(++++) REALER THAN REALITY

A Dog Wearing Shoes. By Sangmi Ko. Schwartz & Wade. $16.99.

     An unusually affecting picture-book debut that takes a true story, twists it just enough to make it feel like a neatly plotted beginning-middle-and-end tale, and presents it with unusually effective black-and-white illustrations enlivened by little dabs of color, A Dog Wearing Shoes stirs emotions far beyond what would be expected from its modest plot. All that happens is that a little girl finds a lost dog, takes it home, realizes it must belong to someone, finds the original owner, gives the dog up, and then gets a pup of her own. But the way Sangmi Ko tells this story – which is based on a dog-finding experience that her niece actually had – makes it very special indeed.

     At the very beginning, the tale opens with an obviously bored little girl named Mini riding in a car driven by her mom in heavy traffic. Suddenly the car screeches to a halt – Mini’s and her mom’s mouths wide open and Mini ending up with her eyes spinning (shown as spirals in Ko’s very clever drawing). A dog is sitting right in front of the car – and it is wearing bright yellow shoes (the only color in the illustration, and a wonderful touch). The dog, small in size but huge-eyed and with extremely frizzy ears and tail, is as cartoony as can be, but there is something instantly endearing and realistic about its obvious enthusiasm. The next scene, showing the dog running toward Mini’s mom as traffic roars all around and drivers look on with smiles, befuddlement, irritation or varying degrees of inattention, propels the story perfectly ahead toward a quick happy ending, with the dog coming home to live with Mini.

     But so simple an outcome is not to be – and that is what makes A Dog Wearing Shoes so special. Yes, Mini and the dog bond and play, but after a while, Mini wants to do things that the dog does not want to do; and the dog looks bewildered and lost in a rather cluttered room in which furniture, wall hangings, plants and an old-fashioned sewing machine are lovingly rendered in a highly attractive artistic style that makes the small pup seem even smaller and his yellow shoes stand out from his black-and-white surroundings even more. Mini, increasingly desperate to keep the dog after he starts barking because he apparently misses his family (Mini’s mom’s suggestion, which Mini refuses to acknowledge), takes the pup to the park, where everyone admires him, he gets along wonderfully with other dogs, and he quickly shows how smart he is by doing a variety of tricks.

     However, Mini’s pride gets the better of her (an illustration of her with enormous eyes and super-broad smile is laugh-out-loud funny). She lets the dog off-leash (the red leash being the only colored item here that is not yellow) to fetch a stick – at which point the dog runs away. Heartbroken, Mini, helped by her mom, searches for the dog, but they find only one yellow shoe. The next day, Mini and her mom go to the local animal shelter, where they are lucky enough to find the dog – who must, Mini now understands, belong to someone who surely misses him. So Mini puts up bright yellow “found” posters around the neighborhood, and the owner, a little boy in a bright yellow shirt, does indeed show up, so happy to be reunited with his pup that he cries tears of joy in a wordless scene that neatly sums up the very special bond between people and their animal companions. Mini and her mom cannot help but be happy to have brought boy and dog together – but now what will they do? The answer, of course, is that they will return to the animal shelter and find a dog just for Mini. And that is exactly what they do – in another wordless scene, in which a caged pup with an ear-to-ear smile bonds so immediately with Mini that the shelter workers and Mini’s mom end up with ear-to-ear grins of their own.

     What a lovely book this is, filled with empathy and compassion and the never-quite-realized potential for heartbreak – and, at the very end, offering information and cautions about dog adoption and suggesting Web sites to visit to find out more. What Ko has done so well here is to take a singular occurrence that really took place and turn it into a story with resonance and meaning beyond the real-world incident that prompted the tale. Parents who read A Dog Wearing Shoes with their kids should be prepared for highly insistent requests for a puppy from the animal shelter – and kids should be prepared for their parents to discuss the responsibilities and potential difficulties of dog ownership, which come through almost as clearly here as do the joys.

(+++) ADVENTURES, SERIOUS AND SILLY

The Chronicles of the Black Tulip, Volume 1: The Vanishing Island. By Barry Wolverton. Walden Pond Press. $16.99.

Alien in My Pocket 6: Forces of Nature. By Nate Ball. Illustrated by Macky Pamintuan. Harper. $4.99.

Fart Squad #2: Fartasaurus Rex. By Seamus Pilger. Illustrated by Stephen Gilpin. Harper. $4.99.

     There is never a shortage of new or ongoing series intended to take preteens, and even readers as young as age six, to new places and into new realms, real or fictional of a mixture of both. Sometimes the books are elaborate, sometimes entirely surface-level; sometimes they are intense and serious, sometimes frothy; but the one thing they all share is ready accessibility – they are fast-paced, easy to read and designed to sweep young readers along from page to page without allowing too much time for thought. The Vanishing Island, which opens a new trilogy called The Chronicles of the Black Tulip, is decidedly of the elaborate-and-serious type. It is one of those alternative-history stories that tosses together elements of Western and Eastern culture and mixes everything up in a rather uneasy broth that works mainly because readers in the target age range can be expected to know, at most, only a little about what is being thrown into the mixture. The basic story line is completely predictable for adventures of this type. There is a bold but misunderstood and trouble-prone protagonist – in this case, a boy named Bren Owen – who leaves his family behind (or rather his father: his mother dies) to seek his fortune. The year is 1599 in this non-historical history, which means it is the Age of Exploration, and Bren, who lives in a port city and whose father makes maps (for a boss named Rand McNally), hears many stories of the wonders to be found elsewhere. He yearns to see these things for himself; that is his only real motivation. Since books of this type nowadays include a girl protagonist as well as a boy, Bren – when he finally does manage to escape from his home town (which is aptly named Map) – soon encounters a girl named Mouse, who is from China and is wise beyond her years, with secrets that only slowly start to be revealed. Barry Wolverton picks and chooses elements of culture, myth and fairy tale to include here. Mouse’s story, for example, is right out of fairy tales: she tells Bren of a flock of cranes that landed at a Chinese mountain lake, undressed and turned into beautiful girls – with a hunter seeing them and withholding the robe from one, who therefore could not return to crane shape and had to become the hunter’s wife. Eventually the crane wife manages to escape, and the hunter casts away all her daughters, one of whom is – or may be – Mouse. As for Bren, his guiding spirit is not so much his heritage as his being given a strange object by a dying sailor – an object that turns out to be a paiza, a sort of passport created by the Mongols at the court of Kublai Khan. Bren and Mouse have a series of far-flung and dangerous adventures involving the search for a vanished island, a search that obsesses a strange Dutchman, Admiral Bowman, of whom readers first learn that he is interested in the paiza and is good at chess – clearly troubling signs in a book of this type. Quests, discoveries, dangers, revelations, betrayals and a number of deaths of subsidiary characters later, some of Mouse’s true powers and true knowledge emerge, with troubling results, and Bren and she find themselves marooned – on an island. What all this means will presumably be revealed as the trilogy continues. Young readers seeking an exciting, if improbable, voyage to places of derring-do and unreliable magic will find those places – which appear regularly in preteen-oriented novels – in abundance here.

     Far more humorous and frequently ridiculous, but with a serious underlying purpose connected with Core Curriculum principles, the Alien in My Pocket series by Nate Ball is now up to its sixth entry, again featuring pocket-size alien Amp and the human boy, Zack, in whose bedroom Amp crash-landed his spaceship. Amp is a mixture of advanced technology, sort-of-magical attributes, and incompetence: space travel, yes, but no ability to repair his ship and leave Earth to help stop a planned invasion; an “Erdian mind trick” ability to convince people “they could smell or taste things – usually gross things”; but no understanding of, say, the tents used in camping or the concept of camping itself. That is what Forces of Nature is all about: Zack’s family on a camping trip that goes seriously awry and was never supposed to include Amp, but does. Here too there must be a girl as “second lead” in the story, and this is Olivia, who alone knows about Amp and  who is often more level-headed than Zack. Inevitably, Zack and Olivia, with Amp, end up separated from Zack’s parents (who are as completely clueless as parents usually are in books of this type); the kids are lost in the woods, with Amp along, and have to figure out how to read a map, use a compass, and handle rumors of an unpleasant ghost by the name of Nasty Ned, who is said to have significant anger issues. Mosquitoes and bears complicate matters (but only mildly), and eventually Zack and Olivia make a water compass – a project outlined at the back of the book for real-life readers, this being the tie-in to educational matters. Rescued thanks to their own ingenuity and the timely appearance of park rangers, Zack and Olivia find again that they and Amp make a good team – and Zack learns that science is not “boring stuff to be avoided” but something that “could really be important, useful, and – dare he think it? – fun!” That is a “mission accomplished” not only for Amp but also for Ball and illustrator Macky Pamintuan, whose pictures help add to the amusement here, if not to the underlying science.

     Stephan Gilpin’s illustrations for Seamus Pilger’s Fart Squad books are intended to do nothing but show various ways in which invisible, unpleasant odors affect characters human, animal and even – in the series’ second entry – prehistoric. There is no science or other educational material so much as hinted at in these gas-obsessed stories, in which four kids consume radioactive five-bean cafeteria burritos and develop various powers associated with expelling gas. Pilger and Gilpin clearly find this concept a lot funnier than most parents will, but kids in the target age range of 6-10 (the same as for Alien in My Pocket but younger than that for The Chronicles of the Black Tulip, which is aimed at ages 8-12) will revel in the juvenile amusements that permeate the writing. They include a town called Buttzville, a lead character named Darren Stonkadopolis, a nasty rich kid named Harry Buttz Jr., a fossilized Buttosaurus, and a real live Fartasaurus that Darren accidentally releases from 150-million-year suspended animation in the local tar pit. None of this makes an iota of sense, and none of it is supposed to. Fartasaurus Rex simply gives the four-member Fart Squad its second chance to do some, err, butt-kicking, when the dinosaur stampedes throughout the town. But then it turns out that the revived dino is not a bad guy at all, not even a flesh-eater – there was a mixup when assembling a skeleton, and “F. Rex” is actually herbivorous. So the Fart Squad must find a way to save the Fartasaurus – and in the process rescue the museum by the tar pit, since the institution is threatened with closure because attendance has fallen dramatically. Everything works out just fine, of course. Darren’s gas expulsions are explosive; one Fart Squad cohort, mixed-ethnic entry Juan-Carlos Finkelstein, has timed expulsions that “go off” after he has left the scene; another, super-brain Walter Turnip (who looks turnip-y, therefore being both the token smart character and the token obese one) can fly as a result of consuming the burritos; and the last squad member, the girl who must be included even in a group like this one – and whose name, Tina Heiney, needs no explanation – is expert with “silent but deadly” emissions that no one would expect to come from someone so petite and angelic-looking. All four get a chance to use their particular and peculiar powers in Fartasaurus Rex, and no reader who finds this sort of ongoing joke funny will go away disappointed by this adventure, which stinks because it is supposed to stink.

(++++) PROBING MUSICAL DEPTHS

Mahler: Symphonies Nos. 7-9. Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Lorin Maazel. Signum Classics. $38.99 (6 CDs).

The All-Star Orchestra conducted by Gerard Schwarz. Programs 9 & 10; 11 & 12. Naxos DVDs. $19.99 each.

     The last and best of the three Signum Classics releases featuring live recordings of Mahler symphonies conducted by Lorin Maazel stands as a genuine legacy to the conductor, who died in 2014 at age 84 after a remarkable 75 years of involvement in classical music. Known when he initially conducted as a preteen as “little Loren” – a nickname he came to despise as his reputation grew – Maazel became a towering figure in the music world, internationally acclaimed and respected for his performances of orchestral and operatic repertoire with a multitude of orchestras. His late-in-life (2009) founding of the Castleton Festival in Virginia is but one of the monuments to him. His Mahler cycle, using performances from 2011, is another, but it is only in this final release that Maazel’s abilities with this composer’s music significantly outweigh his interpretative limitations. At the heart of his success here is a gorgeously sung, splendidly played, interpretatively sure-handed Symphony No. 8, which emerges under Maazel’s leadership as essentially a full-scale, full-length opera (it runs 98 minutes). Maazel expertly brings out Mahler’s marvelous interweaving of the themes from the work’s first part with their reuse at different tempos and in different contexts in the second part. He makes the opening Veni, creator spiritus a strong, almost heavy half-hour, the initial words coming across as an invocation (not, as in some other, more-assertive performances, a demand); and the individual sections receive plenty of time to wend their way through the musical motifs that pervade the whole symphony. Then the extended orchestral opening to the final scene from Faust is presented as transformative, pulling together the heaven-imploring elements of the first part with the very different heavenly ones to come. Maazel does not shrink from having his singers approach the music operatically, especially Stefan Vinke as Doctor Marianus (the soul of Faust) and Ailish Tynan as Una Pœnitentium (the soul of Gretchen). The pacing here is deliberate almost but not quite to the point of ponderousness: Maazel lets the music swell again and again, enlarging the universe portrayed by Goethe and Mahler and thus expanding the experience of the audience, until the final chorus is truly overwhelming in its impact. This is a remarkable performance that fully explores the emotional heights and depths of the symphony.

     Maazel’s reading of Mahler’s Ninth is also highly impressive in the first and final movements, but some of the weaknesses of this cycle show through in the middle. The first movement here is so well done that it seems to grow organically, from the thematic fragments with which it opens through the long-spun melodies and increasingly odd harmonies with which Mahler builds it. The pacing is quite slow – almost 36 minutes – but the music never drags. Instead, it feels as if it is coalescing bit by bit into something very big and very wonderful. As for the finale, most of it is comparatively straightforward, although very well played and very sensitively handled. But the very last part is amazing: it is a transcendent experience to hear the way the music evanesces here, evaporating in a mixture of resignation and acceptance as it returns, the same yet utterly changed, to the mood of the symphony’s beginning. This would have been a great performance if the two middle movements were at this level, but here Maazel’s limitations as a Mahlerian come into play. The bizarre, self-contradictory extremes of Mahler’s music seem to make Maazel uncomfortable: when it comes to showing the unifying elements of a work, as in the Eighth, he delivers splendidly, but when it is necessary to change the mood abruptly and with apparently illogic, as the middle of the Ninth does, he falls short. Neither of the middle movements here has the intensity and punch needed to provide relief from and a strong contrast to the opening and closing ones. The Rondo-Burleske in particular is a disappointment: one waits in vain for Maazel to cut loose, to let this frantic and frenetic piece blossom in its own distinctly peculiar way. It never happens. The two middle movements of this Ninth are simply too well-mannered to serve their purpose as interludes between the beauties of the work’s start and finish. As for the Seventh, it never really takes off at all. Here Maazel’s propensity for unification of these sprawling symphonies serves him (and listeners) poorly. This is a strange symphony, so much so that British musicologist Deryck Cooke famously christened it the “Mad,” and while that is an exaggeration, it captures some of the sense of unease and constant change, unending refusal to be pinned down to any one direction or mood, that pervades this work. Here Maazel’s reading does drag: the first movement seems to go on interminably, its sudden shifts of harmony and rhythm unduly smoothed by tempo choices that make the whole thing ponderous rather than portentous. The two Nachtmusik movements and the central (and decidedly peculiar) Schattenhaft scherzo seem to meander directionlessly: instead of being encapsulations of individual moods, they are for Maazel parts of a larger whole whose shape, unfortunately, is never clear. The finale, so similar to that of the Fifth while at the same time so different, so deliberately straightforward in its C major tonality and Allegro ordinario tempo designation, plods and struggles ahead here, lacking in exuberance, irony, conclusiveness, assertiveness, or any other emotion that it possesses in other conductors’ readings. It loses its way or, more accurately, never finds one – a statement that, unfortunately, applies to this performance as a whole. Nevertheless, for its superb Eighth and the many excellent elements of its Ninth, this is a release in which to rejoice, and a very fine monument, one of many, to one of the great conductors of modern times.

     Although not an interpreter of Maazel’s stature, Gerard Schwarz also succeeds in exploring the intensity of musical communication in some of his performances – and the six volumes of his All-Star Orchestra TV series are, collectively, a particularly fine example. Using an orchestra whose members are drawn from the ranks of multiple U.S. ensembles – and who play efficiently, if not always passionately – Schwarz with these shows offers a modernized update of the famous Leonard Bernstein Young People’s Concerts that ran from 1958 to 1972. There are, though, many differences. Commentary in the Schwarz series is by composers, performers and various experts rather than – as in Bernstein’s material – by the conductor himself. Unlike Bernstein, Schwarz offers programs designed for listeners of all ages, not just young people – and, more intriguingly, often mixes well-known works from the standard concert repertoire with new pieces that even people steeped in classical music may never have heard before. Bernstein’s programs reached across age lines by virtue of the strength of Bernstein’s personality and the excellence of his conducting. Schwarz is a lesser conductor and by no means a raconteur; his shows reach across generational lines because of the choice of music and form of commentary. The Schwarz shows are much better produced – they were done in HD with 19 cameras – although the extensive technical capabilities are not always fully utilized to explore elements of the music.

     These are nevertheless excellent ways for people unfamiliar with classical music to learn about it in an enjoyable rather than strictly educational way. The Naxos DVD containing the ninth and 10^th programs is a particularly good example of the series’ strengths. The ninth program, “Visions of New York,” includes a fine if not tremendously jazzy performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with pianist Lola Astanova; Copland’s Music for the Theatre; and a very recent piece that attempts to take a musical measure of New York after the terrorist murders of 9/11/2001, Ground “0” by Robert Beaser. The rhythmic and harmonic language of the three works may be different (although there are many similarities between the Gershwin and Copland pieces, which both date from the 1920s), but the differing ways in which they attempt to showcase life in the United States’ largest city results in some fascinating insights. The 10^th program is a different matter. It is wholly devoted to a single work, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, featuring violinist David Kim – and while it is commendable that Schwarz performs the complete symphonic suite (a real plus of this series: Bernstein’s offered only excerpts of works, sometimes taking things out of context to make a point), it is never quite clear why an entire program is being used to showcase this particular work. Part of the problem here is the performance itself: Kim plays the solo part well, but the overall sweep and grandeur of the music do not come through as well with this cobbled-together orchestra as they do with the Russian and other European ensembles whose richly burnished strings are so well complemented by brass sections at once warm and biting. Viewers who follow all the Schwarz programs may find, by the time of this 10^th one, that they enjoy its exploration of a single extended work, but neither the performance nor the handling of the explanatory elements is as well-done as is the material in some of the other shows.

     The 11^th program has similar pluses and minuses. This one also features a single piece, Richard Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben, which is an even tougher nut to crack interpretatively than is Scheherazade. Again, the solo playing here is fine – Kim is again the violin soloist and Erik Ralske is featured on French horn – but the orchestra never really digs into this music. Strauss had an idiomatically personal approach to his orchestra music: this is the composer who later wrote Symphonia Domestica as a view of the next part of his family life. Ein Heldenleben, like Scheherazade, is a sonic spectacular requiring a large orchestra, and both works are certainly programmatic. But full comprehension of Strauss’ music requires considerable knowledge of his biography and his views, both musical and philosophical; and this is beyond the scope of Schwarz’ program, although certainly an attempt is made to explain what is going on. It nevertheless seems a trifle odd to build this entire episode around this piece. The 12^th program comes across better, returning to the notion of juxtaposing a famous repertoire piece (Mozart’s Serenade No. 9, “Posthorn,” featuring David Bilger) with a contemporary one (Samuel Jones’ Violin Concerto, with Anne Akiko Meyers). In fact, this program attempts to do a great deal: the Jones work is a world première, Meyers plays it on the Vieuxtemps Guarneri del Gesù violin, and the overall idea here is to explain the ways in which composer, soloist and conductor are all involved in bringing a work to the audience. This is an admirable and ambitious plan, but whether the pairing of these particular works furthers it is another matter. The Jones concerto is well-made, with interesting elements both for listeners and for the soloist, but it is difficult to see why it should be juxtaposed with Mozart – and this particular Mozart work contrasts rather oddly with this one by Jones, in any case. Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4 or 5 would have made a more intriguing pairing; or perhaps, to avoid what would surely be something of an invidious comparison, a Mozart piano concerto (say, No. 9 or No. 15) could have been offered. This 12^th program is worthwhile more for what it tries to do than for what it actually does; and indeed, that is often the case in The All-Star Orchestra conducted by Gerard Schwarz. On balance, these are fine made-for-TV programs that will be of most value to people with some interest in classical music but little understanding of it – although the issues raised in certain shows will resonate with longtime classical-music lovers as well.

(+++) VOICES AND MORE

Sibelius: Jedermann; Two Serious Melodies; In memoriam. Pia Pajala, soprano; Tuomas Katajala, tenor; Nicholas Söderlund, bass; Cathedralis Aboensis Choir; Mikaela Palmu, violin; Turku Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leif Segerstam. Naxos. $12.99.

Gordon Getty: A Prayer for My Daughter; Poor Peter; The Little Match Girl; Joan and the Bells. Nikolai Schukoff, tenor; Melody Moore, soprano; Lester Lynch, baritone; Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks and Münchner Rundfunkorchester conducted by Asher Fisch and Ulf Schirmer. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

Bruno Mantovani: Cinques poèmes de János Pilinszky; Vier geistliche Gedichte; Monde évanoui (Fragments pour Babylone); Cantata No. 4, “Komm, Jesu, Komm.” Accentus Chamber Choir conducted by Laurence Equilbey and Pieter-Jelle de Boer; Sonia Wieder-Atherton, cello; Pascal Contet, accordion. Naïve. $16.99.

Christopher Rouse: Seeing; Kabir Padavali. Talise Trevigne, soprano; Orion Weiss, piano; Albany Symphony conducted by David Alan Miller. Naxos. $12.99.

David Ashley White: The Blue Estuaries; Jocelyn Hagen: soft blink of amber light; Christopher Theofanidis: Messages to Myself; Wayne Oquin: O Magnum Mysterium; Dominick DiOrio: A Dome of Many-coloured Glass. Houston Chamber Choir conducted by Robert Simpson. MSR Classics. $12.95.

     Sometimes music can be too atmospheric. That is the case with Sibelius’ Jedermann, incidental music to a 1916 production of a revision of a medieval morality play. Sibelius designed the music to parallel the speaking parts precisely, enhancing and being enhanced by them, much as was done decades later in film music (and continues to be done in that medium today). The problem is that Jedermann is a very slow-moving slog of a play, true in its 20^th-century incarnation to its very old roots and, as a result, allowing for only a very small amount of brightness in the music. Songs and dancelike tunes are acceptable early in the play, as Everyman indulges in earthly delights, but the point of the play – as of other morality plays – is that earthly enjoyment brings one to the attention of the Devil, and must be given up and repented for in order to achieve salvation. So the choral singing (which is quite fine) and the brief solos from soprano, tenor and bass are soon dispensed with, and the play drags the music along through multiple sections marked Largo, Adagio di molto, Largo e mesto, even Con grande dolore. The unremitting lugubriousness of the music – which makes it unsurprising that Sibelius never created a suite from Jedermann, as he did from his other theater music – fits the story well; but heard independently of the words it was designed to complement and enhance, it is unconvincing. And the overall bleakness of the CD is unrelieved by the material accompanying Jedermann: instead of choosing something contrasting and upbeat for this latest of his forays into Sibelius’ theater and less-known music, Leif Segerstam adds to the play’s music the composer’s Two Serious Melodies (1914-15), depressive violin-and-orchestra pieces reflecting their wartime creation, and In memoriam (1910), a distinctly funereal (and rather Mahlerian) offering that was eventually played at Sibelius’ own funeral in 1957. As in other releases in this generally very interesting Naxos sequence, the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra plays very well, and Segerstam leads it with a sure hand and considerable understanding of the material. But the nearly unrelieved darkness of this release makes it difficult to recommend it to anyone other than committed Sibelius fans who are eager to hear as much of his music as possible.

     An unrestrained recommendation is also difficult to give to the new PentaTone SACD of music by Gordon Getty (born 1934). Getty is a fine composer with sound theatrical instincts and more than a little skill in vocal writing. But his works are not of uniform quality and interest, as is clear from the four offered here. Two use his own texts: Poor Peter and Joan and the Bells, each of which contains three movements. The former is rather self-consciously art-songy, the texts delivered against a fairly light orchestration in a kind of singsong Sprechstimme that is not particularly well-suited to the material. The latter, a cantata about Joan of Arc that is darker, more operatic and scored for a larger ensemble, is much more effective despite being somewhat overly melodramatic. The contrast between the opening movement, Judgment, and the second, Joan in Her Chamber, is particularly pronounced; the final movement, The Square at Rouen, is the most predictable despite being the climax of the work – yet its effectiveness as drama cannot be doubted. This work as a whole is almost a miniature oratorio – and that is also the impression of The Little Match Girl, based on Hans Christian Andersen’s bittersweet (more bitter than sweet) story, in which the positive elements are delivered through unswerving belief in highly traditional Christianity (a frequent theme in Andersen’s tales). Here Getty does not seem quite sure whether the material is tragic or in some sense uplifting; as a result, the work has less emotional punch and less of a central core of feeling than does his setting about Joan of Arc. As for A Prayer for My Daughter, this uses a complex and controversial poem by William Butler Yeats as its basis: the poem deals with Irish nationalism (it was written during the Anglo-Irish War, in 1919), sexuality, expectations of womanhood in the early 20^th century, and more. It calls for a setting of considerable complexity – or, alternatively, one in which the composer chooses among the various interpretations of the poem and uses music to advance the thesis of that particular meaning. Getty’s setting is fine, but it is rather on the pale side, tending to accept Yeats’ words literally rather than to interpret them – and not finding any way to reflect on the war scenario that, along with the birth of Yeats’ daughter, brought the poem into being. As a result, Getty’s work carries rather less meaning than the poem it sets and illustrates; but its sensitive orchestration and attentiveness to the words themselves make it an interesting and, on the whole, effective piece. The performers here are all quite fine, with the Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks outstanding and Ulf Schirmer – who leads Joan and the Bells – delivering a more-nuanced and more-involving performance than does Asher Fisch, who conducts the other three works.

     The vocal music of Bruno Mantovani (born 1974) is only part of his life – indeed, composition itself is only one part. Mantovani is also a conductor, radio music producer, and music educator and administrator. The Accentus Chamber Choir commissioned Cinques poèmes de János Pilinszky from Mantovani in 2004 and subsequently commissioned three additional works from him. All four are now available on a Naïve release that will be of interest as much to fans of the performing ensemble as to those interested in Mantovani’s music. In fact, the music itself is nothing special within its contemporary context. It periodically looks back as far as Bach, Gesualdo and Rameau, occasionally echoes the Romantic leanings of Schubert and Schumann, and frequently dips into jazz, Oriental music and other cross-cultural and cross-musical currents that today’s composers visit with considerable regularity. Mantovani writes well for voices, but only in a modern-music context. Cinques poèmes de János Pilinszky, for example, includes the usual asymmetry of construction, imprecise or absent consonance, fluid or nonexistent key structure, and an overall inspiration that Mantovani himself says he drew from electroacoustical sounds. The result is not particularly poetic and not especially unified: the five poems sound different from one another, and the work as a whole is fragmented rather than joined in any significant way relating either to its content or to its musical building blocks. The sung language is different and the source is poems by Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, but the impact is much the same in Vier geistliche Gedichte and, indeed, in all four works here. It is a point of pride with Accentus and Laurence Equilbey to support, encourage, commission and perform as many new works as possible, and certainly Mantovani’s pieces are well-crafted and well-suited to the Accentus Chamber Choir’s vocal capabilities. None of them, however, stands out either stylistically or communicatively from the large amount of vocal music created by other contemporary composers.

     On the other hand, Kabir Padavali (1998) by Christopher Rouse (born 1949) does have some distinctiveness about it, consisting as it does of six settings of works by Kabir, a 15^th-century mystic poet and saint of India. Settings of works written in Hindi are unusual in modern Western music, and Rouse does a good job of exploring the wider-than-might-be-expected range of Kabir’s interests. These unsurprisingly include religious issues and even religious ecstasy, but more unusually convey hints of humor and even puckishness. Kabir Padavali (which translates as “Kabir Songbook”) is a bit much to hear – it lasts more than half an hour – but the fact that Naxos supplies transliterations and translations of the texts makes the music more accessible than it would otherwise be. And Rouse manages to integrate Western and Eastern elements in his composition in ways that are effective more often than not. Strong performances by soprano Talise Trevigne and the Albany Symphony under David Alan Miller give this work as good a chance of coming across successfully as it is likely to have. And unlike the rather monochromatic Sibelius CD, this one pairs the vocal material with something quite different, although written in the same year. Seeing, for piano (the very fine Orion Weiss) and orchestra, is a kind of piano non-concerto, juxtaposing and contrasting elements of Schumann with ones from Moby Grape co-founder and guitarist Skip Spence (1946-1999). Very little connects the music of Schumann and Spence, but what does connect them is mental illness (exacerbated in Spence’s case by drug addiction and alcoholism), and Rouse uses this point of contact as the basis of the exploration he attempts in Seeing. This is an ambitious and unusual idea and not, in the final analysis, a particularly successful one: yes, the work shifts abruptly from consonance to dissonance, and yes, it is disorienting in a way that may perhaps reflect mental imbalance, but it makes its points several times in different ways and, at a length of more than half an hour, comes to seem rather self-indulgent. However, it has numerous interesting moments within its time span, and its concept is intriguing even if the execution is imperfect. Rouse has some unusual ideas about how to structure his works, and unlike many contemporary composers, seems genuinely concerned about connecting with listeners on an emotional level – something he does inconsistently, but an attempt for which he deserves praise.

     There is a certain amount of reaching out from the five composers on a new MSR Classics vocal release, too. David Ashley White (born 1944), Jocelyn Hagen (born 1980), Christopher Theofanidis (born 1967), Wayne Oquin (born 1977), and Dominick DiOrio (born 1984) are from different generations, but all are intrigued by the communicative power of the chamber choir – and the Houston Chamber Choir under Robert Simpson is a very fine one. Theofanidis’ Messages to Myself (2007) is especially effective in this regard, since in searching for poetry that he himself finds meaningful, the composer comes up with some that reaches out to the audience as well. Yeats, who appealed to Getty, appeals to Theofanidis as well, the work here (the fourth and final one of these “messages”) being an excerpt from When You Are Old. The first three “messages” are from Walt Whitman (from Leaves of Grass), the medieval Persian mystic Jellaludin Rūmi, and (least effectively in terms of involving a wider audience) a personal friend of Theofanidis named Amy Kirsten. There are two other multi-movement pieces here: White’s The Blue Estuaries (1998), using five poems by Louise Bogan, and DiOrio’s A Dome of Many-coloured Glass (2010), which draws on four poems by Amy Lowell. Interspersed with the multi-sectional pieces are two single-movement ones. Hagen’s soft blink of amber light (2014), with the whole title unnecessarily in small letters, includes poetry by Julia Klatt Singer and complements the choir with flute, clarinet, piano, and marimba, lending the work a more varied sound palette than the a cappella pieces on this disc possess. Oquin’s O Magnum Mysterium (2013), the shortest piece on the CD, is in some ways the most deeply communicative of all, using contemporary techniques – but not in any overdone way – to set the classic sacred text for mixed choir, thus producing a joining of today’s musicianship with that of centuries past. All the performances here are first-rate, and although the music will have different meanings, and different levels of meaning, for different listeners, all of it is distinguished by the composers’ clear interest in sharing their emotional responses to texts with a receptive audience – a form of sharing that unfortunately is not always evident in vocal (or, for that matter, instrumental) works by contemporary composers.

(++++) FAIRY TALES WITH WARMTH

Austin, Lost in America. By Jef Czekaj. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $17.99.

The Elves and the Shoemaker. Retold and illustrated by Paul Galdone. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $8.99.

Rumpelstiltskin. Retold and illustrated by Paul Galdone. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.99.

     A modern fairy tale wrapped around a geography lesson, Jef Czekaj’s Austin, Lost in America is the story of a dog who grows up at a pet shop and decides to take his fate into his own hands by escaping and finding just the right place to live – somewhere. Czekaj calls it “A Geography Adventure,” and so it is, as Austin starts out in Maine (where his original home, Sketchy’s Discount Pets, is located) and works his way through all 50 states, learning a thing or two about each one in the process. Maine, for instance, produces 99% of all the blueberries in the United States, and 100 million pounds of lobsters are caught off its coast – but Austin is allergic to blueberries and lobsters, so no Maine for him. On and on he goes, learning things about Massachusetts (Fig Newton cookies are named after the town of Newton), Connecticut (where the lollipop was created), Florida (which has 663 miles of beaches), South Carolina (which contains the world’s largest fire hydrant), West Virginia (where the world’s largest water-tasting competition is held), and on and on. “Every state had fun things to see and do, but none was a perfect fit,” writes Czekaj, so Austin marches on, also taking the bus and train and even an airplane from region to region so he can explore all the states – and pick up informational tidbits such as the fact that Washington is the state that grows the most apples, Idaho has the largest potato chip in the world, California has the nation’s highest population of cats (definitely not the right place for Austin), Utah has the world’s largest known natural bridge, a town in Wisconsin is the world’s yo-yo capital, and North Dakota hosts the annual World Champion Turtle Races. There is so much to see, so much to do, so many places to visit, but never just the right place for Austin. But then, at the very end of his travels, Austin finds himself in Texas, where there happens to be a city named…Austin! And he knows this is where he belongs – especially when a friendly little girl spots him and says she has been looking for a puppy just like him. So Austin’s long trek comes to an end, he has his very own family at last, and when we leave him, he is sending postcards of greeting to his friends at Sketchy’s Discount Pets in Waldo, Maine – a real town, and also a tribute to Martin Handford’s “Where’s Waldo?” books, which surely influenced Czekaj in creating this one.

     Unlike modern fairy tales along the lines of Austin’s, old-fashioned stories from the Grimm brothers tended to be, well, pretty doggoned grim. Never intended for children, the stories were filled with violence, sex and all sorts of racial and religious prejudices that were systematically cleaned up during the 19^th century (starting in later editions of the Grimms’ own collection) to make the tales palatable for children and for right-thinking Victorian families. There were, however, a few Grimm fairy tales whose message was one of warmth and inclusion, and Paul Galdone (1907-1986) retold and illustrated one of them in 1984: The Shoemaker and the Elves. Galdone’s words are based on Lucy Crane’s translation of the Grimms’ German, but the words – telling about a poor shoemaker visited nightly by elven cobblers who make beautiful shoes for him to sell – are only part of the book’s charm. The rest lies in Galdone’s moody but apt illustrations, using many dark colors to show the initial living situation of the poverty-stricken shoemaker and his wife, then contrasting those scenes with those of the naked elves (wearing only very long, bright orange stocking caps) at their work. The kind shoemaker decides to thank the elves for their assistance by making them clothing, and he and his wife produce tiny clothes that are far brighter than the ones they wear themselves, leaving them out one night for the elves to find. The delighted elves are shown donning the clothes, singing and dancing their joy and vowing nevermore to be cobblers – and indeed, the story says they were never seen again. But all still ends happily, for the riches made possible by the elves’ help and the shoemaker’s own goodness remain with the man and his wife all their lives. This is a lovely story of unexplained magic (the reasons for the elves making shoes, choosing this particular shoemaker, and being naked are never given), the moral being that if you are good, good things will come to you sooner or later, in one way or another. There is nothing exceptional about that message (and, indeed, the story is told without a moral, both in the original and in Galdone’s version); but young readers will likely enjoy the lack of preachiness in the tale, as well as the highly engaging way Galdone retells and illustrates it.

     A more-typical Grimm tale retold and illustrated in Galdone’s manner is Rumpelstiltskin. But while The Elves and the Shoemaker is in the “Folk Tale Classics” series of small-scale hardcover books, and Galdone’s Rumpelstiltskin is also available in that format, the new version of this 1985 book is something quite different. It is a giant-size paperback: not a traditional coffee-table book, but large enough to cover a small coffee table completely. At 14 inches wide and 17 high, this is a book whose two-page spreads open to 28 inches – scarcely something to be read to a child in one’s lap. It is the sort of book that invites parents and kids to sprawl on the floor and revel in the story and its illustrations. The ones Galdone produces here, because they are so large, show his technique clearly, and also display the cleverness with which he packs his pictures with ancillary characters and elements that are not in the story but that add to its impact. In Rumpelstiltskin, there is the king’s court fool, who watches the evolving action carefully even though he is no part of it, and whose expressions make it seem that he knows more about what is going on than the principal characters do. There are the dog and cat in the new queen’s bedchamber, as awake as she is while she tries to think of the little man’s name. There is the squirrel on the last page, staring quizzically at the hole in the earth into which Rumpelstiltskin has vanished after the queen correctly identifies him. Galdone hints at but never overtly discusses the unpleasant elements of this story, which come through even in the modified version familiar to families today. It is the avaricious and bloodthirsty king, not the helpful Rumpelstiltskin, who, it can be argued, is the real villain here – and Galdone shows him to be haughty, demanding and cruel-looking. Rumpelstiltskin is actually helpful, not only in spinning the straw into gold but also in allowing the miller’s daughter a way out of the bargain she makes in desperation to save her life: to give the little man her first-born child after she becomes queen. The Grimms’ audience would have understood that the little man is inherently evil  because of who he is, no matter what he does; and the story has decided anti-Semitic overtones as well. Those have long since been scrubbed out and are certainly no part of Galdone’s retelling, but they do explain why Rumpelstiltskin is the “bad guy” of the story even though it is the king who is cruel and greedy and the miller’s daughter who wants a way out of her promise to the little man. Galdone’s retelling is perfectly appropriate for today’s children, and the very large format of this new edition provides plenty of enjoyment not only in the carefully chosen words but also in very well-crafted illustrations that were obviously made with loving care and that today’s families can examine here in as much detail as they wish.

(++++) UP, UP AND AWAY

Flying Cars: The True Story. By Andrew Glass. Clarion. $17.99.

     The cry of “where are the flying cars?” is a common one from people complaining that the future isn’t turning out the way they thought it would. Some people lament that instead of getting flying cars, we get lawn chairs lifted by balloons, or maybe someone using multiple drones to get up in the air, or perhaps we simply get substitute technologies that we never asked for (to the extent that “asking for” future technology means anything), such as Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook. Or we move past flying cars to self-driving ones, which do exist but do not have the emotional appeal of ones that leap from the ground into the air.

     It is certainly true that flying cars have been a staple of science fiction for a century – how many pulp magazines featured “cities of the future” with cars zipping about? TV cartoons such as The Jetsons featured them, and they made their way, sometimes incidentally, into non-science-fiction movies as well: for example, It Happened One Night features a character arriving in an autogyro. But wait – that five-Academy-Award-winning 1934 film was a romantic comedy, not a drama, much less science fiction, and was character- and script-driven, not pushed by special effects. Does that mean autogyros really existed?

     Well, yes. Amelia Earhart flew one. Autogyros were flown twice onto the White House lawn (1931 and 1936), with President Herbert Hoover presenting a trophy to the pilot the first time. Later models of autogyro were “roadable,” as Andrew Glass explains in his thoroughly enthralling Flying Cars. “The rotors folded neatly back for driving, and the entire machine fit easily into an average-size garage.” But like so many of the fascinating inventions discussed in this first-rate blend of science, technology and history, the autogyro hit a series of bumps, some literal (Earhart crashed hers, claiming she was hit by a tornado) and some figurative (the autogyro’s inventor and financer died at age 41 – in the crash of a conventional airplane).

     Flying Cars is not a story of what might have been – it is a story of what really was. And therein lies its fascination. Flying cars do, and did, exist, but despite some heavyweight interest in developing them for the mass market, they never became commercially viable. Glen Curtiss, who received the first-ever official pilot’s license and was founder of what became the aircraft company Curtiss-Wright, created an “autoplane” with encouragement from telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Auto magnate Henry Ford ordered his engineers to make an affordable airplane that could be sold for the price of a Model T, and the result was the Sky Flivver (1926); but production was stopped after a pilot died during a promotional tour, although Ford continued to believe in “a combination airplane and motorcar.” Buckminster Fuller designed, but never tried to build, a flying car that would require inflatable wings and jet engines – which did not exist at the time (1928).

     The storied names are only part of the tale of flying cars. Far more of the dreamers and inventors who have been intrigued by this concept are very little known: Waldo Waterman, Theodore P. Hall, Daniel Zuck, Moulton B. Taylor and others. What is amazing is to realize is how much success flying-car advocates had: a number of their creations were built, really did work, and were put into limited use, at least for a time. The old argument against combining an automobile (whose parts requirements make it heavy) with an airplane (whose flight requirements mean it must be light) surfaces again and again in these stories, and is laid to rest again and again by success after success – only to be revived the next time someone comes up with a flying-car concept. Flying cars also ran repeatedly into geopolitical obstacles: the first wave of them in modern times had to be set aside so the focus could shift to military planes to be developed for World War I, and the second wave lost out to the equally war-focused development of helicopters in the run-up to World War II. In more-recent times, ever-increasing safety regulations have required cars to have more and more equipment that weighs them down and increases their complexity, making integration of an automobile with an airplane harder than ever – although backyard tinkerers still try and sometimes succeed, as Glass points out.

     Nor are tinkerers the only ones interested in flying cars. Glass’ final chapter tries to look “Into the Future” from the standpoint of today, discussing a modern aircar built around a $30,000 Lotus, a Massachusetts firm that says it has a design that switches from car to airplane in 30 seconds, a “carplane” being developed in Germany that is designed to switch from electric-car mode to internal-combustion-engine-powered airplane, and more. None of these is a mass-market vehicle along the lines envisioned by Henry Ford or autogyro pioneer Harold Pitcairn, and as safety regulations become ever more extensive and worries grow about the use of airspace (by drones as well as aircraft containing humans), the likelihood of “a plane-car in every garage” looks more and more like a never-to-be-realized dream. Still, “never say never” would be a pretty good motto for the innovators profiled in Flying Cars, since they were repeatedly told a car-plane combination could not possibly work, and repeatedly proved the doubters wrong, even if these amazing vehicles never did make it into general use. Yet.

(++++) PAPERBACK RECONSIDERATIONS

Discipline the Brazelton Way, 2^nd Edition. By T. Berry Brazelton, M.D., and Joshua Sparrow, M.D. Da Capo. $12.99.

The Time of My Life: A Righteous Brother’s Memoir. By Bill Medley with Mike Marino. Da Capo. $16.99.

     It has been a dozen years since the first edition of Discipline the Brazelton Way appeared, and a lot has changed since then – as the introduction to the new second edition points out. But despite all the technological and societal change of the last decade-plus, T. Berry Brazelton and Joshua Sparrow believe that their basic approach to disciplining children remains valid, and if anything is even more important for parents to master today, when kids are exposed to so much more (for good or ill) because of the Internet and the constant barrage of video information. Based on the Brazelton/Sparrow Touchpoints books, but constructed to be easy to read and subject-specific – and thus simple to turn to when a parent needs help in a crisis – Discipline the Brazelton Way shows that even in today’s world, discipline is not too big a subject to be presented usefully in a short (fewer than 200 pages), easy-to-read form. The subject of discipline seems huge and, to many parents, even overwhelming, but Brazelton and Sparrow make it easy to handle by offering topic breakdowns focused not only on a child’s age but also on emotional and moral development, self-esteem, humiliation, consequences, and such problems as biting, bullying, lying, talking back and many more. For example, one especially useful chapter is called “Ways to Discipline” and is subdivided into three sections: “Usually Worth a Try” (warnings, silence, time-outs); “Sometimes Useful” (taking away toys or TV, leaving the scene); and “Not Helpful” (spanking, shame, early bedtime). Brazelton and Sparrow are well aware that parenting itself has changed since the first edition of this book appeared in 2003, and they devote some time to forms of what might be termed competitive parenting: “tiger mothers,” “happiest kid on the block parenting,” and other fads. They discuss these approaches as objectively as possible, for instance by saying about “helicopter parenting” that “the world may be more dangerous in some ways, and the tolerance for risk is far less than it was when children were given more room to roam.” However, they do not let these recent developments distract them – and, by extension, the parents for whom they write – from the basic need for and tremendous importance of discipline, whose aim is eventually to create self-discipline as a child grows toward adulthood. The chapter called “Discipline as Learning: The Five Steps,” for example, is worth reading more than once, explaining as it does that parents must start by understanding a child’s misbehavior, then discover what happened, then confront and contain, then obtain and gauge the child’s reaction, and only in the final step move on to “Consequences, Reparations, and Forgiveness.” The sequence is enormously important, yet far too many overstressed parents are more likely to start at the final step, with consequences, than with the first one. Nonjudgmentally, Brazelton and Sparrow explain why this is a bad idea, not because of moral or ethical reasons but because it does not, in the long run, serve the purpose of discipline – which, again, is to produce children who eventually become self-disciplined. Updated enough to be readily understandable in today’s hyper-busy world, but solidly old-fashioned enough to help parents ground their children in appropriate behavior patterns, Discipline the Brazelton Way, 2^nd Edition is as valuable now as the book’s first edition was more than a decade ago.

     The paperback version of The Time of My Life, which originally appeared in hardcover in 2014, is neither more nor less useful today than the book was when it first came out. This (+++) book is a typical music-world memoir by a typical looking-back-on-my-life pop musician, Bill Medley, who along with Bobby Hatfield (1940-2003) made up the Righteous Brothers. It is certainly understandable that onetime pop stars would like to write their own autobiographies (often with help, provided here by Mike Marino); the aging baby-boom generation is presumably the audience for Medley’s very straightforward and unsurprising revelations. “Even though I’d not always walked the narrow path, my family had been very involved in the Presbyterian Church, and I knew the basics. John [Wimber] was just exploring Christianity, and once he pulled me aside and asked when I knew about the Christian faith. I told him what I knew. …Until the day he died I always loved and respected John. He was one of the few guys I knew who did more than talk the talk, he lived it.” “I hired Dean Martin’s comedy writer and a band with backup singers and put together a show. Everybody who was anybody in Hollywood was there opening night. It was unbelievable. Sammy Davis, Jr., was supposed to introduce me but at the last minute he had to drop out so they called in Bobby Darin. …Pretty soon the whole crowd was [shouting]. I looked down and saw Bobby Darin jivin’ and clapping, and I knew I was going to be okay. It was a thrill.” This cliché-ridden reminiscence writing is the whole point of Medley’s book, along with the persistent name-dropping – presumably a main attraction for the book’s intended audience. Medley helpfully includes a chapter called “Relationships” in which he talks about Kenny Rogers, Kim Basinger, Waylon Jennings, Keith Richards and the Rolling Stones, Whoopi Goldberg, Sylvester Stallone, Johnny Carson, Glen Campbell and others. And there are the expected 16 pages of black-and-white photos, the last of which shows the much-older Righteous Brothers and is captioned, “From a relationship standpoint, my last years with Bobby were my best years.” The book is not free of heartache (expected) and heartbreak (also expected); it is, after all, about someone in the entertainment industry. And it does contain some offhand remarks about that industry that are rather interesting, as when Medley says that a new recording of Unchained Melody “inspired us to re-record a whole ‘reunion’ album of our hits. Honestly, it was shit. It was a stupid thing to do because you can never really remake those records. It was just that we’d given away all of our rights and this was a way to get them back. Artistically, a stupid idea; financially, a wonderful idea. The album went platinum.” A similar if somewhat milder comment seems accurate about The Time of My Life: artistically, there is not much here, but financially, it may do well for Medley (born 1940) at a time when he, his fans and his music all seem to grow fainter, each in its own way, every day.

(++++) TAKING THE LIGHTER SIDE SERIOUSLY

Contemporaries of the Strauss Family, Volume 1: Johann Schrammel, Iosef Ivanovici, Joseph Lanner, Philip Fahrbach Jr., Oscar Fetrás, Joseph Hellmesberger Jr., Carl Millöcker, Alfons Czibulka, Kurt Schmid, Joseph Gung’l, Carl Michael Ziehrer, Paul Lincke. Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice conducted by John Georgiadis. Marco Polo. $16.99.

Contemporaries of the Strauss Family, Volume 2: Iosef Ivanovici, Paul Lincke, Carl Zeller, Julius Fučik, Karl Komzák II, Franz von Suppé, Juventino Rosas, Josef Hellmesberger Jr., Joseph Labitzky, Oscar Fetrás, Johann Schrammel. Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice conducted by John Georgiadis. Marco Polo. $16.99.

Brahms: Variations on a Theme by Haydn for Two Pianos, Op. 56b; Sonata in F minor for Two Pianos, Op. 34b. Eleonora Spina and Michele Benignetti, pianos. Brilliant Classics. $7.99.

Satiesfictions: Promenades with Erik Satie—A Film by Anne-Kathrin Peitz & Youlian Tabakov. Accentus Music DVD. $24.99.

     An absolutely wonderful two-CD offering from Marco Polo does something that is long overdue: it acknowledges just how good dance music was in Europe in the 19^th century and early 20^th even when the Strauss family was not writing it. Popular music today is so dull and formulaic that it is laughable (highly recommended: the YouTube video called Four Chords by The Axis of Awesome). But there was nothing funny about dance music in the Strausses’ time, and although certainly much of it was written to formulas – there were specific requirements for quadrilles, waltzes, galops, polkas and the like – there was tremendous inventiveness in applying the formulas, which is why the lovely but rather foursquare waltzes by Johann Strauss Sr. became far more symphonic in the hands of Johann Strauss Jr. and even more so in the hands of Josef Strauss. Besides, dance music in this time period was big business, and the venues where it was performed were highly competitive; hence the disputes between the bands of Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss Sr., and between Johann Strauss Sr. and Johann Strauss Jr., and between Johann Strauss Jr. and Carl Michael Ziehrer, and so on. The simple fact is that there was a great deal of excellent music written in a variety of dance forms in the late 19^th century and early 20^th, but very little of it is known by most people now except for the creations of the Strauss family. Hence the delightfulness of the 32 works on these two Marco Polo CDs, many of them world premières and many orchestrated and/or reconstructed by John Georgiadis, who leads the Czech Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Pardubice with enthusiasm and clear enjoyment of the material. A very few names here are quite familiar (Lanner and Suppé), and a few are somewhat less so (Ziehrer, Millöcker, Komzák). A few pieces have retained a special place even today: the march from Lincke’s Berliner Luft always features in the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s concerts, for example, but heard in Volume 2 here is the operetta’s overture, which includes only a bit of the march -- plus some other fine tunes. Most of the material here will be wholly unknown to a modern audience. There are some really fine rediscoveries, notably the music of Iosef Ivanovici (1845-1902), and there are some genuine surprises (Kurt Schmid was born in 1942 and is still very much alive, but is included here because he continues to write music in the old Viennese style, as is evident from the Anniversary March played in Volume 1). Even the music by the more-familiar composers will be new to listeners: Georgiadis and the Johann Strauss Society of Great Britain scoured libraries for manuscripts of unpublished works or resurrected published pieces unheard for well over a century, no matter their provenance. The result of all the painstaking research, reconstruction, rehearsal and release of this material is two-and-a-half hours (on the two CDs) of absolute joy, a window into a vanished world and vanished time in which “light” music was a serious business and the composers and purveyors of dances produced – all right, in some cases cranked out – wonderful tunes, marvelous rhythms, lovely harmonies, and an overarching sense of elegant fun whose doom seems obvious in retrospect but was by no means clear at the time, and which certainly deserves a better fate than to fade into oblivion forever. The revival of these pieces and these composers makes for splendid listening tinged with appropriate wistfulness for a time long past.

     Brahms, who at one point wrote that the Blue Danube Waltz was unfortunately not by him, appreciated and occasionally wrote light music – his Hungarian Dances were a big success, as was his Academic Festival Overture. But he is scarcely thought of as a “light” composer. Nevertheless, his Variations on a Theme by Haydn (which theme is apparently not by Haydn after all, so the piece is now often called the St. Anthony Variations) have many lighter moments, and they are particularly well realized in a performance by Eleonora Spina and Michele Benignetti of the original two-piano version of the score. The orchestral version of this work is far better known nowadays than the two-piano one, but the delicacy and clever interplay of the pianos throughout the eight variations make the keyboard version very much worth hearing and not at all duplicative of the impression made by Brahms’ later orchestration of the music. Spina and Benignetti handle the marchlike character of the basic theme particularly well, and the two pianists nicely bring out the varying characterizations implicit in the different variations, with two-against-three rhythms here, steady and pleasant melodic flow there, grace here, rhythmic insistence there, and real contrapuntal mastery in the finale. This is an altogether winning performance. It is paired on a very well-priced Brilliant Classics disc with a far more serious work: the two-piano version of Brahms’ Piano Quintet, Op. 34a. Even more than in the Haydn Variations, this two-piano piece, Op.34b, is far less known and far less often played than is the work’s other form. On pianos, the sonata sounds something like a study for a symphony, from its unison opening for the two instruments through its very extended, highly chromatic first movement, and on through a four-movement form that concludes with a rondo that recalls earlier material and employs techniques such as counterpoint and thematic overlays. The basic music here is familiar to anyone who knows the quintet, but the sound of the piece is quite different from that of the work for piano and strings. And again, Spina and Benignetti delve into the material with great skill and bring out its balances – and imbalances – to impressive effect, with the result that the sonata Op. 34b seems less like an alternative to the quintet and more like a work with something different to communicate, an effective piece in its own right that just happens to contain the same music as Op. 34a.

     The blend of lightness and seriousness in music reached a pinnacle of sorts in the life and work – the two are inextricably tied together – of Erik Satie (1866-1925). Satie courted notoriety, reveled in it, acted the part of an eccentric (complete with umbrella and bowler hat) while actually being an eccentric, and managed in his music and life to anticipate or take part in movements ranging from dada to surrealism to minimalism. The 56-minute film Satiesfictions, now available as an Accentus Music DVD, is an attempt to use modern movie techniques to bring clarity to Satie’s life and music while also celebrating both. It is a very clever production, showcasing Satie as an early practitioner of what we would now call public relations, as a sort of Parisian Dorothy Parker (he constantly wrote remarks, often very witty ones, within and about his music), and a bit of a proto-Gerard Hoffnung (one of the cleverest elements of the film is the way it turns Satie’s drawings into cartoons). The film is, however, a rarefied one of deliberately limited appeal: viewers unfamiliar with Man Ray, Georges Auric, Pierre Bertin and Jean Cocteau will find themselves somewhat bewildered by what goes on, and those who do not already know Satie’s music and the iconoclasm that pervades it may have some difficulty figuring out what all the fuss is about. There are, for example, scenes of pianists playing stacked pianos and performers in unexpected locations (swimming pools, train stations) turning into “musical furniture.” To understand this, it helps a great deal to know that after Satie’s death, friends who entered his apartment found two grand pianos stacked upon each other – the upper containing musical manuscripts previously unknown or thought to have been lost, some of which would later be published as “furniture music.” Viewers who do not get all the “in” references and cross-references here may nevertheless enjoy hearing bits and pieces of Satie’s music – which was already bits and pieces when written – and may find bonus material such as “Stock Market Report à la Satie” amusing, if largely unintelligible. There is a chaotic if not quite frenzied feel to Satiesfictions, as if Anne-Kathrin Peitz and Youlian Tabakov decided that Satie was a bizarre enough character so they could do pretty much anything with his life and music and would in so doing illuminate the topic. That makes for a rather odd and self-indulgent movie that will be great fun for Satie aficionados, who will find it a (++++) production (perhaps four stacked grand pianos would be a better rating). But, in fairness, it has to be noted that the film makes no attempt really to explain Satie, his time or his art, and is too self-consciously self-aware of its self-referential nature to get more than a (+++) rating among those who are uninitiated into Satie-ism and what could be called Sati(r)e.

(++++) BRASS AND BEYOND

Handel: Music for the Royal Fireworks; Concerti a Due Cori Nos. 1-3. Zefiro conducted by Alfredo Bernardini. Arcana. $18.99.

Haydn: Horn Concertos Nos. 1 and 2; Michael Haydn: Horn Concerto; Mozart: Horn Concerto in E-flat (reconstructed). Felix Klieser, horn; Württemburgisches Kammerorchester Heilbronn conducted by Ruben Gazarian. Berlin Classics. $18.99.

Vivaldi: La Stravaganza—12 Concertos, Op. 4. Federico Guglielmo, violin and conducting L’Arte dell’Arco. Brilliant Classics. $11.99 (2 CDs).

Vivaldi: Concerto in C for Two Trumpets and Orchestra, RV 537; Concerto in C for Organ, Violin, Cello and Orchestra, RV 554a; Sonata in C for Oboe, Violin, Organ and Chalumeau, RV 779; Arias from “Motezuma,” “Il Teuzzone,” “Tito Manlio,” “Catone in Utica,” “Scanderbeg” and “La Fida Ninfa.” Gabriele Cassone and Matteo Frigé, natural trumpets; Francesca Cassinari, soprano; Marta Fumagalli, mezzo-soprano; Roberto Balconi, alto; Mauro Borgioni, bass; Ensemble Pian & Forte conducted by Francesco Fanna. Dynamic. $19.99.

     Splendid playing is a particular joy of all these releases, with the brass especially full and resonant in Zefiro’s performance of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks and three wind concerti (whose music is drawn mainly from the composer’s oratorio choruses – Handel was an inveterate and very adept re-purposer). These performances date to 2006 but sound as fresh as can be, with very quick tempos in the faster movements, sensitive phrasing in the slower sections, close attention paid to Baroque style, and overall enthusiasm that comes through delightfully in all four of the suites. There have been more grandiose recordings of Music for the Royal Fireworks, which was, after all, intended as an outdoor display piece and features accessible themes and a celebratory style; but Anthony Bernardini and Zefiro excel in the musicianly way they approach the music, refusing to regard it as an 18^th-century potboiler, even though that is in some ways what it is. The brass is so good in Music for the Royal Fireworks, so resonant and so full-sounding, that it tends to steal the show from the other instruments – as indeed occurs in the second and third wind concertos as well (the first omits the four horns that are present in the others). One example among many: the fifth movement of the third wind concerto, which is based on Ode for the Birthday of Queen Anne and the 1732 version of Esther, offers delightfully scurrying strings with horn passages that resound in triumph above them to excellent effect. This Arcana CD contains well-known music, but the performances’ level of detail and expressiveness make the pieces sound fresh, and the especially fine brass lends an air of splendor to the whole disc.

     The brass playing is also first-rate, albeit without any claim to authenticity of instrumentation, on a new Berlin Classics CD featuring Felix Klieser, who was born without arms and plays the French horn with his feet, using remarkable breath control to achieve the effects that other horn players manage by hand-stopping their instruments. Klieser’s extraordinary story is not the point of this disc of music by Joseph and Michael Haydn and Mozart, although Klieser’s accomplishments inevitably underlie the whole production. What matters here is the music, which Klieser plays with remarkable sensitivity, fine phrasing, excellent cadenzas, and truly astonishing breath control. Haydn’s Concerto No. 1 – the only horn concerto known for sure to be by him – is stately and measured here in its first two movements, with a particularly fine trill in the second movement’s cadenza, and is then outgoing and bright in its finale. Concerto No. 2, which stylistically appears to be an earlier work than No. 1 whether or not Haydn wrote it, gets an equally sensitive and carefully wrought performance; and although Klieser plays a modern horn, the Württemburgisches Kammerorchester Heilbronn under Ruben Gazarian backs him up with apt attention to period style. Klieser and Gazarian also make a high-quality team for the other, less-known works here. Michael Haydn’s concerto, sometimes called a concertino, may have originated as part of a now-lost serenade, which would account for the unusual movement sequence of slow-fast-minuet. The music is more stylized and more Baroque in feeling than that of Michael’s older brother, constructed with elegance and the sort of formal balance that characterizes much of Michael’s still-underrated music. Klieser’s horn is if anything a touch too prominent here, thoroughly overshadowing the strings and continuo, but the playing itself is top-notch, with fine pacing, phrasing and rhythmic vitality. Also here is a reconstructed two-movement horn concerto by Mozart, cobbled together from two movements with the catalogue numbers K370a and K371. The movements appear to date to 1781, making them earlier than any of the four extant complete concertos (the earliest, No. 2, dates to 1783). The music is certainly Mozart’s, and even if the piece is by its nature fragmentary, it is good to hear something new, or rather rediscovered, in Mozart’s horn production. Here too Klieser plays with care and sensitivity and is well backed up by Gazarian and the ensemble. Because this is a CD rather than a DVD, Klieser’s appearance and performing method never become distractions from the music, and that is what Klieser himself wants: he has said he simply wants to be known as a musician, and on the basis of this recording, he is certainly a very fine one.

     Brass is absent in the latest Brilliant Classics release featuring outstanding Baroque violinist Federico Guglielmo, but virtuosity certainly is not, and here it is coupled with meticulous attention to period style and a willingness to rethink compositions that appear formulaic at first glance but that Guglielmo shows to have considerable individuality. Guglielmo and his ensemble, L’Arte dell’Arco, previously released a splendid L’Estro Armonico, Vivaldi’s Op. 3, and now complement it with La Stravaganza, Op. 4. Despite the title, these 12 concertos are something less than extravagant, and in fact are formally less forward-looking than Op. 3. But they contain some harmonic experimentation that is interesting, including an instance of enharmonic modulation in No. 7 that is well ahead of Vivaldi’s time. As with L’Estro Armonico, Guglielmo presents the concertos – seven in major keys and five in minor – in an order that appears arbitrary, although he does explain that the works on the first CD (Nos. 1, 11, 9, 4, 7 and 2) have a stronger ensemble focus, while those on the second disc (Nos. 12, 8, 5, 10, 6 and 3) are more strongly soloistic. This is a matter of degree, however, and most listeners will likely notice no significant differences in the structure of these concertos or their handling of the solo violin. What they will notice, however, is the strength and forthrightness with which Guglielmo plays the music, as well as the very unusual sound of his Mantuan instrument, built by Tommaso Balestrieri around 1760 and having a number of quirks and downright peculiarities. This is an instrument that sounds notably different in different ranges, a reality with which Guglielmo works carefully in order to showcase the differing sound of the various Op. 4 concertos and, indeed, of the individual movements within them. There is something exhilarating in Guglielmo’s handling of Vivaldi, whom he refuses to deem a fusty composer of formula-based concertos but instead regards as an innovative, clever and instrumentally highly adept creator of music whose individuation Guglielmo seems determined to bring out at every opportunity. The result is a La Stravaganza that is, if not extravagant, intelligent, musically refined and wholly successful.

     Vivaldi did write for brass, although not to anywhere near the extent he wrote for strings – he was, after all, himself a violinist of considerable skill. A fascinatingly variegated CD on the Dynamic label gives a more-varied and more-nuanced portrait of Vivaldi as a composer than listeners usually encounter. Considerable thought obviously went into the assembly of this program featuring the exceptionally fine period group Ensemble Pian & Forte under the direction of Francesco Fanna. The two concertos and sonata here are all in C major, but the featured instruments vary very widely and Vivaldi’s writing for them differs dramatically from piece to piece. The two-trumpet concerto is especially attractive, doubly so because it is here played on the natural trumpets for which it was written, not on the later keyed trumpet – whose sound is very different, much more even and smooth and much more able to cut through an accompanying ensemble, but for those reasons much less distinctive and much less colorful. The concerto for organ, violin and cello is a rarity, showcasing three separate instruments, each of which is given a chance to display virtuosity within the compass of its capabilities. And the sonata, which includes the bright sound of the oboe with the deep voice of the chalumeau (predecessor of the clarinet, whose lowest register is still called chalumeau), attractively combines the woodwinds with violin and organ for a highly unusual sound. The vocal excerpts pale somewhat in comparison, even though they too often include trumpets. However, hearing any of Vivaldi’s operatic music is an unusual experience: only about 20 scores of his operas survive, some of them in fragmentary form, although he claimed to have written 94 (a matter made more confusing by the then-common practice of retitling works and reusing material from one work in another or several others). All Vivaldi’s known operas are essentially in opera seria form, which means the recitatives carry the plot along while the arias are used to express characters’ reactions to events and emotional responses to each other and to what is happening. The seven arias here, from six operas (there are two from Tito Manlio), are not especially distinctive, but all show off Vivaldi’s vocal-writing abilities and provide the soloists, especially soprano Francesca Cassinari (who sings four of the pieces), with opportunities to showcase their vocal range and control. The absence of texts for the arias is unfortunate: the expressions of these characters may be formal and formulaic, but knowing the words would help listeners distinguish between arias using the trumpet to underline a character’s martial prowess and ones using it to indicate the character’s anger (two common reasons for including the trumpet in this context in Vivaldi’s era). Even without the texts, this is a very unusual Vivaldi disc, showing sides of the composer not often encountered and rounding out the portrait of Il Prete Rosso to show him as far more wide-ranging in capabilities and compositional skills than he is sometimes considered to be by people who know him only through his violin concertos.