(++++) BOUNTEOUS BEAUTIES OF BACH

Bach: St. Matthew Passion. Rogers Covey-Crump, Evangelist; Michael George, Jesus; Emma Kirkby, soprano; Michael Chance, alto; Martyn Hill, tenor; David Thomas, bass; Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, Choir of Jesus College, Cambridge, and Brandenburg Consort conducted by Stephen Cleobury. House of Classics. $29.99 (3 CDs + DVD).

Bach: Motets. The Bach Sinfonia conducted by Daniel Abraham. Dorian Sono Luminus. $16.99.

     Bach was first and foremost a religious composer, despite the fact that in our modern, secular age, his nonreligious music is heard far more frequently. Because the organized religion on which Bach’s sacred works depend for their maximum effectiveness no longer holds as universal sway as it did in his time, it takes truly exceptional performances of his religious works as music to restore them to their preeminent position for modern listeners. Even then, they may not have the same immediate attraction as such pieces as the Brandenburg Concertos. But readings as good as Stephen Cleobury’s of the St. Matthew Passion certainly show why this work has been so universally admired since its rediscovery in the 19^th century, when Mendelssohn’s performance of parts of it returned it to prominence. Unlike 19^th-century readings and ones in the 20^th century that derived from them, Cleobury’s has the scale that the St. Matthew Passion would have had in Bach’s own time: a small group of soloists complemented by a small chorus and small, very transparent instrumental ensemble. The result is a work whose emotional intensity comes through very clearly – for example, when the chorus assumes the role of the crowd demanding the death of Jesus and the release of Barabbas. And this is also a performance in which the arias, commenting on and expanding the basic narrative taken from Matthew’s Gospel, are exceptionally effective, thanks to soloists who do not seem to be straining to adapt to the performance practices of Bach’s time. Instead, they sound as if they have absorbed those approaches to the music so thoroughly that their singing flows naturally, apparently effortlessly, the ornamentation clean and clear, the balance with the instruments carefully worked out, the overall effect one of emotional conviction mixed with absolute beauty in the delivery of arias and choruses alike. Of special note are tenor Martyn Hill and alto Michael Chance, both of whom bring extraordinary purity of tone and a very sure sense of style to all their arias. Rogers Covey-Crump handles the narration skillfully, and Michael George makes a sonorous, committed Jesus. Emma Kirkby and David Thomas are also very fine as soloists – and the chorus members enunciate clearly while doing an excellent job of transmitting the emotional meaning underpinning the familiar biblical story. Furthermore, this is one St. Matthew Passion that includes a bonus that really is a bonus: the DVD, which contains the entire 165-minute work, is an excellent supplement to the three-CD audio version, and is so sensitively and unintrusively directed that some listeners may actually prefer it. However, it is worth nothing that the St. Matthew Passion was never intended to be heard all at once – the first part (lasting about an hour) was designed to be performed before the Good Friday sermon, the balance afterwards. One oddity of this excellent performance, incidentally, has to do with what the package says about the version used. The CD box clearly states “1725 version,” which is an absurdity, since the first form of the work dates to 1727. The version usually heard, and the one performed here, was completed in 1746. Also, for English speakers, there is an element here that may prove irritating: the full text of the work is provided, but only in the original German. However, translations are readily available online, and the excellence of the playing and singing more than makes up for these packaging peculiarities. This is, from a performance perspective, an outstanding version of a magnificent work.

     The Bach Sinfonia’s motet performances are top-notch as well. Under the sure-handed direction of Daniel Abraham, the ensemble brings a smooth, pure tone to seven motets and two less-known supplementary pieces associated with two of the seven. The most extended work here is Jesu, meine Freude, BWV 227, handled with considerable emotional sensitivity. Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, BWV 225, the other extended work on the CD, is also carefully structured and convincingly delivered. The shorter works also receive exemplary treatment: Der Geist hilft unser Schwachheit auf, BWV 226; Komm, Jesu, komm, BWV 229; Fürchte dich nicht, ich bein bei dir, BWV 228; Ich lasse dich nicht, BWV anhang 159; and Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden, BWV 230. Especially interesting are two supplementary tracks included after the motets themselves. One is a chorale setting associated with BWV 226 and called Du heilige Brunst, süsser Trost. The other is a second chorale verse and aria for BWV 225, entitled Die Gottesgnad’ alleine. None of these works is outstandingly familiar, although most listeners who have heard Bach motets before will have encountered at least a couple of them. There is no particular reason to hear the motets in this order, or even to listen to the CD from start to finish – except that the overall effect of Bach’s religiosity comes through particularly strongly when a disc as well sung as this one is heard from beginning to end, giving modern listeners a chance to immerse themselves in a level of religious involvement and sensibility that most people have lost today but with which the music of Bach is so thoroughly imbued that it is no exaggeration to describe it as the core value of his entire output.

(++++) THREE FOR THE YOUNGEST

A Book of Sleep. By Il Sung Na. Knopf. $6.99.

Snow Rabbit, Spring Rabbit: A Book of Changing Seasons. By Il Sung Na. Knopf. $15.99.

Where Do Giggles Come From? By Diane Muldrow. Illustrated by Anne Kennedy. Golden Books. $3.99.

     Long before they can read, the youngest children can already start to enjoy books – if the books are written at an age-appropriate level, illustrated catchily, and filled with stories that will be meaningful to children by age one, or even earlier. Il Sung Na has a particularly good sense of how to create enjoyable books for the youngest age group. Her 2007 work, A Book of Sleep, is now available as an attractive board book with a super-wide-eyed owl on the front, and is clearly designed for bedtime (or naptime) reading. The pictures are just slightly whimsical, but not too complex for very young children, and are uniformly enjoyable. On most pages, the owl watches as other animals sleep: koalas, for example, or fish, whose nonblinking stare is duplicated by the owl keeping watch. Even when the text indicates sound (“Some make noise when they sleep,” referring to elephants), the illustrations are pleasantly restful. Parents get to show children animals that sleep standing up (horses), while moving (whales), alone (giraffes), or in groups (penguins), all of them cute and very nicely drawn. At the end of the book, the sun rises and “everyone wakes up” in a picture showing all the animals smiling (including penguins sliding down the whale’s head). But then the final page shows that one animal – the now-tired owl – sleeps when all the rest awaken; and that lets parents use the book to get young children peacefully to their own rest.

     The same author’s Snow Rabbit, Spring Rabbit includes elements of sleep, too, showing bears settling in for the winter as a snow rabbit watches. But this is a more elaborate book, using the rabbit as a silent narrative connection (much like the owl in A Book of Sleep) in a story that shows birds flying to warmer places, turtles swimming to warmer waters – but other animals staying put in the cold, including thick-coated sheep and nut-gathering squirrels. One especially lovely contrast is between the rabbit watching alligators as they “stay very still” and, on the next page, observing mice “moving fast and staying warm” as they scamper through a network of underground tunnels. And just as the sun ends the animals’ sleep in A Book of Sleep, so the coming of spring ends the story here, with the white rabbit now turned brown and sitting happily amid new-blooming flowers and fresh greenery. Parents who by this time of year have tired of winter will be especially grateful for a chance to read this pleasant story of the coming of spring to young not-yet-readers – and early readers, up to about age five, will enjoy going through it themselves.

     Early readers will also have fun with Where Do Giggles Come From? Unlike the animals in Il Sung Na’s books, which retain most of their real-world characteristics, those in Diane Muldrow’s book are really little humans, wearing clothing, taking baths and going to the beach – and having a great time, as Anne Kennedy’s simple and amusing illustrations show. The book shows a variety of “giggle times,” such as giggling in a “bouncy seat,” when upside down, when playing hide-and-seek, and when watching a parent make funny faces. There is no real story here – just a series of scenes of animal parents and animal kids having fun together in a wide variety of ways – but for the youngest children, the non-story will be enough fun to keep them looking at the book and, most likely, giggling at all the amusing things happening within it. And parents and kids alike will enjoy seeing the expressions on the animal parents’ faces – the cats playing “piggie toes” and goats chasing butterflies are especially charming, but everything here is simple, amusing fun.

(++++) WHERE THE MONEY IS

Moneymakers: The Wicked Lives and Surprising Adventures of Three Notorious Counterfeiters. By Ben Tarnoff. Penguin. $27.95.

     When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton famously replied, “That’s where the money is.” But that’s not the only place. In his brilliant comic strip, Pogo, Walt Kelly once had Howland Owl and Churchy La Femme, the turtle, get into an argument after Howland decided that the best way to make money would be to…well, make money. Howland tells Churchy that they will make money; Churchy asks how; Howland says he told Churchy already – by making it; Churchy again insists on knowing how; Howland loudly proclaims that they will make it; fisticuffs ensue; and a good time is had by all.

     But the funny pages and the quips of bank robbers belie the seriousness of “making money” if you are not authorized to do so – and also give no hint of the longstanding history of counterfeiting in the United States. That is the subject of Ben Tarnoff’s fascinating Moneymakers, which uses the lives of three notorious counterfeiters to explain the complex history of paper money in the U.S. In fact, all money in the U.S. has a history intertwined with wrongdoing. Ridged edges were developed for coins to prevent thieves from shaving plain edges just a bit, taking off some silver or gold to sell separately while still passing the coins for their full face value. And the phrase “not worth a plugged nickel” refers to thieves’ drilling a hole in a coin made from valuable metal and filling the hole with lead or something else of no value (there were plugged dimes and plugged quarters, too). But if you really want to go “where the money is,” you need to look at the many frauds perpetrated with paper money, which – after all – has no intrinsic value and is only as good as its backers say it is. Today, U.S. paper money contains numerous anti-counterfeiting elements and is backed by the “full faith and credit” of the United States (whatever that means) – the days of being able to exchange silver certificates or gold certificates for actual metal are, by law, long gone. But in the early days of the nation, things were different – very different. It was in those days that a “moneymaker” (the old word for a counterfeiter) named Owen Sullivan (c. 1720-1756) thrived. Sullivan was a kind of Robin Hood figure who “endeared himself to the populace with his playful defiance of the authorities.” He was also an adept counterfeiter, at one point getting out of jail by creating a phony banknote plate from scratch during his prison term (using materials smuggled in) and then trading the plate for his freedom. Sullivan’s work was so good that, even after he was executed in 1756, others “continued passing his notes and printing money from his plates.” And Sullivan’s life became the stuff of what today would be called tabloid journalism, with leaflets published by enterprising printers and copies of his speech on the gallows gaining some popularity. Sullivan’s seven-year career was based on the colonies printing money to cover military and other expenses – a practice already opposed by some in government but soon to become more widespread during the French and Indian War.

     Not much later was the career of David Lewis (1788-1820), another Robin Hood type – who operated in the backwoods of Pennsylvania, made spectacular jailbreaks of his own, and loudly protested the corruption of Eastern (that is, Philadelphia and New York) financial elites. Lewis operated at a time when the role of the federal government of the newly minted United States of America was very much in flux – and Tarnoff does an excellent job of interweaving the larger history of the nation with the individual stories of the “moneymakers.” While these small-time criminals were printing paper, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were arguing that the federal government could not charter a bank, “because its only powers were those specifically given by the Constitution; the states retained the rest.” But Alexander Hamilton insisted “that the federal government had the right to do whatever was necessary to govern effectively, so long as it wasn’t expressly forbidden by the Constitution.” This was one of the most important debates among the Founders, and one that continues today; and it is part of the background for the exploits of Lewis, which were publicized in such a way that “Lewis went from being an obscure criminal to a leading culprit in a counterfeiting epidemic sweeping the countryside.” Lewis was eventually hunted down, wounded by a posse, and captured alive, only to die of gangrene in jail – an ignominious end.

     In some ways the most interesting story in Moneymakers takes place later in the nation’s history. Samuel Upham (1819-1885), labeled “The Patriot” by Tarnoff, was a Philadelphia shopkeeper who sold fake Confederate bills during the Civil War, supposedly as mementoes – but the well-made bills soon found their way south, in the hands of Union soldiers, and the flood of counterfeits helped undermine Southern states’ economies. Again, Tarnoff places Upham firmly in his time, discussing such milestones as the Legal Tender Act of 1861 (which established a national paper currency, despite the reservations of Treasury Secretary Salmon Chase). Upham operated with the permission of the government when he was forging Southern currency – but that same government soon started tightening its control over Northern paper money. One instrument of that control was exceptionally corrupt: the Secret Service, revered now but reviled after its creation in July 1865 because of its illegal arrests, solicitations of bribery and distribution of the same counterfeit money it seized from moneymakers. All this is part of Tarnoff’s breezily written history, which concludes with a brief discussion of counterfeiting of U.S. money today. Interestingly, although actual counterfeiting has declined substantially in modern times, the allure of its use as a dramatic device remains. Back to Walt Kelly and Pogo: in one series of strips that was actually banned in parts of Canada and Japan, Kelly imagined then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and Cuban premier Fidel Castro conspiring to wreck the U.S. economy by producing counterfeits – not phony bills, but phony trading stamps, which were at the time a popular way for shoppers to obtain bonus merchandise after spending money at various stores. Thus transfigured, the legacy of Samuel Upham, David Lewis and Owen Sullivan entered the modern age.

(+++) LOVE AND FOOD, TWO BASICS OF LIFE

How to Love: Choosing Well at Every Stage of Life. By Gordon Livingston, M.D. Da Capo. $14.

Veganize This! From Surf & Turf to Ice-Cream Pie—200 Animal-Free Recipes for People Who Love to Eat. By Jenn Shagrin. Da Capo. $19.

     Good-natured and homily-filled, Gordon Livingston’s How to Love is designed to help people of any age connect with mates who will be truly good for them, not on a superficial level but at a much deeper one. This is an admirable goal, unfortunately undermined by Livingston’s propensity for treating clichés as if they are revelations: “The first duty of love is to listen.” “Beware of those who are sure they are right.” “What is essential is invisible to the eye.” In fact, Livingston does not always derive these statements accurately: “The paradox that pervades the lives of people with this [perfectionist] style is that an obsessive need to control leads to a loss of control. (Hence the proverb, ‘The perfect is the enemy of the good.’)” In fact, the comment has nothing to do with control. Originally made by Voltaire, it refers to inaction caused by always believing there must be something better out there and therefore being unwilling to settle for something that, while not ideal, may meet one’s needs quite well. In any case, Livingston is addicted to the obvious when not to the formulaic: “We regularly confuse pleasure with happiness and are as a consequence drawn to people and pursuits that provide us with more of the former than the latter.” “Qualities that seem so important at one stage of our lives – physical attractiveness, the promise of excitement, social status – usually do not persist indefinitely. Some traits that do endure may not be so appealing in the long run, leading to disillusionment and confusion.” Stylistic flaws aside – and there are many of them – Livingston does have some plainspoken, sensible ideas about love and relationships. The best part of his book is the middle, in which he enumerates the virtues of “People to Cherish” by discussing the importance for lasting relationships of kindness, optimism, courage, loyalty, tolerance, honesty, beauty, humor, flexibility and intelligence. It may seem strange to find “beauty” in that list, but Livingston uses the word in a particular manner: “Beauty manifests itself in many ways apart from physical appearance. …[B]eauty exists at the intersection of the two great longings that dominate our lives: love and happiness.” The occasional thoughtful and thought-provoking comment in How to Love will make the book worthwhile for many readers, even though there is a great deal of dross to be discarded in order to find the nuggets of value.

     Of course, love and happiness are not the only longings in most people’s lives – food has to be somewhere in there, too, especially for people who say straightforwardly that they love to eat. Actress and comedienne Jenn Shagrin – who is also a vegan chef – is one of those, and it is to people like herself that she addresses Veganize This! The book, at its foundation a cookbook, is peppered throughout with humor, from the folksy to the faintly profane. At one point, Shagrin says that five years before writing the book, if she had been asked what she thought she would be doing in five years, she would have imagined herself “harvesting a flourishing marijuana farm in Northern California under the code name ‘Pimpstress of Mystery.’” She titles one extended chapter “Recipes Guaranteed to Get You Laid” and explains that “walking in the front door after a long day at work to find my beloved [her wife, Jane] preparing me a special meal is enough to make both my jaw and panties drop to the floor.” Shagrin calls herself “Jean Shaggy” and offers “Shaggy Kitchen Tips” along with recipes, in the “Get You Laid” chapter, for vegan Turkish pomegranate meatball soup, freeform wild mushroom lasagne with champagne-lemon cream sauce, vegan chicken marsala masala, and many more. Among other chapters are “Satisfying the Vegan Munchies” (green garlic gumbo, cheesy sweet onion and heirloom tomato pie, vegan spicy no-tuna sushi roll, etc.) and “Get Baked” (vegan Twinkies, her best-known recipe, plus vegan Belgian waffles, garlic French toast and others). The style of Shagrin’s book is more unusual than many of the recipes, and vegans who like the writing will be its most enthusiastic audience: “My mom’s [Green Bean Casserole] was the most ultimate food-coma-inducing, comfort-filled version ever. This stuff didn’t just stick to your ribs, it stuck to your heart.” Strip out the humor-laced writing and you have a series of well-thought-out, tasty recipes that committed vegans will likely enjoy and that, in at least some cases, will appeal to non-vegans as well.

(+++) FATHERS AND OTHER TROUBLES

See What I See. By Gloria Whelan. HarperTeen. $16.99.

All You Get Is Me. By Yvonne Prinz. HarperTeen. $16.99.

     Fathers are often notable by their absence in novels for teenage girls. When they are present, as in these two books for ages 12 and up, they often turn out to be more trouble than they are worth, at least at the start. In Gloria Whelan’s See What I See, father and daughter are both artists, and daughter needs father in order to be able to go to art school. But 18-year-old Kate Tapert really does not know her father, Dalton Quinn, because Kate’s parents are divorced and her mother resumed her maiden name shortly after the split. Now Kate is about to become a scholarship student in Detroit, where her dad lives, and it is only by living with him that she can afford to attend art school. Dalton Quinn is a famous painter, and Kate is sure she can learn art from him and also learn about him, but he has not even answered her letters asking if she can stay with him while attending school. Kate heads for Detroit anyway, her father reluctantly allows him into his house, and she soon discovers that he is gravely ill and will die unless he gets a liver transplant – which has just been refused. So now, in a fairly typical teen-novel plot, Kate has to balance family issues against her own wishes and ambition, trying to figure out who she is, who she wants to be, and exactly what role she wants to play in her father’s life and have him play in hers. “I’ve given Dad my enthusiasm and now I don’t have any left,” says Kate at one point. Dalton Quinn is a prototypical self-involved artist and loner, foul-mouthed and dismissive of everyone from his daughter to the visiting nurse sent by the hospital to check on him. Slowly, slowly, daughter and father develop a bit of a relationship: “I’m amazed he’s talking to me as if I’m really going to be an artist one day. …Is he actually taking me seriously?” Kate works on her own paintings; one of them is sold – in what turns out to be a misguided attempt by her father to help her; and then one sells for real. And there are plenty of scenes involving Kate, a feral cat to which she grows attached, her father’s worsening health, and eventually his death and Kate’s decision (at her dying father’s request) to change her name to Kate Quinn. There is a modestly upbeat ending: Kate’s mother cannot let go of her resentment of her ex-husband, but Kate has come to understand him and to realize that even if she never becomes as famous as her father was, she still has a gift for art and much to bring to the world. Very little in See What I See is unusual or unexpected, but Whelan moves the book along briskly and treats family issues and typical coming-of-age stresses with enough sensitivity to please many readers.

     Yvonne Prinz does much the same with All You Get Is Me. Here too the protagonist is an artist of sorts: almost-16-year-old Aurora “Roar” Audley is a photographer. And here too her father is a problem: in this case, he is a crusader for human rights, and his preoccupations with migrant workers and the environment upend Roar’s world when her dad decides to move them out of the city that Roar loves so they can live on a farm. The move is connected with Roar’s dad’s crusade on behalf of undocumented Mexican farm workers (“in the city, my dad was a human rights lawyer, so trust me, no one’s better at getting up in your face than he is”); but to Roar, it is a huge irritation and inconvenience. The move is precipitated in part by the permanent departure of Roar’s unstable mother – a painter, like the father in See What I See – who “just up and disappeared one day” after going missing a number of times. Once Roar gets to the farm, there are numerous complicating factors in her life, including a fatal accident that becomes a cause for Roar’s father (the victim is an illegal immigrant) and a couple of friends, one of whom is a boy named Forest – to whom Roar has a typical-for-this-sort-of-novel reaction: “My pulse quickens and I think I feel the Earth move slightly.” Another friend, named Storm, creates some, well, stormy circumstances – her name is as obvious as Roar’s. The various relationships become interconnected and complicated, and Roar keeps returning to memories of her mother, and eventually reconnects with her – disturbingly, though. Just to make the point that this is a coming-of-age novel, the book comes to a climax “on the last day of my summer with Forest, which is also the eve of my birthday,” when Roar loses her virginity. And then she gets her driver’s license – and wins an important photography contest. This is quite a cascade of wish fulfillments. “You never know how a rite of passage is going to make you feel until you emerge on the other side,” says Roar, but you usually know pretty much how one is going to turn out in a teen-oriented book like All You Get Is Me. If there is very little of the unexpected here, there is at least a well-told story that is effectively pulled together at the end.

(++++) THE PLEASURES OF REDISCOVERY

Dittersdorf: Violone Concerto No. 1; Hoffmeister: Violone Concerto No. 1; Vanhal: Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra. Edicson Ruiz, double bass; Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar conducted by Christian Vásqez. Klassik aus Berlin. $18.99.

Georg Abraham Schneider: Duo for Violin and Viola, Op. 44/1; Flute Quartet, Op. 69/3; Ten Duos for Two Doubles Basses; Flute Quartet, Op. 52/3. Aline Champion and Gabriel Adorján, violins; Walter Küssner, viola; András Adorján, flute; David Adorján, cello; Klaus Stoll and Eric Ruiz, double basses. Klassik aus Berlin. $18.99.

Giorgio Federico Ghedini: Complete Piano Music, Volume 2—Sonatina in D; Puerilia; Sonata in A-flat; Fantasia; Divertimento contrappuntistico; Capriccio; Ricercare super “Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum”; Allegretto. Massimo Giuseppe Bianchi, piano. Naxos. $8.99.

     The rediscovery of obscure composers and/or of little-known music by reasonably familiar ones has tremendously widened the availability of interesting works for listeners to recorded media, if not necessarily for concertgoers. This rediscovery often turns up in unexpected places: South America unearthing forgotten Classical-era European composers, for example. This is not to say that Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Franz Anton Hoffmeister and Johann Baptist Vanhal are entirely unknown; in fact, they are reasonably famous for some of their works. But their concertos for the violone and double bass are decidedly not among them. The violone – which could indeed resemble a modern double bass, or a modern cello, or neither of the above, and confusingly came in various tunings and numbers of strings as well – had been supplanted by the modern double bass by the start of the Romantic era, but it was a very important continuo instrument and occasional star of concertos for hundreds of years until then. Edicson Ruiz and Christian Vásqez, products of Venezuela’s famous “El Sistema,” bring tremendous élan and a sure sense of style to these 18^th-century works, with Ruiz playing a four-stringed instrument that partakes of the sound of a modern double bass but uses the scordatura tuning often employed in violones to enhance their sound. There is very considerable virtuosity required in all three of these concertos, particularly the one by Vanhal, which is the only one originally written for something approximating a modern double bass. Nothing here is at the level that would later be attained by the works of famed 19^th-century double-bass virtuoso Giovanni Bottesini, but all these finely constructed, elegantly polished works show that the bassist (or violonist) was expected in the 18^th century to perform at a level just as high as those of other first-tier players.

     Unlike Dittersdorf, Hoffmeister and Vanhal, Georg Abraham Schneider (1770-1839) is an almost wholly unknown name, so the new CD of his works – in which one player is, again, Edicson Ruiz – represents a rediscovery not only of the music but also of the composer. And it is a slightly odd rediscovery, since Schneider, to the extent that he is known at all, is identified with the horn: he was one of the earliest composers for the then-new valved instrument, even combining it at times with the older natural horn and demanding considerable skill from the players of both. There is, however, none of his horn music here; instead, there are chamber works of various types, all of them poised and elegantly balanced, and harmonized in the 18^th-century manner although written in the early 19^th. The first of three violin-viola duos from Schneider’s Op. 44 treats the instruments equally and allows both players to exploit their instruments’ sonorities as well as their virtuoso capabilities. The third of the three Op. 69 flute quartets nicely blends the wind instrument with the strings and, despite its key of G minor, does not delve deeply into emotional territory, while the third from Op. 52 (in G major) is brighter and has more bounce. And the double-bass duos give the players many chances to show just how much variety of sound and how many nuances they can bring forward from their instruments. All the playing here is first-rate, and the music, if not of the first water, is always well constructed and lies quite well on the various instruments. A revival of some of Schneider’s horn music would likely be very worthwhile indeed, perhaps starting with his 1818 concerto for four horns and orchestra, which predates Schumann’s supposedly trailblazing Konzertstück for Four Horns and Orchestra by more than 30 years!

     It is not only composers of the 18^th and 19^th centuries who are worthy of rediscovery – so are some from the 20^th. Or perhaps in their case it is more a matter of discovering them for the first time. That would seem to be true of Giorgio Federico Ghedini (1892-1965). A lover of older music, Ghedini went beyond his contemporary countryman Respighi’s fascination (shown in the Ancient Airs and Dances, among other works) to transcribe pieces by Monteverdi, Frescobaldi and others, and to create works of his own based on older music but imbued with the rhythmic and harmonic conventions of his time – often handled in very personal ways. Ghedini also wrote music with significant emotional underpinnings, and often of considerable complexity. His most extended work for solo piano, the Sonata in A-flat (1922), is highly coloristic and rhythmically complex; it is a highlight of Massimo Giuseppe Bianchi’s fine performances on a new Naxos CD. And it stands in striking contrast to the Ricercare that Ghedini started writing during World War II, in 1943, and revised in 1956 – this is a spare, even dry work whose very leanness seems expressive of despair. The remaining pieces here show a composer of very considerable range, with the Puerilia of 1922 (“four little pieces based on five notes”) at one end and the considerable virtuosity of the Fantasia (1927), Divertimento contrappuntistico (1940) and Capriccio (1943) at the other. The early Sonatina (1913) and late Allegretto (1957) are the CD’s opening and closing works, respectively, and make effective bookends for a pianistic odyssey that is very much worth taking, for all that neither the works nor the man who composed them will be familiar to more than a handful of listeners.

(++++) PICTURE POWER

The Secret Box. By Barbara Lehman. Houghton Mifflin. $15.99.

Bedtime for Bear. By Brett Helquist. Harper. $16.99.

How Do Dinosaurs Play All Day? By Jane Yolen & Mark Teague. Blue Sky Press/Scholastic. $6.99.

     Top-notch children’s-book illustrators make these stories for young readers (up to about age eight) a pleasure to look at. And in the case of The Secret Box, the book is also a pleasure to decode. Caldecott Honor illustrator Barbara Lehman’s wordless story starts with a box hidden beneath the attic floorboards of a house that serves as a training academy for boys sometime in the past. The illustrations flow through the years, as the area is developed and becomes part of a bustling city – until three present-day boys find the old box and puzzle over its contents. The photos, map, postcard and trinkets inside then become keys to an adventure in which the boys discover long-abandoned, long-unused reminders of the past in the modern city – and follow a trail into a place where present and past actually meet for a time. Or is it for more than “a time”? The book is open-ended, its mystery unsolved, its sense of possibility intact – a fascinating work carried forward entirely by the quality of Lehman’s illustrations and their power to intrigue without any use of words.

     Brett Helquist, perhaps best known for his work on Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, combines words with pictures in Bedtime for Bear, and proves to have a way with both – although it is the illustrations that have more impact and greater staying power. The story is a simple one, often used in children’s books that feature anthropomorphic animals: Bear wants to have his wintertime sleep, but his friends (in this case, two raccoons) want him to come play in the snow. Bear turns down their offer, but hears them playing – and teasing him – from outside. When he angrily confronts them and demands to be allowed to sleep, he trips, then rolls down a hill in a huge bear-and-raccoon snowball – which is so much fun that he decides to stay up a little longer. So the friends play all sorts of games in the snow for a while until, as night falls, they say goodbye and Bear gets to take his winter nap at last. Helquist writes pleasantly, but it is his pictures that have the real charm here: one raccoon in a scarf, the other in a red-and-white striped hat; a full page of an astonished Bear hit by a snowball; the action view of Bear after he trips, just before he comes down in the snow; the snowman-building and snowball fight and a two-page spread of Bear with the raccoons on his shoulders – all these and more are delightful to see. And so is the cover, with a yawning Bear, in orange-spotted white pajamas, clutching his stuffed-rabbit bedtime toy.

     The How Do Dinosaurs series by Jane Yolen and Mark Teague is graced both with excellent writing by Yolen and with wonderful illustrations by Teague, but How Do Dinosaurs Play All Day? is a special visual treat, because it is, as its subtitle indicates, “A Sticker Storybook.” There are more than 70 self-adhesive stickers included, showing Teague’s rambunctious dinosaurs in all sorts of poses and with all sorts of expressions – together with some of their surroundings. The series’ basic idea – portraying children as huge (drawn more or less to scale) dinosaurs with human characteristics – is intact here. The pachycephalosaurus flicking a claw at unwanted breakfast food, with a pouty expression on its face, is a particular delight, but then so is the silvisaurus doing a handstand on a school desk (as in all these books, the dinosaurs’ proper scientific names are provided). The stickers are coded to particular pages, and the places where they should go are shown in outline form, so the book can be an easy one for new readers to use. But older kids will have fun with it, too, probably by deliberately putting the “wrong” stickers in the “wrong” places – creating their own illustrated narrative that may not be what Yolen and Teague intended, but will be plenty of fun nevertheless. Either as an introduction to this thoroughly delightful series, or as a supplement to it for kids who already know and enjoy the books, How Do Dinosaurs Play All Day? is a wonderful pictorial tour of a world that never was and never could be, but that comes delightfully alive, thanks to the quality of its pictorial portrayal.

(++++) TODAY’S MULTIFACETED COMICS

I’m Tempted to Stop Acting Randomly: A “Dilbert” Book. By Scott Adams. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Ambushed! in the Family Room: “Baby Blues” Scrapbook 26. By Rick Kirkman & Jerry Scott. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Shapes and Colors: A “Cul de Sac” Collection. By Richard Thompson. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

     One need not be a serious student of comics and cartooning to see how enormously varied the art and stories are in today’s best strips. Just look at a daily newspaper – or, okay, view a selection of comics online, although they really do lose something when displayed on a computer screen. Or pick up some collections of some of the best strips around – in book form, not on E-readers, since, again, comic strips really do look better when reproduced on paper. The latest collections of two long-running and one not-so-long-running strip confirm all three as among the very best being written and drawn today, even though each is very, very different from the others.

     I’m Tempted to Stop Acting Randomly is, believe it or not, the 35^th Dilbert collection: Scott Adams and Andrews McMeel just keep churning them out. Like other recent Dilbert books, this one is in color throughout, but that does not conceal the primitive nature of the art or the extreme stylization of the characters. At this point, in fact, Dilbert and his cohorts have become archetypes, their very simplicity of appearance (including Dilbert’s absence of a mouth) saying something about just how dehumanizing it is to work for a large corporation under the management of an unnamed incompetent whose hair forms Satan-like horns. As the Pointy-Haired Boss explains at one point to Alice in the new book, the company is going for “an egg carton vibe” in its layout. But Adams’ characters seem less breakable than they used to: they have more of an attitude, are more willing to push back at manifest corporate idiocy, more willing to say things directly to management rather than behind managers’ backs. And the point? It makes no difference what they say or to whom – things go on as they always have. What keeps this from being depressing and makes it funny is how neatly Adams skewers the whole corporate world. Dogbert, originally focused on world domination, is now satisfied with corporate governance, appearing frequently as a CEO who, for example, tells a senator that although bribing him would be illegal, he “hired your wife as a consultant despite the fact that she thinks ‘present value’ is some sort of gift card.” Dogbert also orders, “Assemble the illuminati” – a huge-brained human and an alien – who work together to create “another economic bubble to drive up our stock value.” Meanwhile, back in the trenches (or is that tranches?) of the company, Wally rises to new heights of work avoidance; Dilbert’s competence continues to cause him frustration and get him into trouble; Alice’s abilities in engineering give her less satisfaction than punching out all sorts of unpleasant people; Asok gets put in charge of “pandemic emergency planning” and starts wondering whether creating a pandemic is a route to a bonus; and there are the usual one-time characters – the industry-standards committee meeting in mud-covered Elbonia, the woman who judges potential mates based on their cell-phone apps, the job applicant whose huge family always needs his attention (so he has no time to work), the angry demon who is the firm’s new director of marketing, and many more. The point of all this? None of it matters: the company continues to function, the workers keep doing their jobs, the world keeps turning, and somehow all of it is both pointed and often hilarious. Quite an accomplishment.

     The accomplishments of Baby Blues come in a more-typical realm for comic strips: the family unit. But what writer Jerry Scott and artist Rick Kirkman do with the modern family is quite different from what was done in the days of, say, Maggie and Jiggs of the Bringing Up Father strip, which started in 1913 and ran until 2000. The MacPhersons have been coping with family life since 1990 – Ambushed! in the Family Room is the 26^th collection of the strip – and watching things get more complicated from the early strips, when Zoe had just been born to Darryl and Wanda, through the birth of Hammie, and more recently when baby Wren was added to the mix. It’s quite a mix, as in “mixed-up.” The wonderful thing about Baby Blues is that almost everything in it is immediately recognizable as real-world happenings – exaggerated ever so slightly. Everyone has experienced the breakage of a 53-week-old appliance with a one-year warranty – but when the MacPhersons have to cope with their just-broken microwave oven, the very next strip has their refrigerator start coming apart, and the one after that features the dishwasher leaking; and when everything is fixed, several strips later, the family is left with big bills and Darryl’s telling comment, “Funny how difficult it is to own stuff that makes our lives easier.” The writing by Scott (who also writes Zits, another top-notch family-focused strip) has become more pointed over time, while Kirkman has started taking more chances with his art and even making it more surreal (although not to the extent of what Jim Borgman does in Zits). In the new collection, one panel shows “Wren Scissorhands” (with child-safe scissors, of course); one beach scene has Darryl unaware that he is about to be “devoured” by the huge sand dinosaur that Hammie has been building; and one especially clever panel shows Wanda’s self-image as a robot vacuum cleaner and cook, with faucets for breasts. Many strips focus on the interactions among the very well-defined family members – Baby Blues is first-rate character comedy – while others are gathered into sequences that are even funnier as they go along. There is, for example, “When Life Attacks!” – in which, at one point, Hammie says, “I know we’re in a hurry, but shouldn’t you have put Wren in the car before we left?” and, in another strip, Zoe says as she drops off to sleep, “Remind me to tell Mom that I volunteered her to make three cakes for tomorrow’s class party.” Or there are the perfectly illustrated “Moments of Household Terror,” such as “stepping on something squishy in the dark” and “finding a capless marker in the dryer.” Add in the fact that, in this collection, Wren starts to walk and talk, and you have all the ingredients for a lusciously indulgent helping of slightly-too-close-to-home humor – a, shall we say, “happy meal,” which Wanda will probably burn.

     Richard Thompson’s Cul de Sac has not been around nearly as long as Dilbert or Baby Blues: the new collection, Shapes and Colors, is only the strip’s fourth. But Thompson has already established himself as one of the most offbeat thinkers and best artists among today’s cartoonists. Like Baby Blues, Thompson’s strip centers on family life, but in very different ways. The central character, four-year-old Alice Otterloop (as in “outer loop,” part of the Beltway ringing Washington, D.C., in whose lookalike suburbs Alice and her family live), attends preschool and has age-appropriate worries, fantasies and academic (or pre-academic) abilities. But she has a distinctive thought pattern that, apparently effortlessly, combines genuine little-kid unworldliness with some of the grown-up concerns and expressions that made the original Peanuts strips (circa 1950) so wonderful. Thompson is surely aware of this bit of comic-strip history, since Cul de Sac is filled with tributes to earlier comics, notably Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, which is here reflected in Little Neuro, the favorite comic of Alice’s eight-year-old brother, Petey. In fact, Petey threatens to upstage Alice as the central character of Cul de Sac, because his world’s genuine oddity is so interesting: his evil-genius-in-training acquaintance, Ernesto, who may be imaginary; his out-of-body oboe-playing experience; his tendency to try to chew his own arm off when he gets upset; his preoccupation with his standing on the world list of picky eaters; his Toad Zombies graphic novel, which never goes anywhere; and those Little Neuro strips, whose central character also never goes anywhere. Petey’s matter-of-fact way of upsetting Alice’s world – for example, by telling her that their parents have real names, Madeline and Peter – is one key to both kids’ characters. Alice’s is further illuminated by the gaggle of friends with whom she interacts: huge-headed Kevin, vaguely unsettling Dill (who has surprising control over his 10 hairs), ponytailed Nara, scrapbook-weary Marcus (whose mom collects absolutely everything about him and eventually creates a Marcus blog where fans can buy merchandise), and others. Each character has an individual personality and is drawn in a slightly different style, almost as if all the children wandered in from different planets for a conclave – which, when you think of it, is a pretty good portrayal of kids’ social interaction. Add in the social commentary of houses that look exactly alike, each with “a small, unique feature in a feeble attempt to differentiate it” (in the words of marimba-playing Viola, who calls Alice’s brother “Petey Potterpoop”), plus unique takes on everything from shoe shopping to tag (each four-year-old has to yell the name of an artisanal cheese so the person who is “it” cannot tag him or her), and you have a remarkable mixture of erudition and laugh-out-loud humor, all wrapped in a subtle parody (sometimes not so subtle) of suburban life. Cul de Sac is definitely a comic for the 21^st century.

(+++) PROJECT PLANNING

The Shadow Project. By Herbie Brennan. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $6.99.

The Amanda Project. By Melissa Kantor. HarperTeen. $8.99.

Magic Tree House #45: A Crazy Day with Cobras. By Mary Pope Osborne. Illustrated by Sal Murdocca. Random House. $12.99.

Magic Tree House Research Guide (#23): Snakes and Other Reptiles. By Mary Pope Osborne and Natalie Pope Boyce. Illustrated by Sal Murdocca. Random House. $4.99.

     Somehow the word “project” conveys tones of mystery, at least in teen-oriented fiction. The Shadow Project makes those tones explicit in its title, so it is clear from the start that there is something dark…indeed, shadowy…going on. In fact, Herbie Brennan’s fast-paced book is predictable throughout, not just in its title. In typical almost-like-a-movie formulaic plotting and writing, it tells the story of a thief who is forced into cooperating with the government after he inadvertently breaks into a house that proves to be the headquarters of a secret government operation targeting international terrorism. This sort of thing – as the 17^th-century proverb says in a sentiment that is actually much older, “Set a thief to catch a thief” – has been fodder for adventure entertainment for a long, long time. And the idea of a secret, benevolent government organization that somehow functions entirely without anyone discovering it is an old one, too; rather outdated, in fact. Of course, if this were a straightforward bad-guy-joins-good-group novel, it wouldn’t be particularly entertaining, nor would it be in accord with modern suspicions of government or the increasing fondness for twists and turns in plots. So we know from the start that Danny Lipman, the book’s protagonist, is basically a good guy, despite his thievery; and we suspect from the start of his involvement with the Shadow Project that all is not what it initially seems to be with the supposed good guys. In fact, the whole plot takes a thoroughly unbelievable supernatural twist as it goes on, as explained by one of the characters: “‘Roland may be nominal head of the operation, but that’s just because it’s on British soil. It’s actually a CIA project, so the real power is Carradine, however much he keeps a low profile. Since he’s CIA, he follows the current party line: [the terrorist group] Sword of Wrath’s the big enemy, War on Terror, all that rot. Unfortunately for the rest of us, Sword of Wrath’s not the enemy. …[It is] a symptom, not the cause. …[The cause is] war in heaven. …Sometimes the hidden powers manifest of their own accord. …But sometimes particularly evil people tap into the powers quite deliberately to further their own ends.’” Uh…yeah, right. Readers who do not find this unintentionally funny will enjoy being swept further into Brennan’s plot and Danny’s confrontation with the baddies: “They were like something out of the Arabian Nights: muscular, bearded men in turbans, wielding scimitars.” Brennan does a good enough job of pulling the novel together, and throws in a note afterwards explaining that “some of the most incredible aspects of the story are based on fact.” But “based on fact” is a slippery concept – The Shadow Project touches on aspects of reality, but quite lightly. It is certainly fun to read for those willing to suspend a lot of disbelief – and it is only the first book in a series, with the second to be called The Doomsday Box.

     The Amanda Project is also the start of a series, and it too purports to connect with reality, although in a different way. The book itself is coyly stated to be by “Amanda Valentino and Melissa Kantor,” thus pulling the fictional title character and real author into the same world, more or less. And the book is part of an interactive “project” to which readers themselves can contribute through online participation – they can even make themselves into characters in Amanda’s story. The story itself is a simple enough mystery: ninth-grader Amanda Valentino arrives at Endeavor High as a freshman; befriends Callie Leary, Hal Bennett and Nia Rivera, without telling any of them about her relationship with the others; proves herself an intriguing and mysterious character, with premonitions about the future and ambiguous references to things that might happen or meanings that might lie within meanings; and then vanishes without a trace on the Ides of March. This leaves Callie, Hal and Nia to try to figure out – together – who or what Amanda is or was, using clues she has left them and others that keep appearing, possibly from Amanda herself. So there is a hint of the paranormal here, too; but if The Shadow Project has an action-adventure approach that will appeal mainly to boys, The Amanda Project is clearly intended more for girls, with its emphasis on cooperative problem-solving and the importance of friendship and working together. The setup is reasonably intriguing, but there is nothing especially interesting about Amanda, despite the characters’ repeatedly contending that yes, there is. Amanda is given to such lines as, “‘Really, everything’s beautiful…if you look at it the right way.’” This is what passes for a profound observation here. What passes for mystery is this sort of comment from Amanda: “‘Like Beatrix (Beatrice, Bellatrix), we warriors fall, but so too do we rise.’” There is in fact a certain amount of intellectual fun in Kantor’s puzzles, and the emphasis on connecting characters who are otherwise very different sends a message about friendship that reader-participants will enjoy. The Amanda Project is the first of a projected eight-book series; the second will be called Revealed, although it is a sure bet that it will not reveal too much.

     The Magic Tree House series may not be labeled a project, but it is one – a very longstanding one. In presentation, it has become more interesting in recent years as Random House has published nonfiction books to accompany the fictional adventures of the brother-and-sister team of Jack and Annie. Those adventures themselves, though, are wearing a bit thin – the whole idea of a tree house connected to Merlin that whisks the daring duo all over the place in time and space seems even sillier now than it did when the series began in 1992. But middle-school students unfamiliar with the series are still likely to enjoy it, although they may well outgrow it fairly quickly. A Crazy Day with Cobras begins a four-book sequence in which Jack and Annie need to find four specific objects that will allow them to reverse a spell that has accidentally turned Merlin’s penguin, Penny, to stone. Don’t even think about asking what Merlin is doing with a penguin (the answer lies in earlier books, but is beside the point of the newest one); the setup is just an excuse for Jack and Annie to have adventures in the Mogul Empire of India, 400 years in the past. To help them out, they are given a potion to make them small; again, don’t even think about asking what good that can possibly be (Mary Pope Osborne does, of course, make sure it gets used, however improbably). The book revolves around Shah Jahãn, builder of the Taj Mahal, and has Jack and Annie posing as ambassadors in order to gain access, they hope, to an emerald cut in the shape of a rose. “Far-fetched” does not begin to describe the adventure, in which the characters become involved not only with cobras but also with elephants. But as with all the Magic Tree House books, there is a welcome smattering of historical knowledge here, and of course the guaranteed happy ending after Jack and Annie confront the usual not-too-scary perils that inevitably await them. As for Snakes and Other Reptiles, like the other research guides written by Osborne in collaboration with her sister, Natalie Pope Boyce, it contains a fair amount of solid information, but also some questionable material. For example, it describes reptiles with the outmoded term “cold-blooded,” although scientists now call them “ectothermic,” meaning they obtain body heat from outside sources – while mammals, here referred to as “warm-blooded,” are “endothermic,” meaning they generate heat internally. The scientific words are not too difficult to learn and are much more accurate; but at least the authors point out that the “cold-blooded” term “doesn’t mean that their blood is cold.” Most of the book is a once-over-lightly tour of the reptile world, sprinkled with good photos and some nicely chosen facts – for instance, that crocodiles’ jaws are super-powerful, but only when biting down: “If you put a rubber band around a small croc’s jaws, it can’t even open its mouth.” Although A Crazy Day with Cobras is not really focused on herpetological matters, young readers who enjoy the snake-related parts of the story and want to learn more about these fascinating animals will find Snakes and Other Reptiles a good place to start. And as usual in these guides (of which this is the 23^rd, although that number does not appear in the title), the authors provide reasonable suggestions for further, more in-depth research.

(+++) SUPER-POWERED SILLINESS

DC Super-Pets: The Fastest Pet on Earth; Heroes of the High Seas; Midway Monkey Madness; Pooches of Power; Royal Rodent Rescue; Super Hero Splash Down. Illustrated by Art Baltazar. Written by J.E. Bright (Fastest; Heroes); Sarah Hines Stephens (Midway; Pooches); John Sazaklis (Royal); Jane Mason (Splash). Picture Window Books. $4.95 each.

Superman: Superman versus Mongul. By Michael Teitelbaum. Pictures by MADA Design, Inc. Harper. $3.99.

Transformers: Hunt for the Decepticons—Prime Target. Adapted by Susan Korman. Illustrated by MADA Design, Inc. HarperFestival. $3.99.

     Notch up the inherent absurdity of DC Comics’ superheroes a bit, turn traditional comic-book writing into chapter-book form, and make the whole arrangement adorable, and you have the basic idea of the DC Super-Pets series, roughly for ages 6-8. The idea is sort of sweet: imagine super-pets that superheroes might have, and put a cartoon of each superhero on the back of each book – with the speech balloon, “Aw yeah, PETS!” Each book includes a multi-chapter (but very simply written) adventure in which a hero’s pet successfully outwits a villainous critter. As usual in DC plotting, the bad guys are bad because they are bad; there isn’t much thought given to motivation here (this is why Marvel was able to carve out a niche years ago by introducing “superheroes with super problems” – they actually spent some time thinking). There are some bad joke at the end of each book, and pictures of all the super good pets and super baddies, and (in a slight bow to education) a short list of words used in each book and their meanings. Not included in the word lists are “BOING!” and “SHHIVVERR!” and “GROOARR!” and other exclamations that appear very frequently in the stories, usually in bright colors and larger type than the narrative (and yes, in all caps). The stories themselves are simple and enjoyable enough: a kangaroo (sorry, “kanga”) outraces and outthinks a cheetah to protect a rare golden tortoise; good pets Topo, Ark and Storm prevent the sinking of Atlantis by manta rays Misty and Sneezers; Beppo the Super-Monkey proves more than a match for Gorilla Grodd; and so on. The interchangeable writers follow the books’ formula with apparent ease, and the fact that all the illustrations are done by a single artist, Art Baltazar, gives the series a unified look. The whole setup is actually rather cute – cutest of all is the book pitting Ace the Bat-Hound and Krypto the Super-Dog against the Bad News Birds: Waddles, Griff and Artie Puffin. The threats and adventures are mild, the writing is easy to follow, and the illustrations are quite colorful – kids who enjoy any of these books will likely want them all.

     For even younger readers, or ones not yet interested in chapter books, there is also plenty of superhero action available – using the original characters, whether from DC or elsewhere. Superman versus Morgul is a Level 2 book in the “I Can Read!” series, featuring a typical plot: alien aboard a planet-size warship travels through space to conquer Earth because…well, just because. Superman fights the alien, wins, destroys the ship’s engines, then hurls it out of the solar system (although the craft certainly does not look planet-size – small-asteroid-size, maybe). The bright and stylized illustrations are right out of DC Comics in its current “chiseled” phase. And for kids who are more interested in DreamWorks’ Transformers franchise than in DC’s heroes, there is Prime Target, which features the evil Megatron tricking the good Optimus Prime into a magnetic trap that prevents the Transformer from, err, transforming, leading to a battle that is not between robots but between a bad robot and a good, well, truck. Kids familiar with the Transformers will know just how this one is going to turn out, just as kids who know DC superheroes will be unsurprised by Superman’s latest triumph. But surprises are not the point of these simple, illustration-heavy stories – the idea is to use young readers’ familiarity with and enjoyment of the characters to pull them into a much wider world than the superheroes live in: the world of reading. And pretty much anything that does that is worth considering – if your children happen to be fans of these characters, then the books that encourage real-world kids to do more reading really are just super.

(++++) STRING FLINGS

Mozart: Violin Concertos Nos. 1-5; Adagio for Violin and Orchestra, K. 261; Rondo for Violin and Orchestra, K. 269; Sinfonia concertante for Violin, Viola and Orchestra, K. 364; Rondo for Violin and Orchestra, K. 373; Concertone for Two Violins and Orchestra, K. 190. Julia Fischer, violin; Gordan Nikolić, viola and second solo violin; Netherlands Chamber Orchestra conducted by Yakov Kreizberg. PentaTone. $39.99 (3 SACDs + DVD)

Charlie Siem: Works by Wieniawski, Kreisler, Bazzini, Paganini, Waxman, Sarasate and Ponce. Charlie Siem, violin; Caroline Jaya-Ratnam, piano. Warner. $18.99.

     Poise, elegance, fine technique, a light touch and genuine enjoyment of the music are all characteristics of a very impressive new recording of most of Mozart’s music for solo violin and orchestra. The focus is on Julia Fischer, but in fact she does a fine job of holding back from any temptation to overwhelm the music through unseemly displays of inappropriate virtuosity: she plays the Mozart concertos with light, bright tone, certainly revels in the cadenzas and the opportunities for significant virtuoso display (especially in No. 5), but is very pleasantly restrained when it comes to most of the music. The result is that the concertos shine as collaborative efforts – and Fischer’s light touch is mirrored by Yakov Kreizberg and the Netherland Chamber Orchestra in accompaniments that are beautifully balanced, very cleanly played and filled with delicacy. The first two concertos are a trifle less successful than the last three – there is less to them, and Fischer sounds as if she is holding back a bit at times – but really, those are quibbles. Concerto No. 5, the “Turkish” and the most elaborate of the group, is best of all, sounding like a fully virtuosic work without seeming in the slightest bit Romantic or inappropriately “big.” But this concerto is no better than the wonderful Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364, in which Fischer’s violin and Gordan Nikolić’s viola intertwine so sinuously and with such attentiveness, each to the other, that the work gains even greater stature than it already has – it sounds absolutely right in its mixture of higher and lower solo-instrument sounds (violin and viola being separated, after all, by only a fifth in their tuning). The darker hues of the second movement are especially fine, with the viola flowering in its comfortable range and the violin, far from being held in check, showing just how expressive it can be without pyrotechnics. Also quite wonderful is the Concertone, K. 190, in which Fischer and Nikolić share the spotlight with Hans Meyer’s solo oboe and Herre Jan Stegenga’s solo cello. The Concertone sounds like carefully expanded chamber music, with all the soloists assuming prominence from time to time and with the total ensemble – including Kreizberg’s forces – performing with chamber-music delicacy and excellent interplay among the musicians. These are all familiar works, to a greater or lesser degree, but they have rarely sounded as transparent and as well balanced as they do here. The bonus Adagio and two rondos are also very well performed, with Fischer seeming to have the most fun with the ebullient Rondo in B-flat, K. 269. And there is another bonus in this exceptionally clear-sounding SACD set: a DVD called “Impressions of Various Recording Sessions” that includes slightly different readings of two movements of the Violin Concerto No. 2 and the first movement of the Sinfonia Concertante. Much of the time, DVDs of classical performances can be more distracting than enjoyable, since they do not duplicate the concert experience and really add to the music only one director’s ideas of what a listener-cum-viewer should pay attention to at any given time. But because this DVD accompanies nonvisual renditions of the music, it actually provides some insight into the way the full performances on the three SACDs were developed, how the works were rehearsed, and how the exceptionally fine ensemble between soloists and chamber orchestra came to be. All in all, this is quite a lovely set in every way – although it is a bit hard to understand why the first SACD includes Concertos Nos. 1, 2 and 5 rather than Nos. 1-3 (the timing of the discs would easily have allowed the concertos to be presented in order).

     It is not hard at all to understand why the works on the new CD featuring Charlie Siem are there: they are pure examples of virtuosic display, with little musical “meat” but plenty of sizzle – designed to show off any violinist’s flair with a bow. Siem certainly has that, although the unrelieved shallowness of his repertoire here leaves the CD with a (+++) rating. The disc is fun to listen to, at least once, but is not the sort of recording to which a listener is likely to return again and again: most of the works are quite familiar, and the CD as a whole sounds a bit like a series of unending encores. Franz Waxman’s 11-minute Carmen Fantasie is the longest work here and, in its own way, the most substantial, with the other reasonably extended pieces being Fritz Kreisler’s Viennese Rhapsodic Fantasietta (eight minutes) and Paganini’s variations on an aria from Paisiello’s La molinara (seven-and-a-half). Length, of course, is no indicator of profundity, but none of the works here allows Siem to show off more than a slick, fairly superficial technique (if a very skillfully deployed one). With cooperative accompaniment by Caroline Jaya-Ratnam – who never tries to pull the focus away from Siem – the CD also offers Kreisler’s arrangement of a Wieniawski Caprice; an interesting work called La Ronde des lutins (“Dance of the Goblins”) by Antonio Bazzini (1818-1897); two Paganini Caprices from Op. 1 (Nos. 1 and 5); Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen; and Estrellita by Manuel Ponce (1882-1948). The whole CD lasts less than 50 minutes, so it is scarcely a good value, especially for this repertoire. But Siem is certainly a highly accomplished violin virtuoso, and listening to his technique is a pleasure. The question of whether he can add thoughtfulness to technical ability will have to be answered by another recording.

(++++) FOR BETTER AND BETTER

Something Old, Something New: “For Better or For Worse” 1^st Treasury. By Lynn Johnston. Andrews McMeel. $25.99.

     This is the first, but not the first, collection of early cartoons by Lynn Johnston; and it is a complicated saga that Johnston herself feels obligated to explain at the start of the book and to try to clarify throughout. Johnston ended For Better or For Worse in 2008, but instead of simply dropping the strip – and to the annoyance of some younger cartoonists, who were hoping to take over Johnston’s slot amid the fast-shrinking availability of newspaper space – Johnston then proceeded to begin the strip all over again. And although many papers dropped the “starting over” strips, many did not. Furthermore, Johnston did not merely rerun or redraw her early panels. She polished them, improved the sometimes clumsy art that she created in the strip’s early years (1979-80), and added entirely new sequences to take the story in somewhat different directions or flesh out some characters or plot points to which she had paid scant attention in the original originals. To do that, she improved some of the early drawings – and attempted to re-create an improved version of her original style (which was quite different from her later, much more refined style), so that newly inserted strips would have both continuity and artistic complementarity with the redrawn originals.

     This was a very complex undertaking, and not a wholly successful one on all levels, since some of the early strips really were out of keeping with the much later ones, and in returning to her roots, Johnston also removed much of the depth and soap-opera elements that made For Better or For Worse such a big success for so many years. On the other hand, the early strips were frequently funnier than the later ones, albeit more superficial, and not all readers necessarily enjoyed the complex, interwoven and often rather dour plot elements of the later strips, which followed aging characters of multiple generations through life, love, disease, old age and death. Something Old, Something New, a handsome hardcover book, gives Johnston’s fans – including ones whose newspapers decided not to carry the “restarted” strips – a chance to judge for themselves whether the time-machine experiment was, as a whole, successful or not. And it includes a fair amount of commentary by Johnston, who (among other things) reveals which strips are based on real-life incidents (for example, ones about buying life insurance while young and about what different characteristics a woman might look for if she ever remarried after her husband’s death). Johnston knows the strips in the book do not flow entirely naturally: at one point, she says “you’re seeing this collection – warts and all!” But on the whole, they do flow reasonably well; and some of Johnston’s insights into her work are genuinely enjoyable, as when she comments that “you sometimes resort to an old gag” to meet a deadline, then talks about “the fun of drawing the third panel” in a four-panel strip in which husband John gets a shock while trying to fix a plugged-in toaster.

     There are also some very serious thoughts about parenting here, not only in the strips but also in Johnston’s remarks about them. In one especially sensitive Sunday strip, her surrogate comic-strip self finally loses it when little Elizabeth and Michael misbehave and don’t listen – there is yelling, there is anger, and afterwards there is regretful gazing at beautiful sleeping children, as a single tear rolls down the comic-strip mom’s face and she wonders, “How did you end up with a mother like me?” Beneath the strip, Johnston explains that the drawing was “an earnest plea for forgiveness,” and marvels at “children’s ability to see the best in you – even when you’re at your worst.” It is this sort of insight, built into the strip and expanded, in this collection, through Johnston’s comments on her early work, that makes For Better or For Worse special – and that ultimately makes Something Old, Something New quite a wonderful book, for all its occasional imperfections of continuity and style. The redrawn strips are by no means perfect, and Johnston’s decision to start again instead of making way for younger cartoonists who have been struggling to find their own voices and newspaper placements is certainly questionable, if understandable. But taken on its own terms, this sensitive, family-focused comic strip continues to charm, inform and entertain on a very high level indeed. In the final analysis, Something Old, Something New is simply a collection in which Johnston in her current form reexamines Johnston in her earlier form, letting readers see what has changed and what has remained the same – for better or for worse.

(+++) MIDDLE-SCHOOL MAGICS

B Magical #1: The Missing Magic; #2: The Trouble with Secrets. By Lexi Connor. Scholastic. $5.99 each.

Dear Dumb Diary #11: Okay, So Maybe I Do Have Superpowers. By Jim Benton. Scholastic. $5.99.

     Simple but clever stories for middle-school girls, both the B Magical and Dear Dumb Diary series are quick reads that are fun without being too complex, their problems at the surface and their solutions enjoyable. The B Magical series was originally published as Spelling B, a cleverer title on several levels, since 11-year-old Beatrix is a witch (from a whole family of witches), and her particular skill lies in casting spells by spelling words (a rarity among witches, who must usually create rhymes in order to make magic). The Missing Magic starts the series with B determined to develop her powers – she is a late bloomer, magically speaking – and includes her discovery of her abilities, which Lexi Connor handles amusingly: B is practicing for a school spelling bee when she notices that words she spells have repercussions in real life (words such as “chaos” and “desert”). By the time B actually has to participate in the spelling bee, she discovers that she needs to lose on purpose, because the alternative is to spell the word “explosion.” B does not really have much of a personality, but one of the other characters does: a hamster named Mozart, who is able to speak under B’s spells and who turns out to talk nonstop – complaining about pretty much everything and everybody. The second book, The Trouble with Secrets, rings some magical changes on a typical middle-school plot, with B’s friend George willing, he says, to tell B anything, while B knows she must not reveal that she is a witch, so she cannot make the same promise to him. There is also a run-in with a typical middle-school bully, Jason (who also plays a villainous role in the first book), and there is a well-done scene in which a carnival witch curses George for not believing that her powers are real, which they clearly are not (clearly to B, that is). This woman, who calls herself Enchantress Le Fay, is the real villain of the book, disappointing even Jason, who thought he would learn magic from her but learns only how to fleece the public. It turns out to be up to B to expose the phony witch, which B does very neatly – but at the book’s very end, she makes a well-intentioned error that will change her relationship with George just in time for the next book, The Runaway Spell.

     There is no wayward magic at Mackerel Middle School, but there are always plenty of antics for Jamie Kelly to describe in her inimitable style. The 11^th entry in the Dear Dumb Diary series is not quite at the level of Jim Benton’s best entries: its threads are woven together rather loosely, and the underlying idea (that Jamie received the superpower of understanding how boys think when she was bitten by a baby) seems too far out for even the sometimes-flighty Jamie to believe. As a result, the best elements of this story – which are often the best elements even when the story is better than it is this time – are the drawings that Jamie (well, Benton) sprinkles throughout the text. There is one hilarious one of Jamie and her attractive Aunt Carol running away from a slobbering monster, with Jamie’s caption explaining that it is important to “be the fastest person in your crowd AND be able to not look delicious whenever necessary.” There is one of Jamie imagining she is among the “tremendously talented people that make great commercials for awful movies,” with posters for “The Day They Invented Prunes” and “The Story Nobody Understood.” There is one in which dying ants act out a play in mock-Shakespearian language (the whole dying-ants plot, though, isn’t very good until its climax, which is hilarious). And there is a truly hysterical drawing to illustrate the funniest part of the book, which is about Jamie’s dog and unfortunately is irrelevant to the plot: “Once, there was a huge wart. Either it ate something terrible, or it contracted some kind of horrible illness, and a beagle broke out on its skin and began to grow. When it achieved maximum grossness, the beagle ate the wart and lived on by itself.” Unfortunately, Benton cannot keep everything in the book at this level of absurdity, but at least he finally has Jamie admit that she kind of likes the too-perfect Angeline, who has been her imagined nemesis through the first 10 books for no good reason at all (and Jamie still dislikes her a little bit, but now she knows it is for no good reason). Fans of Dear Dumb Diary will enjoy Okay, So Maybe I Do Have Superpowers, even though Benton is not at the top of his game here – but anyone unfamiliar with the series will do better starting with some of the earlier titles.

(+++) TEACHERS WHO ARE MORE THAN THEY SEEM TO BE

The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman. By Ben H. Winters. Harper. $16.99.

My Weird School Daze #11: Mr. Tony Is Full of Baloney! By Dan Gutman. Pictures by Jim Paillot. Harper. $3.99.

     What exactly are teachers when they are not, you know, teaching? This is a recurring question for their students, and a recurring topic for books, movies and comic strips. There must be something more to teachers than all those boring lessons and homework that represent the usual interface between them and their students, right? Both Ben H. Winters and Dan Gutman have fun with this perennial question, although in different ways and with the intention of reaching readers of different ages. Winters’ The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman, for ages 8-12, is about a teacher so determinedly ordinary that she is practically invisible. Ms. Finkleman is not a really bad music teacher, but neither is she really good; she dresses conservatively, but not to a great enough degree to draw attention to herself. Clearly there must be a mystery here – clearly, that is, to Bethesda Fielding, who just happens to have a social-studies assignment to solve a mystery in her own life. Bethesda focuses on Ms. Finkleman, and soon learns that the ordinary teacher has a tattoo that appears to be of Ozzy Osbourne. Aha! A connection with rock music! And Bethesda’s father, conveniently (rather too conveniently for believability), happens once to have fronted an indie rock band. So with his help and the discovery of a paper from Ms. Finkleman’s desk, they establish the teacher’s connection to an all-girl punk-rock band called Little Miss Mystery and the Red Herrings. So naturally Bethesda reveals the teacher’s secret rock-music life, and naturally the principal decides it would be a good thing to stage a battle-of-the-bands event right at Mary Todd Lincoln Middle School, and naturally – well, nothing here is really natural, and elements of the story are so forced that it often reads more like a fairy tale than a middle-school romp. So of course there needs to be a secret beyond the secret, a mystery behind the mystery: what has been revealed about Ms. Finkleman turns out not to be correct, not quite, and even that revelatory tattoo, although it exists, proves not to be what it seems. The school, of course, rallies anyway, and there is lots of good rockin’, but Winters is a little too determined to make rock some sort of “wonder music” and to denigrate other types, especially classical. And the twists in Ms. Finkleman’s story are really rather overdone. Still, rock-music fans in the target age range will find that The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman plays neatly to their tastes.

     The target readership is younger in Dan Gutman’s My Weird School Daze series, which is intended for ages 7-10, but the underlying theme of teachers who are not mere disseminators of facts is the same. Gutman’s series is played entirely for laughs, and Mr. Tony Is Full of Baloney! fits right in. Mr. Tony runs “After-School Kids’ Kare” (ASKK), which A.J. is going to because his mom just got a job. And Mr. Tony has an ambition: to make the world’s largest pizza. Well, actually he is really obsessed with getting into The Guinness Book of World Records, to the point of doing such things as juggling while on a pogo stick and jogging while holding a spoon with an egg on it in his mouth. But it is the pizza obsession that captures him after the kids of ASKK suggest it, and of course the whole project gets more and more complex, eventually involves the school principal parachuting from a plane while wearing an ape suit, and is so utterly silly that kids with as little as an ounce of maturity will likely find the whole story ridiculous. Gutman’s book – and the amusing Jim Paillot illustrations throughout it – are for all the kids whose maturity levels fall short of that ounce. And maybe for their parents, too.