’ and Pullin’ is for slightly older readers – ages 6-10 – and tells its story with high seriousness rather than humor. It is a story that touches in its own way on Abe Lincoln, although he is not directly part of it, for this is the tale of poor blacks living in the rural South and expressing themselves both practically and artistically through making quilts – originally for families to use to stay warm, but also as mementoes of events in the lives of the former slaves who settled in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, after the Civil War. Over time, the quilts took on additional and more complex meanings, as Patricia McKissack explains; and they were eventually discovered by people in the larger world, with the result that mass-market stores (notably Sears) started having them made to order for widespread sale. The quilts have even been displayed in museums and portrayed on U.S. postage stamps. But McKissack’s story – whose illustrations, by quilter Cozbi Cabrera, are filled with quilt colors, shapes and patches – is told in a personal way, in the voice of a young girl working on her first quilt with the adult women of Gee’s Bend. “A quilt is a puzzle made of cloth,” the young quilter explains, and then shows what some of the puzzle’s pieces are: a history of the once-isolated community, then its discovery “by sociologists, historians, educators, and journalists, who came from everywhere,” and then the way it subsided back into its original quiet ways for a time – until the 1960s and beyond, as the fabric of society changed in ways that were reflected in the fabric of the quilts as well. Stitchin’ and Pullin’ is an unusual approach to the often-told tale of the struggle for civil rights in the South, and is more approachable than many other narratives of the same events. What holds it together so well are the quilts themselves – just as what holds the bits of fabric together in a Gee’s Bend quilt are the skill, experience and love of the quilters.

(+++) ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Scholastic Book of World Records 2009. By Jenifer Corr Morse. Georgian Bay/Scholastic. $9.99.

Jetpack Dreams: One Man’s Up and Down (but Mostly Down) Search for the Greatest Invention That Never Was. By Mac Montandon. Da Capo. $25.

     Each new year brings a new crop of world records, some of which are evidence of world-record silliness. As people strive anew to get themselves a piece of posterity – however briefly – old records are broken and new ones established. Feeding on this frenzy are a host of world-record books, of which Scholastic Book of World Records 2009 is short enough, at a bit over 300 pages, to be accessible to young readers as well as families. This year’s Scholastic volume opens with sports records (many of which change from year to year), then moves into human-made records (at least some of which change over time), then to nature records (which change much less often), popular-culture records (which change constantly), money records, science records, and U.S. records – one record per state, which makes for some of the more interesting reading here. There is also a bonus section of facts that are not records but are in themselves interesting: zookeepers feed four tons of food every day to the 1,000 animals at Disney’s Animal Kingdom in Orlando; the tiny, mouselike jerboa never drinks water and can jump 10 feet at a time; a mole can dig a tunnel nearly 200 feet long in one night; and so on. Among the highlights of the records sections are some of the unusual distinctions of the states: Pennsylvania has the oldest drive-in theater, Maine the oldest state fair, South Dakota the largest petrified-wood collection. The world-records sections contain some unsurprising information (the United States is the world’s top moviegoing country and has the most movie screens) and some that readers may not expect (the country that eats the most ice cream is New Zealand). The book’s once-over-lightly approach makes it quick and easy to read in little bits, and if the facts are presented in scattershot fashion, that just seems to go with the world-record territory.

     One item not included in world-record books is the most efficient jetpack – or anything about jetpacks at all. That is because these Buck Rogers-style modes of transportation – which actually trace back to Bucks Rogers in the 25^th Century, the comic strip that started in 1929 – still do not exist in a practical form, despite the attempts of many people (from serious scientists to folks best described as nutcases) to develop them. Jetpacks have done very well in fiction, from TV’s Lost in Space to the James Bond film Thunderball to the Star Wars bounty hunter, Boba Fett. But fact has never quite caught up to their promise. Mac Montandon, a frequent contributor to a variety of publications, pursues the still-unfulfilled dream of a personal jet-driven flying transportation method around the world. He tends to downplay character description: “Eric Scott is a lean, craggy-faced former stuntman and air force pilot. …He wears a black-and-red racing suit and a black motorcycle helmet with a clear face shield.” Instead, Montandon gazes with wide-eyed wonder at the various experimental jetpacks and jetpack-like constructions he encounters, especially those, like Scott’s, that actually work, however limited and impractical they turn out to be: “I am about to see a man. Fly. Through the air. I peer at the viewfinder. The pilot cracks the throttle open, and my eardrums melt. I grimace and clutch at my left ear. It’s softened candle wax. With a rush of wind flapping his pant leg, Eric Scott lifts off the ground as if by the Hand of God.” Montandon is nothing if not hopeful, no matter where he goes, as when he heads toward Dublin to see a young man named Will Breaden-Madden: “And though he is but nineteen years old and can be agonizingly slow replying to my e-mails with progress reports and a tad flaky-seeming, at this point he remains my best shot at the wondrously realized future so many others have only dreamed about.” Again and again, of course, Montandon is disappointed, and Jetpack Dreams is essentially a chronicle of ongoing failure, somewhat enlivened by its lightness but also tending to the sophomoric in its style. The book is a mild sort of gonzo pseudo-journalism, from which readers ultimately learn not very much – but which they may enjoy on its own terms and for its own sake. Ultimately, Jetpack Dreams is for someone a lot like the author himself, who at one point writes, “Oh, I badly want to believe. I really do. But the future is seemingly forever far away.”

(+++) FAR FROM TRANQUIL

Tranquility. By Attila Bartis. Translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein. Archipelago Books. $15.

     The first work by Hungarian postmodernist novelist Attila Bartis to be translated into English, Tranquility is a book about almost everything except tranquility. A dark psychological tale set in a nation with which most Americans have virtually no familiarity, it traces deterioration both microcosmically, through the stories of interrelated individual lives, and macrocosmically, as Hungary emerges over a 15-year period from its time as a Soviet satellite to become an independent state.

     This 2001 book, Bartis’ third novel, packs a considerable punch in Imre Goldstein’s translation. The story is multifaceted and complex. The protagonist, Andor Weér, is a writer whose twin sister, Judit, a concert violinist, has defected to the West during an international competition. To put pressure on the family to get the sister to return to Hungary, the authorities deny Andor’s mother, Rebeka – who has been a major theater star – any future leading roles, demoting her to a bit player. But instead of trying to reach out to her daughter, Rebeka turns inward, declaring her daughter effectively dead. Rebeka retreats to her apartment, which she shares with Andor, who has a clearly Oedipal relationship with her but also has a genuine concern about leaving her alone. Even with Andor’s attempted support – which starts to assume bizarre forms, such as his writing letters to Rebeka that purportedly come from his sister – Rebeka slides further into isolation and insanity. And things are not quite right with Andor, either. He meets a beautiful woman named Eszter and the two fall in love – but although Eszter seems nurturing and caring, she also seems to have no past. Andor finds himself unsure whether to reach for his own happiness with Eszter and, if so, how – by bringing Eszter to meet his mother, or by keeping the two women apart?

     For her part, the mysterious Eszter wants to meet Rebeka even though Andor assures her that when Rebeka is not playing a part, “she is exactly like me.” Eszter knows that – she has done some research – but wants a meeting anyway. She also wants sex in a way that Andor, his Oedipal relationship overhanging everything, has difficulty providing: Eszter “undid the belt of her robe and in fact that was the first time I saw her completely naked, when the black and white silk slipped off her shoulders. I wanted to escape but she sat on me the way God sat on the ruins of Nineveh.” The lapses into Biblical references are surely intentional – both Eszter (Esther) and Judit (Judith) are Biblical names. The stylistic flourishes are part of the developing psychodrama, too: “Now is the time I should let down roots, I thought, like oaks do, she thought, more like cedars that live longer, I thought, I love you, she thought, be quiet, I thought, I only thought, she thought, that’d be the end of you, I thought, I don’t care, she thought, can’t go on living like this, I thought, that’s the way I want to live, she thought, be quiet, I thought, I won’t be quiet, she thought, I’ll get her a live-in nurse, I thought, then you’d never see me again, she thought, I know, I thought, I was only thinking, I thought,” and on and on thusly for many more lines.

     There is violence as well as sex in Tranquility (“considering how fond you are of human traits, you can hit pretty hard”), and there is exploration of the brutality of Hungarian officialdom: “He didn’t ask many questions, deflowering had been his weakness for many years; he liked it best if during the act fists pummeled his face, which he would not resist.” Eventually there is a violent confrontation between Rebeka and Eszter, but it resolves nothing; nor is there any certainty about which of them Andor loves, or in what way – the closest Andor comes to self-awareness is his statement to a doctor, “The essence of love is obsession.” But all his relationships are obsessive, and none seems truly to represent love. Certainly none leads to tranquility, and none to freedom, the linchpin of both the personal story here and the societal one. Tranquility is a bleak book filled with bleak characters and leading inevitably to a bleak ending; resignation to a world of bleakness is, it seems, all the tranquility one can expect in Bartis’ constrained world.

(++++) CONCLUSIONS

Ives: Songs, Volume 6. Lielle Berman, David Trevor Bircher, Patrick Carfizzi, Jennifer Casey Cabot, Michael Cavalieri, Robert Gardner, Amanda Ingram, Sara Jakubiak, Sumi Kittelberger, Ryan MacPherson, Diego Matamoros, Tamara Mumford, Mary Phillips, David Pittsinger, Matthew Plenk, Rebecca Ringle, Kenneth Tarver and Leah Wool, vocalists; Douglas Dickson, Laura Garritson, J.J. Penna and Eric Trudel, piano. Naxos. $8.99.

Stanford: Symphony No. 1; Clarinet Concerto. Robert Plane, clarinet; Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by David Lloyd-Jones. Naxos. $8.99.

     The final volume in Naxos’ six-CD release of the songs of Charles Ives brings to 193 the number of Ives songs in the series – far more than Ives released himself as 114 Songs, and still a somewhat uncertain number. As with so much involving Ives, a lot depends on how you look at things. In this sixth volume, for example, “Two Slants (Christian and Pagan)” are counted as two separate songs dated 1921; but they could as easily be considered parts of a single work. And in this volume and others, the same song may appear in multiple guises – once in German, for instance, and once in an English translation – and be counted multiple times. Furthermore, this final volume contains a song dated 1942 – nearly two decades after Ives stopped writing songs. But “They Are There!” is simply a verbal update for World War II of the song Ives wrote in 1917 for World War I, “He Is There!” The lesson in all this is that the numbers do not really matter, but the music does. And this comprehensive survey of all the songs that Ives completed certainly shows the importance of the song in his compositional output – and the fascinating ways in which his song writing developed. The latter will have to be ferreted out by listeners, though, because the series’ alphabetical arrangement means constant juxtaposition of later and earlier Ives songs for no reason beyond their titles (thus, the sixth volume contains three consecutive songs in German, including one from 1906 whose text comes from the Des Knaben Wunderhorn collection much favored by Mahler). Just by the luck of the alphabet, this concluding CD does not contain as many top-notch Ives songs as some earlier volumes (the fifth is best in this respect). Still, there are some gems here, such as “Thoreau” (1915), whose mood parallels that of the “Concord” Sonata; “Vote for Names! Names! Names!” (1912), an effective one-minute condemnation of election-year excesses, in which three pianos represent three different candidates and the voice stands for the put-upon voter; “Tolerance” (1913), another very brief song, in which Ives affirms the interdependence of all people; “West London” (1921), a heartfelt setting of a Matthew Arnold sonnet; and the last song on the CD, “Yellow Leaves” (1923), whose ambiguous tonality and autumnal theme make it a fitting conclusion for an excellent cycle even though it stands at the end only because of its spelling of its title.

     The final volume in Naxos’ series of the symphonies of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford is the one that finally offers his first symphony – a substantial work that dates to 1876 (when Stanford was 24) and shows Stanford to have been heavily influenced by Schumann, Mendelssohn, Schubert and Brahms without having developed a strong individual musical personality. Some would argue that he never did develop one, at least in his symphonies. It is certainly true that, harmonically and structurally, he remained attached to 19^th-century symphonic models throughout his life. Stanford’s First Symphony is more amiable than intense, although it shows fine command of orchestration and counterpoint – and considerable expressiveness. The scherzo, marked “In Ländler Tempo,” is especially interesting: it is an intermezzo with two nicely contrasting trios. This is not a symphony of great depth, but it certainly shows a young composer with potential. The volumes of this series released earlier let listeners judge to what extent that potential was fulfilled.

     The symphony is paired with a very well-played performance of Stanford’s Clarinet Concerto – one of his few works that is still heard in concert with some frequency. Here it is not only the musical language that is reminiscent of Brahms: Stanford wrote the work for and dedicated it to Richard Mühlfeld, for whom Brahms had written his famous late-career clarinet works. But Mühlfeld rejected Stanford’s work, for no known reason – although it is worth pointing out that Stanford’s concerto lacks the ease of flow and beauty of thematic material to be found in Brahms. Stanford’s concerto was first played in 1903, six years after Brahms’ death, but it does sound like a throwback to earlier times (while Brahms’ own clarinet music, for all its romanticism, often seems to look ahead). As in his First Symphony, Stanford keeps the mood of his Clarinet Concert pleasantly expressive, making the work easy to listen to (although scarcely easy to play: Robert Plane handles its difficulties very skillfully). There is little depth to either the symphony or the concerto, but both are very well put together and show Stanford to have been a very fine craftsman, if scarcely an inspired composer.

(++++) VIEWS OF GREATNESS

Tony Palmer’s Film about Stravinsky: Once, at a Border… Tony Palmer Films DVD. $24.99.

Tony Palmer’s Film of “At the Haunted End of the Day” (William Walton). Tony Palmer Films DVD. $24.99.

     Tony Palmer’s films are all, to a large extent, about Tony Palmer – witness the titling of the films’ releases on DVD. But some of them contain less Palmer than others; and although Palmer is a fine filmmaker, it is the movies in which the subjects remain front and center throughout that tend to be his most successful. Palmer’s film about Stravinsky is a perfect case study. Made at the request of Stravinsky’s estate to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the composer’s birth (1982), it is nearly three hours long and packed with stunning and genuinely important musical performances: Les Noces in its original scoring, a reproduction of the 1911 choreography of Petrushka, and much more. Outstanding orchestras (London Symphony, London Sinfonietta and others), top-notch choruses (Westminster Abbey Choir, State Choir of Latvia and more), the Royal Ballet and other fine performance groups contribute to the film – whose narrative thread is largely provided by Stravinsky himself. He is seen at home and at work, reminiscing and conducting, talking and remembering – and just as his tremendous musical accomplishments form the backbone of the film’s performances, so do his thoughtful words become the heart of its verbal elements. This is not to say that Stravinsky is the only thoughtful person here: Robert Craft, who worked with Stravinsky for more than two decades and gave the first performances of many of his later works, provides invaluable commentary, and there are interesting remarks from Nadia Boulanger, Jean Cocteau and many others. The comments by family members (Madam Vera Stravinsky and the composer’s three surviving daughters) are less musically illuminating but more intimate. And there is plenty of other talking by better- and less-known musical personages – all of it serving to illuminate a great deal about Stravinsky the man and Stravinsky the composer…and all of it nicely put together by Palmer so that the film flows well and, despite its length, keeps the interest of a viewer and listener throughout.

     Palmer’s 1981 film about William Walton – made as a TV program – is not at this rarefied level and in many ways is more typical Palmer. Walton is a presence in this film as Stravinsky is in his, but Walton comes across as less lively and less of a natural raconteur than Stravinsky. Some of the interviews with those who knew Walton are fascinating – the contributions by Sir Laurence Oliver and Sacheverell Sitwell especially so – but although the film has moments of beauty and moments of revelation (sometimes the same moment), it seems as a whole a touch plodding even though it runs only 99 minutes. The fault likely lies in the music, which is performed by some top-notch players (Yehudi Menuhin, Julian Bream, John Shirley-Quirk and many more) but is usually in the form of excerpts rather than complete works. The result is that the film seems a bit perfunctory, as if it brushes off the Walton music that ought to be at its core. It is likely that the necessities of TV production, and Palmer’s own interests in pacing and structure, are responsible for this; but for whatever reason, At the Haunted End of the Day comes across as a tribute that had the potential to be more revelatory than it in fact turned out to be. It is well-made and well-researched enough to earn a (+++) rating, but it is simply not in the class of Palmer’s outstanding look at Stravinsky.

(++++) GIFTS BIG AND BEAUTIFUL

Weather: The Ultimate Book of Meteorological Events. Accord Publishing/Andrews McMeel. $40.

The Lincolns: A Scrapbook Look at Abraham and Mary. By Candace Fleming. Schwartz & Wade. $24.99.

     Books make wonderful gifts for Christmas or any other special occasion, and some books, by their design and heft, really cry out to be used for gift-giving. Weather, assembled from material by the contributors of the Weather Guide Calendar, is both gorgeous to look at and tremendously informative. It is as up-to-date as worries about climate change and possible desertification, and as aware of the past as the history of the still-inexact science of forecasting. The photos are the first things you will notice, and they are simply magnificent: the Grand Canyon’s South Rim as cloud-to-ground lightning strikes; a huge tornado over Kansas, photographed from a small plane; the illusion of three suns over northern Canada, as a polar bear walks by; clouds of all shapes and sizes; the inside of an ice cave; closeup views of the gorgeous geometry of snowflakes – these and many other photos make Weather a feast for the eyes. And it nourishes the brain, too. A timeline of major events in meteorology runs from 600 B.C. to the present. A discussion of North American storm tracks explains why some areas consistently get hit much harder than others. An article on Robert Fitzroy, captain of HMS Beagle, explains his complex relationship with Charles Darwin as well as his invention of a barometer still used today. Another writeup discusses Andrew Ellicott Douglass, an astronomer by training who invented the science of studying tree rings, now used to diagnose the effects of air and water pollution. There are essays on lightning, Earth’s auroras, winds and storms (including dust storms, hurricanes and waterspouts), plus plenty of information on rain and snow and ice and other forms of water. Weather makes a lovely gift in any season for anyone with an interest in the ways the world around us affects our everyday lives – or for someone who simply wants to marvel at some splendid photographs that capture the fascinating phenomena that surround all of us.

     The fascination of The Lincolns is of a different type. Now that a new President of the United States has been elected, many people are wondering how he will measure up against the nation’s greatest leaders – one of whom was indisputably Lincoln. But The Lincolns is more a family album than a book of political analysis. Indeed, even when it delves into politics, as it must, it generally does so from a personal angle, as when Mary Lincoln responds to someone who compares her husband’s looks unfavorably to those of another politician: “Mr. Lincoln may not be as handsome a figure…but the people are perhaps not aware that his heart is as large as his arms are long.” Mary, born Mary Todd, was not young Abraham’s first love, and there is information here on that woman, Ann Rutledge, who died (probably of typhoid) in 1835; and also on Abraham’s second love, Mary Owens – who appears in one of the many fascinating photographs that Candace Fleming includes in the book. Here you will find a Lincoln pay stub, pictures of his friends and family, official Matthew Brady photographs of the newly elected President and First Lady – and a picture of the latter’s dressmaker, a former slave who had previously made dresses for the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. There is considerable material on the Civil War, including information often omitted from traditional history books – such as the strong objections to the Emancipation Proclamation among Northern soldiers who were fighting from loyalty and patriotism and did not want to die for the freedom of blacks. But even in its pages on the war, The Lincolns focuses on the personal as much as possible, with a photo of one of Lincoln’s stovepipe hats, an anecdote about the President’s lack of appetite, a frightening dream he had near the war’s end, even Mary Lincoln’s accusation that Andrew Johnson “had some hand in” Lincoln’s assassination. The book continues through Mary’s death in 1882, touching on the couple’s children and grandchildren – and making it clear that the triumphs and tragedies of this family affected not only the nation as a whole but also, very deeply, the family members themselves. Large in size and laid out in an old-fashioned design and typeface, The Lincolns beautifully reflects the era of which Fleming writes – and also stands as a book very much worth considering in the 21^st century, as today’s families await the inauguration of the nation’s first black president in January.

(++++) WALKS ON THE WEIRD SIDE

The Eclectic Abecedarium. By Edward Gorey. Pomegranate. $9.95.

The Sopping Thursday. By Edward Gorey. Pomegranate. $14.95.

The Hapless Child. By Edward Gorey. Pomegranate. $14.95.

     The 100 or so books by Edward Gorey (1925-2000) are not for everybody, and in particular are not for the faint of heart or tender of soul. Gorey was a master of intricate pen work and of the macabre, a combination that led him to create works ranging from the whimsical (such as his animated opening for Masterpiece Theater) to the decidedly downbeat (such as any number of his books; this was his default setting). Anyone who feels overcome by the often-artificial cheer of the current holiday season will find Gorey a welcome antidote, although it does help to take him with a grain of salt or two (sometimes three).

     The Eclectic Abecedarium is somewhat atypical Gorey, being a miniature book (his first, originally published in 1983) and a comparatively benign one. It is, after all, merely the umpteenth march through the alphabet that most readers will have encountered, with tiny illustrations (originally five-eighths of an inch by one inch, here printed slightly larger) and two-line poems written by Gorey himself. This is a fairly mild introduction to Gorey for those unfamiliar with him, and it is quite enjoyable in its own right. “Pick up loose Crumbs/Upon your thumbs,” for example, shows a child standing on a chair doing just that – while the table sports a teapot nearly as big as the child himself. “There is an Eye/Up in the sky” gets closer to typical Gorey oddity, and the Eye is not shown – the picture is of someone gazing upward through the clouds. “In sorting Kelp/Be quick to help” also has an odd and typical Gorey flavor to it, as does “Be sure a Mouse/Lurks in the house.” Then there is “On any road/May sit a Toad,” the amphibian being nearly half the size of the person encountering it; and “Beware the Vine/Which can entwine,” whose illustration makes it seem that the plant is about to reach out and ensnare an unwitting victim. There’s more than a touch of Gorey’s gorier side there.

     The Sopping Thursday takes a step farther into Gorey’s world. First published in 1970, and now available with illustrations in the original size, it is a book about an oddly skewed rainy day, consisting of merely 30 images and 30 lines of text – with all the outdoor pictures being marvelously detailed in-the-rain views. An umbrella is missing; a loyal dog goes to find it; and while the dog searches, various people comment on the rain while carrying umbrellas; a mysterious all-black figure “stole Mrs. Gumbash’s umbrella”; a man tries to purchase an umbrella, eventually giving up in frustration after concluding that “none of these umbrellas will do”; and after some time the dog, Bruno, finds his master’s umbrella with a child in it, about to go down the sewer – and rescues both child and umbrella. A happy ending? Well, yes, for the umbrella; but this is a Gorey book, and at the end the child is sitting unsheltered in the pouring rain, being scolded by an adult whose head is invisible behind an umbrella, because “that was very naughty of you.” The Sopping Thursday is an odd little book, the world it portrays skewed just enough toward the strange and surreal so it is hard to decide how to react to the story.

     For the full Gorey treatment, though, aficionados – and only aficionados – will want The Hapless Child, Gorey’s long-out-of-print 1961 Dickensian story of the terrible misfortunes of a little girl. This is dark, dark material, showing Gorey at his best – or worst, depending on your point of view. The new edition presents the beautifully detailed illustrations in their original size, making it easy for readers to follow Charlotte Sophia’s tragic story, from the disappearance and presumed death of her caring and well-to-do father, to the decline and death of her harried mother, to her placement in a boarding school whose students tear apart her only doll, Hortense…after which things only get worse. Charlotte ends up enslaved to a drunken brute, pitifully making paper flowers while losing her eyesight, until eventually she gets away and meets a pathetic end when hit by a car driven by….her father, who is not dead after all but no longer recognizes the much-changed child. It is all too sad for words, but not too sad for words plus Gorey’s illustrations, which render this pseudo-Victorian tale of pathos and tragedy with grace and a sort of peculiar beauty, as well as with genuine strangeness: is that some sort of small demon climbing the wall at the end, then flying away? This really is vintage Gorey, but it is a vintage that many people will not care to sample. Those who find Gorey’s work salutary, however, will find The Hapless Child very bracing indeed – in the gloomiest possible way, of course.

(++++) VISITS HERE, THERE AND EVERYWHERE

How to Make a Cherry Pie and See the U.S.A. By Marjorie Priceman. Knopf. $16.99.

Sourpuss and Sweetie Pie. By Norton Juster. Pictures by Chris Raschka. Michael D. Capua/Scholastic. $16.95.

Doo-Wop Pop. By Roni Schotter. Illustrated by Bryan Collier. Amistad/HarperCollins. $16.99.

Looking for Miza: The True Story of the Mountain Gorilla Family Who Rescued One of Their Own. By Juliana Hatkoff, Isabella Hatkoff, Craig Hatkoff, and Dr. Paula Kahumbu. Photographs by Peter Greste. Scholastic. $16.99.

     Kids in the four-to-eight age range will have a great time taking virtual tours of many different places through these well-written and delightfully illustrated books. How to Make a Cherry Pie and See the U.S.A. is Marjorie Priceman’s wholly successful attempt to create a followup to How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World (1994). Like that earlier book, this one takes a young baker (accompanied by her dog) on a quest to obtain all the ingredients – including raw materials – necessary to make a pie. That means getting, among other things, coal, cotton, clay and granite, in a quest that starts with a perfectly lovely recipe for cherry pie and soon leads to a taxi ride from New York to “the corner of Pennsylvania and Ohio,” where coal (needed to make steel, which is used in pie pans) is mined. Then the trip continues to such places as Louisiana (cotton for pot holders), Washington state (wood for a rolling pin), Hawaii (sand to make glass for a measuring cup), and so on. There is granite (for a pastry slab) from New Hampshire (which “can usually be found between Maine and Vermont”), oil (for plastic spoons) from Texas, and so on – leading eventually to a tongue-in-cheek at-home manufacturing process that results in…well, a cherry pie, of course. The book is fun to read, fun to look at and fun to learn from – and families can try the pie recipe together.

     Speaking of families: Sourpuss and Sweetie Pie is all about what happens when one little girl, who has nice and not-so-nice sides to her personality, visits her grandparents. This too is a followup – to the 2006 Caldecott Medal book The Hello, Goodbye Window. Chris Raschka’s delightfully childlike paintings here enliven a Norton Juster story in which Nanna and Poppy are unsure which grandchild is visiting – Sourpuss or Sweetie Pie. “Most of the time I really am Sweetie Pie,” the little girl explains. “But sometimes I can be a real Sourpuss. Like when…I don’t want to do what I’m supposed to do, especially right now.” The back-and-forth of the girl’s personalities is the charm here, with “I’m going to take care of you” to Poppy on one page and “I won’t wear any of the things you put out for me, Nanna” on the next. There’s an especially dramatic two-page temper tantrum midway through the book, but it soon passes: “Sometimes you can go from Sourpuss to Sweetie Pie so quick.” The grandparents eventually put the girl(s) to bed, wondering who will be there in the morning – an open-ended conclusion that will give parents (or grandparents) a great chance to discuss behavior with their very own Sourpusses and Sweetie Pies.

     The personalities highlighted in Doo-Wop Pop are of a different sort. This is the story of a school janitor named Mr. Searle who used to be a lead singer with a doo-wop band called the Icicles. So the kids in school call him Doo-Wop Pop – and it turns out he has some things to teach them. There’s rhythmic rhyming throughout Roni Schotter’s text, written in the voice of shy Elijah Earl: “I don’t speak. I just stare at my jeans. I’m not stupid! I know what he means.” Doo-Wop Pop gets Elijah and some of the other loners, the shy kids, together after school, shows them some dance moves, and tells them to find their own music: “The very next day, we start to meet, and like Mr. Searle told us, we listen for the beat.” The kids collect sounds (pencils scribbling, basketball dribbling, paper folding, teachers scolding) and turn them into doo-wop – and those five shy kids end up performing, first in the stairwell, then on the school stage. This is a story of finding yourself, learning what’s inside, and discovering how to express it – guided by someone who has been there himself. Bryan Collins’ mural-like illustrations nicely express the students’ initial uncertainty and later bursts of joy.

     All these books are fiction, but there are real-world adventures for ages 4-8 as well. Looking for Miza, from the same Hatkoff family that produced the stories of Owen and Mzee (a hippo and tortoise that became fast friends) and Knut (a polar-bear cub), is the tale of a baby gorilla in the Democratic Republic of Congo and her remarkable rescue by her own family of great apes. Miza and her mother, Lessinjina, disappear one day while searching for food, but Miza’s father, Kabirizi – leader of the largest family of mountain gorillas in the area – successfully finds the baby, although not the mother. In simple language and with stunning photos by Peter Greste, Looking for Miza explains what happens when the baby, too young to be separated from her mother, struggles to adapt after her rescue. The story is basically a happy one – Miza survives and thrives – but as in any real-world tale, it has many loose ends, and the authors do not gloss them over. What happened to Miza and her mother remains unknown; Lessinjina has never been found. Still, the book carefully draws legitimate comparisons between the gorilla family and readers’ human ones: “Miza’s story…shows that family care and protection can help one get strong and feel secure. It shows that dedicated people can help endangered animals survive.” And that is an excellent message for young children – and their caring parents – to take with them after the book ends.

(+++) DELIGHTS FOR CERTAIN SENSES

Best Food Writing 2008. Edited by Holly Hughes. Da Capo. $15.95.

He Is…I Say: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Neil Diamond. By David Wild. Da Capo. $25.

     Defiantly for niche audiences, these books will please the senses of taste and hearing, respectively, for those of the right gustatory and auditory inclinations. Best Food Writing 2008, the ninth in an annual series that began in 2000, collects 48 essays from a wide variety of sources into eight categories: “Food Fights,” “Dining Around,” “The Restaurant Biz,” “Someone’s in the Kitchen,” “Technique,” “Stocking the Pantry,” “The Meat of the Matter,” and “Personal Tastes.” Some of the writing comes from places you would expect to be part of this sort of anthology: Food & Wine, The New Yorker, Bon Appetit, The New York Times, Gourmet, etc. But other essays are from less-expected places: Wired, Hogwash, Raleigh-Durham News & Observer. Whether these articles are the “best” of the year is, of course, arguable, but most are certainly entertaining. We have “The Art of the Biscuit” and “The Belly of the Beast”; “Butter: A Love Story” and “I Melt with You”; “Yes, Virginia, They Do Eat Guinea Pigs” and “Losing My Carnivirginity: The Diary of a Lapsed Vegetarian” and “Why Vegetarians Are Eating Meat.” There may not be something here for everyone, but there are plenty of somethings for plenty of people who enjoy both fine food and fine writing. The styles are in fact as variable as the topics. In “The Surprise Slice of My Cook’s Tour,” from The Washington Post, Jane Black writes about culinary tourists, “Even the simplest things must be off the beaten path: If it’s papa al pomodoro, the simple Tuscan bread and tomato soup, the (stale) bread had better be homemade, and, if possible, the soup should be cooked over a fire made by rubbing two sticks together.” In “Fat, Glorious Fat, Moves to the Center of the Plate,” from The New York Times, Frank Bruni writes that “bellies (most often pork, more recently lamb) are the counterculture’s LSD. Its Timothy Leary might well be David Chang, the chef at Momofuku, where steamed buns are filled with strips of pork belly. Or maybe it’s Zak Pelaccio, the chef at the tellingly named restaurant Fatty Crab. One of its best-selling dishes, called the fatty duck, takes strips of a bird not exactly known for its leanness, dusts them with cornstarch and deep-fries them.” Of course – and this is an inevitable flaw in Best Food Writing 2008 – the articles are tied to particular times and places. Restaurants change management, change menus, go out of business; book readers may find specific essays intriguing but have no way to follow up on them (the book contains only 11 recipes). And even a regional approach to a matter of national interest, such as heritage foods and “eating local,” may leave readers…err…hungering for more. Thus, “Lost Foods Reclaimed,” from The Philadelphia Inquirer, refers to Neshaminy Creek, Bridgetown Pike, Morrisville, the Wissahickon and Bucks County as if they are in readers’ back yards – which they are, for Philadelphians. Still, if these essays are not incontrovertibly the best of the year and not definitive in their subject areas for a broad audience, they are certainly creative and interesting in their own right, and their own write, as in Jason Sheehan’s “Mr. Wizard” from Denver’s alternative weekly, WestWord: “‘I’m one chemical away from making my own Twinkies,’ he added, as if this was a good thing, and then he convinced me that it was.”

     The writing is less bright and the subject more limited in He Is..I Say, David Wild’s tribute to the often-maligned musicianship of Neil Diamond. Wild, a Rolling Stone contributing editor, is well aware that Diamond is considered far from hip by many fans and critics of rock music. But Wild remains a major admirer – to such an extent that He Is…I Say borders on hagiography. “I would argue that it was Diamond’s grown-up masculinity and transparent brooding intensity that would allow Barry and Greenwich’s sublimely constructed recordings to transform him into a real, iconic star.” “Neil Diamond proved once again that he would do whatever it took to continue to grow as an artist and get his share of control in art, in business, and in life.” “If Diamond had been struggling to truly move past his Bang recordings, he won that struggle with the heavenly help of Brother Love, which brought the world the most soul-satisfying sermon yet in the gospel according to Neil.” “As Diamond’s music grew more and more introspective and searching, his audience now seemed inclined to follow anywhere he would dare to take them.” And so on – and on and on. Calling Diamond “the Jewish Elvis,” Wild positively glows over nearly everything the singer has done, with the result that the book reads more like an extended fanzine than a critical (or reasonably objective) tracing of Diamond’s art and its place in rock history. Wild uses exclusive interviews and well-researched behind-the-scenes information to construct He Is…I Say, but the book so obviously starts from a position of near-worship, and so clearly remains there throughout, that it is difficult to read as biography, as analysis, or as anything more than an outpouring of adoration. For the vast majority of readers and music fans, He Is…I Say gets a (++) rating, because if you do not share Wild’s enthusiasm for Neil Diamond, you will find this book to be very tough going indeed.

(++++) MUSICAL KID STUFF

Panda Classics: Piano Time; March Time; Dance Time. Naxos. $19.99 (3 CDs).

Panda Classics: Toon Time. Naxos. $14.99 (2 CDs).

     Here’s a really great way to get the youngest children involved in classical music – either in your family or, through gifts, in others. Naxos has put together kid-friendly packages of short tunes and entire brief pieces drawn from the company’s very extensive catalogue, giving young children a chance to hear a lot of familiar music in its original form. These are serious performances, not jazzed-up ones designed specifically for kids; that is to say, the music is not “dumbed down” in any way. In fact, the performances are simply repackagings of CDs in the existing Naxos catalogue, originally recorded between 1987 and this year. The nice thing about this arrangement is that it makes the “Panda Classics” CDs into “classical gateways” for kids: if children especially enjoy some of the short works here (a Brahms Hungarian Dance, for example) and decide they want to hear more, parents will be able to buy full Naxos CDs (say, the complete Brahms Hungarian Dances) for future gift-giving occasions.

     The three-CD set may require parents to have some familiarity with classical music in order to get children involved. Otherwise, for young ears, there will simply be some interesting piano, march and dance music and some of less interest. Parents with knowledge of the works included on the CDs will be better able to choose ones their kids will enjoy. For instance, Mozart’s “Variations on a French Song” for piano is actually variations on the tune known in English as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” while Beethoven’s “Für Elise” is a perennially popular work often taught to young piano students. The CD of marches may be even more accessible, including such super-popular tunes as Sousa’s “The Stars & Stripes Forever” and Gounod’s “Funeral March of a Marionette.” And the CD of dances will be the most…well, danceable: here are Tchaikovsky’s “Russian Dance” from The Nutcracker, a ballet that many children may already have seen, plus Khachaturian’s highly melodious waltz from his Masquerade Suite, and much more. There are two dozen “Piano Time” tracks, 22 for “March Time” and 18 for “Dance Time,” all of them complete and uncut – so parents who are not highly involved in classical music, but who know enough so they can initially introduce their children to a few familiar pieces, will have plenty of opportunities to expand both their kids’ musical interests and their own. And there is more fun for kids here than just the three-plus hours of music: the packaging includes three coloring sheets, six colored pencils with which to draw on them, and three sheets of stickers – all nice bonuses to keep small hands busy while small ears are occupied with the music.

     The “Toon Time” two-CD set is more focused and has the potential to be even more fun for families whose children enjoy classic cartoons, especially the great Warner Brothers “Looney Tunes” and Walt Disney’s wonderful 1940 film, Fantasia. Those are the sources primarily associated with the two-and-a-half hours of music here, with Fantasia taking up the entire second CD. In fact, that CD traces almost the entire film, except that instead of the movie’s abridgments of such works as Beethoven’s “Pastorale” symphony and Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite, the CD includes complete elements – such as the full second movement of the Beethoven and the entire “Waltz of the Flowers” from the Tchaikovsky. This CD is a wonderful way to re-enjoy the Disney film or to re-experience it at times when it is impractical to watch the movie itself – during short drives, for example. As for the first CD, it offers complete versions of many works popularized by the wonderful Warner Brothers animators – the pieces being in some cases longer than the six-minute cartoons themselves. So now kids can hear the entire Barber of Seville overture, the complete Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, Johann Strauss Jr.’s whole Blue Danube Waltz, and much more – as well as complete versions of pieces that really are extremely short, such as Rimsky-Korsakov’s minute-and-a-half Flight of the Bumblebee. The only thing parents need to watch out for with this CD is the possibility that kids will enjoy the music so much that they will insist parents go out and buy the cartoons in which the music is used. But of course, that would just produce another opportunity for family bonding. And what could be wrong with get-togethers built around toons featuring all these wonderful tunes?

(+++) RUSSIAN PASSIONS

Tchaikovsky: Manfred Symphony; The Voyevoda. Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vasily Petrenko. Naxos. $8.99.

Mussorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition; Night on the Bare Mountain; The Sorochinsky Fair: Introduction; Khovanshchina: Prelude; Dance of the Persian Slave Girls. Russian National Orchestra conducted by Carlo Ponti. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

     The sweep and passion of 19^th-century Russian music continue to make it irresistible to audiences and conductors alike. But its popularity comes at a price: performance expectations for the works of such composers as Tchaikovsky and Mussorgsky are very high, and even a perfectly serviceable approach that might be more than acceptable is the music of (for example) Anatol Liadov or César Cui does not quite attain top ranking in the works of more-often-played composers.

     This is true even when the works themselves are not among a composer’s best known. Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony, based on a poem by Byron that is a variant of Goethe’s Faust and that also inspired Schumann and others, has never attained the popularity of the composer’s other late symphonies (it was written between Nos. 4 and 5). It is a huge, sprawling work – at around an hour, Tchaikovsky’s longest symphony – requiring a very large orchestra and a conductor who can really pull together its episodic strands without plunging the audience into the deep depression that lurks within practically all its principal themes. This is a tall order, and Vasily Petrenko tackles it with gusto, producing a finely honed reading that nicely contrasts the work’s relatively few lighter sections with its many dark and dismal ones. Unfortunately, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, although it is a fine orchestra, does not really have the sound needed for this symphony. The work requires very lush, burnished strings playing with so much warmth that they constantly risk turning mushy (but never do). The Liverpudlians have a bright, clean sound, which means middle voices and accompaniments to the themes come through clearly, but the symphony as a whole lacks the melancholy darkness that can make it tremendously effective. This orchestral sound is by no means a failing – in other music, it would be a major asset. But in both the symphony and the tone poem The Voyevoda (in which a minor government official discovers his wife is unfaithful, orders a servant to kill her, but ends up being shot himself by mistake), the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic simply seems a little out of place. There just isn’t enough brooding intensity in the playing to give the works their full effect, even though the conductor seems to understand the music well and does his best to shape it tellingly. Petrenko is this orchestra’s principal conductor, so he does have the opportunity – if he wants it – to shape the ensemble’s sound differently; so perhaps he favors what is heard on this CD. Still, it would be nice to hear how Petrenko’s approach would work with an orchestra of richer, warmer strings – such as the Russian National Orchestra.

     The RNO, however, does not have Petrenko at the helm for its SACD of well-known Mussorgsky works. Instead, it has its own associate conductor, Carlo Ponti (eldest son of the film producer of the same name and actress Sophia Loren), and Ponti does not let this excellent orchestra soar to its very high capabilities. The RNO’s sound is simply wonderful, combining precise playing with deep-hued intensity. But Ponti’s interpretations are superficial. Pictures at an Exhibition is certainly all right, but there is nothing distinguished about it – so hint of swagger or thoughtfulness in the repeated “Promenade,” no sense of mystical quietude in “Con mortuis in lingua mortua,” no fairy-tale menace in “The Hut on Fowls’ Legs.” The miniatures that almost play themselves come off very well – such as “Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks” and, in a very different way, “The Great Gate of Kiev” – but it feels as if the RNO could handle them without Ponti being there at all. Far from imposing an interpretation, Ponti seems to avoid one. The same is true of the shorter works here: nothing snarls in “Night on the Bare Mountain”; the excerpt from The Sorochinsky Fair is pleasant and unassuming; and the same may be said of the Khovanshchina Prelude and “Dance of the Persian Slave Girls,” the latter of which lacks any sinuousness. This is a very well-played recording, and the sonic reproduction, as usual in PentaTone SACDs, is of the first quality, but the disc is sadly lacking in interpretative elegance.

(++++) YOURS FOR A BEAUTIFUL SEASON

2009 Calendars: Day-to-Day—Mind-Bending Puzzles; Anguished English; Wall—Antique Maps; Desk—CatCalendar. Pomegranate. $12.99 each (Day-to-Day); $13.99 (Wall); $14.99 (Desk).

Holiday Cards: CatTidings; Winter Trees. Pomegranate. $15 each.

     It’s that time of year: celebrate winter holidays and get ready for a restart of the calendar. And what better way to celebrate than to get calendars that will engage your eyes and mind throughout 2009? That is easily done with the offerings from Pomegranate, which each year produces a truly amazing array of intelligent, amusing, artful, focused, traditional, unusual and always high-quality calendars – with subject matter so varied that the Pomegranate line can be a bit overwhelming. What all the calendars share is very high quality: they are well researched and well made, and are sure to keep you engaged all year with whatever subject you choose.

     A couple of mind-twisting (or mind-amusing) examples from among many are Mind-Bending Puzzles and Anguished English. The first of these 365-day calendars was put together by Nathan Haselbauer, founder and president of the International High IQ Society, www.highiqsociety.org. But don’t be intimidated by all the “high IQ” stuff: this calendar is packed with puzzles to challenge your mind, not make you feel inferior. There are six different puzzle categories, so even if you don’t like verbal analogies and math (perhaps they remind you of SAT tests), you may enjoy fact questions, visual memory, or sequential or analytical reasoning. One day may show you a set of words and ask which does not belong; another may show you irregularly shaped pieces that combine to form a square, then throw in an additional piece and ask how you can form another square; still another may be an old-fashioned word problem similar to those on (yes) the SAT. Of course, you have a full day to solve each problem (a full weekend for Saturday and Sunday problems: those days share puzzles and pages); and yes, the answers are provided if you just can’t wait or want to check yourself. This calendar’s pages are especially useful for note-taking (or figuring out the problems): each has a generous amount of blank, lined space beneath its puzzle.

     Anguished English tickles the funnybone more than the mind. Richard Lederer’s perennially popular compilation of malapropisms includes errors by journalists, teachers, doctors, and many others who really should know better – how about a headline reading, “Death Causes Change”? These are real-world mistakes, too, which makes them both funnier and somehow more worrisome.

     Of course, our idea of the real world has changed dramatically over time; and if you are looking for a striking wall calendar that shows a number of beautifully rendered maps of how people used to think the world looked, you will love the gorgeous Antique Maps calendar, showcasing cartography from the British Museum. The oldest of these maps are Flemish ones from 1571, including several by Abraham Ortelius and one by Gerardus Mercator, for whom the Mercator flat-world projection is named; there is also a Mercator map from 1595. The most recent map is a Portuguese one of Africa that dates to the early 1840s. Accuracy or inaccuracy aside, these maps are true works of art, a pleasure to examine again and again for their detail, coloring and gorgeous draughtsmanship. Each one of the 12 is worth looking at for a full month based simply on its coloration and shape.

     Colors and shapes are also in the forefront of the amusing drawings of B. (for Bernard) “Hap” Kliban (1935-1990), and you really don’t have to be a cat lover to appreciate Kliban’s pictures of things that sort of look like cats but equally resemble small aliens from a planet not too different from ours. A plump cat flying thanks to itty-bitty wings? A cat walking along at the bottom of page after page, wearing four cowboy boots with spurs? A cat sitting on a park bench, feeding riotously colored birds, from flamingos to peacocks? You can find all of them in the 2009 CatCalendar, which is in spiral-bound, open-flat desktop format. Desk or engagement calendars have lost popularity as electronic organizers have gained it, but no PDA can match the solidity, the colorfulness or the wonderful illustrations of this calendar; and no PDA can let you see so much of your week at a quick glance. CatCalendar does not, however, let you see your whole week at one time, unless you are careful to avoid adorning it with Post-It notes, bills to be paid that week, etc. The reason is that this calendar splits weeks between pages – three days on the left page, four on the right, with Wednesday’s space often shortchanged to allow more room for art. The result is that CatCalendar is delightful to look at, but it may not be an ideal planning tool – at least for business purposes. How about for home, or a home office?

     Kliban’s fine and funny felines also adorn some of the holiday cards you can send to share wishes of the season and welcome people to the upcoming year. One cat in the 20-card set called CatTidings actually behaves like a real-world feline, climbing a Christmas tree to get to the star on top – while the treetop bends under the cat’s weight and the star stays just out of reach. The other cards here are more Klibanic than real-life feline: one cat is adorned with a colorful wreath; one sports huge antlers and is apparently connected to Santa’s sleigh; and one card shows two cats, one outside a big wooden crate and the other, wearing a big bow, inside. Cat lovers, of course, will especially enjoy CatTidings, but the cards are amusing enough for just about anyone.

     If you prefer something more fully from real life, though, consider Pomegranate’s extensive line of Sierra Club cards. A portion of their purchase price goes to the Sierra Club – and the cards themselves make strong arguments for preserving the beauty of the natural world. One example is the box called Winter Trees, which includes 20 cards – five each of evergreens gently coated or completely covered with snow, in settings ranging from a thick forest to a woodland’s outskirts. The pictures by Oregon photographer Dennis Frates fully capture both the beauty and the serenity of snow upon trees, giving a sense of the peace that passeth all understanding that, for many people, represents the true meaning of this winter holiday season.

(+++) PICTURE THIS, AND THAT, AND THAT

Walter Wick’s Optical Tricks. By Walter Wick. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $14.99.

The Baby-Sitters Club #4: Claudia and Mean Janine. By Ann M. Martin. Adapted and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier. Graphix/Scholastic. $8.99.

It’s Happy Bunny Ultimate Sticker Book. By Jim Benton. Scholastic. $7.99.

The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror: Dead Man’s Jest. By Matt Groening. Harper. $15.95.

The Lady and the Chocolate. By Edward Monkton. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

     It is scarcely a revelation that we live in a highly visual age – and book publishers know it. Now there are books of all types, for readers of all ages, in which the pictures are the focus. Walter Wick’s Optical Tricks, by the photographer of the I Spy book series, is now available in an attractive 10^th-anniversary edition in which the impossible objects and phantom images look every bit as good as they did when the book originally appeared in 1998. Wick is an extremely clever photographer and designer of photographic assemblages. In this book, he explains something about what is going on in the pictures: how mirrors reflect and distort objects, how the use of multiple mirrors creates scenes that feature many items that do not exist, even how an impossible triangle and an equally impossible building (the latter based on a famous M.C. Escher drawing) can apparently be created in three dimensions through clever photography. Wick reveals some secrets (how the “triangle” really looks, for instance) and leaves readers to figure others out for themselves – resulting in a treat for both eyes and brain.

     The graphic novels based on Ann M. Martin’s popular series, The Baby-Sitters Club, are visually focused in a different way. These are simplified retellings of Martin’s stories, illustrated in black and white with straightforward art that moves the action along briskly (much as in a comic book). The fourth graphic novel in this series focuses on sisters Claudia (a member of the club of the title) and Janine (a dedicated computer nerd who is studying to be a physicist). There is a very serious element at the heart of the book: the girls’ grandmother suffers a stroke, and requires multiple hospital visits and then at-home and rehabilitative care. The girls work out their differences (and they do work them out) against this background; any actual babysitting becomes something of a side issue. Middle-school girls who are unfamiliar with the Martin novels, or prefer to approach books in a more visual way, will enjoy this latest series entry.

     It’s Happy Bunny is also a series, in a sense: it’s the cynical sayings of an apparent escapee from greeting-card land, whose open and simple appearance is at odds with the nasty observations he makes. In fact, the latest entry in this series says “Now Extra Unpleasant!” on the front cover. That’s an exaggeration – it is no more unpleasant than previous Happy Bunny books – but this time, Jim Benton has created something that is almost purely visual. Left-hand pages show Happy Bunny in various poses; right-hand ones have Happy Bunny sayings (such as “I’m happy – don’t wreck it by talking”) but no illustrations. The book includes Happy Bunny stencils and stickers, plus self-adhesive words and phrases that you can use to create your own little bits of Happy Bunny awfulness. This is clever of Benton – he makes readers do the work, which is a very Happy Bunnyish approach – and the book will be fun for kids (and emotionally stunted adults) who can’t wait to put their own spin on Happy Bunnyisms.

     Speaking of emotionally stunted, there’s The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror: Dead Man’s Jest, which is a comic book made to look like a graphic novel – and which, almost in spite of itself, has some very clever elements. Although the stories mostly adhere closely to traditional Simpsons plot lines (Homer’s obsession with doughnuts, Ned Flanders’ obsession with religion, Krusty’s obsession with being evil), this book (Halloween-themed but suitable for Simpsons fans anytime) also includes clever stories tied into the personalities of singers Alice Cooper, Gene Simmons, Rob Zombie and Pat Boone (yes, that Pat Boone). Even more interestingly, it is a tribute of sorts to the wonderful E.C. Comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s: Vault of Horror, Crypt of Terror and all the rest, including war comics. Matt Groening draws actual characters from the comics in some stories, and also creates tales that parallel (with a Simpsons twist) those from the old E.C. line: “Squish Thing,” in which Homer becomes a sort of Swamp Thing and tears apart the person responsible for his transformation, and “Two Tickets to Heck,” in which Bart and Lisa find themselves trapped in E.C. sequences after going through doors with dates on them (“1950” lands Bart in a war comic, while “1952” leads to the “comic-book corruption of youth” arguments that eventually emasculated comic books and destroyed the E.C. line). You need some familiarity with comics history to pick up all the references in these stories (“squa tront” and “spa fon,” anybody?), but there is plenty of Simpsons-style fun even if you don’t have that background – and some pages that are all Simpsons-style humor (such as Bart’s “Halloween Candy Classification”).

     The humor is on a different, more adult level, and the graphics are gentler, in The Lady with the Chocolate, the latest little hardcover gift book from Edward Monkton (pen name of poet Giles Andreae). The cover simply shows a lady and a chocolate bar (which is larger than she is), and the pages are a discussion between them. The Lady argues that “the weight that you put onto my THIGHS, my WAIST and my BOTTOM is not worth the satisfaction of the eating,” but the chocolate eventually persuades her that “being EATEN is the only reason for my existence” and so she really should go ahead. Which she does – the moral being that Ladies who eat chocolate “are performing a very great and GENEROUS service indeed.” Monkton’s ultra-simple drawings are just right for this ultra-simple (and silly) story, right down to the final one showing the Lady with an angel’s halo hovering above her because she has helped the chocolate fulfill its destiny.