(++++) NUMBERS OF ANIMALS

Ten Playful Penguins. By Emily Ford. Illustrations by Russell Julian. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $12.99.

101 Animal Super Powers. By Melvin & Gilda Berger. Scholastic. $8.99.

Zen Socks. By Jon J. Muth. Scholastic. $17.99.

The Very Stuffed Turkey. By Katharine Kenah. Pictures by Binny Talib. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $6.99.

     The number of ways in which kids can learn from, through or about animals is practically limitless, but at least some books assign specific numbers to the learning. Ten Playful Penguins is a counting-in-reverse book with an especially clever design. Ten small plastic penguins decorate the front of Emily Ford’s book, each appearing nestled in its own small cutout, and all looking as if they must be attached to the book’s last page, peeking through to the front. But not so: as the book progresses, the story has penguins disappearing one by one, as each stays with another animal to “have some fun.” And each time that happens, one of the built-in plastic penguins disappears as well, as if by magic. Of course, what is happening is that each three-dimensional plastic penguin is attached to a different page, and as that page is turned, the penguin turns with it and seems to disappear. This makes Ten Playful Penguins especially enjoyable for the youngest children, who will likely start looking behind pages to see where the penguins have gone. As for the text, it has the penguins invited to join a variety of other animals: elephants, chimps, hippos, a bear, parrots and more. Each time the penguins visit another animal – they all live in the same zoo – that animal invites them to stay and have fun, but each time, only one penguin decides to stay; hence the one-at-a-time countdown. At the very end, the last penguin offers the others a surprise, and the final page – on which there are no plastic penguins at all – shows the 10 penguins (in a non-3D illustration) back together again, having a beachfront picnic. Russell Julian’s illustrations nicely complement this story, whose counting elements are in the forefront but whose clever design is its most attractive feature.

     The design is more straightforward in the latest animal book by Melvin and Gilda Berger, but there is far more information here, as befits a book for older children (second to fifth graders). 101 Animal Super Powers gives kids a chance to see extreme close-ups of animals doing some fascinating and very strange things. Item #12, for example, is “Chameleons move one eye at a time,” and the picture shows a chameleon from the front when it has done just that – looking bizarrely cross-eyed and thoroughly otherworldly. The brief text explains clearly what this “super power” means: “a chameleon can look forward and backward at the same time” to search for food and avoid danger. Item #33 is about another lizard, the gecko, which can “walk across ceilings” thanks to “amazing feet” whose “teeny, tiny hairs” create “a pull that is strong enough to hold the gecko onto almost anything – even after it dies.” But not all animals here are exotic. Item #39 explains that “guinea pig teeth cut like knives” and “grow continuously” through each animal’s life. And some facts here will not surprise kids who have seen the creatures in action, such as item #49, “Hummingbirds do acrobatics” and “can fly forward, backward or even upside down.” On the other hand, most kids have probably not noticed item #54, “Kangaroo tails work like legs” – this explains that “for hopping, [a kangaroo] just uses its hind legs, plus its long, muscular tail. The tail is a kind of third leg that adds energy to the hop and also helps with balance.” There are insects here, too, for instance in item #75, “Rhinoceros beetles battle rivals,” which explains that “ounce for ounce, the rhinoceros beetle is the world’s strongest creature – far stronger than a full-grown elephant!” The Bergers always do a fine job of ferreting out fascinating facts and presenting them both clearly and with enough enthusiasm to interest even non-science-oriented kids. And the photos in 101 Animal Super Powers are just right to pull in young readers visually, featuring extreme close-ups of a vampire bat, a vervet monkey, a blood-squirting horned lizard, and many more amazing creatures. From “hairy frogs break their toes” (#40) to “snakes smell with their tongues” (#80) and beyond, this book is informative, attractively presented, and genuinely intriguing.

     The number featured in Zen Socks is more modest: it is three. There are three Zen stories told here by the very large and very human-acting panda first encountered in Jon J. Muth’s Zen Shorts a decade ago. This time the panda, Stillwater (a very Zen name), interacts with Leo and Molly, who have just moved to the neighborhood, and their cat, Moss. Each of the kids gets a Zen-based lesson from Stillwater. Molly, who is in a hurry to become a ballet dancer like her aunt, hears a tale about the virtue – indeed, the necessity – of patience, and the time needed to excel at anything. Leo brings toy “giant robots” to Stillwater’s house to play with and tells Stillwater to be the bad guys, at which point Stillwater offers Leo a cookie but insists on keeping all the good ones for himself – which helps Leo understand that there are many ways to be a good guy or bad guy, and bad guys don’t always even realize they are bad: “‘That is our struggle,’ said Stillwater. ‘Thinking if we get all the best things for ourselves, we will be happier.’” The third and last story here has the two children with Stillwater on a beach where many starfish are stranded and the tide is going out, so the starfish are doomed. Molly, Leo and Stillwater start picking up the starfish and throwing them back into the water and safety, even though Leo points out that there are so many, their efforts won’t make a difference. But Molly says that what they are doing makes a difference to each individual starfish they save – and sure enough, they manage to send all of them back into the water, one at a time, showing how small efforts accumulate into big results. Zen Socks is a little bit too preachy and a little bit too obvious to be fully engaging. It gets a (+++) rating for Muth’s attractive watercolor illustrations and its offbeat premise, but it would have been more interesting if Muth had used Stillwater as something more than a straightforward conduit of Zen wisdom. The panda has presence but sorely lacks personality.

     Turkey, which is to say the protagonist of The Very Stuffed Turkey, does have some personality, and he also has a problem involving the number five. He has been invited to five Thanksgiving dinners, at none of which he himself is going to be featured on the menu. They are at the homes of Pig, Horse, Goat and Sheep, Cow, and Mouse. Although The Very Stuffed Turkey clearly has a Thanksgiving theme, the usual appearance of turkey as a main course never comes up here, the entire book being about ways in which Turkey overeats as he goes from house to house. Turkey first exercises to build up stamina and “stretch his stomach,” then decides in what order to visit the houses, and then sets out. He has beets, corn and a few worms at Pig’s house, out-eating the pigs themselves; oat cakes, hay, carrots and more at Horse’s house, by which time he already feels “too full to trot”; flower-and-weed soup and clover casserole at Goat and Sheep’s house; a huge amount of ice cream at Cow’s house; and “a feast of birdseed, soap, and berries” at Mouse’s house. The ingredients of the various Thanksgiving feasts are amusing, and there is pleasant repetition of the line, “Turkey felt like part of the family. It was a WONDERFUL feeling.” But Katharine Kenah’s story is a bit too full of gluttony, with Turkey out-eating all the families he visits and only commenting near the book’s end that he “ate too much…but it was worth it.” That may not be an ideal lesson for the young children at whom the book is aimed. Binny Talib’s pictures are pleasant but unexceptional, with some characters seeming to change proportions on different pages (the pigs, for example). This is a (+++) book with some pleasant elements, but parents will need to explain to kids that it is really not all right to eat as gluttonously as Turkey does, and it is all right – if the family has a traditional Thanksgiving – to eat turkey.

(+++) BELIEF AND DISBELIEF

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Special Edition 2016. Scholastic. $16.99.

Whoppers: History’s Most Outrageous Lies and Liars. By Christine Seifert. Zest Books. $13.99.

     One element of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! that is a believe-it-or-not fact of its own is that the daily drawings based on Robert Ripley’s concept are the longest-running syndicated cartoon in the world. The annual Special Edition books have not been around quite that long,  but each year they continue to present certain kinds of surprising facts and objects – no longer the “exotic” ones from Africa, Asia and other “far-flung” lands in which Ripley himself specialized (those are now taboo, thanks to political correctness), but now with a focus on people who knowingly or (sometimes) through science turn themselves into examples of exceptionalism or bizarrerie. The 2016 edition includes, for instance, a woman whose fingernails are 13 to 18 inches long, a girl who ate nothing but French fries for 15 years, a Japanese artist whose creative medium is sushi, a man who paints using the tip of his beard instead of a brush, a woman whose 12-foot-long hair takes two hours to wash, some extremely messy participants in the World Custard Pie Championship, and a former soldier who controls his artificial arm with his thoughts. Other entries here are natural phenomena, such as the strange turquoise ice that forms on Lake Baikal in Siberia every winter, and unnatural ones, such as the beachfront hotel constructed from 1,000 tons of sand and the hedge sculpted into the shape of a 100-foot-long dragon. There is less hyperbole in the book than there used to be in the newspaper panels and in early Ripley’s collections, although there is still some overstatement or outright error, for example in describing a python as a “deadly snake.” The 2016 edition tries to maintain relevance in the Internet age by, for example, showing photos of people wearing cats on their heads like wigs – an Internet craze that will likely disappear long before next year’s Ripley book. The attractiveness of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Special Edition 2016 depends largely on a reader’s feelings about celebrities and about the strange things people do, not on remarkable natural occurrences, since so much of the book is about human oddities: an artist who creates celebrity portraits using burned toast, another who paints tiny cityscapes on foods as small as a coffee bean, another who creates faces from crumbled crackers. But none of the works of these three artists is shown – a real shortcoming in our visual age, especially when readers can search for the artists online and get pictures that way. Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Special Edition 2016 is a book in search of relevance, its photos of the strange things people do or create being its strongest part by far. But even those pale after a while: on a single two-page spread are pictures of gatherings of identical twins, redheads and men with mustaches, the net effect being only to show that people with things in common sometimes get together. At a time when it is so easy to see so many strange things anytime, a book that captures a small selection of oddness once a year seems a bit passé. But on the other hand, those newspaper panels keep attracting interest even as newspapers themselves fade from many people’s consciousness and into obscurity.

     The attraction of the Ripley’s material has always been that, no matter how strange it seemed, it was true. But things that are false are of equal interest, and people whose lives are built on or around lies can be especially intriguing. That is the premise of Christine Seifert’s Whoppers: History’s Most Outrageous Lies and Liars. The title itself is kind of a lie: on what possible basis could the fact that Milli Vanilli was not really a singing duo be considered one of the “most outrageous” instances of falsehood in history? And the four divisions of the book overlap and are somewhat arbitrary, even though they make for convenient organizing: “Tall-Tale Tellers,” “Great Pretenders,” “Cheaters & Thieves,” and “Aliens, Ghosts, & Creature Hoaxes.” Each short chapter names “the liar,” gives a date or time period, says what the lie was, and explains the reason for it – although those are not always terribly clear (Seifert says H.L. Mencken made up a story about Millard Fillmore installing a White House bathtub because Mencken “was feeling depressed about World War I”). The book cannot really be considered a rogues’ gallery, despite its title, because some people in it had noble motives (Mattie Griffith, who falsely claimed to be an escaped slave so she could raise money to free the six slaves she had inherited) and some told their lies for literary or admirable sociopolitical reasons (Jonathan Swift, whose A Modest Proposal was not, as Seifert asserts, an attempt “to show people what a ridiculous idea eating babies was,” but was in fact a scathing indictment of the English treatment of Ireland – a fact that readers can glean from the chapter but that is at odds with the setup). Whoppers is riddled with factual errors and misinterpretations, but still manages to dredge up some fascinating material and present it interestingly. There is, for example, the story of Victor Lustig (born Robert V. Miller), who sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap not once but twice – a scam that seems ridiculous on the face of it today, but that Seifert correctly explains was enabled by the fact that the tower was falling apart when Lustig “sold” it, and some people were in fact arguing that it should be demolished. Unfortunately, Seifert’s book suffers not only from errors she makes but also from some that may be due to poor editing: one box is headlined, “Change to Eight Famous Singers Who Have Been Accused of Lip-Synching,” which makes no sense at all. And Seifert’s writing style, peppered with pop references that are often just plain silly, sometimes trips her up even when she tries to be straightforward: in her chapter on Kluge Hans (“Clever Hans”), a horse that supposedly knew math, she includes a box called “An Even Smarter Horse” that reads, “Mr. Ed was so smart that he could talk. He was the star of a popular TV show (called Mr. Ed) that was popular in the 1960s. You won’t be surprised to discover that the horse who played Mr. Ed couldn’t really talk.” That whole passage comes perilously close to incoherence – and it is not the only one to do so. It also seems odd for Seifert to include writers’ use of pen names among her “outrageous” reports. So Whoppers as a whole is very much a mixed bag, containing some fascinating accounts of outrageous lies both ancient and modern, mixed with some less-interesting or less-relevant material, all tied together in a style that may charitably be described as choppy, although it at least makes an attempt to be truthful.

(+++) IT’S INSTRUMENTAL

Bach: Goldberg Variations. Lars Vogt, piano. Ondine. $16.99.

American Intersections—Music by Samuel Barber, William Bolcom, Aaron Copland, Frederic Rzewski, and John Adams. Nina Schumann and Luis Magalhães, pianos. Two Pianists Records. $16.99.

Orbit: Music for Solo Cello, 1945-2014. Matt Haimovitz, cello. PentaTone. $39.99 (3 SACDs).

Andrew Staniland: Talking Down the Tiger (2010); Dreaded Sea Voyage (2013); Flute vs Tape (2012); Still Turning (2011); True North (2007). Andrew Staniland, electronics. Naxos. $12.99.

     What is wonderful about Bach’s Goldberg Variations of 1741 is the way the composer uses a strict, rigid framework as the foundation of some gorgeous and emotionally trenchant musical material. The rigidity of the underlying structure should not be under-emphasized: there are 32 movements, each variation is made up of 32 bars, each is derived from the same bass line, and every third movement is a canon. This seems like a recipe for dullness, and a wag might comment that of course this is why the music was so successful in its intent: Bach wrote it for Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, who often played music for Count Kaiserling, the Russian ambassador to the Saxony court, as a cure for the count’s insomnia. Waggish or not, though, this statement entirely misses the point of the Goldberg Variations, whose extraordinary beauty starts with the aria from which the whole work is derived and comes to the fore with special grace and tenderness in variations 14 and 19 – and approaches haunting despair in variation 25, whose harmonic writing is downright strange and whose expressive intensity looks many years, if not centuries, into the future. The awe-inspiring power of the Goldberg Variations is intimately bound up with the harpsichord, for which the work was written, and brings us to the usual debate about what happens to Bach’s keyboard music when it is played on a modern piano. The answer, in the case of Lars Vogt’s new recording on Ondine, is that a very fine performance with considerable emotional punch in the inward-looking variations is considerably less effective in the more-straightforward variations that depend on clarity of line and contrapuntal effects. Vogt is certainly aware of the fact that he is performing this lengthy work on something other than the intended instrument, and he does not really go overboard in using the piano’s essentially harmonic and chordal (rather than contrapuntal) nature to pull out the variations’ emotional core. On the other hand, Bach knew quite well how to turn an hour and a quarter of harpsichord music into a highly varied and very insightful emotional experience, and his methods of doing so do not lie particularly well on the piano, whose emotive strengths are quite different from those of the harpsichord. Listeners who believe the piano’s strengths are superior will find a great deal to like in Vogt’s well-paced, sensitive performance. Those who prefer to hear the music in the way Bach intended will inevitably find something lacking in piano versions, including Vogt’s.

     The two-piano versions of 20^th-century American music played by Nina Schumann and Luis Magalhães on the Two Pianists label are mostly arrangements, too, but they are more effective and interesting in two-piano form than Bach’s harpsichord works tend to be when heard on modern pianos. The works here have varying provenance. Samuel Barber’s Souvenirs, Op. 28 was arranged by Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale from the original version for piano four hands – a change that may seem to have more meaning to pianists than to listeners, although it actually alters the work’s sound in some significant ways, with Schumann and Magalhães taking full advantage of the combinatorial possibilities inherent in using two separate instruments. William Bolcom wrote Recuerdos (“Reminiscences”) for two pianos in the first place, and the three pieces in the suite – “Three Traditional Latin-American Dances,” as Bolcom put it – actually are a melding of multiple styles. The first, Chôro, mixes Latin American rhythms with ragtime and was written in homage to Brazilian composer and pianist Ernesto Nazareth (1863-1934), from whose tangos’ spirit the music emerges. The second piece, Paseo, again includes Latin rhythms but this time combines them in the style of Louis-Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869), to whose memory this dance is dedicated. The third piece drifts furthest from its roots. Valse Venezolano is said to be in memory of Venezuelan composer Pedro Palacios (1739-1799), but the harmony is definitely not of the 18^th century and the brilliant pianism is very much in 20^th-century style. Schumann and Magalhães take particularly well to this work, embracing its contradictions as well as the ways in which Bolcom’s style creates overall unity. The three other pieces on the CD are all equally well-played, but not quite as interesting. Aaron Copland’s El Salón Mexico, arranged by Leonard Bernstein, comes across more or less as modern salon music. Frederic Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, one of Rzewski’s most frequently played works, sounds good in this arrangement by the composer, but it is less compelling than in its very difficult solo-piano incarnation. And John Adams’ extended Hallelujah Junction, originally composed for two pianos, seems to go on longer than the material really justifies: this is a work whose main rhythms are based on the pronunciation of the word “hallelujah” but whose approach focuses on the pianos echoing each other, and while this is effective enough for a while, it wears thin as the piece continues. The performances here are fine throughout, with the CD likely to appeal primarily to fans of duo-piano performance in general, to Schumann and Magalhães in particular, and to those already familiar with the 20^th-century American works heard here.

     Complete familiarity with the music played by cellist Matt Haimovitz on a new and very lengthy three-CD set from PentaTone is less than likely. There is an extraordinary amount of cello material here, all of it dating (as the set’s title indicates) from the years 1945 to 2014. Most of these tracks have been released before, on five releases on the Oxingale label that appeared from 2003 to 2011. But there are two new recordings here, of Philip Glass’ Orbit and an arrangement of the Beatles’ (Lennon-McCartney) Helter Skelter by Luna Pearl Woolf – who is Haimovitz’ partner and is also represented here by a work of her own. Also here are some major figures in contemporary music: Berio, Ligeti, Carter, Rorem. Haimovitz himself contributes a Jimi Hendrix arrangement. There is a lot of music here, three hours and 45 minutes of it, and there are a lot of different approaches, from the ultra-modern to the tonal (or nearly tonal), from classical in orientation to the pop/rock world. There is really nothing connecting all this material except the playing of Haimovitz, which is quite good on every track. But not even the six Bach cello suites take as long to perform as the material here – Haimovitz has recorded them, too, in a highly nontraditional and not particularly successful way. Haimovitz actually seems far more at home with contemporary music than with Bach, and certainly he moves with ease from works by today’s classical composers to ones from the fields of pop and rock. Indeed, he seems to relish both the similarities and the differences that these distinct types of music produce, and the very different performance techniques they require. So this recording – which, despite being essentially one of re-releases, is being offered at full price, which seems high – is basically for aficionados of Haimovitz rather than for listeners particularly interested in any specific one or two of these 20-plus pieces. There is fine cello playing to be heard here in a program whose musical material is extremely uneven (apparently by design). It is the instrument that is the focus, and the person performing on it, more than the works performed, that will be most likely to be found attractive.

     It is less the traditional instruments than the electronics with which they are combined that will draw people to a new Naxos CD of music by Andrew Staniland (born 1977). The Canadian composer lies firmly in the now-established tradition of electronic composition, which often seems hopelessly outdated, as do so many once-trendy approaches to music. Staniland has something of a new wrinkle in the field, though: his focus is the way in which electronics interact with traditional instruments, with each of the five works on this disc using a different combination. Electronic sounds are, after all, electronic, which means they tend to pale after a while; therefore, perhaps not surprisingly, the most-effective work on this disc full of world premières is the shortest, Flute vs Tape. It is helped by the fact that it does not seem to take itself as seriously as the other pieces on the disc or to be as self-important: Camille Watts plays it with a sense of fun and enjoyment, and the whole work seems light enough to capture an audience that may be suspicious of electronic music or to have overdosed on it. True North, with Wallace Halladay on soprano saxophone, is also an interesting piece, taking the saxophone through its entire range (from the deep to the screechy) while contrasting and blending it with the electronics. And there are some moments of enjoyment in Talking Down the Tiger, too: this work features percussion (Ryan Scott), which goes rather well with electronics even though the piece wears out its welcome quite some time before it is over. The  other works here are of less interest. Dreaded Sea Voyage features guitar (Rob MacDonald), an instrument not very well-suited to extended dialogue and/or competition with electronics. And Still Turning, the longest piece here, mixes electronics with cello (Frances Marie Utti), an even more unfortunate combination: the richness of the cello’s sound, when allowed to emerge, simply shows how comparatively uninteresting the electronics are, while the straining at times to pull from the cello a series of sounds beyond those it normally produces simply makes the instrument sound, well, strained. Each piece here has at least a few elements that make it interesting, but none of them, except Flute vs Tape, really justifies listener involvement from start to finish, and none of them shows convincingly that electronics are more than a byway within music, to the extent that they can be described as music at all.

(++++) A YEAR OF STICK-TO-ITIVENESS

2016 Calendars: Wall with Stickers—Charley Harper; Incredible Insects—Christopher Marley; Inuit Art—Cape Dorset; B. Kliban Cats. Pomegranate Kids. $14.99 each.

     Just when you think there is nothing really new that can be done with the redoubtable wall calendar, along comes a genuinely novel idea that expands the wall-calendar concept into interactive territory with a very pleasant spin. These four calendars are highly attractive in themselves, suitable for just about any wall anywhere, depending on each person’s individual interests. But they allow even more individual expression than simply the selection of art that you happen to like: each comes with more than 150 reusable stickers that build on and expand the art of the calendar pages and provide a wonderful way to mark special dates, upcoming events, can’t-miss appointments, or just about anything else. Or you can simply decorate the entire calendar with the stickers in any way you choose, personalizing it to a degree not otherwise possible – and then take all the decorative stickers off and use them in different arrangements or designs.

     This is entirely too much fun to be confined to children, and even though the calendars are labeled as coming from Pomegranate Kids, they are more than suitable for all ages – in fact, each calendar notes that it is for “ages 3 to 103,” which seems about right. The biggest issue here is deciding which will be the most fun for you and your family, friends, colleagues or anyone else whose walls you may want to regale with these delightful year-long enjoyments. The Charley Harper calendar, for example, features 12 months of Harper’s geometrically intricate drawings of animals: he was remarkable in the way in which he reduced each animal he portrayed to its essential shapes, then rendered it in such a way that the result looks almost more lifelike than the real-world animal – yet at the same time not “realistic” at all. Harper’s was a unique blend of animal understanding and artistic license, and some of his creations as shown on this calendar are exceptionally effective. He was especially good with birds, and his rendition of a stylized male cardinal amid a pine forest whose trees are equally stylized and shaped just like the bird’s body deserves to be a classic. Almost equally good is his portrait of a mother bird feeding her three nestlings. And speaking of mothers and babies, Harper’s portrayal of a mother and baby koala is even more endearing-looking than are the animals themselves – if that is possible. The koala art shows how well Harper could handle non-bird creatures – a fact that is demonstrated equally clearly here in a couple of months featuring his renditions of insects. The drawing of a crowd of ladybugs (or ladybirds, if you prefer to continue the “bird” motif) is especially captivating.

     For a much stronger insect focus, though, you may want to consider Incredible Insects by Christopher Marley, who is a kind of poet of the small world. The Harper calendar offers stickers that showcase Harper’s art but display the animals he portrays in a size smaller than their real ones. The Marley calendar, on the other hand, presents stickers that show insects in their real-life sizes or larger – rendered by Marley in such a way as to showcase their brilliant colors and patterns, which Marley likes to set up to form additional, intricate arrangements worthy of a Busby Berkeley display. One month’s offering shows row after row of beetles, each row in a different color, each color fading into the next, in a style reminiscent of that of some of the woodcuts of M.C. Escher. Other months feature butterflies – here, a single one shown very large and in detail; there, 15 of a similar type arranged in a pattern that beautifully showcases their varying and intricate coloration. Between the vivid portrayals of insects accompanying each month’s layout and the many additional ones in the sticker collection, Incredible Insects is a calendar as bright and distinctive as insects themselves – but quite suitable and enjoyable even for people who would just as soon not encounter too many bugs in real life.

     The life of the Inuit people of Cape Dorset, which lies in the far northern Canadian territory of Nunavut, is intimately bound up with creatures of an entirely different sort: walruses and sea birds, musk oxen and Arctic foxes. The people of Cape Dorset have a unique, immediately recognizable artistic style in their portrayal of the animals surrounding them – the flowing lines of the birds they create, for example, would never be confused with the geometric exactitude of Charley Harper. The 2016 Inuit Art—Cape Dorset calendar is bright and colorful, far more so than the often drab area where the art was produced, and shows a wide variety of artistic styles that nevertheless have in common their keen observation of creatures drawn from life plus a willingness, in some cases, to show the animals in poses that are highly stylized and that portray meldings of animals that would never coexist peacefully in real life. In addition to the collage-like effects of showing multiple animals of various types, the calendar presents some striking portraits of single animals or small groups, such as a trio of polar bears. The stickers here show some of the same animals portrayed in the large one-per-month drawings and some different ones, allowing each calendar owner to create his or her own Arctic menagerie and display it seriously or, in line with a few of the Inuit drawings here, whimsically.

     Whimsicality reaches a higher level in portrayals of much more familiar animals in the B. Kliban Cats calendar for 2016 – although, really, Kliban cats are scarcely familiar in the real world at all, despite the fact that they sometimes seem to act like real cats. But only sometimes. The super-plump feline self-admiring in a mirror certainly seems to partake of real felinity, but not so the one playing the trombone – or the one playing the fiddle in a scene suggesting a time just before the cow jumped over the moon. Kliban was a master of gentle whimsy, showing one cat lounging on his back in a birdbath and another staring from behind a tree at the Easter bunny, who is noticeably discomfited and annoyed. Elsewhere, the look of amazement and desire on the face of the cat staring at a cooked Thanksgiving turkey seems altogether appropriate, while the three wide-eyed cats dancing are simply wonderful in what seems to be a midsummer night’s feline dream (a conclusion based on the tiny winged “cat fairy” hovering above the dancers). Kliban’s cats are instantly recognizable and seem at first glance to resemble each other closely. But in fact each of them is sufficiently individualized so that the stickers with this calendar provide many, many different ways of marking special dates or creating your own cat-alogue of all-year-long events that may be cat-aclysmic or cat-astrophic but are sure to be cat-chy and possibly even cat-hartic.

(++++) THE WIDE RANGE OF GRAPHIC NOVELS

Sunny Side Up. By Jennifer L. Holm & Matthew Holm. Graphix/Scholastic. $12.99.

Prison Island: A Graphic Memoir. By Colleen Frakes. Zest Books. $16.99.

Space Dumplins. By Craig Thompson. Color by Dave Stewart. Graphix/Scholastic. $14.99.

Teen Boat! 2: The Race for Boatlantis. By Dave Roman and John Green. Clarion. $14.99.

     Anyone who doubts that graphic novels have outgrown their infancy and become an art form in their own right need only consider the exceptionally different topics, approaches and illustrations of these recent releases to gain new perspective on the form. The intriguing ways in which writers and artists reimagine comic books and traditional novels, using elements of both in individual and creative ways, mean that readers can pick up a graphic novel just as they would a traditional work of fiction – to discover topics light or heavy, amusing or intense, serious or sunny. Sunny Side Up, for example, is anything but a “sunny” story despite its title and the fact that its central character is a girl named Sunny Lewin. The sister-and-brother team of Jennifer L. Holm and Matthew Holm is best known for the Babymouse romps, small-size graphic novels with some intriguing creative elements (notably the way Babymouse interacts with the books’ narrator). But Sunny Side Up tackles more-serious material, and does so in a way that only gradually pulls the reader into the important part of story. On the surface, it is the tale of a preteen who is unwillingly packed off to Florida for a summer vacation with her grandfather in Florida. Why? That is a minor mystery that, during the book, becomes a major one. Initially, though, the story is about Sunny’s attempts to get used to her grandfather’s retirement community and the very, very old people who live there and do strange-to-Sunny things all the time (such as keeping cats, despite that being against the rules, and then needing Sunny’s help when the cats wander away). Sunny thinks of Florida as the location of the fun of Disney World, but to her grandfather, the state is a warm, slow-paced retirement destination where going to the post office or to a buffet restaurant for an early-bird special is a big deal. Sunny tolerates all the old people and all the inconveniences of retirement life as best she can, and is buoyed by meeting a comic-book-obsessed boy named Buzz, whose father is a groundskeeper at the retirement community. Together Sunny and Buzz read and discuss comics together and have small adventures all their own, involving found golf balls, those missing cats, and an alligator named Big Al. But secrets disturb Sunny’s thinking and her sleep – first about her grandfather’s continued cigarette smoking and lying about it, then about the things her older brother, Dale, has been doing. Slowly, the troubling matters become more and more overwhelming to Sunny, and finally she learns just why she was sent to Florida for the summer: so her parents could try to get help for Dale without Sunny being there to witness a difficult time that is sure to involve a drug intervention and perhaps more. Eventually Sunny and her grandfather really do become pals – and she helps him throw out his cigarettes for real – but the book ends on an ambiguous note, since the eventual fates of Dale, and of Sunny after she goes home, remain unknown. This is very much like real life and very much like what families endure when one member is seriously troubled. The fact that the story is told with such sensitivity and maturity in graphic-novel format testifies to the increasing maturation of the form – and the fact that this is a graphic novel may make it easier for preteens facing similar circumstances to see their own lives reflected here.

     Few preteens or teenagers will see themselves reflected in Colleen Frakes’ Prison Island, a memoir of the time Frakes and her family spent living on the island holding the last U.S. prison accessible only by air or water. This is McNeil Island in the state of Washington, now abandoned, but at one time a place where prison employees and their families lived, went to school, made friends, and confronted the everyday dramas of growing up – all in a setting that seems exotic until you get to the nitty-gritty of life there, which Frakes quickly does. The book is done in black-and-white, unlike the other graphic novels considered here, and this gives it something of the feeling of an old movie or a series of old photos. Most of the book involves a return by Frakes’ family to the island after the prison is closed and the homes abandoned, but there are flashbacks showing scenes from Frakes’ childhood as she lived it. The book is a bleak one, perhaps reflecting conditions on the island or Frakes’ memory of it, or perhaps simply demonstrating the way she chooses to tell her story. There is little humor here, although a sequence in which Frakes and a friend try unsuccessfully to pick up pizza has amusing as well as unhappy elements, and there is little attempt to connect in any way with readers: Frakes’ childhood was very, very different from that of the likely readers of this book, and she emphasizes that point so often that she distances herself from people who would likely be predisposed to empathize with or at least be highly interested in her story. Nothing dramatic happens during Prison Island; even the three escapes that occur during Frakes’ time there are mundane. That may be part of the point Frakes wants to make: that despite all the oddities of the way she lived, she was just an ordinary kid growing up in less-than-ordinary circumstances. Certainly she makes an effort to describe conditions on the island accurately and to explain about the (few) pluses and (many) minuses of her time there. But there is something off-putting about Prison Island, which lacks any real attempt to connect with readers and instead simply assumes that Frakes’ story, given pictorially in graphic-novel format, will in and of itself find an interested audience. But graphic novels (or any novels) can be pushed only so far. This one gets a (+++) rating for its honesty and the matter-of-fact way it handles some unusual circumstances; but its grounding in reality does not make up for its rather plodding pacing.

     The pacing is anything but slow in Space Dumplins, which lies at the opposite graphic-novel extreme from Sunny Side Up and Prison Island. There is nothing the slightest bit realistic in this harebrained but thoroughly enjoyable Star Wars-like adventure, whose colors are so saturated that they will hurt some readers’ eyes and whose use of comic-book and adventure-film conventions is so deeply ingrained that the whole (++++) book comes across as an ongoing romp that pauses from time to time just long enough to tug at readers’ heartstrings. Craig Thompson is a master of manipulation, both of his characters and of his intended audience, and this unusually lengthy graphic novel – more than 300 pages – is packed with everything from hairbreadth escapes to ridiculous heroics to pathos-filled family scenes to biblical musings by a chicken. Oh yes, the whole “alien races” thing permeates Space Dumplins, whose central characters turn out to be a human preteen named Violet; a highly educated chicken named Elliott – who is studious, prone to fits and to dreams that come true, terrified of going into space, and estranged from his brilliant-scientist father; and a lumpkin named Zacchaeus, last of his destroyed species except for his much bigger and really nasty brother, Zucchinus. Then there are three ne’er-do-well lumpy (not lumpkin) types from Violet’s father’s past – Tinder, Gerome and Gwumpky – who race to the heroic (and extremely messy) rescue when Violet’s dad, Gar, gets in over his head in a job involving, umm, space-whale poop (which looks and apparently smells disgusting but is also an important source of energy for space colonies). In addition to the whales, there are bad creatures called Jirglebytes that have a habit of chewing up asteroids, schools, spaceships, that sort of thing. Also here are Adam, the clothing designer who employs Violet’s mother, Cera; a wonderful junkyard-guarding beastie named Radcliffe with one head that really likes Violet and one that can’t stand her (or anyone); a military officer whose job is to provide several levels of mercenaries on demand, ranging from a giant transformer robot “with anthropomorphic charm” (a silly smiling face) to a “budget option” of sort-of-human creatures that stamp their feet and try to look fierce; and many, many more – a huge cast beautifully delineated both in words and in drawings. The central threesome proves far stronger together than separately, as evidenced when Violet intones at one of the many crucial moments that Zacchaeus is “my strength, my chutzpah, my Wild Thing,” while Elliott is “my sensitivity, my spirit guide, my Little Prince.” The all-pervasive humor here is balanced by a genuine sense of bizarre adventure and a certain level of self-referential awareness, as when the ominous “Lab Star” turns out to be lobster-shaped (complete with claws), leading one character to comment, “That has to be the stupidest gimmick name ever.” What is far from stupid is the brilliant way Thompson and colorist Dave Stewart make all the strange and wonderful scenes come alive. Thompson knows the boundaries of graphic novels intimately – the malleable panels, the ability to stretch the action in any direction, the availability of interplay between extremely complex enlarged panels and small ones showing details or silhouettes, and much more – and he actually expands those boundaries through some tremendously creative visualization, such as a full-page spinning-space background on which are superimposed nine separate small panels showing various characters’ actions, each panel turned in a different direction (with dialogue balloons to match). There are full-page and two-page scenes of destruction, battling and general messiness, odd-shaped panels galore (such as a trapezoidal one subdivided into sixths), and occasional no-panel-at-all character appearances (such as one in which Violet surveys the ugly, messy way her family is forced to live and vows “No” to living that way in the future). Space Dumplins has a silly title – based on a remark in Moby-Dick, of all places, about “indestructible dumplings” – that in no way reflects its first-rate storytelling, top-of-the-line art, and wonderful understanding of just how well a story can be told in graphic-novel form.

     The silliness actually goes deeper, but to less effect, in the sequel to Teen Boat! The original book was so absurd as to be “campy,” for anyone who remembers that term: it was beyond silliness that a teenage boy could transform himself at will (and sometimes be transformed against his will) into a small yacht. The first book by Dave Roman and John Green set the stage of typical teenage angst that just happened to involve a boy-to-boat transformer. Toss in some inept pirates and a best-pal girl who is really right for Teen Boat but whom he acknowledges only as a friend – and who may be a transformer herself – and you have, or had, the ingredients for an unusually juvenile teen-focused graphic novel whose genuinely funny moments were enough to encourage overlooking its extreme level of absurdity. The Race for Boatlantis, unfortunately, makes such overlooking impossible. There is just too much ridiculousness here: a high-school principal who was once in love with a boat; a handsome rival known as TeenBot who can transform into a captain’s chair, not an actual yacht; an undersea land where boats rule; a chance for TeenBoat to meet his father, who turns out to be a submarine; the discovery of the fact that his gal pal, Joey, can transform into an iceberg, and the appearance of Joey’s iceberg mom and human father; the enmity between icebergs and the boats of Boatlantis; the reappearance of the pirates; and the maneuvering of the ultimate bad guy, Richard Walet Sr., also known as Copperface. There is a lot of action, most of it pointless, in The Race for Boatlantis, although there is one clever scene in which Teen Bot and Joey kiss at last and find themselves combined (temporarily) into a boat/iceberg that is powerful enough to take on the bad guys. The rest of the story, though, is at best adequate – mostly silly, and not in a good way. The boat jokes are overdone, the final battle is not nearly as “epic” as Teen Boat proclaims it to be, the defeat of Copperface is an anticlimax, and the book’s conclusion at high-school graduation just sort of peters out. The Race for Boatlantis is a (+++) book for those who liked the original, more-enjoyable Teen Boat! It will really not be of interest to readers unfamiliar with the prior graphic novel. But one thing showing the maturity of the graphic-novel form is the fact that books of this design, like the traditional novels of old, can be produced that are very good, even exceptional – or very bad – or, like The Race to Boatlantis, simply mediocre.

(++++) HOLIDAY HIJINKS

Happy Halloween, Witch’s Cat! By Harriet Muncaster. Harper. $15.99.

Scaredy-Cat, Splat! By Rob Scotton. Harper. $9.99.

Otter Loves Halloween. By Sam Garton. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $9.99.

Pete the Cat: Five Little Pumpkins. By James Dean. Harper. $9.99.

Fancy Nancy: Candy Bonanza. By Jane O’Connor. Cover illustration by Robin Preiss Glasser. Interior illustrations by Carolyn Bracken. HarperFestival. $4.99.

     Halloween is an especially enjoyable time for children to show off, fantasize and let their imaginations roam. The same opportunities go to the authors of children’s books, as several new releases show. Harriet Muncaster’s I Am a Witch’s Cat delightfully introduced a little girl who is convinced that her mother is a good witch – based on all the witchlike things her mom does all the time. Those things are really just mundane chores, such as shopping and cooking, but the imaginative little girl sees them as evidence of witchiness. And that leads to the fun in Happy Halloween, Witch’s Cat! It is not necessary to know the earlier book to enjoy this one (although it helps): here, the standard search-for-just-the-right-costume that occurs in so many books (and so many families) before Halloween gets its own enjoyable slant because of the little girl’s conviction that her mom is a witch already, so what should the “witch’s cat” be? The usual possibilities – skeleton, ballerina, vampire – just won’t do; also, a frog would be too slimy, a pumpkin too smiley, a ghost too spooky. But the little girl eventually comes up with a just-right idea for both herself and her mom – and readers will instantly see that nothing else would work as well. What also works exceptionally well here is the art: Muncaster not only weaves a charming tale but also illustrates it in unique style by photographing three-dimensional scenes she creates from paper, foil, fabric and other materials. The result is a book that reads wonderfully while looking wonderful – seasonal, yes, but a treat anytime.

     Splat the Cat’s Halloween adventure is a “witch’s cat” treat, too. Or it starts out to be: Splat plans to be a witch’s cat and win the class prize for the scariest costume. But he breaks his broom, and his mom has to figure out something else in a hurry. The answer: Splat has found a scary spider (not too scary, really, with a big, toothy smile), and he wants to take it to school for Halloween, and that gives his mom the idea of making Splat a spider costume using socks stuffed with newspaper to make four extra legs to go with the four Splat already has. So Splat, best friend Seymour the mouse, and the spider head to school, meeting friends Spike (dressed as a mummy) and Plank (a skeleton) on the way. Splat tries to scare them – after all, he wants to win the “scariest cat” award – but he himself gets frightened when each of them loudly says “BOO!” to him. So it goes in Scaredy-Cat, Splat! – originally published in 2010 and now offered in a new paper-over-board edition. Well, things may initially be pointing toward disappointment for Splat, but at school, things go awry in just the right way for him to win the “scariest” award after all – thanks to an accident that combines Splat’s spider costume with his not-very-scary carved pumpkin with the darkness of a room in which the lights have been turned off so the teacher can tell a scary story. The slapstick of the tale fits well with Splat’s personality and his other adventures and misadventures, and Rob Scotton’s art is as perfectly complementary to his text as usual: the characters’ expressions are just right in reflecting their personalities and their reactions to events.

     The humor is more homespun and less frantic in Sam Garton’s Otter Loves Halloween, another book with a bit of witchiness: Otter dresses up as one as part of getting himself and his friends (Teddy and Giraffe, both stuffed toys) ready for the big day. Otter, who refers to the boy with whom he lives as Otter Keeper, helps out with Halloween preparations by choosing a huge pumpkin and then decorating the house a touch too enthusiastically and messily: “We did decorate a few things we shouldn’t have, but overall we did a great job.” Well, that sort of self-confidence and lack of self-awareness is all part of Otter’s adorableness. So is the way he dresses Teddy as a mummy – in toilet paper – and the way he “allows” Giraffe to dress up as a pink-winged fairy wearing unmatching socks and sporting vampire teeth. Unfortunately for sweet, timid Otter, the trick-or-treaters’ costumes frighten him and he decides he has “lots of important things to do under the bed upstairs,” along with Pig (another stuffed toy). Otter Keeper comes to the rescue with some costume modifications that make Otter feel better, and all goes well until it is almost bedtime, when Otter does even more costume redesign and finally, worn out by all the activity, falls asleep. Garton manages to make Otter look almost real-world-otter-like while making his behavior patterns thoroughly human, along with his abilities (one delightful illustration shows him standing on his hind legs, looking through binoculars). At Halloween or anytime, Otter is a warm, pleasant and thoroughly engaging character.

     Things are less consistently enjoyable in James Dean’s books about Pete the Cat, which always involve musical matters and sometimes try a little too hard to be liked. Happily, Pete the Cat: Five Little Pumpkins flows with apparent effortlessness and works very well as a result. Using an old Halloween pumpkin song as the book’s basis, Dean creates five carved pumpkins that look very strange indeed – and funny rather than scary. Then he has Pete interact with everything the pumpkins say in the song: Pete looks at his wristwatch when told it’s getting late, rides a flying motorbike to the words “there are witches in the air,” dons four red high-top sneakers for “let’s run and run and run” (when Pete is followed by a small yellow bird wearing its own pair of high-tops), and so forth. By the end of the book, Pete is dressed in a robot costume, for no particular reason, and when the song says the pumpkins “rolled out of sight,” they do not roll the way pumpkins normally do and the way the song suggests – no, they head along the sidewalk on skateboards, with Pete joining one pumpkin on the last board. The silliness of the story and Dean’s usual juvenile-style art meld particularly well here, making the book a fine example of seasonal fun even though it somehow manages never to mention the candy that is, for many children, the whole point of Halloween.

     A Fancy Nancy Halloween sticker book, on the other hand, is entirely candy-focused. Fancy Nancy: Candy Bonanza has the big-word-loving, French-language-favoring five-or-six-year-old dressed (indeed, as usual, overdressed) as the Sugar Plum Fairy and entranced by all manner of sweets – even though her mom warns her not to overdo things while trick-or-treating. Nancy tries, she really does, but somehow the extra-big cookie at one house disappears even though she only means to take a little bite, and the candy bar she samples at the next house is soon gone as well, and there is a tree with bags of oh-so-yummy jelly beans hanging from the branches, and everything is just so tempting that Nancy, well, overdoes things. Soon she has indigestion (“that means my tummy hurts”) and needs to go home and lie down, letting her little sister, JoJo, keep going on the trick-or-treat rounds. JoJo brings home plenty of candy and offers to share it with Nancy when Nancy feels better, so everything ends happily in a story that Fancy Nancy’s fans will surely enjoy – and one that gives them 35 stickers to use to dress up the pages or create their own Halloween scenes. And thus a good, if somewhat sugary and sticky, time can be had by all.

(++++) SPECIAL-PURPOSE CARTOONING

Keep Calm and Do the Snoopy Dance. By Charles M. Schulz. Andrews McMeel. $8.99.

Superstars of Science: The Brave, the Bold, and the Brainy. Created by Simon Basher. Written by R.G. Grant. Scholastic. $7.99.

     Comic strips and their characters can be plenty of fun on their own, but they may sometimes be called on in the service of a higher purpose than amusement. Or at least a different one. For example, Snoopy, Charles Schulz’ devil-may-care beagle from Peanuts, has famously (or notoriously) been licensed to help sell insurance. He can also be used, in a more upbeat way, to “endorse” comments about the dance of life – on the basis that Snoopy himself went through much of his comic-strip existence dancing for some reason or other, or none. Hence the little hardcover gift book called Keep Calm and Do the Snoopy Dance, in which a number of dance-focused strips featuring Snoopy are intermingled with uplifting quotes about life as a dance, or dancing through life, or dancing despite life’s difficulties, from a wide variety of observers. “You wouldn’t be so happy if you knew about all the troubles in this world,” ever-crabby Lucy tells happily dancing Snoopy in one strip included here – to which Snoopy replies (or “re-thinks,” since he does not talk to the human characters), “Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. I’m outrageously happy in my stupidity.” And on he dances. This little bit of homespun amusement stands up well to comments like the ones from a Japanese proverb (“We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance”), Erasmus (“The highest form of bliss is living with a certain degree of folly”), and Carl Sandburg (“Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance”). Some remarks here are from people strongly associated with dance, such as master ballet choreographer George Balanchine: “Dance is music made visible.” Others come from people scarcely likely to be thought of as involved in dance, such as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.” The quotations range from the simple to the profound, and in a sense, so do the included Peanuts strips featuring Snoopy, which are sometimes simply amusing and sometimes hint at greater depths – Schulz’s strip had deeper thinking in it, often of a bittersweet kind, than many people who remember it fondly realize. Keep Calm and Do the Snoopy Dance is an enjoyable dose of positive thought, courtesy in part of the thinkers whose words are included but thanks even more to the Snoopy cartoons scattered throughout – and the top-hatted Snoopy shown on every quotation page.

     The cartoons’ purpose is different in Superstars of Science, but here too the objective is to make more-serious material more accessible than it would be if given only in words. The subject here is scientific discovery, and the book is one of an extended series of Simon Basher designs in which stylized, immediately recognizable cartoon figures with oval heads, very high foreheads and extremely simplified facial features are used to represent real-world people (or, in other Basher books, imagined characters or forces). The work of more than 40 scientists is encapsulated here, in each case with a left-hand page showing a Basher-style illustration of the scientist and items associated with him or her, and a right-hand page, written by R.G. Grant, in which the scientist “talks” to the young readers who are the book’s target audience about his or her life and interests. That page also gives a brief time line, some information on the scientist’s specific accomplishments, and a note on his or her legacy. Ptolemy, for example, explains that “I believed the earth was round and tried to work out its size,” and the entry on him also discusses other ancient scientists, such as Aristarchus of Syracuse, who “said the earth revolved around the sun and even guessed the stars were other suns very far away.” William Harvey, “the father of modern physiology,” tells readers that “what really interested me was cutting things up” by doing autopsies; Antoine Lavoisier, “the father of modern chemistry,” explains how he discovered “that the gases hydrogen and oxygen joined together to form water.” What happened to these scientists was often tragic: for example, Lavoisier was beheaded during the French Revolution and Ptolemy was killed when invading Romans conquered his city, Syracuse. These facts are included in Superstars of Science, but they are not its main point. The primary idea here is to give young readers a small amount of familiarity with and understanding of important scientific discoveries and some of the people who made them. There are well-known figures here, including Galileo, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking and others. And there are some names that are famous in scientific circles but not among the general public: Alhazen, William Herschel, Mary Anning, Ada Lovelace, Robert Goddard, Barbara McClintock. The cartoons here, despite being highly stylized, humanize the scientists and – along with the brief information on their lives – can help young readers connect with them as real people, not merely obscure names in textbooks. The idea is to pique readers’ interest so they will obtain more-detailed information elsewhere – a worthy goal, and one certainly worth furthering through the use of the cartooning style for which Basher is known.

(++++) CHAMBER COMBINATIONS

Mendelssohn: Piano Trios Nos. 1 and 2. Sitkovetsky Trio (Alexander Sitkovetsky, violin; Leonard Elschenbroich, cello; Wu Qian, piano). BIS. $21.99 (SACD).

Korngold: Piano Trio in D, Op. 1; Suite for Two Violins, Cello and Piano Left Hand. Daniel Rowland and Priya Mitchell, violins; Julian Arp, cello; Luis Magalhães, piano. Two Pianists Records. $16.99.

Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsodies Nos. 1 and 2; Evocation á la Chapelle Sixtine; Buxton Orr: A Carmen Fantasy; Martinů: Variations on a Theme of Rossini; Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Figaro. Lachezar Kostov, cello; Viktor Valkov, piano. Navona. $14.99.

Sibelius: String Quartet, “Voces Intimae”; Britten: Three Divertimenti; Turina: La Oración del Torero. Skyros Quartet (Sarah Pizzichemi and James Moat, violins; Justin Kurys, viola; William Braun, cello). Navona. $14.99.

American Dreams: String Quartets and other works by Peter Schickele, Ken Benshoof, Janice Giteck, and Bern Herbolsheimer. St. Helens String Quartet (Stephen Bryant and Adrianna Hulscher, violins; Michael Lieberman, viola; Peter Stockley, cello); Lisa Bergman, piano. Navona. $14.99.

Michael Matthews: String Quartets Nos. 2 and 3; Miniatures. Clearwater Quartet (Gwen Hoebig and Daniel Scholz, violins; Yuri Hooker, viola; Karl Stobbe, cello). Ravello. $16.99.

     It was Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio No. 1 that led Schumann to make the famous comment that Mendelssohn was “the Mozart of the 19^th century.” The trio is in fact a wonderful “bridge” work, with much Mozartean fleetness in the strings but a more forward-looking, Romantic piano part that in fact is reminiscent of some of the music of Schumann himself (Mendelssohn actually revised and expanded the piano’s role, on the advice of fellow composer Ferdinand Hiller). Despite the piano’s importance, the cello also plays a significant role in the work, notably in the first movement. But the finale, the movement that Mendelssohn changed the most on Hiller’s advice, is largely a piano showpiece – although contrasting cantabile sections provide moments of relaxation and thoroughly Mendelssohnian respite. Interestingly in light of the Mendelssohn-Mozart comparison, this trio is in D minor, like Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20; and like that concerto, it emerges at the end into D major. The Sitkovetsky Trio plays the work with considerable brio in a new BIS recording, emphasizing its light and fleet moments while never downplaying its more-serious ones. The performers have a very fine sense of balance, and their handoffs among the instruments are always managed with alacrity. This skill also stands them in good stead in Piano Trio No. 2, which – like the Symphony No. 5 – quotes an old chorale in its finale, in this case the 16^th-century Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit, known in English as “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow.” Brahms used melodies from this trio twice in his own works, once in Piano Sonata No. 3 and once in Piano Quartet No. 3. In Mendelssohn’s hands, the work flows with apparent effortlessness from start to finish, and its C minor tonality – which, interestingly, is that of Mozart’s other minor-key piano concerto, No. 24 – gives it both heft and wistfulness, but no sense of anything dire or doom-laden. Here as in the first trio, the performers’ excellent sense of ensemble combines with their individual skill to produce a winning combination that serves the music very well indeed.

     The music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) is undergoing something of a reconsideration these days, and Two Pianists Records is poised to play a significant role in it through a series it is calling The Korngold Project. The first volume includes Korngold’s only Piano Trio, which is his first published work and was written when he was just 13 – showing him as a Mendelssohn-like prodigy. The trio was written when Korngold was studying with Alexander Zemlinsky, and it contains both late-Romantic intensity and high levels of lyricism. It also has some clever compositional elements, to which the performers are careful to pay close attention: notably, it has an almost circular structure, with the work’s opening theme repeated and reworked at the conclusion of the finale. Although it is easy to hear echoes of Brahms and Richard Strauss in the music, there is nothing overtly imitative in it, and its harmonic language is right in line with what would be expected for its time period (1909-10), showing that Korngold understood very early in life the direction in which music was going – even if he often chose in later works not to go that way. The Suite for Two Violins, Cello and Piano Left Hand is later Korngold (1930) and significantly more mature in the sense of being written in a more-definitive, more-personal style. But it too draws largely on late-Romantic notions of harmony and emotional communication, and its five movements are evocative of exactly what their titles suggest: Präludium und Fuge, Walzer, Groteske, Lied and Rondo-Finale (Variationen). It was commissioned by pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in World War I and was very pleased with the left-hand concerto that Korngold had previously written for him. Less thoroughly integrated than the early Trio, as befits a work labeled a suite, this piece gives the performers plenty of chances to showcase their individual parts (including a very demanding opening piano cadenza) as well as their ensemble work – Korngold was skilled at creating equal contributions to chamber music for all the participants. This entry in the budding Korngold revival bodes very well indeed for future releases in the same series.

     The cello-and-piano duo of Lachezar Kostov and Viktor Valkov offers three of its own arrangements of music and three works by composers for this instrumental combination on a new Navona CD. The performances are quite something: Kostov and Valkov seem determined throughout to push their instruments and their own abilities to the limit. Their arrangements of the first two Hungarian Rhapsodies by Liszt strongly emphasize virtuosity over what Liszt thought of as gypsy authenticity: Kostov and Valkov wring all the speed and intensity from the works that they can, along with some over-the-top emotion. Their paraphrase of Evocation á la Chapelle Sixtine is something different: it sounds only marginally like Liszt’s original, using Liszt as the basis for a sonic exploration of contemporary compositional and performance techniques. The result is something far from authentic and not really very much in line with what Liszt himself wrote, but highly intriguing to hear – at least once in a while. Whether it will have Liszt’s staying power is doubtful, although it could become a training work of sorts for other modern cello-and-piano duos. The three other works here were intended for this combination of instruments from the first. Buxton Orr (1924-1997) offers one of the many compilations of tunes from Carmen that have been created by various composers and for various instruments. In this case, that means a work whose salient features include an emphasis on carefully controlled use of vibrato on the cello. Variations on a Theme of Rossini by Bohuslav Martinů deliberately places Rossini’s music in 20^th-century garb, using Martinů’s own harmonic interests to bring Rossini “up to date” while producing a virtuoso showpiece. The work makes for an interesting contrast with, for example, Manuel Rosenthal’s updating of Offenbach in Gaité Parisienne. The original material is certainly there in both cases, but its treatment – while respectful, at least in a sense – is decidedly out of what would have been each original composer’s comfort zone. And speaking of comfort zones, Kostov and Valkov must have a wide one to include not only the Martinů treatment of Rossini but also the one by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, whose Figaro takes the ever-popular Largo al factotum from The Barber of Seville through a paraphrase that, in addition to its undoubted virtuoso elements, is poised and graceful. This CD is an outgoing one from start to finish, providing listeners with some unfamiliar takes on familiar music, all with performances that showcase playing that couples a high level of musicianship with very considerable virtuosity.

     The virtuosity is more inward-looking on a new Navona CD featuring the Skyros Quartet in works by Sibelius, Britten and Joaquín Turina. The Sibelius “Voces Intimae” quartet, Sibelius’ fourth in the form but his only mature one, is the major work here: an extended five-movement exploration of emotion and thought whose very long slow movement is central both in placement and in meaning. The harmonic language here is noticeably that of mature Sibelius (the work dates to 1909, between the Third and Fourth Symphonies), and the piece includes folk and folklike elements; but the quartet has a strongly inward-looking feel throughout, a sense of thoughtfulness and even of looking back at life that might seem difficult for a young ensemble such as the Skyros Quartet to manage comfortably. Yet the performers seem quite at home with the music, allowing it to flow naturally among their instruments and never pushing it too far, too fast or too hard. The quartet members seem to have thought about this music for some time before recording it: their playing is not only technically assured but also very well attuned to the internal emotional focus of the music. The remainder of this CD is more colorful, more forthright and more extroverted. Turina’s La Oración del Torero gives the quartet a chance to show off its rhythmic adaptability to flamenco style and its flair for more-modern sounds than Sibelius offers. And Britten’s student piece, Three Divertimenti, offers just the right sort of diversion in its three short movements: March, Waltz and Burlesque. The titles are self-explanatory and the music is forthright, surface-level, enthusiastic and simply fun – nothing profound here (as in the Sibelius) and nothing exotic (as in the Turina), but a chance for the Skyros Quartet to throw itself with aplomb into short characteristic pieces that offer plenty of opportunities for display and plenty of chances for listeners to enjoy themselves.

     Two other new quartet recordings, one featuring American works and one focusing on Canadian composer Michael Matthews, are somewhat less winning and get (+++) ratings. The Navona CD called American Dreams is one of those offerings of music that straddles the classical and popular-music worlds, in this case including a large dose of folk music as well. Jazz influences are inevitable in music that crosses lines in this way, and Peter Schickele’s String Quartet No. 1, “American Dreams” (1983) is packed with them. It is a large-scale, five-movement work with vaguely rural imagery implicit in its choice of tunes, and it is a deliberate attempt to fuse classical, jazz and folk elements into a coherent whole – an effort that is worthy even though it does not quite succeed. More interesting as an experiment is Swing Low (2004) by Ken Benshoof, which shifts tones, harmonies and rhythms of the spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot through eight variations that are not so much changes in the original as they are deconstructions and reassemblies of elements of it. Benshoof’s six-movement Diversions (2005), for violin and piano, also arranges and rearranges its material in some interesting ways, although neither of these works seems as directly communicative as his short Remember (1977), with its evocative cello part. Also here is a five-movement suite by Bern Herbolsheimer called Botanas (2008), which uses Mayan melodies in an attempt at a Mexican evocation and flavor. The contrast of the pizzicato and legato elements in the half-minute movement X’ni Pe (That Means Dog’s Nose) is a highlight. The CD is completed with two brief pieces by Janice Giteck: Where Can One Live Safely, Then? In Surrender (2005) and Ricercare (Dream upon Arrival) (2012). They are insistent works that try to communicate something about the inadequacies of modern living, but although they are well-made, they do not really relate to the topics their titles suggest.

     As for Ravello’s Michael Matthews CD, it too features music that is supposed to reflect on societal conditions but does not really do so except in the very general way of any serious and thoughtfully composed work. Miniatures (2000) is the least esoteric and least fraught work here, and comes across best. It is simply a sequence of 11 numbered movements, lasting from 17 seconds to just under three minutes, that collectively come across as a series of fragments, as if they are scattered memories of dreams or events in the composer’s life, set down in an order that could just as easily be a different one, beholden to Webern and other 20^th-century modernists but with a sense of questioning uncertainty emerging from time to time. This is highly intellectualized music, yet it is less so than the music of the quartets here, which simply insists on being heard (and interpreted) with the utmost seriousness and portentousness that, unfortunately, shades over again and again into pretentiousness. Quartet No. 2 (2002-03) seems to ask numerous questions and answer none, following in the footsteps of Schoenberg and his followers into a musical language that insists the fault is in the listener if he or she fails to accept what is being said and how. Quartet No. 3 (2008/2013) is more Shostakovich than Schoenberg or Webern, opening with intensity and continuing through second, third and fourth movements that are played attacca and that produce only a feeling of a stasis of pain. This is difficult music, but unlike much that is complex and has come before, it does not really repay the effort needed to plumb what depths it has. It is music that insists on its own importance, but in so doing minimizes itself. Matthews wants to raise significant existential questions through these works, but because he never fully involves listeners – never moves them in any way beyond the purely intellectual – what he creates contains its own distancing mechanisms, so that it ends up being interesting material (especially when heard more than once) but never makes the sort of visceral, emotional connection that would render its complexities worthwhile for most listeners to explore at greater length.

(++++) BEYOND THE SYMPHONIC

Sibelius: Pelléas et Mélisande; Musik zu einer Szene; Valse lyrique; Autrefois—Scène pastorale; Valse chevaleresque; Morceau romantique sur un motif de Monsieur Jakob von Julin. Pia Pajala, soprano; Sari Nordqvist, mezzo-soprano; Turku Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leif Segerstam. Naxos. $12.99.

Bruch: Complete Works for Violin and Orchestra, Volume 2—Violin Concerto No. 1; Serenade, Op. 75; “In Memoriam”—Adagio, Op. 65. Antje Weithaas, violin; NDR Radiophilharmonie conducted by Hermann Bäumer. CPO. $16.99.

Ippolitov-Ivanov: Symphony No. 1; Turkish Fragments; Turkish March. Singapore Symphony Orchestra conducted by Choo Hoey. Naxos. $12.99.

Dutilleux: Symphony No. 2, “Le double”; Métaboles; Violin Concerto, “L’arbre des songes.” Augustin Hadelich, violin; Seattle Symphony conducted by Ludovic Morlot. Seattle Symphony Media. $16.99.

Live from Music City—Music of Michael Daugherty, Astor Piazzolla, Roberto Sierra, Richard Danielpour, and Stephen Paulus. Nashville Symphony conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero. Naxos. $9.99.

     Although best known as a symphonist, Sibelius was also an important theater composer in the early 20^th century, providing incidental music for 13 plays. The latest Naxos release of the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leif Segerstam performing some of this stage material features the composer’s very ambitious music to Pelléas et Mélisande, which dates to 1905 and includes 10 numbers – one of them vocal. The overall somber tone of the music fits the story, which resembles that of Tristan and Isolde, quite well, and the music’s generally subdued palette and restrained atmosphere let the play speak for itself while enhancing its emotional qualities. Those who know the Debussy and Schoenberg handlings of the same dramatic material will find Sibelius’ particularly intriguing: it is less impressionistic than Debussy’s work and on a more-modest scale than Schoenberg’s. Segerstam and the orchestra handle it with care and fine attention to detail. They also offer other, shorter and lesser Sibelius works here. Musik zu einer Szene (1904) effectively contrasts a stormy opening section with a joyful later one. And there are four late pieces on the CD as well. Valse lyrique, Autrefois—Scène pastorale, and Valse chevaleresque date to 1921, 1919 and 1921, respectively, and bear the opus numbers 96a, b and c. The two waltzes, transcriptions of piano pieces and both with a strong flavor of Tchaikovsky, bracket a charming vocal work for soprano and mezzo-soprano whose words recall an old pastoral scene. The very brief final work on this CD dates to 1925 and is based on a waltz theme by an industrialist named Jakob von Julin. It is pleasant and romantic, a nice little bit of salon music from a composer whose complex and enigmatic symphonies show only one side of his personality.

     Max Bruch was a symphonist, too – he wrote three of them – but it is for his works for violin that he is remembered now, and it is those that CPO is presenting in a series of recordings featuring Antje Weithaas and the NDR Radiophilharmonie conducted by Hermann Bäumer. The second volume includes the single work by Bruch that everyone knows: his Violin Concerto No. 1, a piece so thoroughly Romantic that it seems to create its own form instead of abiding by any existing formal conventions, and one so expressive that a fine violinist, such as Weithaas, has to pay as much attention to holding back the emotional overflow as to bringing it forth. Bruch was alternately proud of this concerto and frustrated by the way all his other works were overshadowed by it – and this new release shows why. The concerto is so sui generis, so effective in its almost but not quite overwrought way, that the composer’s later and more carefully laid-out pieces for violin and orchestra come across as rather pale. Weithaas and Bäumer perform the Serenade and “In Memoriam” attentively and carefully, extracting from both as much warmth and thematic beauty as Bruch put into them. “In Memoriam” comes across better, its long, flowing melodic lines and effusive warmth making it possible to lose oneself in its upswell of near-wallowing in emotion. The Serenade, though, keeps drawing attention to its formal and structural elements, in a way that is the opposite of what the Concerto No. 1 does – and this is unfortunate, because Bruch was not very good at following formal precepts and tended to handle them formulaically. Attractive sections of Serenade appear several times, but when Bruch repeats a melodic element verbatim, he undercuts its original effect – and he does this many times (this work is half again as long as the Violin Concerto No. 1). Weithaas and Bäumer make an effort to vary the repetitive elements somewhat, even though Bruch does not indicate in the score that performers are to do this – and their efforts are repaid with a more-effective performance than they would otherwise have delivered. But because the performers do not overdo this sort of variation, Serenade must stand largely on its own merits. And while it certainly has some – Bruch was a marvelously fluid melodist – it also has numerous formal lacks that show clearly why it, like other Bruch violin-and-orchestra works, has always taken a back seat to the ever-fresh Concerto No. 1.

     The music that overshadows all the rest by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov is his Caucasian Sketches, colorful pieces evoking the sounds associated with ethnic minorities in Russia and, later, the Soviet Union. But Ippolitov-Ivanov, like Bruch, deserves to be known for more than a small portion of his output, as a new Naxos CD – actually a re-release of performances recorded in 1984 – demonstrates. The first of Ippolitov-Ivanov’s two symphonies dates to 1907 and fits squarely within the Russian nationalistic tradition, using folk material and melodies that recall the Russian Orthodox liturgy in a piece that follows conventional symphonic structure but contains some surprises – for example, a Scherzo that opens with slow chords. The symphony gets a sympathetic and well-balanced reading from the Singapore Symphony Orchestra under Choo Hoey, if perhaps not one as thoroughly immersed in the Russian sound as it might be. It is accompanied by two works that Ippolitov-Ivanov wrote late in life: Turkish Fragments from 1930 and Turkish March from 1932 (the composer died in 1935). These have more color and a greater sense of characteristic style than does the symphony, and in fact they hark back in their focus on ethnic sounds to the Caucasian Sketches. The four Turkish Fragments form a suite with movements called Caravan, At Rest, Night and Festival, each movement reflecting its title directly and effectively – but with some surprises, as in the Symphony No. 1. For example, At Rest starts and ends with the expected tranquility, but its middle section is considerably livelier than would be anticipated; and Festival, which begins and concludes with animated ebullience, breaks off for a Larghetto section in the middle. This is music of style and verve, nicely assembled by the composer and well-presented by the Singapore musicians.

     Like Ippolitov-Ivanov, Henri Dutilleux wrote two symphonies, but these are works that are as much of the mid-20^th-century (1951 and 1959) as Ippolitov-Ivanov’s are of earlier times. Ludovic Morlot is a champion of Dutilleux’ music, and his latest CD with the Seattle Symphony, on the orchestra’s own label, is entirely devoted to Dutilleux. Symphony No. 2 is called Le double and is set up in the style of an old-fashioned concerto grosso, but deliberately written against that tradition. That is, it includes a small group of 12 players who sit in the center of the stage, surrounded by the rest of the orchestra – but instead of the smaller group acting as soloists and leading the larger one, things are generally the other way around. The smaller ensemble echoes material introduced by the larger much of the time, and sometimes the two groups play entirely different things. Add in Dutilleux’ fondness for polytonality and polyrhythms and you have a recipe for music that often sounds chaotic, for all that Morlot does a good job of keeping the forces under control. Once the layout of the small and large groups and the way they intermingle become clear, this symphony does not seem to have much to say: it comes across as a formal experiment rather than a work seeking to communicate anything in particular to the audience. The Violin Concerto, commissioned for and dedicated to Isaac Stern, is a later work (1983-85) whose four movements are played continuously and intended to show expansion and development throughout. Entitled L’arbre des songes (“The Tree of Dreams”), the concerto uses three interludes to link its four movements and attempt to provide a feeling of both unity and growth. Like Symphony No. 2, it is of more interest intellectually than emotionally, and is apparently designed to be: both works reach out to and challenge performers to a greater extent than they appear intended to appeal to listeners. The third piece on this (+++) CD is Métaboles (1965), a sort of concerto for orchestra in which a different section dominates each of the first four parts and the fifth brings them all together. The most successful of the three works on this disc, Métaboles uses subtle, gradual thematic, rhythmic and harmonic changes throughout to create a feeling of slow metamorphosis that leads to its bright finale, which is marked Flamboyant. Morlot holds the orchestra back a bit in some parts here, perhaps to make that last movement more flashy. The net effect is one of drama and brightness, helping show why Métaboles is one of Dutilleux’ most-performed pieces.

     Symphonic works by other modern composers are sprinkled about a Naxos CD called Live from Music City. This is a curious (+++) disc designed to highlight Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony and coming across as a kind of souvenir recording – the sort of thing a concertgoer might pick up in the lobby afterwards as a memory of the occasion. Each of the five composers heard here is represented by two pieces, or rather by two tracks, since all 10 items on the disc are excerpts from longer works. There are a movement from Daugherty’s Deus ex machina and one from Metropolis Symphony; one part of Piazzolla’s Las 4 estaciones Porteñas and one from Bandoneon Concerto “Aconcagua”; two movements from Sierra’s Sinfonia No. 4 and two from Danielpour’s Darkness in the Ancient Valley; and, from Paulus, one of the Three Places of Enlightenment and a movement from Grand Concerto for Organ and Orchestra. These pieces have almost nothing in common, and the CD seems designed simply to showcase the playing of the orchestra, which is quite good, and the breadth of its repertoire, which is significant but not unusually so. Listeners already interested in the music of these composers will find little of value in this release, since it gives only snippets of the works. Listeners not already enamored of these particular creators will have no real reason to purchase the CD unless they happen to be fans of this orchestra and conductor and want to hear how they handle a variety of modern works. That seems a rather limited audience for what is, in effect, a sampler of material – if not intended as a souvenir of some sort, it is hard to see the recording’s reason for being.