(++++) THE ROMANTIC TEMPERAMENT

Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsodies for Orchestra, Nos. 1-6. Orchester Wiener Akademie conducted by Martin Haselböck. CPO. $16.99.

Mendelssohn: Symphonies Nos. 4 (“Italian”) and 5 (“Reformation”). Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Charles Munch. United Classics. $12.99.

Ferdinand Ries: Piano Sonatas and Sonatinas, Volume 6—Sonatina for Piano Duet in C Major, Op. 6; Sonata for Piano Duet in B-flat Major, Op. 47; Sonata for Piano Duet in A Major, Op. 160. Susan Kagan and Vassily Primakov, piano. Naxos. $9.99.

     Grand sweep, intense and often overdone emotion, and a certain sprawl beyond the limits of formal structure are generally considered characteristics of the Romantic repertoire – and indeed are present in many works of the era. However, the notion that Romantic music is somehow unsubtle, inevitably wearing its heart on its sleeve, is an overstatement that is often (although admittedly not always) unfair to composers of the time. These are thoughts engendered by Martin Haselböck’s poised, elegant and very musicianly performances of the six orchestrated Hungarian Rhapsodies by Liszt (the orchestrations being by Franz Doppler and the composer, apparently working in tag-team manner). These are among Liszt’s flashiest orchestral works, and they have considerable surface-level charm that is often the only impression they leave behind after a performance. Not so here. Orchester Wiener Akademie performs the pieces on original 19^th-century instruments or modern copies – with a few older, 18^th-century instruments thrown in for good measure – and this is one reason the Hungarian Rhapsodies here have a more-mellow sound then in modern-instrument performances. But Haselböck’s way with the music is an even bigger reason. He takes these pieces seriously, studiously avoiding the ebullience that is so much in evidence in most performances and tending to select tempos, even in the friss sections, that are slower and more stately than usual. The result is that, for example, the “Carnival in Pest” (No. 6 of the orchestrated rhapsodies) is celebratory without being raucous, while “Héroïde élégiaque" (No. 5) does have heroic as well as elegiac moments. In truth, Haselböck’s approach takes some getting used to, particularly in the famously exuberant No. 2 – a certain intensity and forthright oomph is missing, not only here but elsewhere in the set, and the fact that it is clearly missing by design does not stop a listener from periodically mourning its absence. But the fact is that Haselböck clearly believes that the Hungarian Rhapsodies are serious music, not light-musical throwaways intended for pop concerts; and in that he is clearly correct, based on Liszt’s own intentions for these works. It is unlikely that this CPO recording will be most people’s first choice for a full set of the orchestral rhapsodies, but when the surface-level brightness of many other readings starts to fade, this one will remain front-and-center and even, indeed, gain considerable stature.

     Stature and grandeur were clearly on the mind of Charles Munch (1891-1968) when he recorded Mendelssohn’s “Italian” and “Reformation” symphonies in 1958 and 1957, respectively – the versions just re-released by United Classics. These symphonies, especially No. 4, tend to get fleet, often lighthearted interpretations – yes, even the “Reformation,” whose underlying topic is as serious as they come, even though Mendelssohn did not here create a deeply intense work (perhaps one reason he was never satisfied with the symphony). To Munch, these are  big works, not in length – neither reaches the half-hour mark – but in seriousness of purpose, and he uses the full force of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to give them as grand a scale as they can have. This is partly because of performance standards of the 1950s – which, among other things, eschewed exposition repeats, an unfortunate circumstance – and partly because of Munch’s own predilections. These are heartfelt readings that largely make up in elegance what they lack in intimacy. Munch’s approach is more successful in No. 5, to which he brings a sense of purposeful loftiness, than in No. 4, which tends to be overweighted and insufficiently fleet of foot, particularly in the finale. The playing is quite good, as is the digital remastering, but as a whole this is a (+++) CD that will be of greatest interest to listeners unfamiliar with Munch’s approach to the Romantic repertoire and to his handling of the Boston Symphony – and to ones who are familiar with both and will welcome a chance to hear them on CD.

     There has been little familiarity in recent times with the work of Ferdinand Ries, who is generally considered “proto-Romantic” even though his career and compositions reached well into the Romantic era, with his Sonata for Piano Duet in A Major, Op. 160, dating to exactly the same time as Mendelssohn’s Symphonies Nos. 4 and 5. Ries in fact grafted Romantic  approaches and techniques onto what was essentially a Classical formal style, albeit one heavily influenced  by Beethoven, the association with whom provides Ries with more fame than does his own music. Susan Kagan recorded all the Ries solo-piano sonatas for Naxos on five notable CDs, and now adds, as a sort of appendix, the three Ries sonatas for piano duet – one piano, four hands. She and Vassily Primakov perform than with élan, and they are certainly attractive to the point of being a must-have for those who bought the earlier Naxos CDs. But in strictly musical terms, there is less here than meets the eye (or the ear). The Sonatina for Piano Duet in C Major, Op. 6 is not a particularly early work, despite its opus number (Ries’ numbering is extremely confusing); it is more of a teaching sonata, somewhat along the lines of Mozart’s K. 545, and runs through four nicely formed and technically unchallenging movements in less than eight minutes. The Sonata for Piano Duet in B-flat Major, Op. 47 is an earlier piece, with particularly well-balanced parts for the two pianists, and with no real attempt at depth: the slow movement is quite short and functions mainly as an interlude. The most interesting work here by far is Op. 160, which shows both Ries’ considerable strengths and his never-conquered weaknesses. The first two movements are very large indeed – the first is longer than the entire Op. 47 and twice the length of Op. 6 – and show Ries at his most intense and expressive, with improvisatory elements and other distinct signs of Romantic temperament. But the third movement does not fit with the first two. Ries simply changes gears and presents a bright, high-spirited finale that does not so much sweep away the emotions of the first two movements as ignore them. It is well done and, on its own, a pleasure to hear, but Op. 160 as a whole ends up as a disappointment, the potential of the first two movements being ignored by a finale that feels tacked-on. This is a (++++) CD for those who found the first five volumes of this Naxos series congenial and who want to hear some very fine piano-duet playing, but musically it is a (+++) disc that shows why Ries never really attained the status of a first-rank composer.

(++++) MEMORY AND BEYOND

The Ocean at the End of the Lane. By Neil Gaiman. William Morrow. $25.99.

     Deaths unlock the past and its mysteries in Neil Gaiman’s elegantly written new fairytale for adults – decidedly for adults. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is the fictional memoir of an unnamed middle-aged protagonist, and “unnamed” is important, since the characters whose names are given are quite different in type and in kind from those whose names are not. The narrator has returned to Sussex, where he lived as a child, to attend the funeral of an equally unnamed family member (there are hints that it is his father); and he finds himself wandering through childhood haunts – and haunting they do turn out to be. The story moves back, back, from the human death that sets it in motion to the death when the narrator was age seven of his beloved kitten, run over by a car driven by a lodger who then, for reasons not directly related to the kitten’s death, himself commits suicide.

     Three deaths in 17 pages, and Gaiman is just getting started. There is also what many children would consider a fate worse than death in those first pages, a seventh birthday party to which no one comes – not one single person – although the narrator, a lonely child, is not deeply affected, taking the “boxed set of Narnia books” he receives as a gift upstairs to soothe and guide himself: “Books were safer than other people anyway.” But maybe not this book.

     As an adult, the narrator – about whom, really, we learn remarkably little everyday information – does something relating somehow to art, and has no romantic attachments or, apparently, attachments of other sorts. “Memories were waiting at the edges of things, beckoning to me,” says the narrator early in the book, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane is about the memories of childhood, the things that happened and the ones that could not possibly have happened but nevertheless did. The narrator’s move from the mundane realities of adult life and a ceremony marking its end to a childhood fraught with possibility, beauty and terror happens so quickly and so subtly that readers will find themselves pulled in deeply – as into, yes, an ocean – almost before they realize that the tides have hold of them.

     The “ocean” of the title is, on a mundane level, merely a duck pond, but it is indeed oceanic, not only through the magic with which the narrator is connected because of the girl who labels it “ocean,” 11-year-old Lettie Hempstock – whose name we do know, rather emphatically, and that is significant – but also in the sense of the oceanic depths unlocked within and around the narrator by his returning memories of his seven-year-old self and his onetime friend and guide. Where Lettie guides him is an important element of the book, as is how she does so. And the where and how become significant facets of a story in which Gaiman guides his readers and pulls them into the depths.

     There is love in this little story – and it is little, quite easy to read in a single sitting and probably inevitably to be read that way, so involving does it quickly become. There is faith, too, the faith of childhood and the lost faith of the adult, perhaps recapturable to at least some extent through a visit to one’s past. There is something redemptive to the story as well, although not redemptive in any religious sense. The sense here is that we are all of us children inside, really, and that that is a good thing, a thing to be treasured, a thing that explains much about how the world works and where we all fit within it.

     There is also danger here, old and magical danger in which a seven-year-old believes implicitly but which an adult, even one containing a seven-year-old’s sensibilities, must resolutely deny. Indeed, the gulf between childhood and the adult world is the underlying theme of this story – or one of the themes – because the narrator’s family’s unawareness of the danger is part of what makes the tale frightening. And it is frightening, on an existential level that laps over from the world of magic into that of space, time, black holes and the frontiers of scientific knowledge – which, when you come right down to it, have a great deal that is magical about them. “The reality I knew was a thin layer of icing on a great dark birthday cake writhing with grubs and nightmares and hunger,” the narrator comes to realize, and thoughtful readers will realize this with him. It is not a particularly comforting realization.

     In such works as Coraline and The Graveyard Book, Gaiman has again and again pulled back the shroud that keeps the perceptions of childhood separate from those of adults. Both those books, like The Ocean at the End of the Lane, draw deeply on myth and fairytale and the world of maybe. Maybe the duck pond really is an ocean. Maybe Lettie’s family really can see atoms, manipulate bacteria, make the moon full every night, remember the Big Bang. Maybe the narrator’s loneliness and fear in childhood (he tells us that he always slept with a light on and the door open) make him vulnerable to terrors that are not really there – or maybe they enable him to see and experience things that a less-sensitive child, or an adult, would miss. Certainly we know from the references to the Narnia books and to Lewis Carroll that the narrator is, or was, someone prone to losing himself, or perhaps finding himself, in fantasy, to finding it more appealing and somehow more “real” than reality. But this begs the question of where the one leaves off and the other begins – a question to which Gaiman returns again and again, in this book as in many others. The Ocean at the End of the Lane is by and large a serious story, its occasional glimmers of amusement coming across as somewhat unnecessary stylistic sparkles, for all their inherent attractiveness. It is ultimately a book about loss – but not so much the loss experienced through a funeral as the deeper and more profound loss, more profound because largely unacknowledged, of the ability to reach out and touch the extraordinary. That ability is what childhood has and adulthood lacks, Gaiman tells us – here and elsewhere. And it is a heartrending circumstance, made all the more so by our adult inability to perceive it. Unless, of course, we join Gaiman on a journey to reconnect with the child whom we all carry inside.

(++++) GO, NATE!

Big Nate: Game On! By Lincoln Peirce. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.

     What makes Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate – the 11-to-12-year-old central character of the eponymous comic strip – so much fun to read about is that he is at the same time completely self-unaware and surprisingly endearing. Nate, a sixth-grader and budding cartoonist (as Peirce says he himself was at the same point in his life), worries as much about being in a “smack-talking slump” as he does about playing basketball; gets as much satisfaction from being hit by a pitch and thus breaking up the opposing team’s perfect game as he would if his team could actually play baseball well; panics when he cannot find his lucky socks before practice; finds himself on a team called the Doormats; needs to shovel snow so he can find the ball during spring training; and has a series of run-ins with always-unseen Chester, the ultimate bully, who apparently weighs 600 pounds and has nicknames such as “the hammer” (“because he beat up the wood shop teacher”).

     A lot of these incidents may be vaguely reminiscent of classic Peanuts strips, including the important unseen character and the desperate-loser teams; and certainly Peirce (pronounced “purse”) is aware of Charles Schulz’ classic productions – as is every modern cartoonist. But despite occasional vague references to the Schulz ethos, Big Nate has a very different sensibility. For one thing, there are plenty of adults in the strip – ranging from the helpful ones (the primary sports coach) to the crazily intense ones (“Coach John,” fat and loud and always screaming at the “ladies” on the boys’ teams) to the purely inept ones (Nate’s father, who in one strip turns Nate’s baseball uniform pink by washing the whites with a red sweatshirt – making readers, if not Nate, grateful for the fact that Big Nate: Game On! is in full color throughout).

     Basketball, baseball and soccer – the three sports in which Nate participates in this book – all bring out his overly generous opinion of himself; his worries and peculiarities (such as his fear of cats); and his proclivities where his teammates are concerned (he feels constant rivalry for the super-nice Artur, so when he yells “Let’s Go” to each of his soccer teammates by name, Peirce uses very small letters when Nate is “encouraging” Artur and very large ones for everyone else). Nate is generally good-natured – one of his redeeming qualities. But things tend to go wrong for him when he isn’t, as when Artur scores the winning soccer goal through luck (a ball bounces off his head) and Nate later complains about Artur’s never-ending luck to the coach – not knowing that Artur is nearby, hears everything and is truly hurt because “I thought we were friends.” Or then there is Nate’s determination to prevent other teams from scoring when he is goalkeeper, leading to him calling himself “Mister Zero,” leading to his friends complimenting him on the nickname “because you can apply it to so many parts of your life.”

     In reality, though, Nate is not a zero – just a rather mixed-up almost-teenager whose hormones have not fully kicked in yet (although they are getting there) and whose sense of his own importance is somewhat overdone. Peirce takes that overdoneness and overdoes its presentation just enough so that even when his team loses – and even when Nate is to blame for the loss – readers will consistently find that Nate himself is a winner.

(++++) THE QUALITY OF SOLOISTS

Brahms: Sonatas Nos. 1-3 for Violin and Piano. Sergey Khachatryan, violin; Lusine Khachatryan, piano. Naïve. $16.99.

Nielsen: Concerto for Flute and Orchestra; Griffes: Poem for Flute and Orchestra; Reinecke: Concerto for Flute and Orchestra; Chaminade: Concertino for Flute and Orchestra; Tchaikovsky: Largo and Allegro for Flute and Strings; Poulenc: Flute Sonata; Rimsky-Korsakov: The Flight of the Bumblebee. Sharon Bezaly, flute; Residentie Orkest Den Haag conducted by Neeme Järvi. BIS. $21.99 (SACD).

Hindemith: Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by C.M. von Weber; Concerto for Violin and Orchestra; Concert Music for String Orchestra and Brass Instruments. Midori, violin; NDR Sinfonieorchester conducted by Christoph Eschenbach. Ondine. $16.99.

     A performance in which two high-quality virtuosi tackle the Brahms Violin Sonatas can be fraught with peril if the players use the opportunity to showcase themselves and compete for attention. Or it can be fraught with pure pleasure if the performers cooperate fully and subsume their individual personalities into a totality that is even greater than the sum of its parts – as brother and sister Sergey and Lusine Khachatryan do in their new recording for Naïve. These are readings of great warmth, great skill and considerable understanding, the virtuosity of the players being a given and therefore not the central element of the very high-quality music-making. From the opening of the first sonata, marked Vivace ma non troppo and played here with more focus on the non troppo than the vivace, the blend of sound and easy, conversational back-and-forth of thematic material produce readings that are tightly integrated and emotionally compelling from start to finish. The Khachatryans see the first sonata as expansive, even leisurely, spinning out its beauties to fine effect throughout. The second sonata, least frequently played of the three, here gets its full due, especially in the amabile sense of the first-movement Allegro amabile – this is a warm and loving performance that lets the music ebb and flow unrushed and with close attention to detail. Most impressive of all is the third sonata, the one with the widest scope and largest variety of moods. Here the Khachatryans carefully explore the depths of the Adagio, remain quite cognizant of the con sentimento marking of the third movement (Un poco presto e con sentimento), and conclude with a Presto agitato that, although it certainly is agitated, brings with it a feeling of accomplishment and the end of a remarkable emotional journey. The excellence with which both performers handle their parts – which includes the ease with which each backs off when the other needs to move into the forefront – produces a wholly effective, frequently compelling reading of all three sonatas.

     The new BIS disc featuring flautist Sharon Bezaly is effective, too, although it is more scattered than focused – the inevitable result of mixing Nielsen, Tchaikovsky and Poulenc with Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Carl Reinecke and Cécile Chaminade. The SACD’s avowed purpose is to showcase Bezaly’s talents, and that it does very well indeed, although not all the music is at an equally high level. For example, Reinecke’s work, the longest here, is nicely constructed but not particularly consequential, while Nielsen’s has some attractively elusive qualities that Bezaly brings out with considerable skll, and Poulenc’s is atmospheric and works quite well in an orchestration by Lennox Berkeley. The brief Tchaikovsky offering, in an adaptation by Ernest Sauter, is pleasant, and Flight of the Bumblebee is a very short and inevitably amusing encore in an arrangement by Kalevi Aho. The infrequently heard pieces by Griffes and Chaminade are pleasant surprises: both use the flute well and idiomatically, nicely exploring the instrument’s capabilities and nuances without stretching the performer too much. From start to finish, Bezaly receives supple and well-balanced support from the Residentie Orkest Den Haag under Neeme Järvi. There is no particular rhyme or reason for the inclusion of these specific works here, much less in the specific order in which they appear on the disc. But they do create collectively an attractive portrait of Bezaly as performer as well as a pleasant mini-survey of writing for the flute in the Romantic era and beyond, with Poulenc’s late sonata (1956-57) bringing the instrumentation into modern times.

     Yet nothing on the Bezaly disc sounds as craggily modern as the works of Hindemith on a new Ondine release, even though the latest Hindemith piece (Symphonic Metamorphosis) dates to 1943, while the Violin Concerto was written in 1939 and the Concert Music in 1930. Hindemith has a density and forward-looking sound in his music even though he never fully adopted the approach of the Second Viennese School. The soloist on this CD, violinist Midori, handles the concerto with sureness and sensitivity, exploring its solo part – which can sometimes sound awkward – with clarity and concentration. The concerto comes across as more fully formed in this performance than it does in some others, the differences in its three movements being as clear as the similarities among them. Christoph Eschenbach is an erratic conductor, but he takes to Hindemith’s music and to the NDR Sinfonieorchester very well, accompanying Midori with care and a fine sense of style – and also producing very effective readings of the other two works heard here. Eschenbach sometimes rises to the occasion in live performance, as these live recordings indicate: his interpretations are pointed, well-crafted and thoughtful, with particularly good orchestral balance and some real flair in the orchestra’s fine brass section in the Concert Music. Hindemith, like Max Reger at a slightly earlier time, is a composer whose works can seem turgid and difficult to approach. But Eschenbach here makes them understandable and clear – complex and at times academic, to be sure, but well-thought-out and particularly strong in their use of and contrast among the various orchestral sections. Hindemith can be a difficult composer to like, but Eschenbach certainly shows him as one to admire.

(+++) EXPLORATIONS

Marcel Tyberg: Symphony No. 2; Piano Sonata No. 2. Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta; Fabio Bidini, piano. Naxos. $9.99.

Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny: Le Roi et le fermier. Thomas Michael Allen, William Sharp, Dominique Labelle, Thomas Dolié, Jeffrey Thompson, Delores Ziegler, Yulia Van Doren, David Newman, Tony Boutté; Opera Lafayette Orchestra conducted by Ryan Brown. Naxos. $9.99.

Cimarosa: Opera Overtures, Volume 3—Le astuzie femminili Nos. 1 and 2; Artemisia, regina di Caria; Il mercato di Malmantile; Cajo Mario; I due baroni di Roccazzura; Le stravaganze d’amore; I nemici generosi; L’eroe cinese. Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä conducted by Patrick Gallois. Naxos. $9.99.

     Uncovering little-known music can be a worthwhile and pleasant endeavor even if the music itself turns out not to be of absolute top quality. JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic are in the forefront of discovering and rediscovering quite a bit of “misplaced” music, and particularly that of Marcel Tyberg (1893-1944), who died during the Holocaust but whose music remained in the hands of a Buffalo family that eventually brought it to Falletta’s attention. This was fortuitous, since Falletta has both the passion and the wherewithal to devote time and energy to bringing Tyberg’s work into the concert hall and onto recordings. Having previously recorded his Third Symphony for Naxos, she now turns to his Second, a work from 1927 that in parts sounds remarkably like the symphonies of Bruckner, for better or worse. The striding opening of the symphony’s first movement, much of its third-movement Scherzo, and some parts of its finale clearly resemble the work of Bruckner, who had died in 1896 – although there is no indication that these are deliberate homages. Tyberg was no innovator: he used the orchestra effectively and brought sensitivity to his emotional expression, but his work tends to sound like a memoir of an age gone by rather than a product of a unique voice. The bucolic and rhapsodic elements of his Second Symphony coexist rather well, and the first three movements certainly seem to build toward an effective final argument. But the finale is odd, a Preludium und Fuge that harks back more than adequately to Baroque models but does not fit very well with what has gone before – and then includes an unexpected scherzo section that seems out of place. Even when as well-played as it is here, Tyberg’s Second is more of an intriguing work than a thoroughly convincing one. As for the second of his two piano sonatas, which dates to 1934, it is a large-scale piece (lasting more than half an hour) that alternates urgency and lyricism within, once again, what is essentially a 19^th-century framework, here with hints of Wagnerian rather than Brucknerian influence. An intermezzo-like section within the Scherzo is a highlight, and here the finale is genuinely climactic, thanks in part to the intense concentration that Fabio Bidini brings to the entire performance. Tyberg’s music is certainly worth reviving, although it would be overstating things to describe it as in any sense groundbreaking.

     On the other hand, Le Roi et le fermier, a 1762 opera by the long-lived Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny (1729-1817), did break some new ground in its time; and just as Tyberg has a strong advocate in Falletta, so Monsigny and other neglected composers of early French opera have strong and effective proponents in Ryan Brown and the singers of Opera Lafayette. Le Roi et le fermier is a comedy, with serious overtones, about a Sherwood Forest encounter between a king and a farmer. It mixes a certain amount of social consciousness and mild questioning of class stratification with more-straightforward comic incidents that involve mistaken identities and standard punishment for a standard stage villain. What is not standard is the music, which in parts looks ahead toward the Romantic era, notably in a storm scene that concludes the first act and helps bridge the way to a very different setting for Act II. There are a number of interesting elements in the opera, such as separate songs praising country living by the farmer and his beloved – followed by an aria in which the king, who at this point is thought to be only a member of the king’s court, sings of a ruler attaining happiness by giving to his subjects all that is expected of him. The opera contains some well-considered stage business – a gunshot, a hunt that is well-portrayed in Monsigny’s music – and a number of engaging arias, all of which the Opera Lafayette performers deliver with enthusiasm and skill. It is easy to see why the attractive tunes and subtly subversive libretto of Le Roi et le fermier made it popular in its time. If its theme of royalty and country folk is dated today, its bubbly music is certainly not, and the well-played and nicely sung Opera Lafayette performance – the troupe’s ninth recording for Naxos – gives Monsigny his due, and will undoubtedly encourage listeners to wonder what other gems of early French opera remain to be brought to the modern stage by this fine ensemble.

     Naxos has an unusually strong commitment to out-of-the-ordinary musical sequences – not only Tyberg’s music and the productions of Opera Lafayette, but also a series such as the opera overtures of Domenico Cimarosa (1749-1801). And the Cimarosa releases to date are unusual even among Naxos projects, since each of the them has been performed by a different orchestra and conductor. The first volume offered the Nicolaus Esterházy Sinfonia under Alessandro Amoretti; the second, the Toronto Chamber Orchestra under Kevin Mallon; and the third comes from Sinfonia Finlandia Jyväskylä conducted by Patrick Gallois. These are all fine chamber groups with skillful conductors, and Naxos may plan to have even more such ensembles participate in this project, since Cimarosa wrote more than 65 operas and sometimes created more than one overture for the same work (as is the case with Le astuzie femminili on the new CD). Unfortunately, the good playing, skilled conducting and generally top-notch ensemble work of the performers cannot conceal the fact that Cimarosa’s overtures tend to blend together. Rossini is sometimes accused of writing nearly indistinguishable overtures, but that is generally untrue – especially given the fact that many of his overtures include themes from the operas they introduce. The charge makes far more sense when leveled at Cimarosa, whose overtures were all pure curtain-raisers, unrelated to the music of the operas to which they were attached – and Cimarosa, like Rossini, was not above using the same overture for several stage works or cannibalizing one overture in creating another. The result of all this is that the pleasant overtures heard on this CD, like the ones on the two prior discs, are just that – pleasant. But they are not particularly distinguished musically or from each other, for all that they are very well-constructed and handle the orchestra with sure skill (although not a great deal of innovation). The careful listener will detect differences of form and structure among the pieces – and any listener will notice the difference in length, with pieces on the current CD ranging from four minutes to 12. But whether an opera is comic or serious, whether it is relatively early Cimarosa or relatively late, its overture tends to sound a great deal like every other one. There is certainly a recognizable “Cimarosa sound,” but this composer’s overtures offer insufficient variety to make this Naxos series an enjoyable acquisition for anyone but listeners who particularly enjoy well-formed short-form 18^th-century orchestral pieces.

(++++) THE FACTS OF THE MATTER

The Great American Dust Bowl. By Don Brown. Houghton Mifflin. $18.99.

About Time: A First Look at Time and Clocks. By Bruce Koscielniak. Sandpiper. $6.99.

     Don Brown’s The Great American Dust Bowl looks like a graphic novel, reads like a graphic novel and is paced like a graphic novel, but it happens to be fact, not fiction – and some terrifying fact at that, every bit as scary as what graphic novels typically offer. Brown builds the book toward the climactic dust storm of April 14, 1935, by starting with that storm – shown as a roiling dark-brown cloud before which animals as well as people are fleeing – and then backtracking to the history and prehistory of the American Midwest, briefly mentioning everything from the raising of the Rocky Mountains to the switch from an unsuccessful cattle-farming economy to one based on subsistence farming. The farm economy significantly contributed to the drying out of land that had long been arid already, and by 1931, when “the rains stopped and the misery of the Southern Plains deepened,” the scene was set for dust storms the likes of which no one in the region had ever seen before. Dust does not seem like much – Brown makes the point that five specks could fit within the period at the end of one of his sentences – so the sheer scale of the dust storms that swept the Plains during the 1930s is almost impossible to imagine. Brown rises to the occasion superbly, producing a spare narration and a set of illustrations done almost entirely in earth tones, with a mixture of yellow, brown and orange visually communicating the unrelenting dryness of the region at this time. Carefully understated drawings take on considerable meaning: a farmer glances heavenward, holding his hand out, palm up, in a hopeful gesture for rain that does not come; a woman’s expression changes significantly and resignedly after she tastes food into which dust from the storms has become mixed; a child packs his stuffed bunny as his family, beaten by the weather, pulls up stakes to leave the devastated region. Throughout The Great American Dust Bowl, Brown includes comments from people who were there and who lived through the devastation – quotations from the Oklahoma Oral History Research Project (OOHRP) are especially telling and unconsciously dramatic: "We watched the weather – we’d look up there and see a little cloud. Oh, we’d be so excited to see it. Oh, I know it – just prayed, ‘Come on, give us some drops.’” By the time Brown’s book reaches the climax of the almost unbelievable dust storm of April 14, 1935 – which was by no means the last of the storms – readers will fully understand another quotation from OOHRP: “I thought it was the last day of the world!” And they will have learned about some byways of Dust Bowl times, including reporter Robert Geiger, who covered the events and came up with the “Dust Bowl” name; phony rainmakers whose kites carried dynamite to clouds to try to explode water from them; eerie blue-glowing barbed wire – an effect of the swirling dust; and much more. Evocative, moody and genuinely enthralling, The Great American Dust Bowl is both a superb graphic novel and an astonishingly inventive history book. And it ends, almost offhandedly and after the narrative concludes, with a pair of thought-provoking photographs, one showing a dust storm in Texas in 1935 and one showing a gigantic storm of the same type over Phoenix, Arizona – in 2011. The juxtaposition is intense and highly thought-provoking.

     More conventional in approach but still very effective and well written and illustrated, Bruce Koscielniak’s About Time – originally published in 2004 and now available in paperback – starts and ends with a mystery: what exactly is time? Most of the book is about how time is measured, but what exactly is being measured? The question is one for philosophers, not writers of history, but it hangs over the entire book and lends it depth beyond its discussion of the various ways time has been kept for millennia. Koscielniak starts with astronomical time, explaining years, months and days by reference to Earth and the sun; then discusses calendars from the age of the Sumerians to the Gregorian calendar that is widely used today (mentioning along the way that the ancient Greeks used three 10-day weeks per month, while the Romans used an eight-day week until about the year 200). The real fascination of the book, though, comes as Koscielniak starts writing about and showing the constructions that people have built to measure and keep track of time. There are, for example, Egyptian obelisks and water clocks – the latter being a form of timekeeping also used by the Greeks and Romans – although, as Koscielniak points out, “water can freeze, produce algae, and block spouts with sediment and corrosion, all causing loss of accuracy in timekeeping.” The contrasts of the water clocks – from highly elaborate Chinese ones to later but simpler models used in medieval Europe – are very interesting, with Koscielniak’s straightforward illustrations giving a good sense of the general appearance of the timepieces and their functional elements. Then comes the invention, in the 13^th century, of the first all-mechanical clock, and Koscielniak discusses escapements, pallets, weights, cranks, verges, crown wheels and other elements of clockmaking clearly – and illustrates the various parts well. Along the way, he explains where the word “clock” itself comes from (probably from a German word meaning “bell”) and why small portable timepieces are called watches (guards – known as watchmen – carried small clocks so they knew how long to stay at each duty post). Tracing clockmaking and watchmaking through pendulums to springs, tuning forks, quartz movements and atomic vibrations, Koscielniak brings this history of timekeeping to the present. But as he points out, ever since Einstein’s theories caused people to think of time in new ways more than a century ago, we have had even more reasons than in the past to consider just what time is. The way we measure it has changed, but its mystery endures.

(++++) REQUIEMS AND BEYOND

Bruckner: Symphony No. 7. London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Stanisław Skrowaczewski. LPO. $16.99.

Brahms: Ein Deutsches Requiem. Anna Lucia Richter, soprano; Stephan Genz, baritone; MDR Leipzig Radio Choir and Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop. Naxos. $9.99.

Mozart: Requiem. Anna Prohaska, soprano; Sara Mingardo, alto; Maximilian Schmitt, tenor; René Pape, bass; Bavarian Radio Choir, Swedish Radio Choir and Lucerne Festival Orchestra conducted by Claudio Abbado. Accentus Music Blu-ray Disc. $39.99.

     Bruckner wrote three Masses and a Te Deum, but never a Requiem. Yet this highly religious composer, who dedicated more than one composition to God, certainly had the sensibility to create a Requiem if he had wanted to – as is shown in the second movement of his Symphony No. 7, written in the knowledge that his idol, Wagner, had not long to live. The symphony’s first performance, a huge triumph for Bruckner, came in 1884, the year after Wagner’s death, but whether there was anything bittersweet for the composer on the occasion is unknown. The Seventh remains one of Bruckner’s most popular symphonies and one of his most effective, and Stanisław Skrowaczewski gives it a highly impassioned, yet stately, performance in a live recording from October 2012 – just weeks after this distinguished conductor’s 89^th birthday. As with most Bruckner symphonies, there are differing and sometimes competing versions of the Seventh available, the original 1883 one (played at the première) unfortunately being lost.  The 1944 Haas edition and 1954 one from Nowak are the two most often performed, but Skrowaczewski has made his own, and uses it in this performance. Details of the differences will not be apparent to most listeners, although Skrowaczewski does retain the cymbal clash and other percussion at the climax of the Adagio (as does Nowak but not Haas). What will be clear to listeners is that Skrowaczewski has a determinedly old-fashioned and, in its way, highly effective approach to the symphony, seeing it as a glorious edifice whose grandeur is its primary feature and whose Wagner-requiem second movement is its heart if not its climax. Stately, well-paced (on the slow side but without dragging), and played with warmth and sonic beauty by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, this Bruckner Seventh is testimony both to Skrowaczewski’s thoughtfulness in handling the works of this composer and to the composer/conductor’s own understanding of how to pace and build a grand work that sustains emotionally from start to finish.

     Marin Alsop could use some lessons from Skrowaczewski. Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem predates Bruckner’s Seventh by some 15 years and is its equal in scope and scale. But Alsop seems somewhat impatient with it, offering a performance that runs less than 65 minutes and often seems superficial if not overtly rushed. Alsop often evinces a certain discomfort with standard-repertoire works, especially those of the Romantic era, tending to perform them dutifully but without any special insight. She extracts very fine playing from her forces here – soloists, chorus and orchestra all are responsive, involved and clearly committed to the music – but the emotional core of this (+++) reading is not what it should be. Brahms’ work is quite different from traditional Catholic Requiems, using texts from Luther’s translation of the Bible and focusing more on the living who must go on after the death of a loved one than on the dead and the hope of their eventual resurrection. Some performances of Brahms’ work make it almost turgid, and its tempos can be painfully slow in some conductors’ readings; certainly Alsop cannot be accused of those excesses. But she tends to go too far in the opposite direction, never into actual lightness – the work scarcely permits that – but into a kind of blasé near-indifference that prevents the heartfelt sentiments of Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras and Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit from coming through as effectively as they can. Certainly this performance is well played and well sung, but it is not emotionally evocative or convincing in the way that Ein Deutsches Requiem can be, and does not leave listeners feeling either especially sad or particularly uplifted. The beauties of the music come through, but its depths do not.

     One of the great settings of the traditional Catholic Requiem is Mozart’s, and it does get a highly effective reading in a live recording from the Lucerne Festival in August 2012. Mozart’s incomplete Requiem is a surprisingly hopeful work, and it is its essence of forgiveness and consolation on which Claudio Abbado focuses to fine effect in this (++++) performance. Much of the credit for the quality here goes to the quartet of soloists: Anna Prohaska, Sara Mingardo, Maximilian Schmitt and René Pape are all first-class singers, and Abbado melds them skillfully in sections whose tonal beauty is matched by the expressiveness of the music throughout. Abbado does not use the most commonly heard version of this work, the one finished by Franz Xaver Süssmayr: the Sanctus here was completed by Robert Levin. The non-Mozart potions of the music are, in any case, true to the form and orchestration of what Mozart himself wrote. What is most impressive here is that Abbado clearly shapes the work as a totality, despite its incompleteness, and by focusing on consoling rather than mourning, he produces a reading that makes the promise of redemption the central element of the music, while not ignoring the sadness that lies at the heart of every Requiem, by Mozart or anyone else. The biggest failing of the recording is not in the performance but in the pricing: the 60-minute Requiem is the only work here, and $40 for a Blu-ray Disc of this single work – which is available in many other, equally fine renditions – seems excessive. Listeners who want to see as well as hear this specific performance and who strongly favor the Blu-ray format will, however, find Abbado’s reading a top-notch one visually and sonically as well as musically.

(+++) BYWAYS

Cantus: Music of Arvo Pärt, Steve Reich and Hywel Davies. Kuniko Kato, percussion. Linn Records. $22.99.

Possessed: Music of Santiago de Murcia, Hildegard von Bingen, Guillaume Dufay, Vincent Youmans, Caitriona O’Leary and others. EX. Heresy. $16.99.

Yarlung Records: The First Seven Years—Music of Beethoven, Mahler, Adams, Bach, Lutoslawski, Harrison, des Prez and others. Yarlung. $9.99.

     Almost by definition, classical-music anthologies are limited-interest items. There may be considerable enjoyment at a concert from seeing and hearing performers handle the works of multiple composers, but with the visual element missing, recordings that hopscotch from one composer to the next and showcase the performer more than the music are likely to be satisfying primarily to those interested in hearing a considerable amount of music played on instruments that tend to get short shrift in sol roles in the concert hall – such as the classical accordion or, more to the point with the disc called Cantus, percussion. Kuniko Kato, who generally uses only the name Kuniko, is a very fine percussionist who is strongly dedicated to the music of contemporary composers – so strongly that she not only gives world premières of their music but also arranges some of their works for percussion so she can perform them as well. Given the fact that some of these pieces, in any form, are a bit of an acquired taste, it is hard to say to whom Kuniko’s percussion versions will appeal – listeners must first be interested in the works of Arvo Pärt, Steve Reich and Hywel Davies, then in percussion, to find this CD appealing. The disc will be of most interest to fans of Pärt, since four of the six works here are by him: Für Alina (1976/2012) for vibraphone and crotales; Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1977/2012) for marimba; Fratres (1977/2012) for marimba and vibraphone; and Spiegel im Spiegel (1978/2012) for marimba and bells. Kuniko’s arrangements are attractive, and she certainly plays them well, although there is something of a surfeit of percussion sounds after a while: this CD is better heard over several listening sessions than all at once. The works by Pärt are interspersed with Reich’s New York Counterpoint (1985/2012) for marimba and Davies’ Purl Ground (2003), resulting in a CD whose total length of about 52 minutes seems longer if the disc is heard straight through. This is partly because of the sonic environment, which tends to blur a bit no matter how skillfully Kuniko plays, and partly because many of the composers’ techniques are sufficiently similar so that their music sometimes borders on the interchangeable.

     There is nothing interchangeable about the works of the composers whose music is performed by the early-music ensemble EX (sometimes spelled “eX”). And there is certainly something unusual in the exceptionally lurid packaging of this CD, which looks like a cross between a bad horror movie and a strip show – scarcely what classical CDs usually look like, which of course is the point. Possessed is the name of a show that EX has created around a variety of Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque and traditional musical works – the underlying idea being to explore ecstatic trance in the Christian tradition (although it is a bit hard to see what the picture of a woman being carried in the jaws of a giant spider has to do with that tradition). The idea here is to explore trances from Hildegard von Bingen to Joan of Arc, demonic possession as in the Salem witch trials, plus Afro-Brazilian initiation rites and a “musical exorcism” from Puglia. The result is a genuine mishmash of everything from Psalm 121 to a vibrant and enthusiastic tarantella, in 17 tracks with names in English, Spanish, Latin, Italian and so forth. The mixture of Dufay (1397-1474) with modern composers and some traditional Italian and American works is odd and more dislocating than revelatory, although it must be said that the singing and instrumental playing are very fine and the whole of Possessed has a certain infectiously endearing quality. It is not really a musical quality, however – the CD is more of a souvenir for people who have seen Possessed as a show than it is a compelling production, musical or dramatic, in its own right.

     The composers and compositions are far more mainstream on the CD called Yarlung Records: The First Seven Years, but the audience for this disc is even harder to fathom. The CD celebrates a recording company dedicated to “real sound and real music” and intending to reproduce, not literally but in feeling, the great sonic environment of top-notch firms’ recordings of the past (RCA Living Stereo, Mercury Records Living Presence, etc.). This is all well and good, and the endeavor would have been particularly welcome in the 1980s, when digital recording was new and no match whatsoever for the analog recordings that it was in the process of replacing because of CDs’ smaller size and greater convenience (decidedly not because of any superior sound quality). By this time in the 21^st century, though, when companies such as PentaTone routinely produce sonically outstanding discs that are different from but in every way comparable to the highest-quality vinyl recordings, Yarlung’s quest seems a trifle quixotic – the label does offer both excellent performances and top-notch sound, but it does not stand alone in doing so, as it would have 30 years ago. Yarlung Records: The First Seven Years joins a growing list of self-congratulatory productions in which recording firms point to their successes and crow a bit. These productions can become somewhat grandiose: in 2009, Chandos notably released a 30-CD set commemorating its 30^th anniversary. But the Chandos set included reissues of complete CDs, while most other offerings of this type – including Yarlung’s – simply proffer excerpts that the company considers to be unusually high-quality and/or particularly representative of what it is striving for musically and technically. There is nothing wrong with this, and indeed nothing wrong with patting oneself on the back from time to time. Yes, Yarlung has delivered some fine performances in excellent sound, and yes, that is evident from the excerpts on this CD. But at whom is the CD directed? It is a sampler – the sort of thing one would expect to be included as a bonus with other CDs, not purchased on its own. It may be a fine sampler; in fact, it is. But there is nothing on it so distinctive that it is clear why a music lover would want to pay to own it.

(++++) FUN TIME, 2014 STYLE

2014 Calendars: 365-Day—Dilbert; Pearls Before Swine; Non Sequitur; Big Nate; Signspotting. Andrews McMeel. $14.99 each.

     The box cover for the 2014 Dilbert page-a-day calendar features Dilbert telling the Pointy-Haired Boss, “There no kill switch on awesome,” and certainly fans of Scott Adams’ workplace-skewering comic strip will have an awesome time throughout the coming year with this full-color compendium featuring all the strip’s instantly recognizable characters. Adams’ art has never been the main point of the strip, and as a result it actually looks better on small calendar pages than does the more-elaborate work of other cartoonists. Shrinking Dilbert panels may not make them better, but it doesn’t hurt them all that much. Besides, the writing matters more than the art here. In one strip, Dogbert creates “fake press releases for imaginary new green energy technologies,” leading Dilbert to ask how he will know which of those technologies are real, leading Dogbert to reply, “Seriously? You think there are real ones?” And there you have social commentary, Dogbert style. In another strip, the boss refuses to send Dilbert to a class to make him more efficient because “you’re working on a government contract and billing by the hour.” And that is just about all you need to know about government contracting. In still another strip, Dogbert asks the CEO for inside information that Dogbert can use in his hedge fund, telling the big boss, “Think of it as a tax on people you don’t know.” The boss says, “That’s the best kind!” And that is about all you need to know about senior management of big companies. In fact, a year with this Dilbert calendar may teach you so much about corporate America that you’ll end up determined never to have any dealings with it again. And good luck with that.

     Another artist whose strips shrink well to the size of the pages of a tear-off calendar is Stephan Pastis, whose Pearls Before Swine owes its original success to Adams’ endorsement and has often been used to show Pastis’ gratitude through a series of insults and demeaning drawings. Yes, that is how Pastis shows he is grateful. Witness the title of his 2014 calendar: “Please move. I don’t want to catch your stupid.” In one series, Larry the croc gets drunk and rubs his behind against that of a zebra, the photo is posted online, and – well, this sort of thing happens to enough human beings nowadays so you can probably guess what comes next, although Pastis certainly gives the situation his own twists. Elsewhere, a new and incidental character, Tina Turtle, is introduced just so Pastis can show the dark side of her apparently devoted behavior: she carries her deceased husband’s shell around on her back, but only so she can store beer in it. Pastis also chronicles a war between East Coast and West Coast cartoonists and their creations, in which Pastis is kidnaped by Mutts characters and Rat refuses to ransom him because he doesn’t want him back. And then there is the strip in which Guard Duck turns a flamethrower on The New York Times because the paper does not have a comics section. Throw in some awful puns and the occasional tongue-twister, plus a strip whose punchline is, “Hey! You try coming up with 365 ideas a year!!” – and you have a year’s worth of dark, death-pervaded, often nasty and definitely not-for-children pages to take you through 2014 in, um, style…of some sort.

     Wiley Miller’s Non Sequitur is more stylish and more complex in its art than the work of Adams and Pastis, but it still works well in page-a-day format, because most of the time Non Sequitur is a single-panel strip. Miller goes for intellectual and esoteric comments some of the time, as in the “Libertarian Ice Fishing” panel showing that someone has fallen through the ice and drowned, with one man telling another, “I told you the free market could determine if it’s safe or not.” Then there is the panel in which a monk is carefully lettering an illuminated manuscript with the words, “Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away,” while another monk looks heavenward and exclaims, “Forgive him – he’s from California.” Also here is “The Job Market for Philosophy Majors,” with a waiter telling diners that “entrées come with a choice of quotes by Nietzsche, Chomsky or Goethe.” Non Sequitur means “it does not follow,” which allows Wiley to take his work in any direction he chooses without connecting one day to the next. But sometimes he likes to make connections, as in mini-stories featuring super-cynical Danae – for which Wiley generally divides each of his single panels into four, allowing him to explore the little girl’s frequent proclamations of outrage, including outrage at her father for “not taking my outrage seriously.” A lot of the Non Sequitur punchiness comes from its passing social commentary, as in the panel in which a man using a metal detector on the beach explains, “It’s not a hobby. It’s my pension plan.” Or, in another beach scene, “The Free Market Celebration of Labor Day,” the lifeguard station has a sign on it: “Lifeguard on duty somewhere in India.” The full-color Non Sequitur panels in this calendar are perfect for a year in which – guaranteed – the days will follow each other, but what happens during them will not necessarily follow at all.

     Also in full color, but more traditional in approach and less sophisticated – and still a lot of fun – the Big Nate 2014 calendar by Lincoln Peirce celebrates the ups and downs of 12-year-old Nate Wright, genius (he says) and super-popular man-about-town (he also says) and, for that matter, a budding cartoonist himself. Nate’s lack of self-awareness, his slovenliness, and his general cluelessness about his effect on other people are among the ongoing themes of Peirce’s strip, and they come through quite well in page-a-day-calendar form. In one strip, Nate comes up with a new school motto: “Sucking the life out of students for almost a century.” In a series, Nate tries to find a store to sponsor his baseball team, and ends up asking mall kiosks to do so. In another, Nate finds out how much money romance novels bring in annually and decides to write one. And then there are the mashed potatoes in the faculty lounge for “prank day.” And the series in which Nate pulls out his eyelashes to try to get wishes to come true. And Nate’s pride in getting kept after school so often: “I like to think of all my detentions as outstanding.” Nate is quite a character – and his antics provide a full year of fun for everyone who knows him or is just getting a chance to make his acquaintance.

     Of course, comic-strip-based calendars are only for people who know the strips and enjoy them. But they are scarcely the only amusing page-a-day offerings out there for 2014. If you want amusement but are not a comic-strip fan, you can always try Signspotting, whose subtitle makes the calendar’s topic abundantly clear: “Absurd & Amusing Signs from Around the World.” Absurd they certainly are. In Ghana, there is a barber shop called “Rely on God Hair Cut.” In Colorado, an “Information” sign points to a tree – wood you expect to learn a lot that way? A sign in Ireland offers “Washed Rooster.” At a Minnesota zoo, the main sign says “open 365 days a year” and the smaller one underneath says “building closed.” A British restaurant offers “bugers.” In Vermont, a labeled emergency exit bears a second sign: “Open door slowly.” In Spokane, Washington, a highway sign proclaims, “End Future 395.” A Belgian nightspot is labeled “Delicious Floor.” A food special in Monroe, Washington, proclaims, “Buy one Fish & Chips for the price of two and receive a second Fish & Chips absolutely free!” Compiled by Doug Lansky, these signs are sometimes hilarious, sometimes silly, sometimes obvious, sometimes appropriate in a goofy way – and always amusing enough to brighten your day when you tear off one page and move on to the next. And sometimes they really do make you wonder what the sign-posters were thinking, as in the Mill Valley, California photo of two signs on the same post – the top one saying “Not a Through Street” and the bottom one pointing straight ahead and indicating “Evacuation Route.” Just the sort of daily touch of absurdity you can use to help you get through everyday foibles – day after day throughout the year to come.

(+++) EASY, PLEASING READERS

Lulu Goes to Witch School. By Jane O’Connor. Illustrated by Bella Sinclair. Harper. $16.99.

Pony Scouts: Blue Ribbon Day. By Catherine Hapka. Pictures by Anne Kennedy. Harper. $16.99.

     The Level 2 readers in HarperCollins’ “I Can Read!” series are designated as “high-interest stories for developing readers,” and these two new ones – both for ages 4-8 – certainly qualify. Jane O’Connor moves from the realm of Fancy Nancy to that of Lulu Witch in Lulu Goes to Witch School, in which (witch?) the fun comes from seeing how things are both the same and different when witch school is compared with the everyday school of the kids who will pick up and enjoy this book. Lulu is both excited and nervous about starting school, for example – it is easy to identify with that. Of course she cannot eat her “frosted snake flakes” for breakfast and feels as if bats (rather than butterflies) are in her tummy. Comparisons here are easy. But then things get a little more complicated, as when Lulu meets her teacher, Miss Slime: “Miss Slime had a long nose and a wart on her chin. Miss Slime was very pretty.” Now, that is not something most kids would think about a teacher described that way – but Bella Sinclair actually does a fine job of showing Miss Slime just as O’Connor describes her and still making her appear attractive. The rest of this school tale focuses on Lulu's relationship with a fellow student, Sandy Witch, who is just too good at everything and who bullies Lulu a bit in ways that are not exactly cruel but that, in this book's context, are certainly unkind. For example, after Lulu shows up at school wearing a brand-new grey dress with spiders on it – leading Miss Slime to compliment Lulu on how she looks – Sandy uses her magic wand to turn the dress pink and change the spiders into flowers. Miss Slime makes Sandy change the dress back, but this is only one way in which Sandy is unpleasant to Lulu, and the fact that the teacher does not do much about the situation may upset, or at least concern, young readers who are nervous about what may happen to them in school. Eventually, and not at all surprisingly, Lulu and Sandy come to a sort of truce, even if they do not exactly become friends; and the reason they get along is amusing enough to make the book’s conclusion a pleasant one. Lulu Goes to Witch School is just offbeat enough to offer early readers something different in the back-to-school arena, with a story simple enough to follow easily but fraught with enough conflict to be mildly challenging.

     Pony Scouts: Blue Ribbon Day has some built-in conflict, too, but of a different kind. This Catherine Hapka story featuring Jill, Meg and Annie is all about a county fair, at which Jill’s mother is entering the ponies, Inky and Smoky, in a driving-class competition. The conflict comes in the form of a boy named Ben, whose mother is also in the competition and who is himself something of a braggart. This is the eighth book in the Pony Scouts series, and fans of the sequence will not be surprised to see how things go. Ben and the girls enter a pie-eating contest – after the girls have already stuffed themselves with county-fair food – and Ben defeats them and boasts about it. In the driving competition, though, Jill’s mom comes in first, but instead of the girls teasing Ben the way he has teased them, Meg “knew it wouldn’t be nice” and therefore compliments Ben’s family’s horse, Champ, on doing so well and finishing in second place. This makes Ben’s mom happy, even if Ben accepts the kind words rather grudgingly. A book for young horse enthusiasts – and for readers who like the simple, pleasant illustrations with which Anne Kennedy brings the story to life – Pony Scouts: Blue Ribbon Day is an easy reader with an easy story that teaches a straightforward, not-too-preachy lesson, while providing lots of opportunities to look at horses and ponies of many types.

(+++) MONSTERS (VARIOUS)

How to Catch a Bogle. By Catherine Jinks. Illustrated by Sarah Watts. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $16.99.

Plants vs. Zombies: Official Guide to Protecting Your Brain. By Simon Swatman. Illustrated by Adam Howling. HarperFestival. $7.99.

Plants vs. Zombies: Brains and the Beanstalk. By Annie Auerbach and PopCap Games. Illustrated by Charles Grosvenor and Jeremy Roberts. HarperFestival. $4.99.

Plants vs. Zombies: The Three Little Pigs Fight Back. By Annie Auerbach and PopCap Games. Illustrated by Charles Grosvenor and Jeremy Roberts. HarperFestival. $4.99.

Batman: Battle in Metropolis. By John Sazaklis. Illustrated by Andy Smith. Colors by Brad Vancata. HarperFestival. $3.99.

     Victorian England remains a particularly fertile field for the growing of monstrous creatures, and the first book of a planned Catherine Jinks trilogy rings some familiar atmospheric bells in its approach to the subject. How to Catch a Bogle is the story of 10-year-old Bridie McAdam, whose first name has been changed to Birdie by “Alfred the Bogler,” to whom she is apprenticed – because she will not be a bride for a very long time, if ever, and she has a lovely voice (“a voice like honey”) with which she sings like a bird. That is part of her charm, and also part of the charm with which she attracts the fearsome bogles, evil and frightening creatures regarded by Alfred as mere nuisances even though readers will quickly become curious to know more about them: Alfred “had no real, abiding interest in bogles, even though they were his livelihood. To him they were just vermin, plain and simple. He didn’t worry about the whys and the wherefores.” But Jinks’ book, illustrated somewhat too simplistically by Sarah Watts, is all about the “whys and wherefores.” The two words actually mean the same thing, but the phrase is a common Victorian one and is among the many ways in which Jinks creates the period setting for this fantasy. Bits of Cockney slang, words such as “cadger” and “topher,” talk of laudanum, hawkers’ calls of “ol’ cloes,” matter-of-fact references to such bits of Victoriana as the fact that chimney sweeps would sometimes get stuck in a flue and die there – these are among Jinks’ methods of weaving a tale for preteens of a time and place that often feel grittily realistic even though the book’s central premise is far from reality. The story is a bit creaky, following just the type of plot outline to be expected in tales of this type, from a dramatic opening showing what Birdie does and what she is up against when acting as bogle bait, to the eventual appearance of a genuinely evil nemesis to whom Alfred says, “you’re the devil,” which brings the reply, “I am merely a man who wants to harness His infernal powers.” Birdie, the central character, is illiterate and ill-spoken, and not above calling a bad guy a “bloody bastard,” but she is a sympathetic and attractive character for all that – more fully formed than anyone else in the book – and likely to be strong enough to carry the weight of the whole series on her young back.

     What is being carried in the Plants vs. Zombies books is a little harder to pin down. Bogles are genuinely frightening in Jinks’ novel, but there is no intention of making these zombies really scary. They come from a PopCap game, and they look rather video-game-ish both in Official Guide to Protecting Your Brain (for ages 6-10) and in two short fairy-tale rewrites (for ages 4-8). The problem is that while they are not particularly scary, they are not really a lot of fun, either – although presumably they are enjoyable in game form, and these books are most likely to appeal to kids who already like the deliberately silly game premise. As Official Guide to Protecting Your Brains explains, “In order for you to defeat a zombie, you must first understand a zombie. This does not mean being friends with a zombie. …When zombies first appeared, our scientists tried this approach and we never saw any of them ever again.” So this book about “apocalyptic gardening needs” sets out to explain the difference among, say, the conehead zombie, pole-vaulting zombie and backup dancer zombie, not to mention the dolphin rider zombie, bungee zombie and catapult zombie. There is even Gargantuar, “all zombie muscles and stamping. You’d think he’d rather be at the gym lifting weights than standing outside your house trying to eat your brains, but clearly zombies are a dedicated bunch.” This book introduces the apparent head (so to speak) of all zombies, Dr. Zomboss, explains “crucial differences” between the dead and undead, explains that saucepans are good both for cooking dinner and for wearing to protect your brains, and discusses “plants and their uses” during the zombie apocalypse. The plants include cherry bombs that blow zombies up, peashooters that grow quickly and shoot peas at the undead, snow peas that freeze zombies, and so forth. When not presenting zombies and/or plants, the book offers “Crazy Dave’s Time Machine,” zombie TV shows, a package of “Shufflers Brain & Vinegar Potato Crisps,” “What to Do if You’re at Home When the Zombies Come,” and so on. Fans of the Plants vs. Zombies game – and, even more, those fanatical enough to love Plants vs. Zombies 2 – will probably enjoy the Official Guide to Protecting Your Brain even though it doesn’t, like, actually move or anything.

     The two fairy-tale redos, each of which comes with more than 30 stickers, are a little more offbeat, featuring zombified versions of Jack and the Beanstalk and The Three Little Pigs. The stories are not as amusing as the writers seem to think they are, but the concepts are fun in their own way – especially that of Brains and the Beanstalk, since, after all, a beanstalk is a huge plant and the overall concept here is that of Plants vs. Zombies. The idea of both books is to take familiar elements of old stories, add zombies, mix well, and see what happens. What happens in Brains and the Beanstalk is that Jack trades a lawn mower, not a cow, for beans that turn out to be magic and that produce a huge beanstalk that fights zombies and features a silver-and-gold-coin-producing flower at the top – along with a Gargantuar with a tiny Imp Zombie on its back. In The Three Little Pigs Fight Back, there are the expected three different houses, but the attack of the wolf is shortened when zombies show up and scare him away – leading to adventures in the three houses’ gardens and to the pigs’ exclaiming fearfully about zombies that “want to eat our brainy-brain-brains!” Some heavy-duty vegetables and a few bad puns later, the zombies are all defeated and the pigs are relaxing in “a big mud bath,” and fans of Plants vs. Zombies are presumably back to playing the game itself – or have moved on to the next big (or at least weird) thing.

     By comparison with Plants vs. Zombies, the adventures of old-time heroes such as Batman and Superman – and their monstrous or not-so-monstrous old-time nemeses, such as the Joker and Lex Luthor – are comparatively tame. One way to jazz things up, then, is to combine characters, upping the ante for modern young readers who want a lot more smash-bang video-game-like activity than the comics offered when some of their most famous characters were created in the 1930s. So the short and simplistic Battle in Metropolis is designed to combine super-villains and superheroes and throw them at each other to dramatic effect: “Together, the world’s finest heroes are ready for action!” There is the usual dialogue, as when the Joker spots Superman and says, “Everywhere I go there’s a big blockhead in long pajamas” – a statement rendered funnier by the fact that current drawings of Superman and the other DC Comics characters do render them in a very blocky style. Luthor, double-crossed by the Joker, laments that “we were supposed to take over the world together,” while the incessantly unfunny dialogue gives the Joker the best line of the book as he is led off to jail: “Take us away! …I can’t stand any more of these corny jokes!” For kids who do not know just how corny the jokes are, or who know and don’t care, and for anyone looking for not-terribly-monstrous bad guys to be defeated in 24 pages of action-packed, brightly colored art, Battle in Metropolis will be punchier, if scarcely brainier, than Plants vs. Zombies.

(+++) OF MEDIA AND MEANING

Software Takes Command. By Lev Manovich. Bloomsbury. $29.95.

     Not for the faint of heart and decidedly not for the faint of mind, Lev Manovich’s Software Takes Command is a complex, highly theoretical analysis of what happens when media-specific tools such as photo editors are simulated and transformed into software that is independent of the medium for which the tools were designed. Indeed, what is a “medium” in the decidedly post-McLuhan age of Photoshop, Final Cut and Google Earth? It is no longer the medium of photography, of editing, of geographical mapmaking. Yet the new software subsumes as well as contains the media from which the software emerged, and it is the ways in which media revenants – almost, in a sense, ghosts from the machine – continue to permeate modern digital programs that particularly interests Manovich.

     Or, more accurately, this is one thing that particularly interests him, since Manovich – professor of computer science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York – has a very wide range of interests indeed. They all center, though, on creating a kind of unified field theory of technology, figuring out where the programs that so many people use today (without necessarily knowing or caring about their history) have their roots in the past; whether those roots matter and – if so – how they matter; and what the current state of technology tells us, or implies for us, about the future.

     Software Takes Command is the fifth book in a very ambitious series called International Texts in Critical Media Aesthetics, and it is not easy reading. Some of what Manovich says is straightforward enough to be revelatory: “Although the ability to search through a page-long text document does not sound like a very radical innovation, as the document gets longer this ability becomes more and more important. It becomes absolutely crucial if we have a very large collection of documents – such as all the web pages on the Web.” Most of the time, though, Manovich’s writing is more philosophical in tone, more complex, and can be convoluted enough to be difficult to follow unless you proceed very slowly indeed: “The sequence of examples also strategically juxtaposes media simulations with other kinds of simulations in order to emphasize that simulation of media is only a particular case of the computer’s general ability to simulate all kinds of processes and systems.” And Manovich is sometimes given to a fineness of argument that approaches that of distinction without difference, as when he observes that "computerization of media does not collapse the difference between mediums – but it does bring them closer together in various ways.”

     Amid the abstruse, Manovich’s occasional brightly shining comments emerge with unusual clarity: “[I]t is important to remember that without software, contemporary networks would not exist. Logically and practically, software lies underneath everything that comes later.” But while this is clear, the directions in which Manovich takes an argument of this sort are extremely complex and not really intended for the lay reading (or computer-using) public. “[B]oth theoretically and also experientially – at least for the users who have more than casual experiences with media applications – ‘media’ translates into two parts which work together. One part is a small number of basic data structures (or ‘formats’) which are the foundation of all modern media software: bitmap image, vector image, 3D polygonal model, 3D NURBS model, ASCII text, HTML, XML, sound and video formats, KML, etc. The second part is the algorithms (we can also call them ‘operations,’ ‘tools’ or ‘commands’) that operate on these formats.”

     What Manovich is trying to do in Software Takes Command is to explain what makes software “the engine of contemporary societies” and what that tells us about software, about software designers, and about society itself. This is a highly ambitious goal toward which Manovich can only move through in-depth study of concepts such as “hybridity,” “deep remixability” and “compositing,” and it is perhaps inevitable that the very last portion of the book is called “software epistemology,” since epistemology in the realm of philosophy is the development and exploration of a theory of knowledge itself – and indeed a theory of philosophy. There is thus a self-referential element to epistemology, and in a similar vein there is a fair amount of navel gazing inevitably implied by the way Manovich constantly seeks the larger implications of the smallest elements of software development and design – the societal implications of decisions to handle specific media programs in a particular way rather than in another manner. Software Takes Command reads more like a book for a graduate-level course in the philosophy of silicon life (or something along those lines) than like a work for any sort of general reader. It is heady stuff, to be sure; but it is also dense, difficult and frequently very hard to wade through in search of revelation. Like many other philosophers who have thought on a grand scale, Manovich has bitten off more than he can chew in this wide-ranging exploration; but he has produced a thoughtful, complex and frequently fascinating work that one suspects he would do better to use as the basis of a course than as a book foisted upon a world that, however much it has been transformed by silicon and software, may not be quite ready yet for this level of analysis of what has happened.