(+++) HOW SWEET IT IS, OR CAN BE

Chocolate: Sweet Science & Dark Secrets of the World’s Favorite Treat. By Kay Frydenborg. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $18.99.

     This is a picture book, a recipe book, a history book, a sociopolitical tract, an advocacy book, a celebratory book and a science book – or at least it wants to be. Unfortunately, Kay Frydenborg’s attempt to make Chocolate: Sweet Science & Dark Secrets of the World’s Favorite Treat into all those books means it is not very satisfying as any one of them – certainly not as satisfying as chocolate itself, a topic that invites delectation both intellectual and sensual. From time to time, Frydenborg shows herself aware of chocolate’s attractions, and this tends to cause her to lapse into hyperbole: “For most people on earth, eating chocolate feels like a necessity, almost like breathing air and drinking water. …Chocolate is a glue that binds people, cultures, history, and the health of the planet. It’s a bridge to understanding.” But quickly enough – in the case of the above excerpt, beginning with the very next sentence – Frydenborg moves away from the positive (even if overstated) elements of chocolate to what seems to be her real focus, which is that people should not enjoy it too much, because it conceals what her book’s subtitle calls “dark secrets.” Specifically, after introducing her “bridge” metaphor, Frydenborg continues, “Crossing that bridge present many barricades built on centuries of oppression, exploitation, and misunderstanding, and it has been a long road to try to reach this understanding, and we’re not all the way there yet.”

     Leaving aside the odd notion of a bridge crossing that presents barricades, this passage shows that Frydenborg sees chocolate as yet another thing for which “exploiters” (usually Europeans of centuries past) ought to be held to account by having their modern descendants (spiritual if not literal) feel guilty, especially as regards what lighter-skinned “conquerors” of chocolate-producing regions did to darker-skinned indigenous people and, by extension, to those people’s modern counterparts.

     Those not interested in being guilt-tripped where chocolate is concerned can skip many of the passages that do so, but likely not all of them, since this element of Frydenborg’s book is pervasive. Nevertheless, there are many other aspects to chocolate explored here, to at least some degree, and they contain most of the fascination to be found in the book. The many photos of cacao trees and pods are quite interesting, as are some of the historical discussions – of the days when cacao beans were used as money, for example, and of the relationship between chocolate as food and chocolate as medicine. There are passing discussions of “the science of taste,” of specific types of cacao beans, of the reasons chocolate is poisonous to dogs and cats, and of other topics. There are recipes for Mexican and Ecuadorian hot chocolate, Toll House chocolate crunch cookies, and “My Grandma Crowell’s Fudge Pie.” There is even a list of the Web sites of small, specialty chocolate companies, albeit one introduced with Frydenborg’s usual preoccupation – she says these firms are “doing some incredible, exciting things today, in so many ways: flavor, innovation, sustainability, and social justice.”

     Although Frydenborg generally gets the history and science of chocolate right, her presentation contains some elements that are confusing or just plain wrong, for reasons that are impossible to decipher. In explaining about taste, for instance, she includes a diagram of the human tongue, marked for sections associated with specific tastes, and then says in the caption, “This tongue mapping has been discredited by more recent science, but was once believed to be true. Many people still believe it is!” But if it is discredited, then why make it the sole illustration of an important scientific point? Elsewhere, she writes that Western medicine, in the time of the Spanish conquistadors, “was based almost entirely on classical Grefi [sic] theories that dated back to Hippocrates…and Galen.” She presumably means “Greek” theories, but never explains why she refers to them this way.

     There is also an irritating typographical oddity in the book. The letters “eh” are replaced by a sideways caret, so, for example, the word “households” is spelled “hous>olds” and the word “comprehensive” appears as “compr>ensive.” This makes reading more difficult, and there is no reason given for it. Something similar was done in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s recent edition of Terry Pratchett’s The Carpet People, but there it seemed to be part and parcel of telling a fictional tale set in a strange place, while in this book of nonfiction, it comes across only as a bizarre element or an outright mistake.

     There is some genuinely fascinating material in Chocolate: Sweet Science & Dark Secrets of the World’s Favorite Treat. Indeed, it would be hard not to find some matters of high interest in a substance that so many people have enjoyed for so long, for so many reasons. Frydenborg does a good job of explaining the difference between “cacao” and “cocoa,” for example, and manages an occasional strikingly wry comment when doing so is in line with her sociopolitical agenda: “[F]or the rest of that century [the 18^th] chocolate was widely prescribed for the prevention and treatment of many ailments, even for the deadly smallpox virus. This was ironic indeed, considering that it was smallpox – brought by the Europeans – that had all but wiped out the Native Americans who had introduced them to chocolate in the first place.” But the book as a whole is too unfocused, too scattered and too argumentative about “social justice” concerns to serve as a fully satisfactory introduction to the lore and love of a substance whose popularity seems to know almost no bounds.

(+++) OLD, NEW AND BOTH

Rachmaninoff: All-Night Vigil. Phoenix Chorale and Kansas City Chorale conducted by Charles Bruffy. Chandos. $19.99.

English Hymn Anthems. The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge conducted by Stephen Cleobury. Choir of King’s College. $14.99 (SACD).

Poulenc: Mass in G; Sept Chansons; Four Motets for the Season of Lent; Four Motets for the Season of Christmas. Elora Festival Singers conducted by Noel Edison. Naxos. $12.99.

Robert Paterson: Eternal Reflections; Choral Suite from “A New Earth”; Lux Aeterna; The Essence of Gravity; Snow Day; Did You Hear?; Life Is but a Dream; A Dream within a Dream. Musica Sacra conducted by Kent Tritle. AMR (American Modern Recordings). $16.99.

A Knight’s Progress. Choir of the Temple Church conducted by Roger Sayer. Signum Classics. $17.99.

Derek Charke: Tundra Songs. Tanya Yagaq, Inuit throat singer; Kronos Quartet (David Harrington and John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; Jeffrey Zeigler, cello). Centrediscs. $16.99.

The Flaming Fire: Mary Queen of Scots and Her World. Roland Angel, tenor and countertenor; Dongsok Shin, virginal; Parthenia (Beverly Au, bass viol; Lawrence Lipnik, tenor viol; Rosamund Morley, treble viol; Lisa Terry, bass viol). MSR Classics. $12.95.

Uncharted: A Viola da Gamba Adventure. Gerald Trimble, bass viola da gamba, viola d’amore, quinton de viole, pardessus de viole, five-string fretted bass violin, vocals; Webster Williams, six-string bass viola da gamba; Eliot Wadopian, double bass; River Guerguerian, percussion; Juan Camillo Reyes, palmas. MSR Classics. $12.95.

     The notion that “everything old is new again” is scarcely a new one, but the cliché gains new meaning from a spate of recent releases in which past and present merge in some intriguing ways. A cappella singing, for example, is among the oldest forms of Western music, and has often been deemed more liturgically correct than music that includes instruments. Indeed, in composing his All-Night Vigil, Rachmaninoff took to heart what was at the time (1915) a Russian Orthodox Church proscription against the use of instruments in sacred music. Sometimes incorrectly called Vespers – only the first six of its 15 movements are settings of texts from the Russian Orthodox canonical hour of Vespers – All-Night Vigil was one of Rachmaninoff’s favorite pieces, and he asked that the fifth movement be sung at his funeral. The work is written in three different styles of chant, and depends heavily on the quality of the very low bass voices for which Rachmaninoff wrote the foundational parts. Those voices on the new Chandos recording featuring the Phoenix Chorale and Kansas City Chorale under Charles Bruffy are neither as deep nor as resonant as some heard in earlier recordings, including the very first, made in 1965 under Alexander Sveshnikov. But the singers here are involved with the music and expressive, and indeed the expressiveness of the entire ensemble is what makes this recording successful. The harmonization is particularly good here – Rachmaninoff creates up to eight-part harmony and, in one section, 11-part – and the voices interweave with strength and emotional commitment. Strictly speaking, this is not a religious “passion,” for although it focuses largely on Jesus and eventually proclaims his triumphant resurrection, it does not dwell on his last hours and martyrdom. But the work has plenty of passion in the “intensity” sense, and is stylishly delivered in this recording, with a fine sense of choral balance and emotional commitment.

     Rachmaninoff’s work, being a unified whole, contrasts with the dozen individual pieces performed by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge on a new SACD  release on the group’s own label. The composers heard here are fixtures in Anglican worship, and some are quite well-known outside that sphere, although others are not. They include Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Hubert Parry, Charles Stanford, Edward Bairstow, Percy Whitlock, Henry Walford Davies, William Harris, George Dyson and Charles Wood. Vaughan Williams and Parry are represented here by two works apiece, each of the others by a single one. All this music is used in regular Evensong services, and all of it recalls a time – principally the late 19^th century and early 20^th – when anthems based on or including hymn tunes were particularly popular. The use of well-known hymns constituted a kind of musical call to prayer, being designed to bring in the public through familiar, often-heard music that had been incorporated into creations for liturgical purposes. In any case, whatever the motivation was for producing these works, they sound polished, elegant and meaningful in these performances, with the choir’s smooth and well-balanced sound managed very ably by Stephen Cleobury, and with contributions by organists Parker Ramsay and Douglas Tang adding to the effectiveness of the singing. There is also some fine trumpet playing by Alison Balsom in Vaughan Williams’ Lord, Thou has been our refuge. This piece is a highlight of the recording; among other high points are Parry’s broadly conceived Hear my words, ye people and Ireland’s Vexilla Regis. The performances do much to turn listeners’ attention to the concept of the hymn-anthem, a form that is now little known and is something of a musical and spiritual byway, but that those interested in sacred music – and in some less-often-heard works by some very substantial British composers – will find involving and highly intriguing.

     Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil is a Russian Orthodox work, and the hymn-anthems sung by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge are in the Anglican tradition, but Roman Catholic choral music is even older, and it is Catholic teachings and beliefs on which Poulenc drew for the choral pieces offered on a new Naxos CD. Poulenc was raised Catholic, but his father’s death led him to abandon the faith in 1917 – only to return to the church two decades later, after the death of his friend, composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud. That return brought with it a decision to compose, in his father’s memory, a mass – the Mass in G (1937) that is heard here in a performance by the Elora Festival Singers under Noel Edison. The work is powerful and has a sound that is very much of its time, with pervasive tonal ambiguity that seems to reflect Poulenc’s shifting moods as he contemplates the memory of his father and his own return to the fold of Catholicism. The occasional near-playful choral writing is at odds with the overall traditional and intense seriousness of the text, but makes perfect sense in the context of Poulenc’s own compositional development. The Mass in G was written just a year after the Sept Chansons, which show that development more clearly: the songs are set to surrealist texts and seem to meander in and out of everyday life – although they are not as pointed as, for example, Walton’s Façade, originally written earlier (1922) but revised later (1947-48). Nor do the Sept Chansons have the religious orientation of the Mass in G or of the near-contemporaneous Four Motets for the Season of Lent (1938-39) or much later Four Motets for the Season of Christmas (1952). Both sets of motets use a deliberately archaic form to communicate a mixture of spiritual fervor and strong individual emotion – and those elements are well brought out by the performers here. The CD as a whole offers a perspective on 20^th-century choral music that complements the one offered by the Rachmaninoff All-Night Vigil and shows the ways in which recent choral music is both beholden to the past and a step beyond it.

     Even-more-recent choral works, such as those of Robert Paterson on a new CD from AMR, continue to show a strong sense of the past – combined with an understanding of the ways in which choral music can reflect contemporary concerns. Under its music director, Kent Tritle, the choral group Musica Sacra delves into both individual, self-contained Paterson pieces and ones that collectively make up three choral song cycles. Those three are Eternal Reflections, a generally sober and atmospheric three-movement setting of words by Czeslaw Milosz, Mary E. Frye and Paul Lawrence Dunbar; the intense Choral Suite from “A New Earth,” whose four movements seek to explore the very modern concern of climate change in a context of high emotion; and the generally more upbeat The Essence of Gravity, with four movements tackling subjects both serious (“Echoes of War”) and fraught with modernity (“Machines”). Also on the CD is Paterson’s moving, although rather conventional, setting of Lux Aeterna, along with two works that reflect the worries of modern young people’s lives (Did You Hear? – about rumors and gossip) and some unanticipated joys for any age group (Snow Day, which revels in an unexpected day off). Most interesting of all here is the juxtaposition of two “dream” settings: Life Is but a Dream, which is neither more nor less than an exploration of the recurrent words from “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” and A Dream within a Dream, a far more parlous work that aptly sets a strange, near-mystical poem by Edgar Allan Poe. The performers here are adept at the quicksilver mood changes of these pieces, and listeners intrigued by the notion of modern compositions for a very old form of ensemble will find the CD quite pleasurable.

     The ways in which modern choral pieces drawn on older ones and are differentiated from them are particularly clear on a Signum Classics CD that juxtaposes the two. Entitled A Knight’s Progress, the disc includes music by three of the composers also heard in performances by the Choir of King’s College: Vaughan Williams, Parry and Bairstow. In addition, it includes works  by two other major British composers of the recent past, William Walton and John Tavener. Complementing these pieces, which have both sacred and secular elements, are a much older work, Haydn’s Te Deum in C, and a very recent one, Nico Muhly’s Our present charter, here receiving its world première recording. One thing this disc shows is that a skilled choral group – and the Choir of the Temple Church is certainly one such – can adeptly handle music of all eras in a way that sounds idiomatic and that communicates composers’ intentions with skill and sensitivity. Another matter clarified by this disc is that effective choral music, both older and contemporary, uses voices in ways that blend multiple singers while allowing individual ones to stand out from time to time in order to make a composer’s points. Roger Sayer’s conducting makes this very clear indeed. And Greg Morris’ organ performance underlines the continuing importance of this instrument to a great many choral works from a variety of time periods. As for the music itself, Muhly’s four-movement work is intended as the centerpiece here. It was commissioned by this choir for the 800^th anniversary of the Magna Carta, which was signed in 1215 by King John. The movements mix sacred and secular concerns: “First,” “Thy Kingdom Come, O God,” “The Beatitudes,” and “Nullus Liber Homo Capiatur” (which translates as “no free man shall be seized,” an important Magna Carta provision). The piece is effective enough, by turns forthright and reverential, although the music lacks  the power and devotional solemnity of Haydn’s, and for that matter of Walton’s The Twelve and Vaughan Williams’ Valiant-for-Truth. Still, Muhly is in impressive company here, and holds his place rather well. Parry’s I was glad opens the CD; Tavener’s brief Mother of God, here I stand provides an effective juxtaposition with Muhly’s work; and Barstow’s Blessed City, heavenly Salem offers an appropriately solemn approach to its material. The Choir of the Temple Church provides further evidence, if any is needed, of the skill with which the best British vocal ensembles can handle music of many types and from many time periods.

     Of course, choral music is scarcely the only vocal form to have developed through the years while still retaining many of its traditions. Much less familiar to most listeners is the distinctly odd-sounding (to ears accustomed to traditional Western music) practice of Inuit throat singing, which is heard in what is presumably authentic style on a new Centrediscs recording aptly entitled Tundra Songs. The singer here, Tanya Tagaq, presents sounds that are largely guttural and seem to trace back to a much, much earlier age of humanity. She offers the sounds in the context of works by Derek Charke, with the Kronos Quartet providing instrumental accompaniment that is certainly appropriate but that takes a back seat to Tagaq’s vocalizing almost throughout the CD. There is one complete work here, Cercle du Nord III, and there are four selections from a piece called 22 Inuit Throat Song Games. The four are called Dogs, Lullaby, Throat Song and Song of a Name (for a boy). All the music sounds vaguely (and sometimes not so vaguely) ritualistic, and all of it seems to call on the vast open spaces of the Arctic tundra for its effect. Much of the time, the sounds made by Tagaq are not particularly pleasant ones, and they are sounds rather than what would usually be called music – but in blurring the distinction between music and noise, they open listeners’ ears in a way analogous to (although quite different from) the way John Cage opened them by similarly exploring the bounds of what is usually deemed musical and not musical. It is hard to see how this disc will achieve wide circulation – even at a mere 48 minutes, there is a lot of material to absorb and digest here, and the sonic experience tends to wear thin after a while – but it will certainly appeal to anyone seeking entry to an entirely new (to most people) aural world that is, at the same time, very old indeed.

     The world explored on a new MSR Classics release called The Flaming Fire is, loosely, that of Mary, Queen of Scots (1542-1587), who is best known for her conflicts with Queen Elizabeth, which resulted in Mary’s death and posthumous triumph – her son was James VI of Scotland and James I of England, ruling the combined kingdom after Elizabeth died childless. This CD approaches Mary’s era from a nonpolitical angle: it was the time of the Reformed Church in Scotland, whose adherents, much like the better-known Puritans, forbade almost all music and deemed it devilish, condemning everything from dancing to church organs. Indeed, all printing of secular music was banned in Scotland for a century, from 1560 to 1660, and material from that age is therefore difficult to come by and very rarely heard. The 27 tracks on this CD, most of them very short indeed, include quite a number of anonymous pieces as well as a few whose composers are known: John Black, James Lauder, David Peebles, Robert Johnson, William Byrd (one of the two best-known composers on the disc), Thomas Tallis (the other one), and several more. There is scarcely a focus of any kind on any specific composer: Byrd, for example, is represented by a single two-minute work, Tallis by a single three-minute one. And there is little direct focus on the doomed queen, except in a piece called Lament of Mary Queen of Scots, with words by Robert Burns. What is offered here, in historically informed and very well-played and well-sung performances, is a potpourri of music of the 16^th and early 17^th centuries, loosely correlated with Mary’s lifetime and the events after it, and offered for the delectation of listeners enamored of this historical period and the vocal and instrumental sounds it produced.

     Another MSR Classics release, this one featuring Gerald Trimble on a variety of very old and/or old-fashioned string instruments, offers a smattering of similar-era material – which Trimble combines with forays into Celtic and Eastern music and works ranging from the Baroque to the Jazz Age. This CD, called Uncharted: A Viola da Gamba Adventure, will be even more a matter of taste than similar forays into multiple musical forms and backgrounds. It is very difficult to get a handle on anything that unites the disc’s 14 tracks, except for Trimble’s performances – but even they, occurring as they do on a number of different instruments, bespeak a commitment to variety rather than any particular unifying factor. Indeed, this is less a “viola d gamba adventure” than a “viola da gamba and other instruments adventure,” and its adventurousness takes listeners into improvisational territory as well as the realms of classical forms (Greensleeves to a Ground), ballads (The Duke of Norfolk or St. Paul’s Steeple), nationalistic folk tunes (MacKenzie’s Farewell), Arab music (Hikaz Taksim), and much more. The possibility of enjoying a particular track does not predict whether one will enjoy the next, and one’s interest in an individual instrument that Trimble plays does not guarantee equal interest in another one. Certainly this disc is a showcase for Trimble and an opportunity to hear a multiplicity of instruments and musical styles and traditions, all gathered in a sort of mash-up in which the focus, sound and style change every five minutes or less. The disc may be exhilarating for some, unsettling for others, wide-ranging for a certain number of people, stretched too far for others. It is not exactly a love-it-or-hate it release; it is more of a love-parts-of-it-or-hate-parts-of-it CD, on which it is difficult to get an auditory or emotional handle. Its territory is not so much uncharted as it is charted in multiple ways that seem mutually exclusive but that in fact all flow from Trimble’s esthetic – in which, however, one must share wholeheartedly in order to enjoy the recording.

(+++) MASTERS REMASTERED

Bizet: Carmen. Marilyn Horne, James McCracken, Tom Krause, Adriana Maliponte, Colette Boky, Marcia Baldwin, Donald Gramm, Russell Christopher, Andrea Velis, Raymond Gibbs; Manhattan Chorus and Metropolitan Opera Children’s Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein. PentaTone. $35.99 (2 SACDs).

Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique. Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa. PentaTone. $16.99 (SACD).

Berlioz: La Damnation de Faust. Stuart Burrows, Edith Mathis, Donald McIntyre, Thomas Paul; Tanglewood Festival Chorus, Boston Boys’ Choir and Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa. PentaTone. $35.99 (2 SACDs).

     Are excellent remastering and extremely fine sound, coupled with performances featuring various “name” artists, reasons enough to launch a new line of recordings and reasons enough to buy them? PentaTone apparently answered “yes” to the first part of the question and hopes many listeners will answer “yes” to the second part. These three recordings date to the 1970s: 1972 for Carmen, 1973 for the two Berlioz offerings. And all were originally made in quadraphonic sound, a short-lived experiment whose very high in-the-studio quality was ill-matched to the sound systems of the day and the vinyl records played on them – and which therefore never caught on. In a way, there is irony in releasing these performances on SACD, since Super Audio CDs are to some extent like quadraphonic sound of four decades ago: clearly superior to those who have equipment that does them full justice, but otherwise of no special interest or added value. The difference today, though, is that technology allows both SACD layers and traditional CD ones to be produced on the same disc, so even people without the capability of hearing full-fledged SACD sound can still get very fine CD-level discs from firms that are as good with recording technology as PentaTone is.

     All this, however, evades the question of whether these specific recordings are worthy of the technical skill that has been lavished on them through the remasterings done in 2014. For most classical-music lovers, the unfortunate answer is: not really. These are recordings with historic value, to be sure, and ones that fans of the performers are likely to want to have, but none of them stacks up particularly well, from an interpretative standpoint, against more-recent performances.

     The issue is especially acute when it comes to Carmen. This was, and remains even today, a bold and unusual interpretation. The Metropolitan Opera at this time used the original Opéra-Comique version of the work, which had extensive spoken dialogue (like the German Singspiel or an operetta) – and then as today, this version is very rarely staged and invites controversy, the much-preferred one using Ernest Guiraud’s recitatives. Leonard Bernstein, never a strong opera conductor, had not yet attained superstar status at this time, but his podium predilections – some would call them indulgences – were already pronounced. Most noticeably, Bernstein liked to push tempos and change them frequently; in this Carmen, that means occasional very fast sections and a great deal more that are very slow, with, for example, a Toreador Song that is either exceptionally draggy or revelatory, depending on whether you dislike or like it. To bring off so unusual a Carmen successfully would require top-notch principal singers and a first-rate chorus, but this recording has neither. Marilyn Horne is aggressive and tight-voiced as Carmen, not seductive at all, and makes the sexy gypsy sound more like someone’s brittle maiden aunt. It is not that she gets the notes wrong but that her vocal characterization is so far from sultriness that the opera’s focus ends up being on Don José rather than on her. This could actually be an intriguing angle, but James McCracken is weak in the role, his voice being all right but rather colorless and his characterization being too bland and uninvolving to pull listeners into the drama. Tom Krause is fine, if scarcely outstanding, as Escamillo, but the best singing here turns out to come from Adriana Maliponte as Micaëla – and it is decidedly odd to have that part be the opera’s strongest. To make matters worse, the chorus – which at the time of this recording consisted largely of freelance singers – is no more than adequate, and the entire cast seems distinctly uncomfortable speaking French: aggressive mispronunciations are many, to the point of being an embarrassment to listeners who know the language to any significant extent. So what we have here is a peculiarly paced and oddly emphasized Carmen, with lead singers who fit their roles at best uneasily, a chorus that is of insufficient quality, and a performing edition that requires considerably more comfort and familiarity with the French language than the cast possesses. Even fans of Horne and McCracken are unlikely to find this a worthwhile addition to their collections, except perhaps for the sake of completeness. Fans of Bernstein may want it because of the comparative rarity of Bernstein opera performances and because the peculiarities of the conducting are so reflective of how Bernstein came across elsewhere. But that is at best a lukewarm recommendation, and indeed the whole musical quality of this recording, as opposed to its technical quality, is lukewarm at best.

     The case is much the same with the two Berlioz releases conducted by Seiji Ozawa. Ozawa was a Bernstein protégé, and like other such – Marin Alsop comes immediately to mind – seems never to have become fully comfortable with the standard repertoire, tending to overdo well-known works through over-frequent rubato and unjustified emphases along the lines of what Ozawa apparently considered to be Bernstein’s own way. Bernstein did abuse composers’ intentions a great deal of the time – his bitterly intense Adagietto from Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 is a good case in point – but he usually did so to try to delve more deeply into the music than he felt other conductors did. Even when he was wrongheaded in this, he was thoughtful and frequently insightful: it was easy to disagree with his interpretations but difficult to deny that he was after something special and unusual in them (this is even true of his Carmen). Ozawa, though, especially early in his career, seemed to go through the motions of being a “Bernsteinian” without ever having a clear sense of why he was doing what he was doing. In the case of Symphonie Fantastique, this is clearest in the first two movements, which are very well played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra but come across as rather indulgent, or self-indulgent. Matters improve significantly in the third movement, which hangs together much better than it usually does – and that in turn leads to intense drama in the fourth movement and considerable grotesquerie in the finale. In toto, the result is a performance that improves as it goes along, ending in a wholly satisfying way after starting in a less-than-involving one. For potential purchasers who are not dyed-in-the-wool Ozawa fans, though, there is a question about the value of a recording featuring only 47 minutes of music – nothing else is included here, even though the original Deutsche Grammophon release that PentaTone has remastered paired the symphony with Scène d’amour from Roméo et Juliette. On balance, however, there are more pluses than minuses here for listeners willing to accept a disc that contains only the symphony itself.

     The pluses and minuses are more evenly balanced in Ozawa’s La Damnation de Faust. Again, the Boston Symphony plays beautifully – the orchestra was at a high point of quality in the early 1970s – and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus is excellent as well, which helps a great deal in a work in which the choral elements are so important. On the other hand, Ozawa’s unnecessary tempo changes are very much in evidence – the unjustified speedup of the Marche Hongroise is one example among many, with the conductor apparently thinking that accelerandos are somehow guaranteed to produce excitement. Ozawa does have a good sense of the richness of Berlioz’ scoring – he brings that level of understanding to the Symphonie Fantastique as well – but his conducting is too uninvolving and at times even crass to make the overall performance effective. Stuart Burrows sings the role of Faust very well, with more subtlety and attentiveness than Ozawa brings to his podium role, although Burrows’ French pronunciation is not of the best. Edith Mathis has too high a voice for Marguerite – she is a good soprano, but this is closer to a mezzo-soprano role – but her interpretation is touching even if her actual singing is not really rich enough in tone. Donald McIntyre, unfortunately, is a disappointment as Méphistophélès: the best single word for his not-very-smooth singing is “loud,” his French is not very good at all, and he neither cajoles effectively nor oozes menace – instead, he comes across as something of a bully, and not much more than that. This makes the character uninteresting, which is one thing the devil should never be. On balance, this is a good but scarcely outstanding recording, with high points for its choral singing and orchestral playing, middling ones for Ozawa’s conducting, and a mixture of the good and not-so-good in the singing and characterizations of the main solo roles. Just as with PentaTone’s other releases in what it is calling its “Remastered Classics” series, there are interesting elements here, presented in sound that is just about as good as it can possibly be. But none of these releases is an unalloyed (or even close to unalloyed) pleasure, and certainly none is a must-have for listeners for whom the primary attraction of these works is the music itself.

(++++) BOARD-BOOK BONUSES

Gossie: A Gosling on the Go! By Olivier Dunrea. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $8.99.

Peedie: A Forgetful Little Gosling. By Olivier Dunrea. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $8.99.

BooBoo: A Small Gosling with a Big Appetite. By Olivier Dunrea. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $8.99.

Gossie & Gertie: Best Friends, Always Together. By Olivier Dunrea. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $8.99.

Gus Explores His World. By Olivier Dunrea. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $9.99.

Gemma & Gus: Big Sister, Little Brother. By Olivier Dunrea. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $9.99.

     Olivier Dunrea’s bright, amusing little tales of goslings have delighted young children and their parents for well over a decade now, and it is a pleasure to rediscover them – or bring them to a whole new generation of kids – through brand-new, oversize, padded board books that are easy for small hands to hold and sturdy enough to withstand all sorts of unintentional mistreatment. Dunrea’s “Gossie & Friends” series includes such nicely distinguished characters as Gertie, Ollie, Gideon, Jasper & Joop, Gus, and Gemma – but it all began in 2002 with Gossie herself. She is “a small, yellow gosling who likes to wear bright red boots” and whose slightly mussed-up head and tail feathers make her extra-endearing. She is seen wearing her much-loved boots when encountering a hummingbird, when eating from a bowl on whose side a beetle is perched, when riding a happily bounding pig, and in other places as well -- and especially when walking. Dunrea turns simple sentences such as “she walks backward” and “she walks forward” into joyous proclamations by giving Gossie expressiveness and showing her high-stepping into encounters with her environment, in the form of grass and a small flying insect. The scenes of red-booted Gossie walking in rain (with eyes closed) and snow (wearing an expression of wonder, or perhaps bewilderment) build to the “problem” of the book, in which Gossie one day cannot find her boots. Then Dunrea takes her through a search that involves, among other things, seeing her rear end sticking out from under her nest and watching her look down from a rock toward a mole that has just burrowed to the surface. Eventually Gossie locates her boots and, at the same time, finds Gertie, and the book ends with the two friends sharing not only the boots but also the fun of exploring in them. Although the story is certainly simple enough for a board book, it is longer and has more character than do many board-book tales – quite enough to charm pre-readers and young readers into seeking out other gosling books by Dunrea.

     The ways in which Dunrea makes the books and their characters different, while also keeping them similar enough to make children comfortable, are clear in the new board-book versions of the stories of Peedie and BooBoo, both originally published in 2004. Peedie looks a lot like Gossie, except without the ruffled tail feathers – and with a bright red cap instead of bright red boots. Like Gossie, Peedie interacts with insects, pigs and other characters – the spider that lands on his beak is especially amusing. Kids who have read about Gossie and now read that Peedie “never forgets to wear his lucky red baseball cap,” even though he often forgets other things, will not be surprised when Dunrea shows the many ways Peedie wears the cap and the many places he visits while doing so. Nor will they be surprised that Peedie does indeed forget where he left the cap one day, after putting it “in a secret place.” So Peedie – like Gossie – embarks on a search, in the pond (with only his rear end showing), through the pile of apples (one of which is on his head), and so on. Despondent, Peedie goes to do his chore of turning the egg (an assignment that he often forgets), and lo and behold, the egg is wearing the cap – that is where Peedie put it! The Peedie and Gossie books make a delightful pair, and each is fun on its own as well.

     The BooBoo story is slightly different, yet recognizably part of the same series. BooBoo is blue, not yellow. And her primary characteristic is not what she wears but her enjoyment of food. In one of many wonderful illustrations, she is lying on a small pile of hay, beneath a bunch of grapes, waiting for one to fall into her mouth – which it is in the process of doing. Her watchword is “good food,” a phrase she says again and again. BooBoo gets food from the hens, from the goat, even from the mouse, sampling here and nibbling there, even trying the weeds that grow in the pond. But as in the other Dunrea books, the gosling’s main characteristic leads to a problem: BooBoo swallows a bubble that is floating over the pond and suddenly finds herself burping. The burps push her forward and backward – Dunrea must have had great fun creating those illustrations! – and BooBoo cannot stop herself from burping until a helpful little turtle urges her to drink water. So she does, and then burps only “a teeny tiny bubble,” and then concludes that the strange burp-inducing bubbles were, like everything else she eats, “good food.” This is a wonderfully apt ending to yet another silly and endearing book in which Dunrea lavishes care and attention on his pictures of the goslings and their adventures while keeping the backgrounds completely white, so the characters – main and subsidiary alike – stand out clearly and delightfully at all times. The new padded-board-book versions of these stories are every bit as much fun as the original books were – and at this point, Dunrea’s early gosling tales deserve to be called modern classics.

     The “classics” label applies not only to Dunrea’s stories of individual goslings but also to ones about gosling friends exploring and playing together. Gossie & Gertie, originally published in 2002, is about one such pair. Gossie, of course, wears his bright red boots all the time, while Gertie wears bright blue ones and is a slightly smaller gosling. Everything in this book is about what they do together: splash in the rain, play in the daisies, dive in the pond, and so forth. “Gossie and Gertie are best friends,” writes Dunrea, and this usually means that Gossie leads and Gertie follows – but not when Gossie decides to jump into a mud puddle. Gertie does not wish to follow that, and afterwards, she stops following Gossie altogether: he says to follow him, but she follows a frog; he again says to follow him, but she follows a butterfly; again and again, no matter how loudly Gossie insists that Gertie follow him, she follows something else. So then Gossie follows Gertie for a change – right to their food bowl for dinner, with the final page showing both of them with their heads all the way inside the bowl, eating together, best friends again (or still). This is the sort of gentle amusement that initially enchanted readers of Dunrea’s gosling tales, and that still does so in the stories’ new padded-board-book format.

     Dunrea continues to produce new gosling stories as well. Even as the decade-plus original stories appear in a new format, Dunrea is offering brand-new stories in small-book (but not board-book) form. Gus Explores His World features a gosling who likes to discover new things – on his own. He is a do-it-yourself explorer, and in fact he is introduced when Dunrea describes him as “a small yellow gosling who likes to be by himself.” Like Peedie, Gus wears a hat – it looks like a small inverted cooking pot. Above all, Gus is an observer, watching a spider spin its web, watching mice in the barn, watching everything that goes on in the pond – and, it just so happens, watching a turtle walk out of the pond and start scraping in the dirt nearby. After the turtle returns to the water, curious Gus gently explores the area where she has been digging, and discovers three small eggs. Gus knows about eggs – he carefully sits on them and soon finds that egg-sitting is no small task. Mice scurry past, rain drops on him, night falls as a snail walks by, morning comes as a bird sits atop his hat – and all the while, Gus faithfully sits upon the eggs, keeping them warm and watching them carefully. And then, all of a sudden, the eggs move, and a surprised Gus hops off them – watching them split open and seeing three little green heads peeking out. Gus and the baby turtles stare at each other – and suddenly Gus, who always likes to be by himself, becomes Gus “who likes to be by himself. Most of the time.” The final heartwarming page shows the three turtles riding along on Gus, two on his back and one on his hat. And never mind that in the real world, turtle eggs hatch without being sat on, and in fact Gus would have needed to wait for two to three months before they would have hatched – Dunrea is, after all, not writing true-to-life nature books!

     Gus interacts with his big sister in Gemma & Gus, in which Gemma is described as “a small yellow gosling” and Gus as “a smaller yellow gosling.” Gemma, who wears a pith helmet and carries binoculars, is also, not surprisingly with those accessories, an explorer. And when the two goslings are together, she takes the lead – into the cattails, onto a flowerpot, even onto the back of Molly, the dog. But when Gemma decides she does not want Gus following her all the time, Gus takes the lead – and now Gemma follows him as he peeks under the hen and jumps into the pond. Exasperated, Gemma asks Gus what he is doing, and he replies, in all capital letters, “EXPLORING!” And so there is nothing left for the two to do but explore together, at the same time – which they are doing on the final page, both carefully looking at a bat that is hanging upside down. An amusing approach to sibling rivalry and sibling cooperation and at the same time a perfectly fitting entry into this ongoing sequence about goslings, Gemma & Gus shows, as does Gus Explores His World, that Dunrea’s creativity has certainly not flagged in the decade-plus since he started this series – and is, indeed, continuing to move him in new, ever-expanding directions that nevertheless preserve the series’ approach both in writing and in pictures.

(++++) TANTALIZING MEMORIES

The Book of Memory Gaps. By Cecilia Ruiz. Blue Rider Press. $16.95.

Members Only: Secret Societies, Sects, and Cults—Exposed! By Julie Tibbott. Zest Books. $14.99.

     Short and bittersweet, Cecilia Ruiz’ The Book of Memory Gaps is a strangely affecting little collection of 14 one-paragraph (sometimes one-sentence) tales of people with misshapen memories of various sorts. Adorned with drawings of neurons on its front and back pages, framed by a concluding quote from Jorge Luis Borges and an opening one that starts, “We are the things we don’t remember,” Ruiz’ book uses understated illustrations filled with muted colors to complement poetic language based on real memory conditions and disorders. For some reason, the sufferers here – which is not to say that most of them know they are suffering – are almost all Russian: Pyotr, Ivan, Nadya, Viktor, Natasha and others. Two particularly poignant tales are of musicians. In one, “Alexander quit his career as a composer when, for the fifth time, without noticing it, he wrote a piece that already existed.” The illustration shows a well-dressed, mustachioed man holding an ax that he has used to chop two legs off a grand piano. In the other music-related story, “Pavel keeps forgetting what he just did. He has been rehearsing the same melody over and over for almost a year. The entire neighborhood has left.” He is a silhouette, seen through a window, playing a violin, in a building on a canal or river in which all other spaces have broken windows – which are also seen throughout the darkened building across the water. Whether Pavel’s playing has driven the neighborhood away or whether matters have deteriorated around him without his noticing is left to the reader to decide. The delicacy with which Ruiz portrays what is essentially a series of stories of mental illness, or at least incapacity, produces involving wistfulness rather than distancing judgment. One little story shows a woman named Koka sitting at a table in a room whose only other furnishing is a hanging plant that appears to be dead. She has just rediscovered money she once hid – but the currency has changed and “the bills were no longer in circulation.” Another tale is of a ballerina named Polina who is “not able to create new memories” and believes every night is opening night – leading her repeatedly to perform in “a used discolored costume” to an empty theater. There is pathos aplenty in these little stories, but there is provocative thoughtfulness here, too, which will be especially intense for readers who realize that they too remember, or think they remember, having memory lapses of one sort or another. It would be stretching the truth to call The Book of Memory Gaps charming, but it would be wrong to call it charmless. It is a strange little book about the strangeness of memory itself and the many ways in which the world we perceive, re-creating it day after day from our memories of how it appeared the day before, may be very different from the one seen and lived in by others.

     Strangeness and memory mix in a different way in Julie Tibbott’s Members Only, a fascinating – if somewhat too glib – look at 22 secret societies and sects (with passing references to quite a few more). The organizations profiled here include ones whose names are quite well known, even if their practices are understood at best imperfectly: Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians. There are others that readers may have encountered as byways of history: Know Nothings, the anti-immigrant group that briefly flourished in the United States before the Civil War; Thuggees, the murderous bands of roving criminals in India about whom Mark Twain wrote and from which the word “thug” is derived; and the Knights Templar, much-feared medieval Crusaders whose mysteries inspired The Da Vinci Code and several films. There are university-based, still-operating secret groups, such as the well-known Skull and Bones at Yale and the less-known group called The Machine at the University of Alabama. And there are the Bilderberg Group, which possibly influences the course of many nations in the world today; the Bizango, which practices its own form of voodoo in Haiti; and the Thule Society, which helped inspire Nazism and claimed many top Nazis as members. For each group, Tibbott explains when it started, whether or not it remains active, to what extent it is exclusive and secretive, how threatening it is or was (and to whom), and how quirky it should be considered. Her chapters on the groups include a sometimes uneasy mixture of accurate (if surface-level) historical research with commentary that takes far-out notions a little too much at face value – for instance, regarding the Illuminati, that “the majority of US presidents…share a common ancestor” but that “there are those who believe that the beings in these bloodlines are not even human, but reptilian humanoids.” Tone is Tibbott’s difficulty in Members Only: she is not sure to what extent she wants to mock the groups, to what extent she simply wants to explain them, and to what extent she wants to warn readers to take them very seriously indeed. Also, Tibbott is described as “an editor of teen fiction at a major publishing house,” but if so, she is badly in need of a better editor herself: among the many gaffes and improper usages here are misspelling Adolf Hitler’s first name as Adolph; writing “must possess have high morals” (page 47); saying “banned together” rather than “band together” (page 100) and “cut and dry” rather than “cut and dried” (page 103); saying that Germany “was going through tough times, with [sic] having been defeated been defeated in the First World War” (page 187); and discussing when the Thuggees (erroneously spelled with a single “g” in the table of contents) “were could embark on the hunt for victims” (page 217). The uneven tone and frequent mistakes undermine the fascinating material here, leaving a (+++) book that is less revelatory than it could have been but that still contains plenty of food for thought, as well as a frisson of titillation that will enthrall conspiracy buffs and conspiracy debunkers alike.

(++++) THE USES OF PICTURES

Bone, Book One: Out from Boneville—Tribute Edition. By Jeff Smith. Color by Steve Hamaker. Graphix/Scholastic. $14.99.

My Near-Death Adventures (99% True!). By Alison DeCamp. Crown. $16.99.

     Although it was Will Eisner (1917-2005) who largely bridged the gap between traditional comic books and graphic novels, it is Jeff Smith (born 1960) who has really shown the power, versatility and entertainment value of the graphic-novel form. Smith’s Bone series of nine books, originally self-published, actually led Scholastic to launch an entire new publication line called Graphix that has since put out numerous notable graphic novels. Smith himself expanded the Bone universe beyond its original confines with supplements called Rose and Tall Tales, a Bone Handbook, and the three-part Quest for the Spark, which was more of an illustrated traditional novel than a graphic novel. The lines tend to blur where Smith is concerned, and the quality of his work only becomes more apparent on repeated readings and viewings – as is clear in the new Tribute Edition of the first book of the Bone saga. Introducing most of the series’ major characters, Out from Boneville also shows with exceptional clarity the debt Smith owes to cartoonists who came before him, particularly Walt Kelly of Pogo fame, whose brilliant characterizations inform the shape of the three Bone cousins themselves and also are quite clear in the creation of such subsidiary characters as the baby possums and Ted the bug. The cover of the new Tribute Edition is as clear a tribute to Pogo as anyone could want: Fone Bone, the sequence’s central character, appears all alone, dressed in top hat and tails, tipping his topper and leaning on his walking stick in as Pogo-esque a pose as you are likely to see this side of Kelly himself. Yet there is little in Bone that is actually derivative, for all that the overall plot is a typical heroic fantasy quest and many of the characters are traditional tropes of the form. Smith – abetted by the absolutely first-rate coloring of Steve Hamaker, which really makes the Bone world come alive – incorporates elements of the expected into a story filled with unexpected twists and turns, a tale that keeps readers guessing and is every bit as involving as many a traditional novel. And the illustrations are marvelous to look at, the characters’ varied appearances and positioning being as important to the tale-telling as Smith’s words. Bone is unusual in so many ways that readers really need to discover them for themselves, from the inclusion of references to Moby-Dick to the creation of evil Rat Creatures that are vicious, destructive, and somehow amusing in their stupidity and (in one case) their love of quiche. The Tribute Edition includes some extra material: an illustrated poem by the quiche-loving Rat Creature and a number of artistic interpretations of Bone-related matters by other visual artists. But these tributes are not what the Tribute Edition is really all about: what matters here is the chance to revisit a remarkably effective instance of storytelling in a just-right mixture of words and pictures, and to revel in the power that graphic novels can have when someone as skilled as Smith creates them.

     Most books that rely on visuals for their effect are far from the quality of Bone, but that does not stop authors from repeatedly trying to bring illustrations to novels for young readers in an attempt to make the stories more interesting than they would otherwise be. This is what Alison DeCamp tries in My Near-Death Adventures (99% True!), a book whose main attraction is its unusual setting (a lumber camp in 1895) but whose voluminous illustrations – looking like scrapbook clippings of ads and magazine illustrations, with comments by the 11-year-old protagonist written on them – add much less to the narrative than the author clearly hopes. The basic problem with this (+++) book is Stanley Arthur Slater, its central character, who is far too silly and immature for his supposed age and whom DeCamp tries far too hard to turn into a sort of Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn type. Instead, Stanley comes across as hopelessly and not very charmingly naïve, and his habit of writing the narrative as if he is thinking it, only to have another character comment on what has just happened – meaning that Stanley was speaking out loud rather than just thinking something – quickly becomes annoying and, eventually, irritating. Stanley does not understand all the many comments about his missing father, a ne’er-do-well who, Stanley imagines, must be writing him increasingly improbable letters about all his wonderful jobs and adventures. DeCamp thinks the many illustrations relieve this sort of style: “Granny looks at me. She is not amused. ‘Stan, I am not amused.’” And while the pictures are quite funny some of the time, far too often they seem forced, as well as more juvenile than need be. A little of the style here goes a long way: “Sure enough, when I wake up, I’m dead. …Unfortunately, the first thing I see is Granny. And then I know. This isn’t Heaven. …Uncle Henry is the angel Gabriel. Who would have thought? This information certainly would have come in handy when I was alive.” There is a lot of misunderstanding of death and dying in the book, as should be obvious from its title, and that too is a matter in which a little goes a long way: “I must admit, it’s a relief to hear Stinky Pete probably won’t be murdering anyone in their sleep, but I’m still watching out for that guy. You never know, he might have an evil side.” Throw writing like this together with a diagram of a coffin from which escape is possible if you are buried alive (a real 19^th-century invention), a picture of President Grover Cleveland, a map of Michigan with a supposedly hand-drawn arrow and the words “we are here,” a female cousin determined to become a doctor even though everyone (especially Stan) knows that only men are doctors, and a lot of pictures related to logging, and you have a book that tries very hard indeed to be offbeat, amusing and unusual. But it comes across most of the time as simply trying too hard, just as Stan himself seems to be trying too hard – not merely to be grown-up, mature and capable, which are common attempts for 11-year-olds in books for the 8-12 age group, but to be interesting. The liberal sprinkling of illustrations here does little to make the characters, especially Stan, more appealing. Stan’s repeated assertion, “I don’t mind saying,” is a remark that, like much else in this novel, wears thin awfully quickly. “I’m a whiz at shaving, I don’t mind saying. Or at least drawing whiskers.” “I am a whiz at being a patient, I don’t mind saying.” “I myself am a whiz at whistling, I don’t mind saying.” Readers in the target age group may find that enough of this is more than enough, they won’t mind saying.

(+++) VISITS TO FANTASY LANDS

Mars Evacuees. By Sophia McDougall. Harper. $16.99.

The Last Dragon Charmer, Book 1: Villain Keeper. By Laurie McKay. Harper. $16.99.

     Whether told with humor or the utmost seriousness, novels for readers ages 8-12 are frequently set in locations deliberately designed to be as unlike everyday life as possible – except that the protagonists are designed to be just like the readers, talking like them and interacting with others as they do. The improbable mixtures are a fact of fictional life in books whose underlying theme is that preteens, in whatever world they may find themselves, can out-think, outsmart and outwit adults at every turn. The particular world in Mars Evacuees is, as the title indicates, Mars, and if this is not exactly the Mars known as Barsoom in the Edgar Rice Burroughs tales, it is not precisely the one known to 21^st-century scientists either. True, there are some scientific discussions here, designed to create an aura of plausibility: “Noctis Labyrinthus. It’s a system of canyons by the equator at the west end of Valles Marineris – Mariner Valleys. It was formed by extensional tectonics in the Noachian period and erosion by rivers and collapse of grabens in the late Hesperian and Amazonian periods.” This material is, however, rather spectacularly boring, as this sample indicates, and it is not at all the point of Sophia McDougall’s book, the first of a two-book series. Of far greater interest are the brave spacefighters of Earth; Alice, the 12-year-old narrator of the book (whose mother is one of the boldest and best-known warriors); and the alien Morrors – with whom humans have been at war for 15 years. As Alice puts it, “Obviously I was scared of the Morrors, because you can’t see them and they can kill you and obviously I really wished they would go away.” Understandable, but then there wouldn’t be much of a book here. It seems that the Morrors have been re-jiggering Earth’s climate to be more to their liking, just as Earth has been re-jiggering the climate of Mars so humans can “sort of breathe the air and sort of not get sunburned to death.” The ironic parallel is not noticed or significant here, though. What matters is that as Earth continues to suffer through the lengthy war, some preteens are evacuated to Mars, where their schooling is handled by robots that (as is often the case in science fantasy) have more personality than most of the humans. However, “there’s only a few hundred people on the whole planet, and most of them are us,” one student points out, so of course it falls to the young people to make an uneasy sort of peace with the Morrors and eventually get the two races to cooperate “when the solar system’s infested with planet-eating bugs,” the sort of menace that makes former enemies into allies and opens the door to this book’s planned sequel. McDougall has a light touch that shows she is well aware of the absurdity of what she is writing, and the eruptions of humor (much of it appropriately juvenile) make Mars Evacuees more enjoyable than many other fantasy adventure books for preteens. It is impossible to take the book seriously, of course, but McDougall provides plenty of nudges and hints that indicate she knows that – and even the characters sometimes seem on the verge of figuring it out as well.

     Villain Keeper, on the other hand, is very serious indeed. However, it too follows a familiar pattern for fantasy adventures, being set in a world that is obviously make-believe and one that is, or seems to be, the everyday world of the readers. Specifically, the story here is of Prince Caden of the Great Winterlands of Razzon, who is expected to become a dragon slayer, just like his seven older brothers. That sounds like a traditional fairy-tale setup, and it is. But there is a wrinkle – not in time but in geography. The prince suddenly and mysteriously finds himself in the “real” world of Asheville, North Carolina, a city decidedly lacking in magic and dragons. What is going on? Well, of course it will turn out that Asheville is not so mundane as it seems to be; in fact, as one villain from Caden’s own land explains to Caden, “The locals call Asheville the Land of the Sky. …But I and the other teachers, we call it the Land of Shadow, the land of the banished. …I’ll admit…it’s nicer than advertised. One of the better prisons I’ve known. You worry about me, but there are twenty-four others banished here just like me.” Yes, 24 villains from Caden’s realm in North Carolina, all of them teachers – there’s a preteen fantasy for you – and making statements that are “like the web of a Korvan spiderbird, sticky and full of bloodsucking traps.” And then there is the small matter of dragon slaying: somewhere along the line, Caden starts to suspect that maybe that is not what he is supposed or destined, to do. There is also the small matter of Tito, the “real-world” boy and another 12-year-old, with whom Caden is staying in a foster home. There is considerable opportunity for amusement in Caden’s attempts to adjust to the “real” world and figure it out, but Laurie McKay is not much interested in humor: she wants adventure, and she serves it up through a series of mysteries – not only how and why Caden is in North Carolina, and how and why the villains of his land are there as well, but also whether there really are dragons about and, by the way, who the mysterious “she” is that all the banished evildoers (those that are now teachers) seem to fear. To be sure, there are glints of amusement in Villain Keeper from time to time: “Caden’s pocket, the one containing his phone, began to shake. Truly, he preferred the loud music to the buzzing. Any person who’d ever felt the debilitating sting of a Razzon crater wasp would feel the same.” But by and large, McKay stays on the straight-and-narrow road of fantasy adventure in this first book of a planned series, setting out various scenarios and introducing various characters that she will surely explore at greater length in the future. There is nothing especially innovative or unusual in this start of The Last Dragon Charmer sequence, but as easy-to-read escapism for all the would-be Cadens out there, it is just fine.

(++++) HARD DRIVING

Seagate Seven. Windows 8, 7, Vista or XP; Mac OS X 10.6.8 or higher; iOS 7 or higher; Android 2.3 or higher. Seagate Technology. $99.99.

Seagate Wireless: Mobile Storage. Windows 8 or 7; Mac OS X 10.7 or higher; iOs 7 or higher; Android 4.0 or higher. Seagate Technology. $129.99.

     To see how far beyond the utilitarian hard drives have gone, to note the extent to which they can be fashion accessories as well as crucial elements of a home or small-business computer configuration, it is only necessary to examine two new and very different portable hard drives from Seagate Technology. Some of their specs make them seem similar: both are small, easy to carry, and offer 500 GB of storage. But their out-of-the-box appearance is so different and their purposes and uses so distinct that they provide a window into the direction in which the entire hard-drive industry is going. The fact that they both work very easily and do their jobs extremely well is almost beside the point – users expect that from any hard drive, although admittedly portable ones are, as a class, more failure-prone than ones that reside permanently on a desktop. What matters here is that the jobs themselves, the purposes of these drives, are very different from each other, as are the means by which the drives do those jobs.

     Seagate Seven gets its name from its thickness, which is a mere seven millimeters: this is the thinnest external hard drive on the market, smaller than an iPhone 6 and so closely resembling an internal hard drive that someone taking it out of its box for the first time may wonder if the wrong item ended up in the package. The drive’s appearance is clever and stylish, and there is also considerable practicality to it: this drive is going to go places, since it fits so easily into just about any bag or pocket, and that internal-drive-like appearance reflects a casing made of stainless steel that effectively protects the drive itself (which is only five millimeters thick) despite the lack of a carrying case.

     Seagate Seven is a USB 3.0 drive that does an excellent job of transferring files quickly; it is also backwards compatible with USB 2.0, although of course the transfer rate with that standard is much slower (around 30 Mbps, compared with 100 Mbps for USB 3.0). Seagate Seven comes with an 18-inch fabric cable and an impressive three-year warranty – indicating that Seagate has faith that this particular portable drive is likely to be more durable than are many others. In truth, the drive is rather expensive for a 500Gb unit, but Seagate Seven is certainly worth the price for its small form factor, ease of carrying, very sturdy construction, rapid operation, and – perhaps – a certain coolness factor, that being an element in the hard-drove world that was unthinkable just a few years ago but that is definitely a driver of development today.

     What to do with the Seagate Seven? The whole point of a portable drive is to make non-cloud data transport easy and safe, and provide a simple way to back up crucial files. Seagate Seven comes preloaded with Seagate Dashboard backup software, which has three flavors: PC Backup, Social and Mobile Backup. The PC Backup function – for Windows only – is for backing up files and folders; you can choose the ones to back up or let the software pick. Once selections are made, the drive will back up automatically when changes are detected – or you can create your own backup schedule. (The feature is not available for Macs because you can use Apple's Time Machine backup feature with the Seagate Seven.) The other two parts of Seagate Dashboard work both for PCs and Macs. The Social feature is for sharing media at social-networking sites, including Flickr, Facebook and YouTube – and backing up media from those sites to the portable drive. Mobile Backup is for content stored on a mobile device – it uses the free, downloadable Seagate Mobile Backup app. You do not need to install Seagate Dashboard to use the Seagate Seven, but the software works well and simplifies the backup process.

     However – and this speaks to the point about the different ways in which external drives are now being designed, manufactured and sold – if your primary interest is mobile backup, you are in the target group for the new Seagate Wireless: Mobile Storage drive. This looks very, very different from Seagate Seven. It is quite small, almost square, with rounded edges, and – speaking of fashion accessories – it is available in five colors: black, white, green, red and blue (although all have a black base). As its name indicates, this is a wireless drive – battery powered, with at least six hours of battery life – and it is designed for data streaming to up to three devices at the same time: computers, tablets and smartphones. Seagate Wireless: Mobile Storage takes direct aim at a significant problem involving data usage on mobile devices. In light of the limited capacity of most smartphones and tablets, users end up streaming desired content – but this can result in unnecessary data usage if the user is out of reach of WiFi. Usage fees can be high and streaming can be very inconvenient. Enter this drive, which creates its own local WiFi signal: offloading media libraries to Seagate Wireless: Mobile Storage is a way to avoid usage fees while maintaining remote access to desired content.

     To this end, Seagate Wireless: Mobile Storage allows big-screen streaming through Chromecast, Roku, Airplay, and LG Smart TV – in addition to preexisting compatibility with iOS, Android, Kindle Fire, and Windows through the Seagate Media app. The app has a clean, easy-to-use design that allows users to manage file transfers simply. The contents of the drive are managed through a drop-down menu at the top right of the interface; this lists files according to type as well as their retaining folders. The four administrative icons along the top right of the interface include a search function, alerts, and a drop-down menu – which offers a refresh button, connection indicator, user list, battery life information, system settings, and a help button. The whole setup is intuitive, using familiar icons and an easy-to-follow layout, and it makes downloading to the drive or uploading from it simple and quick. Reasonably quick, that is: it takes a while for the initial buffering, although things move speedily enough after that. However, users who want to connect the drive directly to a device will find that Seagate Wireless: Mobile Storage offers only USB 2.0 – further indication that this really is a drive intended for wireless, not wired, use.

     There are a couple of other irritations with Seagate Wireless: Mobile Storage as well. Its warranty is for only two years, not the three offered with Seagate Seven. And although Seagate Wireless: Mobile Storage is certainly usable with a desktop interface, that interface’s design is different from and less pleasant to use than the mobile one. The two designs offer the same features, but it would have been much better for users to put them in the same place. Instead, the desktop app uses a different icon arrangement and display, which means users who go back and forth between it and the mobile app may encounter at least momentary – and unnecessary – confusion. The drive’s functionality is fine with either app, but the reason for having two different displays is not apparent.

     Seagate Wireless: Mobile Storage is excellent for providing mobile storage across multiple devices with a small-form-factor, easily portable unit featuring wide compatibility for streaming content. It seems to be primarily a consumer product – more so than the heavier-duty Seagate Seven, which it is quite easy to see being used extensively by small businesses. What Seagate Wireless: Mobile Storage does is to provide more storage space than any standard smartphone or tablet, making it possible for users to cut their data-access needs while on the go. Transfers are not super-fast but will be fine for most consumer purposes, and the Seagate Media app is a very good remote management tool (better than the desktop app, although both get the job done).  Seagate Seven, in contrast, fills the more-traditional role of providing external local (but easily portable) backup – and it offers very fast file transfer, very easy device portability, and an attractive design that appears to be especially rugged. The bottom line is that the apparent similarities of these two small Seagate 500 GB external drives are just that – apparent similarities. The devices are intended for different markets, fill different niches, and make use of their identical capacity in different ways and for different purposes. These Seagate products confirm that the days of simply grabbing an external hard drive, figuring that one is much the same as the next, are over.

(+++) POWERED BY PIANO

Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I. Kimiko Ishizaka, piano. Navona. $19.99 (2 CDs).

Busoni the Visionary, Volume III. Jeni Slotchiver, piano. Centaur. $15.99.

Hindemith: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1-3; Suite “1922.” David Korevaar, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.

Powerhouse Pianists II—Works for Two Pianos. Stephen Gosling and Blair McMillen, pianos. AMR (American Modern Recordings). $16.99.

Saint-Saëns: Piano Trios Nos. 1 and 2. Trio Latitude 41 (Bernadene Blaha, piano; Livia Sohn, violin; Luigi Piovano, cello). Eloquentia. $21.98.

     It is sheer enjoyment of the sound of the piano and the abilities of its many modern virtuosi that will drive listeners to a wide variety of recent recordings – more than, in some cases, the music will. Kimiko Ishizaka’s version of the first book of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier will of course be of interest to any lover of this transcendent music. But the question listeners will ask is why we need another recording of this material on piano rather than on the type of instrument for which Bach wrote the material. What, specifically, does Ishizaka bring to the work that makes her version worth considering amid all the others played by pianists – not to mention those performed, with far greater authenticity, on harpsichord or clavichord? The answer is that Ishizaka offers a firm intellectual understanding of the music, coupled with the technical ability to keep the musical lines clear and the willingness to eschew pedal use in order to bring greater clarity to the music than it generally receives on piano. These strengths, however, only bring into higher relief the reality that this sort of clarity and contrapuntal attention are not the strengths of the type of instrument Ishizaka plays, certainly not those of the Bösendorfer 280 concert grand used in this recording – a piano with vastly more resonance and a far greater span of notes than anything from Bach’s time. Ishizaka performs all this music with care and obvious attentiveness, and attractively brings out many of its lyrical moments without delving into entirely inappropriate Romantic-era swooning. But the recording, although a feast for Ishizaka’s fans and those who think Bach “sounds right” on piano, is not particularly compelling otherwise. Those seeking their first recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I on piano should certainly consider it, but those who already have one of the many fine versions currently available – or who see no particular reason to hear this music on a modern concert grand in the first place – can safely bypass Navona’s two-CD set.

     The piano is certainly the right instrument for the music of composer/pianist Ferruccio Busoni, and the third volume of Jeni Slotchiver’s survey under the title Busoni the Visionary is a fascinating one for listeners interested in this still-underrated composer. Ties between Bach and Busoni are many and well-known, with Busoni not only transcribing a number of Bach’s works for piano (which is not the same as simply playing them on a modern instrument) but also creating his own works using Bach’s forms in both imitative and developmental ways. There are bits of all this on Slotchiver’s new Centaur CD. Busoni’s transcription of Prelude and Triple Fugue in E-flat for Organ, BWV 552 (“St. Anne”) is the highlight of the disc, monumental in its structure and enormously impressive in its design and Slotchiver’s execution – and in Busoni’s knowing, intelligent transcription, which both conveys the magnitude of the original organ work and produces a fully satisfying piano piece. The other Bach-flavored works here, although of lesser scope, are also impressive. Fantasia nach Johann Sebastian Bach, written in memory of Busoni’s father, takes Bachian musical ideas and transforms them, incorporating them into a new structure that is far more free-flowing than Bach’s own music. It is a work perhaps more worthy of intellectual appreciation than emotional involvement, but is certainly an interesting experiment. Toccata uses a form often employed by Bach for a work that is very much of the 20^th century, filled with drama and technical virtuosity and incorporating a central Fantasia that is brooding and lyrical. This CD also contains three works with no Bach ties at all. Ten Variations on a Prelude of Chopin, from 1922, is refined and poetic, delicate and altogether lighter than Busoni’s earlier (1884) variations and fugue on Chopin’s work, from which this piece is derived. This work is in line with Busoni’s mysticism, which is increasingly apparent in his late music, but this element of Busoni’s creativity is even clearer in the two remaining works here: Prélude et Étude (en Arpèges), which delves into a world of shimmering fantasy, and Nuit de Noël, intended as an expression of joy but coming across as a rather restrained form of pleasure. The Bach-related works aside, this release will be of interest mainly to those already following Slotchiver’s path through Busoni’s piano music.

     Hindemith, like Busoni, remains an underrated composer, his vast skill, thoughtfulness and versatility generally acknowledged but his music often thought of as intellectual rather than gripping, and sometimes even turgid. While Hindemith’s piano sonatas will certainly not be to all tastes, those seeking a particularly appealing recording of them will very much enjoy David Korevaar’s performances on MSR Classics. Hindemith wrote all three sonatas in a single year, 1936 – after he had been denounced by the Nazis but before he felt forced to emigrate. The first sonata, in five movements, shows Hindemith at his most lyrical: inspired by a poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, it often feels more like a fantasy than a classical sonata. The second sonata, which Hindemith considered closer to a sonatina, is the slightest of the three, but there is a fair degree of drama in its three movements – and Korevaar brings this out to especially fine effect. The third sonata is in four movements and is the darkest of the works, more serious than No. 2 and less lyrical and warm than No. 1. Its harmonic tension is considerable and is a key to its effective interpretation, and Korevaar brings it out with a sure hand (actually two sure hands). The CD also includes Suite “1922,” a five-movement work born of the same 1920s experimentalism that inspired such music as Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 2. The movements are a march, nocturne, and three based on popular pre-jazz dances – shimmy (a type of fox trot), Boston (a slow jazzy waltz), and ragtime. This suite is quite different from the later sonatas, treating the piano primarily as a percussion instrument and allowing all sorts of clattering and crashing in the march, ragtime and outer sections of the shimmy. Thick and cluttered with notes and chords, the music has little in common with Hindemith’s later work – except in the nocturne (Nachtstück), which is mostly quiet and melancholy. Infrequently heard even by the standards of Hindemith’s music, Suite “1922” is very much a work of its time – but also one whose brash ebullience listeners may well find to be at odds with what they think they know of this composer’s creations.

     Most of the composers on a new AMR recording called Powerhouse Pianists II will be even less familiar to listeners than Busoni or Hindemith: Robert Paterson, Doug Opel, Amanda Harberg and Mary Ellen Childs are scarcely household names in most households. Three composers represented on this CD do, however, have fairly widespread reputations. John Corigliano’s Chiaroscuro uses two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart, resulting in dissonance that ranges from the subtle to the extensive in a work whose expressive effects are more those of an intellectual exercise (and something of an “in joke”) than a reaching-out to a wide audience. John Adams’ Hallelujah Junction offers Adams’ usual minimalism, which has worn rather thin by now but still has many adherents. On the other hand, Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, taken from his Four North American Ballads, is a showstopper in this two-piano arrangement, filled with drama and industrial clangor and requiring tremendous virtuosity of both pianists – which Stephen Gosling and Blair McMillen supply in abundance. As for the rest of the disc, Paterson’s Deep Blue Ocean is a fairly straightforward mixture of tinkling notes with block chords, a typical representation of water and its movements. Opel’s Dilukkenjon is fun – a word not often applied to contemporary music – in its dueling-pianos scenario, whose lighthearted intensity may remind some film-oriented listeners of the piano competition between Donald and Daffy Duck in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Harberg’s Subway is a New York City transit portrait that is all hustle and bustle. It contrasts strongly with Childs’ Kilter, a work of much simpler sonic texture with a much greater sense of mysticism. As is often the case in anthology CDs of modern works, this is a recording with some elements that will interest certain listeners and some that will interest others, with no particular unifying feature except for the excellent pianism of the two performers. It is the chance to hear two highly skilled players performing in tandem that is the main attraction of the disc.

     Those who prefer a far mellower and more Romantic piano sound will get great pleasure from the Trio Latitude 41 recording of Saint-Saëns’ two piano trios – a (++++) disc that fully justifies its presence on the Eloquentia label. Bernadene Blaha, Livia Sohn and Luigi Piovano are indeed eloquent in these two very different works, written nearly 30 years apart. The first, in F, dates to 1863 and is the earliest Saint-Saëns work still played regularly today. This is music of subtle charm and a pastoral cast, using deliberate rhythmic confusion (two beats vs. three) to build the first movement – and including a hurdy-gurdy-like drone in the second, followed by off-beat rhythms in the third that make the music sound somewhat like a peasant dance. The piano really comes into its own in the finale, initially seeming to accompany the strings until Saint-Saëns uses some delightful sleight-of-hand to show that the piano is creating a melody and the strings are in fact accompanying it. Making this movement effective in its subtlety can be a significant challenge for performers; it is one to which Blaha, Sohn and Piovano rise skillfully. The wit and brightness of this finale, which includes dashing piano arpeggios, lead to a conclusion of great charm, in which this performance is fully steeped. The second trio is quite different: written in E minor in 1892, it is larger (five movements instead of four), longer and considerably more serious than the earlier one. Structurally, the second trio has extended outer movements enfolding shorter and generally lighter inner ones, the overall effect being that of an arch. The opening movement is the longest and in many ways the hardest to bring off successfully: the piano must play a series of chords very lightly (something for which the modern concert grand is ill equipped), and the pianist must maintain a delicate, almost airy touch nearly throughout. The second movement is in 5/8 and 5/4 time, rarely used by Saint-Saëns and generally uncommon at the time; the movement sounds in some ways like the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique,” written a year later. Next comes a simple, rather straightforward slow movement, then a graceful waltz, and finally a large movement of contrapuntal complexity, with a fugue in the middle, in which the piano writing is particularly virtuosic. Trio Latitude 41 makes a very strong case for the disparate beauties of these two works, playing them with gusto and understanding and providing considerable insight into the ways in which Saint-Saëns, who has often been accused of failing to develop much musically during his long career, in fact refined and deepened his musical communication in ways that were very significant indeed.