(++++) CUTENESSES

Five Little Monkeys Reading in Bed. By Eileen Christelow. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $7.99.

Bedtime for Chickies. By Janee Trasler. HarperFestival. $8.99.

Pottytime for Chickies. By Janee Trasler. HarperFestival. $8.99.

Little White Rabbit. By Kevin Hankes. Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $7.99.

Princess Baby, Night-Night. By Karen Katz. Schwartz & Wade. $6.99.

Dancing Dreams. By Kate Ohrt. Illustrated by Kristi Valiant. Accord Publishing/Andrews McMeel. $8.99.

     Bedtime board books are so much fun that it is quite understandable if children up to age four want more and more of them – or the same one multiple times. Eileen Christelow’s Five Little Monkeys are up to their usual hijinks in the new board-book version of 2011’s Five Little Monkeys Reading in Bed, more-or-less-obediently getting ready for bed but then becoming so interested in bedtime stories that they simply can’t go to sleep until they read just one more book. Or several. Tired Mama leaves and closes the monkeys’ bedroom door, but the little ones just cannot resist a bit more story time – and considerable acting-out. They read about a little lost puppy and break into sobs and tears, littering the bed with used tissues as they weep and wail in the best drama-queen style that Christelow can show. Then the puppy in the story is found and all ends happily, and the Five Little Monkeys express their joy with their usual ebullience: “Those monkeys are LOUD! (You should cover your ears!)” Predictably, Mama comes in, repeats that there is to be “no more reading in bed!” – and exits, giving the little monkeys the chance to do it all over again, this time with a scary book about ghosts that has them making eerie and, of course, LOUD ghost sounds. Mama returns, the little monkeys are duly chastised, and as soon as she is gone, they pull out a joke book and indulge in – what else? – LOUD hilarity. This time Mama has had enough, and she takes all the books out as she gets ready for bed. What’s the twist? She can’t resist reading them herself, and the Five Little Monkeys have to remind her that it’s time for bed, not more books. Young children will have a great time with the amusing story line and the climactic role reversal, but don’t be surprised if they want this book read repeatedly at bedtime!

     The three chicks in Bedtime for Chickies have trouble nodding off, too, but for different reasons – ones that make life difficult for the sheep, pig and cow who take care of them. “We can’t sleep,” the chickies repeatedly say. “We’re thirsty.” “We need a story.” And so on. Janee Trasler makes the chicks so adorable that the increasing exhaustion of the sheep, pig and cow comes across as funny, not troubling in the least. And the repeated, easy-to-follow poetic refrain helps move the story along: “It’s bedtime for chickies. It’s bedtime for sheep. It’s bedtime for pig and cow. Let’s all go to…” And each time, instead of “sleep,” readers turn the page to “cheep cheep cheep” and something else the chickies want. Eventually they get what they really need, a bedtime hug and cuddle, and the last page shows them soundly sleeping in the arms of the understandably exhausted sheep, pig and cow – a just-right ending.

     One thing the chickies say they need before sleep is to go potty, and that is the focus of Pottytime for Chickies, which is even funnier than Trasler’s bedtime book. One after the other, pig, cow and sheep tell the three chickies to “hop on the potty and get the job done,” only to be told, “We know what the potty’s for.” First it’s for splashing, as the three chickies dive in (one wearing snorkeling gear) and toss water everywhere – after which the ever-patient pig says, while mopping the floor, “Oh no, chickies. Pat. Pat. Pat. Pottytime is NOT for that.” Next, the chickies decide to play games with toilet paper, making a complete mess that always-understanding cow has to clean up. Sheep tries again to get the chickies to go potty, and this time they play acrobatic jumping games. Finally, all three “adult” animals tell the chickies that they really must do “what the potty’s for,” and all three chickies sit together and go “tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,” after which everybody celebrates and the chickies get to “take a bow.” Super-silly but with an underlying serious message, Pottytime for Chickies is fun both to read and to use in real-life potty training.

     The new board-book version of Little White Rabbit, a Kevin Hankes work originally published in 2011, has a subtler real-life use: it is about the wonders and limits of curiosity. Hankes amusingly illustrates the things the little rabbit thinks about as he hops along: he wonders what it would be like to be green, and is shown in that color, surrounded by crickets, a frog and a turtle; he wonders about being tall, and is shown bigger than a fir tree, with birds flying just over his head; he wonders about being unable to move, like a rock, and is shown in four identical poses at different times of day and night and in different weather; he wonders about flying like a butterfly and is shown flapping his ears and wiggling his tail as he soars with colorful butterflies all around him. But then the little rabbit is frightened by a cat, and stops wondering anything – he simply hops “as fast as he could” back home, where he continues to be curious about many things but “didn’t wonder who loved him.” This is a gently uplifting and calming message about being willing to explore, while knowing there is always a safe haven available at home.

     The safest haven of all for a little girl is her bedroom, and that is where all the action takes place in Princess Baby, Night-Night. The board book opens as Karen Katz’s adorable character, wearing her gold crown (which, on the front of the book, is covered in gold glitter, as are Princess Baby’s shoes), protests that she is not tired, even though her unseen parents say she should be getting ready for bed. Page after page, Princess Baby does sort of what her parents want – that is, she does what they say but not what they mean. They ask if she has put her toys where they belong, and she says yes – but while they mean the toys should be put away, Princess Baby puts them in the specific chairs or other places where they belong when she is playing with them. They ask if she has put on her pajamas, and she says yes – but what she is doing is putting pajamas on her stuffed toys. They ask if she has brushed her teeth, and she says she is brushing, too, with the illustration showing what that means: she is brushing her toys’ make-believe teeth. Eventually, Princess Baby says she is “almost” ready for a kiss, and we see her and her toys sitting together in a straight line, looking out the window at the stars. And then her parents come to her room to check on her – and what they find is that Princess Baby has fallen sound asleep on the floor, next to and amid all her little stuffed-toy friends. What can the parents do but what they do do? They pick up their sleeping little princess, gently put her in her bed, and give her a good-night kiss. The result is that Princess Baby, Night-Night is both charming and reassuring, as the best board books so often are.

     The glitter on the front of Dancing Dreams is there not for “royal” purposes but to accentuate the ballerina costume that little Gracie wears – and the real one worn by the prima ballerina she is imagining herself to be. Rather than a board book for giving a young child sweet nighttime dreams, Kate Orht’s is one that celebrates daydreams, with Gracie playing dress-up and thinking of all the kinds of dancers she could become when she grows up. A chorus-line dancer, country dancer, hula dancer, tap dancer, cheerleader, flamenco dancer – Gracie can see herself as any or all of them. Kristi Valiant’s illustrations highlight the fantasies by having each imagined grown-up dancer actually look like an adult version of Gracie, as if the young girl is seeing into her own future – or multiple possible futures, each of them equally but differently danceable. The pleasant contrast between Gracie’s still-awkward real-world dancing costumes and poses and her imagined poised perfection as an adult adds to the enjoyment of this pleasant when-I-grow-up fantasy. And the final pages, showing that Gracie really is the star of a show at her current age and current level of dancing ability, add a lovely “maybe it will really happen” element to the book – and a chance for parents to tell young children that sometimes daydreams really can come true.

(++++) FAMILIAR CHARACTERS’ SEASONAL STORIES

Pete the Cat: Big Easter Adventure. By Kimberly and James Dean. Harper. $9.99.

Pinkalicious: Eggstraordinary Easter. By Victoria Kann. HarperFestival. $4.99.

Alvin and the Chipmunks: Alvin’s Easter Break. By Jodi Huelin. Illustrations by Walter Carzon and Artful Doodlers. HarperFestival. $3.99.

The Berenstain Bears’ Easter Parade. By Mike Berenstain. HarperFestival. $3.99.

     Kids ages 4-8 who are fans of specific characters can enjoy them not only in “anytime” books but also in seasonal works of all sorts – including, this spring, ones in which they help or are helped by the Easter Bunny. Pete the Cat’s adventure starts when he finds a note asking him to help by finding, painting and hiding eggs – and the note comes with a pair of bunny ears to wear while doing all that. The illustration of Pete hopping like a bunny while wearing the big white ears is very funny indeed – as is the later one in which he looks even more like a rabbit after making himself a bunny nose and tail from cotton balls. The ridiculousness of Pete’s appearance helps make the straightforward story more fun: Pete predictably gets eggs from the chickens and paint and brushes from the toolshed, then colors the eggs and takes them around the neighborhood for his friends to find – earning a thank-you from the Easter Bunny, who shows up just as Pete is finished helping. The book’s activities are as enjoyable as the story itself: a full-color poster is included, along with a dozen Easter cards to be cut out and sent (including several showing Pete with those bunny ears), plus a page of stickers. Kids who enjoy Kimberly and James Dean’s books about Pete will find that this one fits into the series very nicely.

     Victoria Kann’s series of Pinkalicious tales gets an amusing, “Pinktastic”-stickers-included Easter entry as well in Pinkalicious: Eggstraordinary Easter. Here Pinkalicious gets clues from Edgar the Easter Bunny rather than being asked to help. She and Edgar are pals, so on Easter, he leaves her a special basket with a note that starts Pinkalicious and her family on a scavenger hunt – which takes them to a treehouse, school and playground before Pinkalicious is stumped by a clue saying to go to “the place Pinkalicious loves most.” Eventually Pinkalicious figures out what the clue means, and all ends happily as she receives “the most eggstravagant Easter basket,” even though she is too “eggshausted” to eat the treats immediately. Kann’s usual pleasant inclusion of Pinkalicious’ brother and parents in the adventure, during which her mom digs in a sandbox and her dad goes on a playground swing, keeps the family focus of the book front-and-center and makes it as much a togetherness tale as an Easter story.

     Two other character-driven seasonal books are not quite at this level and get (+++) ratings, but will still be enjoyable for fans of their particular fantasy worlds. Alvin’s Easter Break features the singing chipmunks – Simon, Theodore and Alvin – taking a beach vacation with their human father, Dave, but being repeatedly interrupted by three identical boys who are big singing-chipmunk fans and simply won’t leave the trio alone. The “international rock stars” try to escape the boys “and have some real fun,” but it turns out that everyone is on the same plane, and everyone is going to the same hotel, and the “miniature groupies” are tremendously intrusive and at times genuinely disruptive. But instead of supporting the chipmunks’ desire for a little quiet time, instead of perhaps saying something to the triplets’ parents, Dave tells the chipmunks to spend even more time with their fans “in the spirit of holiday fun.” Under orders, that is just what Simon, Theodore and Alvin do – and in the spirit of complete fantasy, they discover that their vacation is better as a result, in fact becoming “the best Easter Alvin could remember.” How parents interpret this story of celebrity, fandom and privacy will have a great deal to do with what young readers get out of it.

     Some interpretation will also be helpful for The Berenstain Bears’ Easter Parade, a typically lightly plotted springtime tale in which everybody decides to get dressed up in finery for a walk through town at Easter – except for Brother, who is “happy wearing his plain red shirt and blue pants every day” because when he does, “I always look like me.” That plainspoken common sense is a problem here, since everyone else agrees to dress as fancily as possible – which would be just fine, except that it turns out the family only has old fancy clothing that does not fit properly or is falling apart. Instead of making do with what they have or repairing the old clothes, the Bear family proceeds to go to a department store and buy everything new, simply for the purpose of wearing the dress-up duds one single time and showing themselves off to the town. And this being a Berenstain Bears book, the result is not that they learn a lesson about conspicuous consumption and the waste of money on frippery – oh no! Instead, they receive “the prize for best-dressed family,” and even Brother is converted to the buy-stuff-and-look-good philosophy. Although Mike Berenstain carries on the tradition of Stan and Jan Berenstain in making the Bear family pleasant and its concerns and worries modest, his book has a strangely unsettling subtext in its disdain for simplicity and advocacy of spending substantial sums of money to keep up with the Joneses (or the other bears) and to show off. Easy tweaks to the story would have sent a very different message: for example, Brother might have bought his new clothes but then given them away to someone who was needy, ending up feeling good about himself – and perhaps winning a special award, not for his clothing but for his heart. This is not the Berenstain way, though, and families will have to decide for themselves how comfortable they are with the lessons that The Berenstain Bears’ Easter Parade teaches.

(+++) DETAILS OF OUR WORLD

The Thing with Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal about Being Human. By Noah Strycker. Riverhead. $27.95.

The Sugar Season: A Year in the Life of Maple Syrup, and One Family’s Quest for the Sweetest Harvest. By Douglas Whynott. Da Capo. $24.99.

     A fascinating ramble through many things avian and birdlike, but so discursive that it frequently reads like a stream of consciousness rather than a closely observed and argued book, The Thing with Feathers is fascinating to follow if you can follow it – that is, if you find the meandering mind of Noah Strycker attractive. Strycker, associate editor of Birding magazine, is in fact a highly observant researcher, and much of what is in the book is based on his personal treks, trips and notes. But his presentation method, in which he writes about one thing for a while, then thinks of something else and writes about that, then recollects what he was writing about the first time and comes back to it, will be maddening to those who do not find it attractive. It is hard to be neutral about this book’s style – some will love it while others will hate it. One section, for example, notes that “if you Google ‘America’s most hated bird,’ all of the top results refer to starlings. Such universal agreement is rare in matters of opinion, but on this everyone seems to concur: Starlings are rats with wings. …[But] the starling’s only real fault is success.” He then explains how and to what extent starlings have multiplied in the United States, along the way taking “time to appreciate the starling’s merits,” noting that “Mozart kept a starling for three years and taught it to sing bars of his music,” then after its death “buried it in his backyard and wrote a commemorative poem.” He also mentions a Shakespearean reference to starlings, discusses the fact that large flocks of the birds may contain 1.5 million of them, and then points out that that number isn’t very large compared with the crowd at a 1994 Rod Stewart performance in Brazil, the billion-plus flocks of the now-extinct passenger pigeon, or “a single locust swarm [that] was once estimated to weigh 27 million tons, including 12 trillion insects.” Oh – and starlings are disappearing in their native European habitats. Following all this is dizzying.

     Elsewhere, Strycker discusses the longstanding debate about whether birds have a sense of smell or hunt purely by sight, getting into John James Audubon’s opinion on vultures, an experiment on the subject done by Charles Darwin, and a more-elaborate set of investigations done by American naturalist John Bachman, “for whom a sparrow and warbler are now named.” He details the seven vultures that live in the New World, discusses the convergent evolution of Old and New World vultures, and then zips onward to the use of mercaptans to cause natural gas, which is naturally odorless, to smell – alerting people to its presence. He connects this back to vultures by discussing a group of them that was attracted by the odor when its usage began, leading to the still-used practice of “looking for circling vultures when tracking down a leak.” As the book zips or strolls hither and thither, Strycker tosses out comments such as, “It’s the animals in the middle – the ones with some experience of humans, but not too much – that are most afraid of us.” And, regarding memory in both birds and humans, “Use your head, in other words, or you’ll literally lose your head.” (Well, not literally, but you know what Strycker means.) Whether discussing the brain-computer metaphor, the opinions of ancient Athenian politician Themistocles, the vocal mimicry of bowerbirds, the enacting of copyright laws in the 1700s, or the way in which the pecking order of chickens (for whom the phrase “pecking order” was created) parallels tennis ranking, Strycker tosses information bits all about as if he just has to get his comments out there to see which ones will, err, take wing. And then he surprises readers by lapsing into the poetic: “The romantic life of an albatross is a sweeping kind of romance, the dreamy feeling that all horizons open to an unlimited universe where anything is possible, given sufficient time and space. Albatrosses exist so close to infinity that on a windy day and in the right state of mind, far from the sight of land, the casual observer may be forgiven for forgetting that these are earthly creatures.” It is never entirely clear in The Thing with Feathers exactly what birds “reveal about being human,” per the book’s subtitle, except that just as birds range all over the world and their interests are all over the metaphorical map, so are those of Strycker and, by extension, of humans as a species. Readers need not be deeply interested in birds to enjoy this book, but they must be deeply interested in Strycker himself, as he presents himself and his views in these pages. Those who find Strycker’s approach congenial will find the book delightful; those who do not will feel as if they are being pecked to bits, wafted first here, then there, then back again as the author’s thoughts insistently take flight and, not infrequently, soar.

     A far more down-to-earth book that is focused on an even narrower slice of life than birds – albeit one that is wholly human – Douglas Whynott’s The Sugar Season is an enthralling exploration of the maple-syrup industry and the people who keep this very old occupation (by American standards) going in the 21^st century. This is a book for people who want to dwell intimately with a condiment that many people do not even buy, since maple syrup is so much costlier and so much more delicate in flavor than packaged and artificially flavored sugar syrups. You must be a maple-syrup aficionado, a history buff and a person fascinated by rural living and how industry is encroaching on it to get the full flavor (so to speak) of The Sugar Season, and although that radically limits the book’s potential audience, it also means that people who are interested in the subject will really, well, lap it up. The narration is of the Prairie Home Companion variety: “Not to mean that the spirit wasn’t festive at the Clark sugarhouse that weekend; it was festive and magnanimous. They brought miniature donkeys down from the farm for kids to pet. The inside of the sugarhouse was warm and inviting. Jugs of new syrup were lined up by the counter, bison burgers were on the grill, and bags of maple cotton candy hung from clips like a row of balloons. …And there was Alvin, wearing another funny hat – this was shaped like a buffalo head, with glass eyes and cute yellow horns.” But beneath the down-home scenes lies the story of an industry affected by everything from the black market to thievery to global climate change, an industry with highly specific grading standards for its product and even a Global Strategic Reserve of syrup (which, Whynott points out, is worth more per barrel than crude oil).

     Vacuum pumps and tubing are used to harvest the sap that becomes syrup today – the days of buckets and wooden spouts are long gone – but there is a core of rural hardiness and engagement with the natural world that remains in the syrup industry, and it is this that Whynott focuses on by detailing a single year, 2012, of sugar production by Bruce Bascom, whose successes and setbacks are intended to mirror those of other sugar producers and of the industry as a whole. The Sugar Season is a sometimes uneasy mixture of moving scenes (such as the excerpts from a poem that Ken Bascom, Bruce’s father, wrote after Bruce’s mother died) and mundane ones (such as the biology of the maple tree and the method of grading syrup). The book is written as a memoir and travelogue, describing Whynott’s comings and goings while also including facts such as this: “Franklin County, in the uppermost northwestern part of the state, produced a third of the Vermont maple syrup crop and ten percent of the maple syrup crop in the entire United States.” The highly personal elements of the book, such as Bruce Bascom’s longtime struggle with his stuttering, humanize the maple-syrup business, while discussions of changing technology, climate issues and bank lending policies dehumanize it. The mixture does not always work, and Whynott’s attempt to turn the maple-sugar story into yet another plea for climatic improvement undercuts the originality of the book and is itself undercut when, in a postscript, he notes that the winter of 2013, like that of 2011, was quite cold, with Bruce Bascom estimating that the U.S. maple-syrup crop in 2013 was “the greatest in over seventy-five years” – suggesting that perhaps the less-successful year that Whynott spent studying the industry and its people was an aberration. The Sugar Season is far more intriguing and engaging, at least for lovers of maple syrup, when it gets into the nitty-gritty of syrup manufacture and the people who do it, than when it becomes something closer to a climate-change polemic. Fascinating tidbits abound here, but they do not always blend well with the everyday elements of the narrative or with Whynott’s heartfelt but not particularly original concerns about where maple-syrup production fits within the continuing controversies about the Earth’s climate.

(+++) KID STUFF

How Much Is Too Much? Raising Likeable, Responsible, Respectful Children—From Toddlers to Teens—In an Age of Overindulgence. By Jean Illsley Clarke, Ph.D., Connie Dawson, Ph.D., and David Bredehoft, Ph.D. Da Capo. $16.99.

Mayim’s Vegan Table: More Than 100 Great-Tasting and Healthy Recipes from My Family to Yours. By Mayim Bialik with Jay Gordon, M.D. Da Capo. $21.99.

     The very title How Much Is Too Much? reflects supersizing of a sort: this book is a revised and updated version of 2004’s How Much Is Enough? Apparently enough isn’t enough anymore. Taken from the results of 10 studies (the original book was based on three), the book in large part consists of common-sense ideas that do not seem very common anymore: “Overindulging children is giving them too much of what looks good, too soon, and for too long,” and “frequent overindulgence can be painful to [children] – and to the people around them.” Many of the authors’ recommendations are commonsensical, too: “We’re not suggesting you consider eliminating playmates; just consider putting balance in your family schedule.” And: “Remember, the word ‘No,’ used only when you mean it, helps children feel safe, even when they resist it.” So if the material here is indeed largely a matter of common sense, why do we need the book? Because, say the authors, “overindulgence has become the cultural New Normal,” with wide-ranging deleterious effects of which people are insufficiently aware. Jean Illsley Clarke, Connie Dawson and David Bredehoft identify 14 “risky raindrops” of overindulgence, in a somewhat overdone metaphor created on the basis that “rain can nourish the land and replenish the aquifer or can become a deluge and create muddy holes that keep us stuck.” These include such feelings and behaviors as helplessness, an overblown sense of entitlement, lack of gratitude, confusion of wants and needs, poor self-control and more. The negatives emerge from homes in which there is overnurturing, “soft structure” (unclear boundaries), a tendency to give kids too much – or some combination of those factors. The authors urge parents to think of ways to turn “murky raindrops” (yes, their terminology is inconsistent) into strengths, shown graphically as clear raindrops (which, however, are quite as capable of causing a flood as are murky ones). Thus, entitlement should be turned into an expectation of earning from effort; poor self-control should become good self-control; goals of wealth, fame and image should become goals of personal growth and meaningful relationships; and so on. What should a parent do if, for example, she “wants to exchange the soggy raindrop [sic – aren’t all raindrops soggy?] of her son’s lack of appreciation for the nourishing drop of appreciation”? Specific suggestions range from thanking the cook and helpers at the end of each meal to asking a child what he appreciates about school, his clothes, etc., and if he says “nothing,” replying that he should think about it and you will ask again the next day. Whether this and the other prescriptions here will work is largely a matter of the individual personalities of parents and children, the overall family dynamics, and the age of kids when parents try to deal with overindulgence – so it is impossible to say whether the recommendations will do what the authors hope. But they are recommendations, and the fact that the authors focus on the prescriptive rather than simply reciting the results of their research is a significant strength of the book. There are enough ideas here so that if one does not work, it is possible to try another, and then another. The book also includes a helpful, if scarcely comprehensive, discussion of what adults who were themselves overindulged as children can do to counter the effects of their childhood. And it has sections on grandparents who overindulge – and grandparents concerned because their children overindulge the grandchildren. On balance, How Much Is Too Much? is something of a hodgepodge, both in content and stylistically. It contains “In Their Own Voices” sections drawn from the authors’ research and helping to personalize it; quotations of varying levels of relevance sprinkled around the pages; occasional footnotes in the middle of the page; many bulleted lists; and a writing style that seesaws between the academic and sentences such as this one: “STOP. THINK. CHOOSE. DO.” (Capitalization as in the book.) The choppiness of the presentation, which also includes elaborate charts and diagrams, makes the book disproportionately difficult to read, but it does contain a considerable amount of interesting descriptive information as well as some useful recommendations. If read in small chunks, it has more to offer than if tackled head-on and read straight through.

     Mayim’s Vegan Table, like other recipe-focused food books, is not intended for straight-through reading. It is a straightforward vegan-cooking book for fans of actress Mayim Bialik, who wrote the book in collaboration with pediatrician Jay Gordon. Eat-the-vegan-way books inevitably begin by discussing the vegan commitment itself and explaining why plant-based eating is better for humans, even though our teeth and digestive systems clearly show us to be omnivores rather than herbivores. Thus, Bialik’s book has a fairly straightforward introductory chapter (one of several introductions) called “Is Plant-Based Eating Really Better for Us? Nutritional Choices.” It will not convince non-vegans and will not be needed by vegans, but it does give Gordon the opportunity to make some rather questionable advocacy statements: “If milk were good for you, the dairy industry wouldn’t have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars [each year] to convince you of that.” Of course, what the industry is actually trying to do is to get people to drink milk instead of other beverages, and it is using the “health” angle to try to do so; but this is too much nuance for the presentation here. Similarly, Bialik herself is so convinced that “we can and will be satisfied with wholesome plant-based foods” that she states that kids would not argue with vegan eating if they knew how good it would be for them when they reached, say, their 50s. This may be true but is scarcely helpful. What is helpful here are not the arguments or argumentativeness but the recipes, which take up most of the book and are the only real reason to consider buying it. They come in the usual categories, among which are breakfast, soups and salads, snacks, vegetables and other side dishes, main courses, breads and desserts. Bialik, who is Jewish, includes some interesting vegan versions of tzimmes, mandel brot, rugelach, sufganiyot, hamantaschen, and matzo ball soup, with explanations of what the foods are and where they fit into Jewish culture. She also offers recipes for such decidedly cross-cultural foods as spanakopita (misspelled as “spanikopita”), tacos, pesto crostini, Mexican bean dip, udon with edamame and Vietnamese banh mi with do chua. The many special recipe ingredients will be familiar to vegans, and the preparation instructions will be clear to those used to the particular time needs associated with vegan food preparation, especially for those who have recently decided to try this form of eating. Mayim’s Vegan Table will not convert anyone to a vegan lifestyle, but for those who already believe in it, it offers some interesting and healthful (not “healthy,” as the subtitle has it) recipes that families committed to vegan foods will enjoy trying.

(++++) SYMPHONIC SPLENDOR

Nielsen: Symphonies Nos. 4 (“The Inextinguishable”) and 5. Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sakari Oramo. BIS. $21.99 (SACD).

Brahms: Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2. London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. LPO. $17.99 (2 CDs).

Brahms: Symphonies Nos. 3 and 4. London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. LPO. $16.99.

     Carl Nielsen gets some respect as a symphonist, but on the basis of the excellent BIS recording of his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra under Sakari Oramo, not nearly enough. Oramo’s handling of this music is simply superb, from an opening of No. 4 that will make listeners sit up and take notice, if not fall out of their seats, through the altogether softer and more emotionally compelling middle movements, to a finale that starts with amazingly fast but perfectly controlled strings and ends with an upbeat positivity that is tremendously exciting. The four movements of this symphony are played without pause, and Oramo takes full advantage of that structure to turn the music into a single grand sweep of emotion, pulling the audience back and forth among a myriad of interconnected feelings, faithfully accepting Nielsen’s assertion that this symphony was designed to express the things in humanity and music itself that are ultimately inextinguishable – a tremendously difficult and highly admirable goal for a work written smack in the middle of World War I (the symphony dates to 1914-16). And then Oramo delivers every bit as monumental and compelling a performance of the Fifth (1921-22), a frequently bizarre two-movement work whose opening looks ahead to the first movement of Shostakovich’s Seventh but whose use of the side drum (brilliantly played by Daniel Kåse) is even stronger and stranger than the Russian’s of two decades later. The Fifth is one of only two Nielsen symphonies without a subtitle (the First is the other), and indeed it is hard to encapsulate this work’s intentions and meaning in a few words. It is in some respects a continuation of the struggle of the Fourth, in others a deeper consideration of the cacophonous postwar world and the eternal battle between the forces of dark and those of light. It is a far larger work than its 34-minute running time would indicate, being in some respects as world-encapsulating as Mahler’s twice-as-long symphonies and in others as compressed as the symphonies of Sibelius. Oramo has a clear vision for the complexity and emotional difficulty of this symphony, and the orchestra communicates it highly effectively, abetted by outstanding sound that not only allows the crashing climaxes to have their full effect but also puts the many quiet passages of both symphonies in just the right perspective. This is the first release in a planned Nielsen cycle by Oramo and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, and it cannot but whet listeners’ appetites for the upcoming ones.

     The more-familiar symphonies of Brahms are grand and expansive where those of Nielsen are grand and compressed, and first-rate interpretations of them abound, while top-notch ones of Nielsen are decidedly rarer. The cycle by Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, consisting entirely of live recordings from 2010 and 2011, has a number of significant high points, coupled with some low ones that are rather surprising in performances by this usually thoughtful conductor. The pluses and minuses are abundantly clear in Jurowski’s reading of the First and Second. The latter is excellent, in line with what listeners familiar with Jurowski’s conducting will likely expect. The rhapsodic lyricism of this symphony is everywhere apparent despite the rather quick tempos, the orchestra plays beautifully, and the interpretation is filled with small, felicitous touches that the fine recording brings out very well. For example, the diminuendo at the end of the third movement and the full-throated display of orchestral brilliance after the hushed opening of the finale are both performed and captured beautifully. But the First, somewhat surprisingly in view of Jurowski’s penchant for dramatic music, is disappointing. Here too the tempos are quick, but in this case they feel rushed, and here the details work against the music instead of with it. Most notably, the opening of the first movement is sped up so it nearly matches the Allegro that follows it, essentially making the movement seem to be at a single tempo when it is really at two (and requiring some very fast timpani playing at the start of the symphony). The whole movement has a breathless quality that certainly results in (and from) a rethinking of Brahms, but does not work to the music’s benefit – the whole thing seems somewhat lightweight. Also, the orchestra itself sounds less full here than in the recording of the Second (which was made four months later) – and the sound is thin, too, adding to an overall impression of insubstantiality that is at odds with the music and, if meant to be a new way to look at and hear Brahms, is an unconvincing one. Brahms is often made, unfortunately, to sound heavy and ponderous, but having his music come across as lightweight is no improvement.

     The recording of the Third and Fourth is more consistent and more successful. The woodwinds are particular standouts on this CD, and here Jurowski and the sonic engineers achieve a balance between a thinner, more-transparent sound and a full display of the well-balanced sections of the orchestra. Most tempos here are somewhat more relaxed than in the First and Second, and the prominent use of string portamento – while it may not be to all listeners’ taste – gives the symphonies a pleasantly old-fashioned sound. The best thing about these performances is Jurowski’s emphasis on the long lines of the music – the Third almost seems like a continuous movement from start to finish, and the finale of the Fourth, which can seem episodic as it progresses through its 30 variations, here has sweep and vitality combined in an attractive package that crowns the symphony as well as the entire set of four.  There is a freshness to these performances that goes beyond the notion of a simple attempt to do something different – that attempt appears to be what misfires in the First. This is not to say that the readings are flawless. To attain the continuity of the Third, for example, Jurowski takes the second movement rather quickly, certainly not as the Andante that Brahms calls for, and because this comes on the heels of a rather speedy first movement, the approach takes some getting used to. And although the symphony’s finale is well-paced and well-played, its mysterious opening gets short shrift here. In the Fourth, the first movement has plenty of ebb and flow, but is somewhat lacking in depth of feeling, and the third movement is taken at so headlong a pace that listeners will likely respond to it with surprise – although it must be said that Jurowski balances the sound well and provides, overall, a genuinely thrilling effect along the lines that one hears more often in a Tchaikovsky scherzo than in Brahms. Jurowski takes lots of chances in all these well-worn pieces, providing a considerable number of insights despite drifting astray from time to time, most notably in the First. The quick pacing and comparatively transparent orchestral sound mark these interpretations as “rethinkings” of Brahms, and certainly these symphonies can stand some of that. However, there is such a thing as over-thinking, or over-rethinking, and Jurowski is guilty of some of it: Brahms is a composer of considerable depth, and even in the best elements of this Brahms cycle, depth tends to be missing. There is a superficiality here that does not go particularly well with the music – but there is, at the same time, a salutary willingness to see the works in a different way and to try out an approach to them that, if not always successful, is filled with intriguing touches.

(++++) MORE AND LESS INSPIRED

Prokofiev: Piano Concertos Nos. 1-5. Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, piano; BBC Philharmonic conducted by Gianandrea Noseda. Chandos. $37.99 (2 CDs).

Beethoven: Christus am Ölberge. Maria Venuti, soprano; Keith Lewis, tenor; Michel Brodard, bass; Gächinger Kantorei Stuttgart and Bach-Collegium Stuttgart conducted by Helmuth Rilling. Hänssler Classic. $14.99.

     No composer is 100% inspired 100% of the time – not even Mozart, although some might argue that he is the exception that proves (that is, tests) the rule. Even when creating works they intend to perform themselves, composers do not always produce music at the highest level of which they are capable. And that is generally accepted as the situation when it comes to Prokofiev’s five piano concertos, all written by 1932 and all intended by the composer for his own use. The consensus opinion is that Concerto No. 2 is far and away the best of the bunch, with No. 1 being a bit of a youthful extravagance and the last three concertos being complex but not up to the standards of the Second. Interestingly, though, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, who made his concerto debut playing Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 1, sees the works differently – and his new recording for Chandos, with the BBC Philharmonic under Gianandrea Noseda providing excellent, supple accompaniment, benefits enormously from Bavouzet’s determination not to regard any of these works as inferior to the others. Indeed, Bavouzet is particularly fond of No. 5, a thorny and rarely heard concerto filled with originality and surprises, but one without any particular tunefulness (despite its moving slow movement) and therefore a difficult one for audiences. Bavouzet plays it here with considerable conviction and attentiveness to its structure, bringing out its lyrical elements – especially in the finale – while never shortchanging its considerable technical difficulties. Similarly, in the other rarely played concerto, No. 4 – which Bavouzet admits finding less than entirely congenial – the pianist uses his own experience with focal dystonia (the same debilitating hand condition that afflicted Leon Fleisher for decades) to help him understand and appreciate this work, which was written for the left hand only. The concerto was created for the famed virtuoso Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost an arm in World War I and commissioned not only Prokofiev’s left-hand concerto but also Ravel’s far more famous work, among others. Wittgenstein never played the Prokofiev concerto, saying he did not understand it, but Bavouzet clearly does have insight into what Prokofiev did here, and his carefully modulated performance makes as strong a case for this work as it is likely to get.  The first three concertos also come across splendidly. The ebullient No. 1, which runs  only 15 minutes, sounds like juvenilia but not like a throwaway here, its one tragic-sounding theme overbalanced by its generally upbeat mood, into which Bavouzet enters fully. No. 3, also a bright work – and one that looks ahead in its thematic diversity to No. 5 – is especially noteworthy for its second-movement variations on an odd little gavotte theme, which Bavouzet handles with aplomb. And No. 2, best-known of the concertos and the one that remained closest to Prokofiev himself, gets a full-blown, soulful and very piano-centric performance here, the gigantic first-movement cadenza flowing very impressively and the still-modern-sounding Intermezzo getting top-flight playing not only from piano and tuba but also from the rest of the orchestra. Whether Prokofiev’s five piano concertos are all equally inspired is a matter of debate, but one thing is certain: they were inspired by different circumstances, and therefore require highly individual handling by performers who realize how their varying styles fit into the Prokofiev oeuvre as a whole. Bavouzet and Noseda make find advocates of these works, both separately and together.

     It is generally accepted that the inspiration level of Beethoven’s sole oratorio, Christus am Ölberge (“Christ on the Mount of Olives”), is comparatively low, but this is one of those works – Sir Arthur Sullivan’s opera Ivanhoe is another – that is considerably better when approached with an open mind and without regard to what “everyone knows” about it. Open-mindedness is clearly what underlies the very fine performance led by Helmuth Rilling in 1994 and now re-released on the Hänssler Classic label. Yes, the text of Christus am Ölberge is poor, as Beethoven himself acknowledged; but the composer strongly resisted the wholesale changes to it that his publisher wanted, and this performance shows the wisdom of Beethoven’s position. The words here matter less than the dramatic setting that Beethoven gives them, and indeed the piece comes across more as a drama, nearly a theatrical one, than as a traditional oratorio. Despite the relatively late opus number, this is an early work, dating to 1803, and this explains some of its infelicities, particularly in the vocal writing. But the solo passages for Jesus (the tenor role), a seraph (soprano) and Peter (bass) are by no means poor; they are simply less involving and less dramatic than the choral sections and the surrounding orchestral texture. In fact, the arias for Jesus go a long way toward humanizing him, and the work as a whole is less staid and standoffish than it is sometimes accused of being. Part of its effectiveness in this recording comes from how well Rilling handles the ensembles he founded, the Gächinger Kantorei Stuttgart and Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, and how adeptly the three soloists perform individually and in contrast to the chorus. No, Christus am Ölberge is not at the level of much-later Beethoven vocal music, such as the Missa Solemnis and Ninth Symphony, but it is unfair to compare this youthful and text-hampered work to the much later and undeniably greater ones. And it is worth pointing out that the oratorio is significantly more engaging than some of Beethoven’s later vocal creations, such as the occasional cantata from 1814, Der glorreiche Augenblick. Indeed, Christus am Ölberge is effectively expressive in many passages and effectively dramatic in many more, and if it is unlikely ever to become one of Beethoven’s most-popular compositions, it certainly deserves to be heard much more often than it typically is – provided it is performed with as much sensitivity and understanding as it receives here.

(++++) JOURNEYS TO THE ODD

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch. By Anne Isaacs. Illustrated by Kevin Hawkes. Schwartz & Wade. $17.99.

The Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky’s Abstract Art. By Barb Rosenstock. Illustrated by Mary GrandPré. Knopf. $17.99.

The End (Almost). By Jim Benton. Scholastic. $16.99.

     Whether wholly fictional or fact-based, some books for young readers succeed because of the way their stories are presented – a way that can at times be delightfully far-out. Anne Isaacs’ Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch is a tall tale terrifically told, featuring a sweet British widow who inherits $35 million from her late husband and hightails it from Greater Bore, England, to By-Golly Gully, Texas, where she now owns a ranch. Determined to make a go of things in Texas, widow Tulip Jones shows up just when it’s so hot that chickens are laying hard-boiled eggs and lizards “hobbled around on tiny stilts to avoid burning their feet on the ground” – and if you think that’s a bizarre image, wait until you see Kevin Hawkes’ marvelous illustration. Things just get stranger and stranger down Texas way. For one thing, the tomatoes grow huge (again, wait until you see them), and for another, “potatoes got so big that it took only seven of them to make a dozen.” And the 12 tortoises that Widow Jones brought from England grow so big that Widow Jones and her three helpers ride them everywhere, because they grow fast as they get large and “eventually, they could outgallop any racehorse.” Well, shucks, things aren’t strange enough yet, because that $35 million is mighty attractive to all the unmarried men in Texas, and “in 1870, every man in Texas was unmarried.” And soon Widow Jones is besieged by a thousand unwanted suitors, including Sheriff Arroyo and his brother Spit, leaders of “the infamous Hole in the Pants Gang.” The sheriff is a lyin’ pack of horse manure, and Spit never says anything but “riprocious!” and has a habit of eatin’ barbed wire and rocks (and his teeth show it). Will Widow Jones find a way to get rid of a thousand suitors, sew up the Hole in the Pants Gang, keep those big tortoises happy, keep runnin’ her ranch, and maybe even find a happy endin’ for herself? You betcha! Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch knits all the loose ends beautifully and hilariously together, complete with fairy-tale trappings such as setting the bachelors three impossible tasks, and a sound “so bone-chilling that coyotes all over Texas covered their ears.” A delightful romp with impossible premises piled atop each other and some absolutely wonderful illustrations propelling the story from high point to high point, Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch is a show-stoppin’ bit of fun all the way to the tip-top of the weddin’ cake made with two tons of sugar and 10,000 gallons of milk.

     Far more modest, fact-based rather than wholly fictional, but just as unusual in its own way, Barb Rosenstock’s The Noisy Paint Box tells the story of abstract painter Vasily (Vasya) Kandinsky (1866-1944), one of the earliest abstractionists and the fortunate possessor of a form of sensory intermingling called synesthesia. In this congenital condition, stimulation of one sense causes response from a different one – so, for example, Kandinsky could hear colors while listening to music. Kandinsky was scarcely the only artist with synesthesia – composer Alexander Scriabin, who, like Kandinsky, was Russian, lived at about the same time and was also famously synesthetic. The mixing of visual and aural senses affected the two men very differently, though. The Noisy Paint Box imagines the very proper, straightforward upbringing Kandinsky had in Czarist Russia, and his eventual willingness to break away from formal art lessons and traditional teachings to try, starting in 1910, to paint what he heard when he looked at colors. Rosenstock makes Kandinsky a pleasant, slightly befuddled boy and young man, trying to understand the way he perceives the world around him and the reasons he is simply not comfortable with traditionalist models. Mary GrandPré provides highly involving illustrations, showing young Kandinsky bored to tears before discovering the sounds within paint colors, then increasingly fascinated by what the colors sound like to him. The emerging sounds from the boy’s box of paints are particularly effectively shown, and the thoughts of Kandinsky as a young man especially nicely portrayed, such as “the scarlet sunset haze ringing above the ancient Kremlin walls.” At an opera performance, Rosenstock writes, “Vasya heard the colors singing. Vasya saw the music dancing.” And GrandPré does her best to communicate visually what Kandinsky experienced. The Author’s Note at the back of the book gives additional information on Kandinsky and should be enough to send young readers fascinated by this introductory book – and their parents – to additional resources about this highly influential artist, and perhaps even to some of the many museums around the world that display his work.

     The work of Jim Benton is scarcely museum-quality, either as writing or as art, but if there were a “just for fun” museum, his would surely be in it. Master of gently absurd concepts such as the snarky “It’s Happy Bunny” series and the unfailingly clever “Dear Dumb Diary” middle-school sequence, Benton has now turned his hand and brain to picture books, producing in The End (Almost) just about what readers familiar with him would expect: a story that stops at the beginning. Very simply drawn and written with a minimum of words, the book is about a blue bear named Donut who burps, and that is all that happens. The end. No more. Finished. Gone. Over and done with. This, however, does not satisfy Donut, who comes up with a series of ruses to keep the story from being over, even though the narrator repeatedly tells him to go home. Eventually, Donut’s antics get the narrator to expand the story after all – at which point the book runs out of pages and really does end. Oops. This is frustrating not only to Donut but also to his robot and “a talking ice-cream cone,” both of which are introduced solely so they can promptly be removed from the tale. Clearly the only thing readers who want to help Donut keep going can do is to read the book again, which is just what Donut and the ice-cream cone recommend. Exceedingly silly and featuring humor reminiscent of that of Monty Python, but for a much younger audience, The End (Almost) is a little too thin to be read again and again and again, but there are probably a few “agains” in it before kids start asking when the next book about Donut will show up. Which, knowing Benton, it undoubtedly will.

(++++) VIVID IMAGINATION

Dream Dog. By Lou Berger. Illustrated by David Catrow. Schwartz & Wade. $17.99.

Where’s My Homework? By Michael Garland. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $6.99.

Taking Care of Mama Rabbit. By Anita Lobel. Knopf. $11.99.

     The places where reality meets fantasy are especially fascinating ones for kids ages 4-8 to explore. Dream Dog takes them there in style. It is the story of a boy named Harry, whose dad works at a pepper factory and is allergic to everything, which means a family dog is out of the question. But Harry really, really wants one. What to do? The answer is the X-35 Infra-Rocket Imagination Helmet, which Harry uses to conjure up his very own dog, Waffle. This occurs after a misadventure with a color-changing lizard, which Harry’s dad buys to try to satisfy Harry’s desire for a pet. “Harry tried to like the lizard, and he did, a little. He just didn’t love it.” So he gives it to his friend Mathilda, who does love it, and returns to pining for a dog – until the helmet idea occurs to him. This is a fairly straightforward plot, or would be if illustrated in a straightforward way, but David Catrow’s pictures are what make Lou Berger’s pleasant if rather ordinary story come vividly to life. The illustrations are, in a word, weird. But wonderfully weird. The lizard turning green and plaid, the enormous shopping-cart-pushing woman who almost runs it over, the ridiculously exaggerated thought thing that coalesces into Waffle, the sheer joy in Harry’s whole body when the dream dog appears, even the odd decorations hanging on walls and sitting atop tables at home – Catrow brings all these absurdities into the realm of delight, while at the same time beautifully illustrating the strong bond between boy and imaginary dog. The two-page illustration of Harry and Waffle in the bathtub, while Harry’s thoroughly befuddled father looks on, is just priceless, and so is the much smaller picture in which Harry’s dad – after finding a new job at the Ping-Pong-ball warehouse, where his allergies do not act up – shops for a real dog for Harry and gets to choose among some mighty strange creatures, one of which appears to have an eye the size of dad’s entire head. The rest of the book involves the way in which Harry takes the new dog, Bumper, into his life, finding a gentle and thoroughly satisfying way for Waffle to exit joyfully: “Harry was happy that Waffle was happy,” and that is the end, charmingly, of that.

     A dog figures as well in Michael Garland’s Where’s My Homework? But this dog, whose name is Frumpy, appears in a story that goes well beyond the standard the-dog-ate-my-homework theme that Garland seems at first to be exploring. The boy narrator knows he did his homework, but he can’t find it anywhere; and after he searches for it on his desk, under his bed and in the bathtub, his speculations about what happened to it get wilder and wilder – with Garland’s illustrations going right along. Maybe aliens took it? Green, big-headed ones emitting red light from their eyes are seen scrutinizing the pages. Pirates, perhaps? One has a page on his hook, another two pages on his sword. Could a boa constrictor have slithered away with it? Could it be with the clowns at the circus? Maybe a wicked witch or dragon or some monkeys had something to do with the mysterious disappearance? As the boy gets more and more worried, as he imagines scenes in which Frumpy is frequently watching the weird things happening, readers will figure out what is going on; and yes, it turns out that Frumpy really did eat the homework. But all is not lost: the boy takes Frumpy to school, where a timely doggy burp brings all the pages right back, apparently legibly enough so the teacher and boy are both pleased with the way things have turned out. Young readers will be pleased, too – and highly amused.

     The amusement is gentler and the story sweeter in Anita Lobel’s Taking Care of Mama Rabbit, which is intended for ages 3-7 but will probably be most enjoyable for kids at the low end of that age range. It is simply about a day on which Mama Rabbit stays in bed, not feeling well, while Papa goes out to get medicine for her and the family’s 10 little rabbits search for ways to make Mama feel better. A toy, a cookie, a pretty ribbon, a picture, a book – these and more help perk Mama up, so by the time Papa returns, she does not need the medicine at all, and she and Papa watch the “nicest, sweetest, cleverest little rabbits in the whole world” put on a show. The book is a touch too sweet for any but the youngest children at whom it is targeted, and the story will likely be too thin for many kids who are old enough to read it for themselves. The pictures are pleasantly old-fashioned, reminiscent of classic ones in Little Golden Books, although some of the expressions – such as those of Mama and Papa while watching the little rabbits’ show – seem a bit strained. Taking Care of Mama Rabbit is a (+++) book that will be most enjoyable for adults to read to kids who are not quite ready to read on their own, but who will like seeing ways in which children can make their parents who are a touch “under the weather” feel better.

(+++) DEATH FROM ABOVE

The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe, 1940-1945. By Richard Overy. Viking. $36.

     Perpetual fascination with the war that ended almost 70 years ago has led historians and scholars to continue to produce dense, detailed books about nearly every aspect of World War II. It could be argued that fictional books about the war, such as Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse-Five, tell modern readers, the vast majority of whom were not born when the war ended, at least as much about the ethos of the war as extended factual accounts. There is nevertheless a sure place among war scholars and those who remain fascinated by the conflict for works such as The Bombers and the Bombed, a 562-page summation and dissection – including 125 pages of notes, bibliography and index – of the bombing campaign carried out by the Allies against Germany and its occupied territories in Europe.

     This is not a book to be read casually, because its exhaustive level of detail can be daunting to wade through, and the style of Richard Overy, a professor of history at the University of Exeter, favors lengthy sentences and arguments parsed so carefully that they must often be read and re-read before a reader can be sure to have absorbed them. Just one typical example: “American officers had in many cases been drafted into the air force from business and professional backgrounds, which prepared them for the vocabulary and categories typical of modern managerial practice. The formal procedure laid down in July 1943 reflected that culture: a conference of key personnel at four in the afternoon before the operation at which the prospective weather determined the target to be attacked; target folders checked; fighter escort informed; calculation of type and weight of bombs and number of aircraft; notification of assigned combat groups; finally, determination of axis of attack, rendezvous point, route out, initial point (near the target run-in), altitudes, aiming point, rally point (just outside the target area), and route back.”

     Readers unwilling to put up with page after page of this precision plodding may want to skim The Bombers and the Bombed to examine some of the ethical dilemmas posed by the air war in Europe – issues that continue to resonate today. The notion of “precision bombing” is itself imprecise, bombs and bombers never having become accurate enough during the war to avert very high civilian casualties. The extent to which civilians were deliberately targeted rather than becoming collateral damage is still a matter of dispute, but the fact is that, one way or the other, the Allied bombers killed bystanders by the many, many thousands. Some of the instances of extreme bombing have become well-known, such as the firestorm destruction of Dresden in the war’s waning days – actually just one of several firestorms that obliterated large portions of German cities. After the war, Dresden’s Frauenkirche was deliberately left in ruins, as were prominent churches in Hamburg and Berlin, as memorials to civilian suffering beneath the bombs – with the Frauenkirche finally being rebuilt early this century in an attempt, decades after the war, at reconciliation.

     Overy’s book should give 21^st-century readers some idea of just why reconciliation was needed, and why it took so long to come – if indeed it has. Many of the work’s most interesting and moving passages, and its most telling photographs, show civil defense efforts in Germany during and after bombing raids. Overy points out that nine million Germans eventually were evacuated from bombed cities – an astonishing number. Photos of the Hamburg firestorm of 1943 and of the circus elephants and concentration-camp inmates required to help clean up afterwards drive home, with an emotional punch that Overy’s highly detailed and scholarly text lacks, just how desperate matters were on the ground because of the Allied bombs.

     One view is that the raids were intended to cause desperation in order to force the unconditional surrender that eventually was offered in 1945. Certainly air power was decisive in World War II: it was the nuclear bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with the enormous number that fell in Europe, that ended the war. The Bombers and the Bombed is much more than a paean to air power, however. By including stories about the ground-level effects of the massive European bombing campaigns alongside detailed information on the campaigns themselves, by showing (among other things) a propaganda poster in which President Roosevelt smiles jauntily as bombs destroy Italy, Overy contrasts the “wide popular endorsement of the bombing campaign” with the realities of what the cost of the campaign was, both militarily and among civilians on the ground. Certainly postwar euphoria led to a belief that bombing was the long-sought solution to the difficulties of pursuing modern war – a belief given the lie in Vietnam. But the postwar response to the Allied bombing campaign in Europe is beyond the scope of The Bombers and the Bombed. What readers who want a great deal of detail about the intricacies of modern warfare will find here is an extremely carefully researched, well-balanced portrayal and explanation of a prime component of the Allied victory of 1945 – and its cost to all involved, both during the war and afterwards.

(++++) EXPLORATIONS

Hummel: Mozart’s Symphonies Nos. 38, 39 and 40 Arranged for Flute, Violin, Cello and Piano. Uwe Grodd, flute; Friedemann Eichhorn, violin; Martin Rummel, cello; Roland Krüger, piano. Naxos. $9.99.

Rossini: Complete Overtures, Volume 4—Il barbiere di Siviglia; Il Turco in Italia; Sinfonia in E-flat; Ricciardo e Zoraide; Torvaldo e Dorliska; Armida; Le Comte Ory; Bianca e Falliero. Prague Sinfonia Orchestra conducted by Christian Benda. Naxos. $9.99.

Glière: Symphony No. 3, “Il’ya Muromets.” Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Naxos $9.99.

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 1; Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 12. Leon Fleisher, piano; Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester conducted by André Cluytens (Beethoven) and Georg Ludwig Jochum (Mozart). ICA Classics. $16.99.

Mozart: Symphony No. 35; Richard Strauss: Till Eulenspiegels Lustige Streiche; Brahms: Symphony No. 1. Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Herbert von Karajan. Andromeda. $14.99 (2 CDs).

     The standard classical-music repertoire is filled with so much beauty and so many attractions that it is easy to dwell within it constantly, rarely if ever exposing oneself to music that is off the beaten track. But at some point, for most people, the familiar, no matter how grand and beautifully performed, will begin to pall, and that is the time to explore less-known music – which can actually be done while hewing very closely to works with which most classical-music lovers are already thoroughly familiar. If that sounds like a contradiction, consider Mozart’s onetime house guest and pupil, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, and the tribute he paid to his adored master by arranging some of Mozart’s symphonies as chamber music. No matter how well one knows Mozart’s Symphonies Nos. 38, 39 and 40, it is unlikely that he or she is familiar with the Hummel arrangements that are quite wonderfully performed by Uwe Grodd, Friedemann Eichhorn, Martin Rummel and Roland Krüger on a new Naxos CD. Krüger takes the lead here – Hummel, a superb pianist himself, gave most of the thematic material to the piano – but these arrangements give plenty of scope to the other instruments as well. And they are not “mere” arrangements: Hummel inserted new accent patterns and changed some of the dynamics of the symphonies to try to bring out characteristics that he considered particularly significant. Whether or not one agrees with what Hummel did, the fact is that he worked with great skill and with full appreciation – near-reverence – for these works, producing versions with a fascinating sound (thanks in large part to attractive use of the flute) and considerable musical interest beyond their curiosity value. This is a disc that will send listeners back to the orchestral versions of the symphonies with a new understanding of what Mozart created and a new appreciation of his original instrumentation – a state of affairs of which Hummel would surely have approved.

     There is nothing unfamiliar in the instrumentation of the Rossini overtures included in the fourth and final Naxos volume featuring the Prague Sinfonia Orchestra under Christian Benda. The exploration here comes from the music itself. Yes, the CD includes one of the best-known Rossini overtures of all, to Il barbiere di Siviglia – a work already heard in Volume 1 of this series as the overture to Elisabetta, Regina d’Inghilterra, Rossini never having hesitated to reuse and recycle his own music. Another of the composer’s most popular overtures, to Il Turco in Italia, is here as well. But the remaining works on the CD are much less known. They include the early Sinfonia in E-flat that the composer later adapted – in another instance of self-borrowing – to create the overture to his first operatic hit, La cambiale di matrimonio. And the remaining overtures are all tuneful and very adeptly constructed, from the very brief one to Le Comte Ory to the more-extended openings to Armida, Ricciardo e Zoraide, Torvaldo e Dorliska, and Bianca e Falliero. The creativity of Rossini’s overtures, and indeed of his operas, is sometimes underestimated because the composer was so facile at producing fine music and did use and reuse forms as well as actual sections of works (or entire pieces). But just as it is a mistake to consider Rossini’s operas formulaic – Armida, for example, calls for six (!) tenors – it is wrong to think of his overtures as all cut from the same musical cloth. As this very fine series has shown since its first volume, there is a great deal of variety as well as a great deal of pleasure in Rossini’s overtures, whether frequently performed or not.

     Just as Rossini is generally known for only a handful of his overtures and a smaller handful of his operas, the music of Reinhold Glière (1875-1956) is generally heard only in performances of his Horn Concerto and his ballet The Red Poppy, particularly the Russian Sailor’s Dance from the stage work. But there is a great deal more worth exploring in this composer’s music, which includes three early symphonies – of which the huge Third is Mahlerian in scale and scope and dates to 1911, the year of Mahler’s death. More a set of connected tone poems than a fully integrated symphony – many listeners will no doubt be reminded of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred – Glière’s Third is known as “Il’ya Muromets” because it revolves around that legendary Russian hero (much as Tchaikovsky’s work focuses on Byron’s Manfred). The Glière work requires a very large orchestra that includes eight horns, two harps and a celesta, and it needs a conductor who can sustain the scene-setting as well as the dramatic elements without allowing the 70-minute work to flag (Tchaikovsky’s Manfred is shorter by some 20 minutes). JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic acquit themselves splendidly in their recording for Naxos, with the orchestra rising to the occasion with warmth and grandeur of sound and Falletta doing a first-rate job of contrasting Glière’s instances of extreme quiet with those of overwhelming massed sonority. The story, well-known in Russia but exotic elsewhere, is similar to those of many other legendary heroes, with Il’ya rising from powerlessness to become a great warrior, capable of defeating supernatural foes as well as earthbound ones – until led by his hubris to challenge the Celestial Army, resulting in the defeat of his forces and their being turned to stone. Glière’s grand-scale music is evocative and highly expressive, very much in the Romantic mode. Falletta’s accomplished conducting brings it to vivid life and should lead to a reconsideration of Glière’s music in general – perhaps even to a revival of interest in his other two symphonies.

     Interestingly, it is not necessary to venture into unfamiliar repertoire in order to do some off-the-beaten-track musical exploration. Another way to broaden one’s horizons is to delve into unfamiliar performances of well-known works – particularly by listening to historic renditions by artists with soaring reputations, but ones concertgoers can no longer hear, for one reason or another. ICA Classics and Andromeda make this sort of exploration possible through their releases of music that is very well-known indeed – but not in the performances offered on these CDs. Leon Fleisher, before severe problems with his hands forced him off the concert stage for decades, was an absolutely phenomenal interpreter of the music of Beethoven, Mozart and others. The March 1960 live performance of Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto and March 1957 live recording of Mozart’s Concerto No. 12 (K. 414) show just why Fleisher (born 1928) left so many concertgoers awestruck. The fluidity of these performances, the lightness of touch and absolute command of the instrument under Fleisher’s hands, add up to a highly involving and engaging experience even though the ICA Classics monophonic sound is only so-so and both conductors are more workmanlike than inspired when leading the Kölner Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester (subsequently renamed WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln). Fleisher has only been able to perform again with both hands within the last few years – his first CD release marking the occasion was in fact called “Two Hands” – and the pianist no longer gives concerts like the ones memorialized here. So this recording, although it gets a (+++) rating because of its sound and the less-than-stellar (although perfectly adequate) conducting, will be a real and rare treat for anyone wondering what all the fuss was about Fleisher in his youth.

     Similarly, those interested in the continuing fascinating with the personality and musical abilities of Herbert von Karajan (1908-1989) will be delighted to discover the two-CD set of the concert he gave at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., in February 1955 – the first time the Berlin Philharmonic appeared in the United States after World War II, which had ended a decade before. The political importance of the concert was extremely high, a fact that makes the way it opens – with the national anthems of both the United States and Germany – especially significant. In many ways, this concert cemented the postwar geopolitical order, in which the United States and West Germany (with East Germany still under control of the Soviet Union) were firm allies against the spread of Communism. Many modern listeners will find the historical realities quaint, even irrelevant, but even they will be moved by the power and intensity that Karajan and the orchestra bring to this concert, especially in their grand and glorious handling of Brahms’ First Symphony. As with the Fleisher disc, this two-CD set is lacking in excellence when it comes to sound; no one will buy it as a first (or even second) version of the Brahms, much less as a definitive version of the Mozart and Strauss works. That makes this (+++) release one for those interested in Karajan’s conducting skill, his role as a musical ambassador in the years after World War II, and his ability to galvanize an orchestra and an audience with precisely played, finely honed performances of familiar works that sound poised, fresh and beautifully balanced under his leadership. This recording explores a vanished time and vanished set of political realities, and at the same time celebrates the enduring power of music that is both familiar and undeniably great.

(++++) BACH, BEFORE AND BEYOND

Meine Seele: German Sacred Music. Matthew White, countertenor; Tempo Rubato conducted by Alexander Weimann. ATMA Classique. $16.99.

Il Diario di Chiara: Music from La Pietà in Venice in the 18^th Century. Europa Galante conducted by Fabio Biondi. Glossa. $18.99 (CD+DVD).

C.P.E. Bach: Complete Keyboard Concertos, Volume 20—Concerto in E-flat, Wq 47 (H 479); Concerto in F, Wq 46 (H 408); Sonatina in D, Wq 109 (H 543). Miklós Spányi and Cristiano Holtz, harpsichords; Tamás Szekendy, fortepiano; Concerto Armonico Budapest. BIS. $21.99.

E.T.A. Hoffmann: Missa in D minor; Miserere in B-flat minor. Sibylla Rubens and Jutta Böhnert, sopranos; Rebecca Martin, mezzo-soprano; Thomas Cooley, tenor; Yorck Felix Speer, bass; WDR Rundfunkchor Köln and WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln conducted by Rupert Huber. CPO. $16.99.

Harrison Birtwistle: The Moth Requiem and Other Choral Works. Roderick Williams, baritone; BBC Singers and Nash Ensemble conducted by Nicholas Kok. Signum Records. $17.99.

     It is a commonplace to speak of the enormous influence of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), but like other clichés, it is at once true and somewhat off the mark. Bach was not especially influential during or immediately after his own lifetime, being labeled “old Bach” when his music was considered rather passé – and then largely passed over in favor of his sons, notably Johann Christian and Carl Philipp Emanuel. It is also important to remember that J.S. Bach did not himself appear out of nowhere, having been substantially influenced by other composers and organists – and not only Dietrich Buxtehude. An excellent ATMA Classique CD called Meine Seele does a fine job of placing “old Bach” in historical perspective while giving listeners a chance to hear some genuine rarities of sacred music (and a touch of the secular as well) by composers who have long since vanished into total obscurity, as well as a couple who have not quite disappeared. The CD begins, quite fittingly, with one of Bach’s own sacred works, the cantata Widerstehe doch dir Sünde (BWV 54). Then it launches into a series of beautifully sung and played works that have in common the period in which they were written and the heartfelt nature of their communication. The only two reasonably familiar composers here are Bach’s great predecessor Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672), represented by the brief concerto Erbarm dich mein, O Herre Gott, and Bach’s contemporary, Georg Muffat (1653-1704), from whom a very well-made secular organ passacaglia is offered. The other composers and works on this fascinating CD are Franz Tunder (1614-1667), with a very short Sinfonia sur “Da pacem Domine” and a motet, Salve, mi Jesu; Philipp Heinrich Erlebach (1657-1715), with Overture and Suite No. 3 and a cantata, Trocknet euch, ihr heissen Zähren; Johann Rosenmüller (1619-1684), with a motet, Ascendit Christus, and a pleasant set of secular dances; Johann Michael Bach (1648-1694), with an aria, Auf, laßt uns den Herren loben; and Christoph Bernhard (1628-1692), with the concerto Was betrübst du dich, meine Seele. The blurred boundaries between the sacred and secular are quite apparent on this CD – the notion that forms such as the concerto were entirely worldly was yet to emerge – and the elegant expressiveness of all the music is very well conveyed throughout.

     As with J.S. Bach, so with his equally renowned contemporary, Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), whose music influenced Bach and was arranged by him. Vivaldi was long associated with the Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, but was scarcely the only important musician involved with the famous convent, orphanage and music school – although his accomplishments far overshadowed those of others, both composers and violinists. The intriguingly titled Il Diario di Chiara, which includes a CD of music and a DVD of the eponymous 32-minute film by Lucrezia Le Moli and Fabio Biondi, features works by Vivaldi and six other composers, all within the context of the life of Chiara (or Chiaretta), who was taken into the Ospedale della Pietà after being abandoned at the age of two months – and who rose to become one of the most acclaimed violinists and viola d’amore players in Europe in the middle of the 18^th century. The personal diary of Chiara – who was taught by Vivaldi – is the underlying connection among the musical works on this Glossa release, which offers a series of concertos and sinfonias: two by Vivaldi, two by Antonio Martinelli, and one apiece by Giovanni Porta, Nicola Porpora, Gaetano Latilla, Fulgenso Perotti and Andrea Bernasconi. All these composers taught at the Ospedale della Pietà, and all were clearly highly accomplished in creating the music of their time, which is played by Europa Galante with real élan and close attention to period style. None of the pieces here is a particular standout musically, but that is not the point of this release. Three of the works, one of Vivaldi’s and both by Martinelli, are specifically dedicated to “S.ra Chiara,” and all the others are associated with her in one way or another. The recording thus stands as a tribute to an important virtuoso of her time and to the music that swirled around her and that she inspired – and it also serves to show how Vivaldi fit into the musical life of his time and place, just as Meine Seele does for J.S. Bach.

     As the music of Vivaldi’s and J.S. Bach’s time evolved toward the Rococo and then the Classical, one of the primary figures in musical life was Bach’s son Carl Philipp Emanuel, whose middle name was a tribute to his godfather, Georg Philipp Telemann, who like “old Bach” is considered a grandest-of-the-grand Baroque composer. The transitional nature of C.P.E. Bach’s work, which is more dramatic and intense than the more-mannered Rococo compositions of his time and therefore leads more directly toward the world of the Mannheim Orchestra, Haydn and Mozart, is especially clear in his keyboard works, which have been explored in a wide-ranging and excellently played series from BIS. The 20^th and final release in the series in many ways encapsulates C.P.E. Bach’s place in musical history, offering three works for double keyboard: a sonatina and an F major concerto for two harpsichords, plus an E-flat major concerto for harpsichord and the newer fortepiano – the most interesting work on the disc, showing clearly how the composer was trying to move beyond the Baroque models of his father while striving for expressiveness and use of new instrumental combinations within accepted but still-evolving forms. The influence of “old Bach” is still heard here, particularly in some of the virtuosic requirements placed upon the harpsichord, but the musical language is less contrapuntal and more emotionally direct than it generally was in the secular compositions of J.S. Bach – although still several steps from the intensity of later composers’ music.

     The influence of “old Bach” on sacred music was in many ways deeper than his influence on instrumental works, permeating in sensibility, if not necessarily in structure, much later works from differing religious traditions. Thus, there are echoes of Bach’s time, if not directly of any specific work by him, even in the avowedly Catholic Missa and Miserere by E.T.A. Hoffman (1776-1822), who is far better known for his writings on music, his adoration of Mozart, and his creation of eerie stories that were enormously influential on composers and dramatists alike in the 19^th century, than he is for his own compositions. There are about 85 of those, and although Hoffmann was Lutheran, one-quarter of his pieces are sacred works for use in Catholic worship – including the Missa in D minor and Miserere in B-flat minor that are beautifully performed on a new CPO disc. The Mass – for soloists, four-part choir, strings, organ, woodwinds (excluding flutes and oboes) and brass, with two horns added in some sections – has some small textual departures from the standard form but is otherwise rather conventional in design and approach, looking back toward the Classical era that in turn looked back through C.P.E. Bach to “old Bach.” The Miserere is more impressionistic and stronger in feeling, being more of a Romantic work – and one written almost entirely at a slow pace. Varied instrumentation among the piece’s 11 movements helps provide contrast despite the similar tempo indications and the exclusive use of flat keys. Interestingly, despite the somewhat Romantic feeling of the music – Hoffmann was a transitional figure between the Classical and Romantic periods, as C.P.E. Bach was between Baroque and Classical – Hoffmann’s Miserere actually looks directly back through a tradition that stretches to Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere of the early 17^th century, before the days of “old Bach,” all the way to that of the Renaissance of Josquin des Prez (c. 1450-1521). This very well sung disc of Hoffmann’s sacred music not only shows him as a composer of considerable skill but also makes clear the extent to which his time owed a debt to the Baroque and even before.

     Nor does the debt end there, as may be seen in a very fine Signum Records release that includes six world première recordings of choral works by Sir Harrison Birtwistle (born 1934). The clearest connection between this very modern composer, whose theatricality pervades his music even when it is not overtly written for the stage, and the music of J.S. Bach and other antecedents, is heard on this CD in Three Latin Motets from “The Last Supper” (1999), taken from Birtwistle’s operatic retelling of the Last Supper story through a character meant to represent the audience, and in The Moth Requiem (2012), a work for 12 female voices, three harps and flute that manages to be thoroughly modern-sounding while still evocative of Requiem settings of the past. Birtwistle’s complex music, which often involves juxtaposition of sound blocks and sometimes, especially in earlier pieces such as Carmen Paschale (1965), has a distinctly ritualistic feel, will surely not be to all tastes; but this (+++) disc provides an effective introduction to it – and is particularly well performed. Birtwistle’s music certainly sounds nothing like that of “old Bach” or, for that matter, of E.T.A. Hoffmann, but it does draw on similar themes and reinterpret them through a contemporary lens. The Ring Dance of the Nazarene (2003), the longest work on the new CD, does so clearly, just as Birtwistle’s very brief Lullaby (2006) and lengthier On the Sheer Threshold of the Night (1980) recall atmospheric music of the past without being directly beholden to any specific work or composer. Those seeking insight into a significant modern British choral composer will find a good deal of it here.