(+++) VOYAGES OF SELF-DISCOVERY

Skinnybones. By Barbara Park. Yearling. $6.99.

Skinnybones 2: Almost Starring Skinnybones. By Barbara Park. Yearling. $6.99.

The Kid in the Red Jacket. By Barbara Park. Yearling. $6.99.

Storm in the Valley. By Lee Passarella. Enigma Press/Ravenswood. $9.99.

Cold Comfort, Ill Wind. By Lee Passarella. White Stag/Ravenswood. $9.99.

     In light of the longstanding hit that Barbara Park (1947-2013) had with her Junie B. Jones books, it was probably inevitable that she kept looking for a boy-oriented success that would do as well as those girl-oriented ones. She never quite found it, but she certainly kept trying, as with her stories of Alex Frankovitch (the Skinnybones books, originally dating to 1982 and 1988) and Howard Jeeter (The Kid in the Red Jacket, originally published in 1987). Both Alex and Howard are reasonably likable, reasonably typical preteens, engaged in typical preteen hijinks and having typical preteen angst and worries – well, typical in comparatively sanitized, suburban-setting books, at any rate. Park tries hard, in fact rather too hard, to make the boys amusing and even endearing. One of the first occurrences in the first book about Alex, for example, involves his response to a school assignment to bring in a picture of what you are going to be when you grow up. Alex brings a picture of the leprechaun used to advertise Lucky Charms cereal, and when the teacher asks why he wants to be a leprechaun, he says he does not want to be one – he wants to be a pilot – but he is going to be a leprechaun, and the assignment said to bring a picture of what you are going to be, not what you want to be. This is an elaborate “Alex is really short, but his parents keep assuring him that he will grow soon enough” scene, and it does not work very well, because it seems too complex and too forced – as does a lot of the plotting in the Skinnybones books. The first of them has Alex striving mightily to be a good baseball player and never managing to be one, but ending up successful in a different way when an entry he sends to a contest about cat food is chosen as the winner and he is going to get to appear in a TV commercial. Almost Starring Skinnybones is the sequel, in which Alex has a whole series of misadventures while trying to prove that if he isn’t a great baseball player, he can certainly be a big TV star. “Real life is almost never like the movies,” Alex discovers in what passes for a revelation here. He hates what he has to do in the commercial, and his friends think the whole thing is awful, and so he decides that he needs to find some other way to impress everyone. That situation leads to Alex’s part in the school play, A Christmas Carol, in which he wants to be Scrooge but is cast at Tiny Tim and decides to make life impossible for the boy who is cast as Scrooge – until, in a not-quite-believable scene, Alex realizes he is being, well, mean, and he helps the other boy do a great job, becoming in the process, in a teacher’s words, a “quiet hero. The very best kind.” But Alex is not quite satisfied with that, and almost turns mean again at the book’s end, but then manages not to turn mean, and this is supposed to be somehow very satisfying to readers. But it really smacks of too much authorial manipulation and not enough natural flow from Alex’s personality. In the Junie B. Jones books, Park managed to make the actions result largely from Junie’s personality. Here, though, things just happen because the author needs them to, and Alex does not have very much personality at all.

     The same is true of Howard, although The Boy in the Red Jacket explores some themes a bit more seriously than the Skinnybones books do. Howard’s family has moved across the country, and Howard is feeling upset and displaced. He is stuck in a new school where he does not have any friends and in a neighborhood where nobody knows him or wants to spend time with him, except for a six-year-old girl named Molly who has had some difficult times: she lives with her grandmother because her parents have divorced and, rather unbelievably, gone their separate ways – both of them without her. Molly is typecast as an annoying little sister (except that she is not Howard’s sister), and Howard is just plain mean to her, which takes care of readers developing much empathy for him despite the undoubted difficulties he is facing because of his family’s relocation. It may be that preteen boys will find Howard’s discomfort with Molly and his nastiness to her appealing, but Park herself seems unsure, since in one crucial scene she has Howard and another boy tease Molly mercilessly by taking her doll away from her, while a third boy – one with whom Howard would like to be friends – gets disgusted and walks away. So Park realizes, and presumably wants readers to realize, that Howard is not a very admirable character. But then he becomes one toward the end of the book, which makes for a pleasant turnaround if not a highly believable one. In Howard’s case as in Alex’s, the nice actions that follow the not-nice ones smack of authorial necessity rather than any feeling that maybe one protagonist or the other has somehow matured or come to his senses. Park paces the Alex and Howard books well, and her writing is, as always, quite easy to read. But these books have a forced feeling about them: they do not flow naturally, their positive endings do not tie clearly to what has come before, and there is little sense that the central characters have grown in any significant way. The boys have changed, yes, but that is because Park wants them to change, not because they actually seem to have learned anything about themselves or about life.

     The circumstances and the concerns underlying them are far more dire in Lee Passarella’s two Civil War novels for young readers, Storm in the Valley and Cold Comfort, Ill Wind. The coming-of-age aspects here are those of a much earlier and much more perilous time than anything to be found in contemporary books by Park and similar authors – although there are some parallels, notably the focus on the binding ties of family and how they matter even when family members are separated by distance and traumatic events. Passarella is not interested in revisiting the “rightness” or “wrongness” of the causes of the Civil War: his characters are of the Confederacy, but his focus is resolutely on their personal situations and their response to battlefield events, not on the grand strategies and political/moral issues through which the war is typically viewed. Those may matter to the leaders in Washington and Richmond, but what matters to brothers Monk and John Tyler Philips, and to all those with whom they come in contact, is day-to-day survival under difficult and often deadly circumstances. Passarella does not dwell on such matters but does not evade them, either. For instance, in Storm in the Valley, when a character named Matt is injured by a wood splinter after a cannonball hits a fence, another character says that Matt is hurt. “‘Hain’t nothing,’ Matt grumbled in answer, but when he put his hand up to the bloody trail, he realized that the wound was something. Later, the surgeon would dig an inch-long piece of wood out of his cheek.” More strongly, in a scene that may be difficult for sheltered contemporary readers to take, Passarella evokes the atmosphere of a military medical facility of the time: “Outside the cabin that they used for a hospital, a pile of severed limbs grew higher and higher as the day progressed. Hands, feet, arms, legs: bloody though they were, they had a strange blue cast – a waxy, foreign look to them, as though they weren’t real. But in fact, Monk knew they were all too real.”

     Storm in the Valley and Cold Comfort, Ill Wind are coming-of-age novels, novels of self-discovery, and thus stand in a long line of war-based books that includes The Red Badge of Courage and The Naked and the Dead and many, many others. Passarella calmly accepts the horrors of war and the meaning it develops through generations: Monk’s uncle, who raised him, served in the Mexican-American War, and the impetus for the book’s separation-of-brothers theme lies in Monk being a drummer boy while John Tyler, who is older, is a cadet at the Virginia Military Academy. A family with strong roots both in the military and in Virginia may be one to which modern young readers can relate even though the Philips family situation likely differs markedly from that of people reading their story. Separation and reuniting remain the crux of both books: in Cold Comfort, Ill Wind, for example, the brothers meet on a battlefield but are soon pulled apart again after John Tyler is wounded. Passarella knows his Civil War history, knows, for example, what happened in Staunton, Virginia, at the battle of New Market, and what occurred later at Petersburg. Famous names from the conflict appear repeatedly in the books: Generals Early and Sheridan, Lee and Grant. But they are not the prime movers of the action or major players in the nitty-gritty of battle after battle: like the political leaders of North and South, the high-ranking officers use the lower-ranking characters on whom Passarella focuses largely as pieces on a chessboard, with Monk and John Tyler as pawns, however honorable they see themselves and their cause as being. As the tide turns decisively against the Confederacy in Cold Comfort, Ill Wind – the Shenandoah Valley battles of the earlier book go better for the South – Monk, the books’ primary protagonist, starts to look out more for himself and his best friend and comrade-in-arms, Bummer Crosse. The worries of the mid-19^th century may be unfamiliar to today’s young readers – at one point John Tyler thinks about whether a fellow soldier may “get chewed up by Yankee minié balls or come down with cholera or some such” – but the worries of family members about each other will be familiar ones. Cold Comfort, Ill Wind ends inconclusively, indicating that Passarella intends to create a third book in this series; that also makes sense in terms of the sequence of Civil War battles about which he writes. The language and circumstances of the characters may take some getting used to for readers today, but those who do become involved in these two books will surely want to find out what happens to the Philips boys – whose eventual fate is unknown, although that of the Confederacy is becoming increasingly certain.

(++++) VOCAL EXPLORATIONS

Carl Michael Ziehrer: Die Landstreicher. Daniel Behle, Thomas Dewald, Maria Leyer, Karl Fäth, Anneli Pfeffer, Boris Leisenheimer, Dominik Wortig, Caroline Stein, Kay Stiefermann, Espen Fegran, Arndt Schumacher; WDR Rundfunkchor Köln and WDR Funkhausorchester Köln conducted by Helmuth Froschauer. Capriccio. $16.99.

Simon Mayr: Saffo. Andrea Lauren Brown, Jaewon Yun, Markus Schäfer, Marie Sande Papenmeyer, Katharina Ruckgaber, Daniel Preis; Members of the Bavarian State Opera Chorus, Simon Mayr Chorus and Concerto de Bassus conducted by Franz Hauk. Naxos. $25.99 (2 CDs).

Ravel: L’Heure espagnole; Don Quichotte à Dulcinée. Luca Lombardo, Isabelle Druet, Frédéric Antoun, Marc Barrard, Nicolas Courjal, François Le Roux; Orchestre National de Lyon conducted by Leonard Slatkin. Naxos. $12.99.

Michael G. Cunningham: Choral Works. Kühn Choir conducted by Marek Vorlíček. Navona. $14.99.

     Carl Michael Ziehrer (1843-1922) was something of a scamp, if you like him, or an outright thief, if you do not. Either way, he would seem to be just the right composer to set to music a libretto by Leopold Krenn and Carl Lindau called Die Landstreicher. That translates as “The Vagabonds,” but the meaning is a bit different from that of “tramps” in the Depression era and Charlie Chaplin films. These vagabonds are essentially itinerant ne’er-do-wells and occasional thieves, as necessary and as opportunities present themselves. They sound a bit like the composer himself: Ziehrer, who in his first concert with his own band passed off music by his teacher as his own, created in Die Landstreicher a lovely lied called Sei gepriesen, du lauschige Nacht that used the tune of Johann Strauss Jr.’s Spirals waltz. The waltz long predated Die Landstreicher, and Ziehrer probably thought no one would notice; besides, Die Landstreicher itself had its première only three weeks after Strauss’ death in 1899, so Viennese audiences presumably had Strauss on their minds in ways unconnected to Ziehrer’s work (which was quite successful and was hailed at the time as a worthy successor to those by Strauss himself). The plot of Die Landstreicher involves a typically operetta-ish set of complex trifles in which the vagabonds find a valuable necklace, are arrested for having stolen it (which they actually did not), and encounter everyone from a judge more concerned with his mistress (for whom he wants the necklace) than with justice – and a prince who wants the necklace for his mistress but intends to swap it for a cheap copy because, although he loves her and all that, he does not love her to that degree. Through a series of machinations and misunderstandings, the prince’s lady eventually gets the copy and the prince gets the original – which, it turns out, is also a fake, since the prince had been swindled in buying the necklace well before the operetta began. The joie de vivre and sentimentality of fin de siècle Vienna are very much in evidence in Die Landstreicher, and the performance on Capriccio is a very fine one, led by Helmuth Froschauer with considerable verve and style. All the singers are fine if scarcely outstanding: they fill their roles very well, with the interplay between two feckless lieutenants (Boris Leisenheimer and Dominik Wortig), whose uniforms are stolen by the vagabonds (Thomas Dewald and Maria Leyer), being particularly well done. The only major disappointment here is an all-too-typical one: there is no libretto and no link to one online – and the 20-page booklet spends 11 pages detailing the background of the performers, space that would have been much better used, if not for a full libretto, then for a more-extensive plot summary than is in fact provided. Operetta plots, it is true, tend to be both complicated and inconsequential, and certainly Ziehrer’s tuneful handling of Die Landstreicher is highly enjoyable even if one cannot understand the words. But really, vocal works offered without words are in their own way a bit of a theft of enjoyment from listeners – even when the pieces are by somewhat shady characters such as Ziehrer.

     The latest Naxos recording of a major work by Johann Simon Mayr (1763-1845) fares better on the word-offering front: the libretto in German, with English translation, is available online. Bravo! And a bravo is in order for this world première recording of Saffo as well. This was Mayr’s first opera (dating to 1794) and had many elements of opera seria despite its happy ending, which may seem forced to modern audiences but which helped Mayr gain popularity in his own time. Mayr, like Hummel, has a style that bridges the Classical and Romantic periods – one reason both composers have long been neglected, as transitional figures often are – but Saffo ossia I riti d'Apollo Leucadio has many original touches, notably in orchestration, at which Mayr was quite skilled. If the characters and melodies are by and large formulaic, the work’s development is handled very adeptly, and the title role gives a soprano plenty of opportunities to hold forth with genuine bel canto enthusiasm. Andrea Lauren Brown is not quite equal to all the challenges, but for the most part she emotes with feeling and skill even when her vocal gifts fall short in some of the more-florid, more-challenging passages. The story primarily involves Saffo’s love for the hunter Faone – a castrato role that is here sung by soprano Jaewon Yun. Initially rebuffed by Faone, who still mourns the death of his wife, Cirene, Saffo is ready to climb a rock from which unhappy lovers cast themselves into the sea. Then Faone has a dream in which Cirene asks him to have pity on Saffo, and so the two are united at the end. There are several impressive voices here, notably those of tenor Markus Schäfer as Alceo (whose singing of the male version of bel canto elements is unusually good), soprano Katharine Ruckgaber as Laodamia, and tenor Daniel Preis as Euricleo. These are small supporting roles, but are handled so nicely that they give Saffo a sense of depth and solidity – one that the chorus and orchestra enhance through their excellent performances under the sure-handed and intelligent direction of Franz Hauk, a strong advocate of Mayr’s work. Like much of Mayr’s music – and much of Ziehrer’s, for that matter – Saffo is well worth discovering or rediscovering.

     There is rediscovery to be had as well in the latest first-rate Leonard Slatkin recording of music by Ravel. The discovery lies not in the comparatively well-known one-act opera L’Heure espagnole but in Ravel’s much less frequently heard final work, Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, whose fluidity and lyricism contrast strongly and elegantly with the wry comedy of the opera buffa. Ravel is most often noted for his colorful orchestration and his highly personal handling of harmony, but the works on this new Naxos CD impress more with the very fine vocal writing and the composer’s ability to bring poignancy and a sense of human foibles to material that could, in other hands, simply be presented as farce. Part of Ravel’s effectiveness here is traceable to his own Spanish roots: his mother was Spanish, and Ravel himself was born in Basque country. L’Heure espagnole is unusual in numerous ways. Driven not by arias but by conversations among the characters – yet lacking the character of a Singspiel – the opera is notable for the care and delicacy with which Ravel handles the orchestration, which gives almost all the musicians chances to show their abilities. And the concluding quintet here is simply a joy to hear, combining amusement with subtlety and delivering the mixture with real cleverness (half kudos to Naxos for making this libretto too available online – half because it is given in French but without translation). All five singers handle the quintet music, and indeed the entire opera, with bounce and flair and just the right amount of piquancy – further credit to Slatkin’s exceptional way with Ravel. As for Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, this is a small set of character pieces originally intended for a film (Ravel was too ill to complete the project), and they are sung by baritone François Le Roux with empathy, comprehension and an understated tenderness that is altogether winning. For lovers of Ravel, lovers of opera and lovers of some less-known 20^th-century vocal works, this disc will be a real joy.

     Matters are considerably more serious in the choral music of Michael G. Cunningham on a new Navona release. The CD bears the title “Wisdom, Love, Eternity,” and is every bit as somber as those words indicate. From spare settings of Christian liturgy in Memorial Concert Mass and Come Holy Spirit to choral elaborations of the poetry of Shakespeare (Shall I Compare Thee?), Petrarch (The Nightingale), Longfellow (A Psalm of Life), Burns (Posies, with the chorus accompanied by a harp) and Shelley (The West Wind), Cunningham considers death, love, the ever-continuing search for understanding of God, and equally fraught topics. Christopher Pearse Cranch’s Gnosis, with its lines about “spirits clad in veils” and “what the dim-eyed world hath taught,” is here, along with Robert Herrick’s To Daffodils (“We have short time to stay, as you,/ We have as short a Spring!”). The most interesting piece on the CD, because it is the most varied in its poetic selections, is Analects, its eight very short movements offering works by poets ranging from Sir Walter Raleigh to Edgar Allan Poe. The reality is that nearly an hour and a quarter of these Cunningham vocal works is quite a lot, even though the settings are very well sung by the Kühn Choir under Marek Vorlíček. The CD’s insistence, and the composer’s, on the high level of seriousness and importance of the material lead to a sense of a listener being preached to, or talked down to, rather than accompanying Cunningham on a joint journey of emotional and spiritual exploration. The settings and the CD’s overall thoughtfulness earn it a (+++) rating even though there is a certain sameness to the choral writing. But the experience offered here, although not exactly gloomy, is somewhat too portentous – and occasionally pretentious – to be embraceable to the extent that Cunningham clearly wants it to be.

(++++) PORTRAITS IN SOUND

Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue; Neil Sedaka: Manhattan Intermezzo; Keith Emerson: Piano Concerto No. 1; Duke Ellington: New World a-Comin’. Jeffrey Biegel, piano; Benjamin Wesner, clarinet; Brown University Orchestra conducted by Paul Phillips. Naxos. $12.99.

A Tribute to the Band of the Welsh Guards. British Military Music Archive. $19.99 (2 CDs).

Paul John Stanbery: Robert McCloskey—The Life for Me; Craig Madden Morris: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra. Frank T. Restesan, violin; Hamilton Fairfield Symphony Orchestra conducted by Paul John Stanbery. Navona. $14.99.

     An intriguing mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar, a blending of musical styles as well as genres, and a portrait of New York City in all its sprawl and excitement, a new Naxos CD of the music of Gershwin, Sedaka, Emerson and Ellington features first-rate pianism and a pervasive sense of joy in music-making. Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue has been recorded innumerable times, although not always in the Ferde Grofé orchestration heard here. Jeffrey Biegel and the Brown University Orchestra under Paul Phillips proffer a performance in which the jazz elements of the music predominate and the rhythmic verve of the music carries it through from start to finish. This may be a student orchestra, but it is a well-trained and well-rehearsed one that has considerable polish and does not seem to be struggling with any of the material. The other three pieces on this disc are less often heard, much less often recorded, and also feature contributory work by hands other than those of their composers. Second-oldest after Gershwin’s 1924 piece is Ellington’s New World a-Comin’ from 1943, as arranged and edited by Maurice Peress. This is written-out jazz, with a written-out cadenza originally created by Sir Roland Hanna – something of a contradiction in terms, but the work retains the feeling of spontaneity associated with the jazz form, and the cadenza also sounds spontaneous, as if Biegel were making it up on the spot. Emerson is best known as a founder of the group Emerson, Lake & Palmer, not as a classical musician, but he clearly has abilities in the classical field. His Piano Concerto No. 1, which dates to 1976 and was co-orchestrated by John Mayer, is in the traditional three movements but gives very short shrift to the central slow one, which is not in an especially slow tempo (Andante molto cantabile) and lasts just two-and-a-half minutes in a 20-minute piece. The result is a work weighted toward positive emotions and a kind of bright optimism, despite the initial fury of the finale. Although not overtly connected to New York in the way the other works on this CD are, the concerto is certainly reflective of some aspects of the city’s personality, notably through its insistence on fighting through to optimism in the end – despite whatever reversals appear earlier. In contrast, Sedaka’s 2008 Manhattan Intermezzo, orchestrated by Lee Holdridge, does directly celebrate New York; and it makes a fascinating parallel and contrast to Gershwin’s Jazz Age piece of virtually the same length. Sedaka, like Emerson, is known for popular music, not anything classical, but here he shows himself quite capable of working in an admittedly free-form sort of concert piece, for which Biegel himself filled out and embellished the piano part. Essentially a freewheeling tribute to the energy, intensity and diversity of New York (Manhattan is only one of the five counties that make up the city, but is the one that virtually everyone refers to when speaking of the city as a whole), Sedaka’s piece is superficial but quite attractive – as the city on which it focuses often seems to be. Actually, none of the works here tries to look for the artistic and cultural depths that are elements of New York life: there is certainly no grandeur here. But all four pieces suggest that there is a great deal of enjoyment to be had in music that relates to New York, as well as in the city against whose backdrop the pieces were produced.

     Even people who are not New Yorkers and perhaps not fans of the city can enjoy the Biegel/Phillips collaboration, but the new British Military Music Archive release paying tribute to the Band of the Welsh Guards is for a distinctly limited audience. This two-disc set chronicles the band’s first 25 years – it is now a century old; hence the “tribute” concept – and that means the recordings heard here date from 1916 through 1941. The ability to restore such early material to anything approaching acceptable modern sound is quite a feat, and the very fine job done by the producers and engineers of this release is to be commended. That does not, however, mean that the discs are up to modern sonic standards or that the performances will be of significant interest other than to devoted collectors of military music or ones particularly enamored of this specific band; it is the limited-audience nature of the production that results in its (+++) rating. The entire first CD offers recordings from 1916, from the very first one the band ever made (The Welsh Guards on Parade) to such curiosities as The Phantom Brigade (representing a retired colonel thinking of the glory of the past) and March of the ANZACs (a tribute to the fighters of Australia and New Zealand at Gallipoli – it is important to remember that this band was founded during World War I and did a tour to the front lines). The selections on the second CD were recorded from 1921 to 1941. Here, for instance, is Wedded Whimsies, a musical potpourri from 1931 including everything from Turkey in the Straw and My Old Kentucky Home to snippets of Schubert’s “Unfinished” symphony and Bizet’s Carmen. Separately, also recorded in 1931, there is a selection from Gounod’s Faust. From 1934 comes Eric Coates’ sturdy London Bridge, and from 1941 there is a collection of Welsh national songs featuring tenor David Lloyd. None of this material will be a must-have for listeners in general, but those devoted to fine band music and interested in celebrating a century of one first-rate ensemble’s performances will find the release very attractive.

     The musical portrait is not of a city or a performing group but of an individual person in Paul John Stanbery’s Robert McCloskey—The Life for Me. This is film music, composed for a movie about the author of the well-known kids’ book, Make Way for Ducklings. Stanbery has extracted two brief suites from the film, and he conducts them with the Hamilton Fairfield Symphony Orchestra on a new Navona CD. This is uncomplicated, straightforward music, as befits both the film medium and children’s books: there are, for example, clear portrayals of mechanization in The Donut Machine and of broad outdoor spaces in The Rocky Coast of Maine. The most amusing movement, and the one most directly tied to McCloskey’s most-famous work, is called Ducklings Everywhere! It channels a touch of Copland through irregular “waddling” rhythms and is just plain fun. There is certainly nothing of far-reaching importance in Stanbery’s suites, but they are easy to listen to and enjoyable. Stanbery here also conducts the violin concerto by Craig Madden Morris, a substantial three-movement work with rather nonspecific programmatic titles for its movements: By the River, Breezes and Dance. Violinist Frank T. Restesan handles the solo part well – it is nothing special, but does include its fair share of technical complexities. There is little tone painting in the music, though. There is nothing especially bucolic about the first movement, and while there is some gentle swaying in the second, it is not particularly evocative of anything, although there is some attractive lyricism on display. The third movement adds some percussive elements to the mood of the second, but if these are dances, most are very slow ones, and they are not especially rhythmic through the majority of the movement. There is an overall monochromatic feeling to the concerto, a fact that is largely responsible for the (+++) rating of this CD despite the pleasantries of the shorter and lighter tribute to Robert McCloskey.

(++++) FANTASTIC BEASTS

The Bear and the Piano. By David Litchfield. Clarion. $16.99.

A Dragon’s Guide to the Care and Feeding of Humans. By Laurence Yep & Joanne Ryder. Illustrations by Mary GrandPré. Yearling. $6.99.

     There is something so sweet, so touching, so peculiar and yet so strangely familiar in David Litchfield’s story of The Bear and the Piano that it feels as if the book has been around for a long time even though it is brand-new. The story just seems to fall into place as a series of impossibilities that quickly seem only improbable and soon after become maybe-could-be. The concept is odd, initially made comfortable only because Litchfield’s beautifully evocative art quickly pulls readers into a world that never existed but maybe does exist. The tale starts in a forest where, for reasons never explained, a piano sits beneath a tree – where a bear cub happens upon it and creates a plonk sound by touching it with a paw. Not much there; the bear cub leaves. But something draws him back to this place, this instrument – which, by the by, is perpetually in tune, as befits a piano in a fairy tale. The intrigued bear keeps returning and figuring out, note  by note over “days and weeks and months and years” (the passage of time being shown simply and gorgeously in the illustrations), how to play the piano so that “the sounds that came from the strange thing were beautiful.” The grand and great power of music not only makes the bear happy but also makes him dream “of strange and wonderful lands.” Night after night, for an audience of the other bears that discover the strange thing in the clearing, the never-named bear performs, until one night a man and girl happen to hear the musical marvel and ask the bear to come with them to the big city. Somewhat reluctantly, not wanting to disappoint the other bears but moved by curiosity and opportunity, the bear joins the man and girl – and now we have a fish-out-of-water (or bear-out-of-forest) theme. But things go well for the bear, not badly – very well indeed, as he becomes the toast of the town and a huge success: Litchfield’s rendition of a bustling New York City street scene with piano-playing-bear-themed focus is marvelous. All goes well, all of it, except for one small thing: “He missed his old friends. He missed his home.” Can you go home again? That is now the book’s question: the scene of the bear, back in the forest but still wearing his tuxedo, dashing along toward the clearing where he always played the piano, is a gem. And when the bear arrives there, he finds – nothing. No piano. No other bears. Nothing. Sad? Yes – but not permanently so. For Litchfield finds a way to show that you can go home again, can recapture the magic of an earlier time, can return to acceptance, can again produce joy and wonder for your original audience. And what then? Litchfield is smart enough not to answer that question: kids and parents who read The Bear and the Piano can have long talks about whether the bear stays in the forest or returns to the city, whether he alternates his time between the two, whether the man and girl come looking for him, whether he finds true satisfaction back home or again yearns for the delights of large-scale success. A book that answers many questions while resolutely refusing to answer all of them, The Bear and the Piano is marvelously sensitive and a glorious celebration of the power of music, which here has charms far beyond those needed to soothe a savage breast.

     Matters are considerably lighter in A Dragon’s Guide to the Care and Feeding of Humans, the first book of a planned trilogy by Laurence Yep and Joanne Ryder, originally published last year and now available in paperback. The basic idea here is to explore the relationship between a 3,000-year-old dragon who frequently transforms into the human shape of Joan of Arc and goes by the name of Miss Drake – and a typically feisty 10-year-old girl named Winnie. Instead of having Winnie keep the dragon as a pet – something that has been done innumerable times before – this book has the dragon keep Winnie as a pet, one in a long line of human pets Miss Drake has had from Winnie’s family. Predictably, the two central characters clash from the start, but readers will realize very soon that they are much alike under the skin, or scales, as the case may be. Miss Drake, who narrates the book, is neither as crusty nor as unemotional as she wants Winnie to believe her to be; and Winnie, who takes care both of herself and of her injured and slowly healing mother, is not as independent and adult-before-her-time as she thinks she is. Both characters are misfits, and both find, as the story progresses, that they have much to offer each other. Miss Drake slowly introduces Winnie to the magical world that dragons and other fantastic creatures inhabit, which coexists with San Francisco but which humans are prevented, by spells, from perceiving. However, it turns out that Winnie has some magic-making ability of her own – of a problematical kind. She is a talented young artist, constantly drawing in a sketchbook – which proves to be enchanted in a way that results in her drawings coming to life. Yep and Ryder throw in occasional real-world references to keep this rather frothy concoction of a (+++) novel interesting, but young readers may not get them. The Joan of Arc reference, for example, is supposed to come through even though the authors never actually mention Joan of Arc. Elsewhere, Miss Drake discusses a magical shopkeeper – an air sprite named Clipper – and says, “Over four hundred years ago, when I had been in London with my pet Renwick, I’d introduced her to a neighbor, an actor named William. Her large eyes and delicate features had inspired him to write a funny little piece about the midsummer that still seems to please audiences today.” Whether preteens will know that the authors are referring to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an open question. In any case, these passing references are not the core of the story; nor are Miss Drake’s often-amusing personality traits, such as her using a bank debit card and having “digital subscriptions to all the fashion magazines” so she can transform into a human wearing trendy clothing. The book’s climax involves a magic-eating monster that Miss Drake and Winnie conquer together at the Enchanters’ Fair, specifically at the Spelling Bee – which is a contest involving spellcasting. The book ends with the promise of further adventures, of course; the next novel will be called A Dragon’s Guide to Making Your Human Smarter, and an excerpt is offered at the end here. It is true that the “turnaround” aspect of the who-is-the-pet issue wears thin long before the first book’s conclusion, but the humor – abetted by some of Mary GrandPré’s usual high-quality illustrations – bids fair to continue as the sequence does.

(+++) WAY OUT TO ONE SIDE

Hillary Rodham Clinton: Some Girls Are Born to Lead. By Michelle Markel. Illustrated by LeUyen Pham. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $17.99.

Hillary Rodham Clinton: Do All the Good You Can. By Cynthia Levinson. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $16.99.

Fight Like a Girl: 50 Feminists Who Changed the World. By Laura Barcella. Zest Books. $14.99.

     Hagiography during intense political campaigns is only to be expected. When books tell candidates’ stories exactly as the candidates would want them to be told, the authors are in effect making campaign contributions rather than contributing in any useful way to reasoned political speech. That is the case with two new works about Hillary Clinton, one for younger readers and one for somewhat older ones. Starting with their praise-to-the-sky subtitles and continuing in much the same vein from there, both books make it abundantly clear how much the authors admire, respect, care for, support and look up to their subject, treating her, if not quite with reverence, with a degree of admiration that is out of proportion to responsible biographical writing but is right in line with what any candidate would love to have as an endorsement. Michelle Markel’s book goes even farther out on a limb on Clinton’s behalf than Cynthia Levinson’s does. Markel’s is a picture book for young readers – the illustrations by LeUyen Pham are fine, although they are on the stodgy side and not among her best – and suggests that Clinton was a heroic figure from her earliest years: “Take that, 1950s! Some girls are born to lead.” In Markel’s narrative, Clinton could and did do no wrong, ever, raising money for the poor when she was very young; attending the right church at the right time to be inspired by a youth minister and by Martin Luther King, Jr.; doing “a startling thing” by criticizing a senator in a graduation speech; proclaiming what was right and proper and correct and worthwhile again and again, in rallies and newspapers and from stages and in debates and – she just did so much so well, according to Markel and Pham. And her political career? Well, it was just one success after another, even though she took some time along the way to marry “Bill, her law school sweetheart. The two of them loved politics as much as they loved each other.” Lest there be the slightest doubt how Markel feels about Clinton, on one page she specifically proclaims her “a superwoman” – yes, in bold type. So little ever went wrong for Clinton, who always did so much that was so good for so many people, that young readers will be extremely puzzled at one sentence, “Some people hated Hillary and her new ideas.” But they will be reassured that those bad new-idea-hating people could not keep Clinton down: the rest of the book shows her moving from success to success to success, loved and respected by everyone except those unnamed haters, because “all her life she’s fought for fairness and compassion.” What a shame that the readers targeted by this book are too young to vote: they would cast ballots for Clinton without a second thought. In fact, the whole book is designed to be sure there are no second thoughts about her.

     Levinson’s book is at least a touch more nuanced. The extent to which she backs Clinton personally, and presumably politically, is abundantly clear throughout, but the book at least includes (even if it glosses over) some of the many unsavory elements of Clinton’s life: the Whitewater accusations, her husband’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and subsequent impeachment, the hard feelings between her and Barack Obama when they fought for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008, and more. However, Levinson downplays all these and other negatives by showing each and every one to have been, in Levinson’s view, a learning experience for Clinton and one that made her an even better person than she already was. For example, when discussing how Clinton’s proposed overhaul of healthcare failed in 1994, Levinson asks, “What Went Wrong?” She then mentions multiple serious shortcomings – and quickly dismisses them. For instance, “Creating a task force. Other strategies were possible. For instance, Congress could have developed the plan. However, Hillary was determined to establish managed care and universal coverage, and Congress might have had other ideas.” Well, duh, a thoughtful reader might say here – Congress is charged with making laws, after all, not rubber-stamping the notions of an unelected task force assembled by the president’s wife. Another example from the same section: “Hillary’s Refusal to Compromise. …Hillary had made a pledge to the American people for universal health care. And she didn’t want to break her promise.” That is, her motives were 100% pure, 100% of the time. That is the underlying premise and argument of Levinson’s book: even when she made mistakes or things went against her, Hillary Clinton was pure of heart, pure of mind and pure of motivation. Readers who agree with Levinson’s viewpoint and enthusiasm will find here a book that confirms all the wonderful things they already believe. Readers who do not share Levinson’s attitude – who either oppose Clinton or are simply looking for information so they can try to make up their mind about her – will find this book sadly lacking. It is so one-sided that even its modest contemplation of negatives associated with Clinton must be taken with several grains of salt, because the author is so determined to show how everything in Clinton’s life was ultimately for the better – not only for her but also for the entire United States.

     Clinton makes a brief appearance in Laura Barcella’s Fight Like a Girl, too. All the biographies in this once-over-lightly book are short and positive, so there is nothing surprising in the fact that Clinton’s is as well. “Clinton has spent the last thirteen years as the Gallup poll’s most admired woman,” Barcella writes, flippantly adding that her popularity “was speckled with scandals too, but hey – that’s Washington.” But Barcella’s aim is not to boost Clinton’s candidacy, as is the apparent aim of Markel and Levinson: Fight Like a Girl is intended simply to celebrate 50 selected women who, in Barcella’s estimation, have had world-changing lives, with Clinton being #28 based on her birth year. Thus, #29 is Kate Bornstein, “née Al Bornstein, now Katherine Vandam Bornstein,” author of Gender Outlaw, who “celebrates her own ‘freak’ status with aplomb.” Only five of the women in this book were born before 1900, and except for Clinton, there are no politicians profiled at all: Barcella clearly believes that changing the world involves writing, art and stridency rather than any actual use of systems that can change things. True, a few women here are inevitable figures in a book of this sort: Marie Curie, Frida Kahlo, Rosa Parks. Others are commonplace if not 100% to be expected in a book celebrating women’s power: Shirley Chisholm, Maya Angelou, Jane Goodall, Sally Ride, Oprah Winfrey. More interesting than these are Barcella’s choices of various women whose names are unfamiliar or who might not be expected to turn up in a feminist-focused work: lawyer Anita Hill, who accused Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment; singers Beyoncé, Madonna, Queen Latifah, Kathleen Hanna and Poly Styrene (the book has quite a few pop entertainers in it, as if they are somehow world-changers); Mexican-American author Sandra Cisneros; fashion blogger Tavi Gevinson; artist Renée Cox; and others. Of course, personal selections of 50 people famous for anything are just that – personal – so there is no right or wrong list. Fight Like a Girl is a book for readers who believe that pop culture is really, really important; that change is almost entirely a modern (21^st century or at most late 20^th century) phenomenon; and that the whole concept of “change” largely revolves around artistic endeavors, popular entertainment and issues of racial and gender identification. For those who share Barcella’s predilections, the book offers clear but superficial portraits of those it names – not sufficient for a thorough exploration, but perhaps enough to encourage readers to look for more-in-depth material elsewhere.

(+++) THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA

First Entrepreneur: How George Washington Built His—and the Nation’s—Prosperity. By Edward G. Lengel. Da Capo. $25.99.

     It was President Calvin Coolidge who was quoted as saying, “The business of America is business” (actually a misquotation: he said “the chief business of the American people is business,” which is not quite the same thing). And it was that erudite musical mischief-maker and satirist, Tom Lehrer, who said, in a song called Smut, “When correctly viewed, everything is lewd.” Putting these two thoughts together – an admittedly unlikely combination – produces the notion that when correctly viewed, everything in America is about business. That even includes Edward G. Lengel’s notion of George Washington as an entrepreneur.

     This is a curious viewpoint, not because Washington was not creative in his business ventures (he was) and not because it is unattractive to think of Washington as more than a stodgy figurehead (it is), but because the whole notion of entrepreneurship has so little to do with 18^th-century farm-and-land-focused life. An entrepreneur is a business organizer who takes on substantial financial risk. This scarcely describes Washington, who, if not quite a gentleman farmer, did manage an estate that was already in his family – taking on the same sorts of risks encountered by farmers today, but not the types associated with modern entrepreneurial ventures.

     But even if this book’s title is a stretch, Lengel, director of the Washington Papers documentary editing project at the University of Virginia, is onto something here. Washington is usually seen as a military and political leader, but military and financial matters were as intimately interrelated in the 18^th century as they are today, and Washington had almost as much to do with one as with the other. Through a series of successes and reversals both in his military role and at the Mount Vernon estate, Washington was enmeshed in “the commercial rivalry between Virginia and Pennsylvania” in the 1750s even as he was honing his military skills and deciding for the first time that “British colonial authority [was] indifferent to if not actually opposing Virginia’s and his own financial prosperity.”

     Thus, Lengel argues, the seeds of Washington’s revolutionary leadership were intimately connected with his business concerns, and as time went on, he became more and more adept – despite his lack of formal education – in the discipline, hard bargaining and hard work that served him well both on the battlefield and at home. Lengel does a good job of showing how committed Washington was to fair financial treatment and appropriate compensation for duties performed, and also takes Washington as economic planner out of the shadow of Alexander Hamilton, who – Lengel argues – largely implemented and expanded policies that originated with Washington. “When it came to business,” Lengel writes, “Washington was no idle dreamer but a hard-headed realist.” This applied not only to his personal affairs but also to those of the new nation – setting a course, Lengel says, upon which the United States continues. What Lengel does not say is that this argument draws an important distinction between Washington and Thomas Jefferson, the polymath who, for all his far-seeing ways and cultivated instincts, was most comfortable viewing the United States as a self-supporting agrarian nation. Jefferson was thus a proponent of what would today be called “small, decentralized government,” while Washington, it can be argued, favored the “big, centralized government” model that has, for better or worse, persisted.

     Inevitably for a history book of the 21^st century, Lengel’s deals with Washington’s attitude toward slavery, looking at Washington’s late-in-life plan to sell enough land “to liberate a certain species of property which I possess, very repugnantly to my own feelings.” In accordance with Washington’s business principles, the emancipation, Lengel states, was to be done “in a way that did the least harm either to the enslaved or to his estate.” The planned land sale did not go through, however, and it was eventually left to Washington’s widow, Martha, to free their slaves, in accordance with Washington’s will.

     Washington’s business savvy and hard-won knowledge of economic success and failure may not have constituted entrepreneurship in any modern sense, but Lengel does a good job of showing how the first president’s hatred of debt and concerns about poor public credit, inefficient government and an insecure currency helped shape the nation’s early policies in ways that Hamilton would fight to implement. And at the very end of First Entrepreneur, Lengel brings up something intriguing: “Emotion bound America to France, but interest bound it to Great Britain.” That sentence alone shows a great deal about Washington’s economic pragmatism and desire for fiscal stability, even if that meant closer ties with the nation’s onetime enemy and looser ones with the country that helped Washington win the Revolutionary War. This sort of traceable-to-Washington pragmatism, it can be argued, has long been the linchpin of American economic policy. But it follows, then, that if Washington could see the bloated and deeply debt-ridden federal government of the United States today, which spends so much time redistributing wealth and so little helping individuals find new ways to maximize it, he would be appalled.

(++++) STRINGALONGS

Beethoven: Sonata in A, Op. 47 (“Kreutzer”), transcribed for cello and piano; Artur Schnabel: Sonata for Solo Cello; Emánuel Moór: Ballade in E. Samuel Magill, cello; Beth Levin, piano. Navona. $14.99.

Violin Futura: 21^st Century Solo Violin Project. Piotr Szewczyk, violin. Navona. $14.99 (2 CDs).

Alex Lubet: Aria; Ein Keiloheinu; Slow Blues; Eliyahu Hanavi; Ma Yafeh Hayom; Maja Radovanlija: Macedonian Dream; Los Biblicos; Semi-Improvised Nostalgic Study. Alex Lubet and Maja Radovanlija, guitars. Big Round Records. $14.99.

     Whether bowed, strummed or plucked, stringed instruments provide a wide variety of opportunities for expressiveness, and composers have found a wide variety of ways to exploit strings’ potential. It has become something of a tradition to perform works written for one stringed instrument on another, sometimes to widen the repertoire for a neglected instrument such as the viola and sometimes simply to give performers a chance to play music that they find meaningful but that happens to have been created for a different musical range. The latter case explains the performance of the 1803 Beethoven “Kreutzer” sonata not on violin but on cello – but it should not be thought that Samuel Magill came up with this version for his own purposes. It was actually created in 1822 by famed pianist and Beethoven pupil Carl Czerny; as performed here, it incorporates material from first-rate Romantic-era cellist August Franchomme (1808-1884) and includes some passages restored from the work’s original manuscript. Whatever the provenance of this version, it proves highly convincing as Magill and pianist Beth Levin perform it. There is certainly no compromise in virtuosity, and the cello sound proves more suitable to Beethoven’s thematic material for violin than might be expected: the broad opening Adagio sostenuto and the second-movement variations both gain from the richer tone of the larger instrument, and the concluding Presto skips along with a winning combination of brightness and warmth. Magill follows this sonata with one for solo cello by pianist (and Beethoven specialist) Artur Schnabel (1882-1951), but the juxtaposition is rather unfortunate. Schnabel’s four-movement sonata does not sustain for 27 minutes and comes across as a potpourri of 20^th-century compositional techniques rather than a unified and fully thought-through work. It stops and starts repeatedly, recalls Schoenberg periodically, ventures into extreme chromaticism and atonality, and wears out its welcome long, long before its conclusion. A highly respected pianist, Schnabel shows in this sonata that he had little sense of how to sustain a solo sonata for a stringed instrument other than the piano (which uses strings but is really a percussion instrument). Techniques, themes and rhythms here become repetitious to the point of boredom, and there is little of the warmth – even in the Larghetto – for which the cello is so noted. On the other hand, the final work on this Navona CD, by another pianist, is an undiscovered gem – truly undiscovered, this being its world première recording. This is a Ballade by Hungarian composer, pianist and instrument maker Emánuel Moór, best known for creating a two-keyboard piano and for writing music that was often performed by cellist Pau (Pablo) Casals. This unpublished Ballade dates to 1913 and was dedicated to Casals; it was written for cello and orchestra and subsequently arranged by the composer for cello and piano, as heard here. Strictly Romantic in temperament and tonality, it is a work that appreciates and makes use of the cello’s unique sonic capabilities in all the ways that the Schnabel sonata does not. The instrument sings, emotes, pleads and celebrates, finding ever-new forms of expressiveness that enthrall the listener and carry through from start to finish of a rather extended (14-minute) work that proceeds at a deliberate pace but never seems to drag. Magill and Levin handle it with plenty of warmth and sensitivity, and while it would be overstating to call this a great piece – it is basically salon music with touches of additional depth – it is nevertheless a “find,” and a work that cellists seeking something different and captivating would do well to consider presenting.

     Neither length nor depth characterizes the 33 miniature solo-violin pieces collected and performed by Piotr Szewczyk on a two-CD Navona release called Violin Futura. The title of the release explains everything here: Violin Futura was a project created by Szewczyk in 2005, and all these works were written for him from 2006 to 2010. The works range in length from one to seven minutes and are designed simply to give composers – one of them being Szewczyk himself, who contributes First Coast Groove – a chance to show what they can do with short-form solo-violin music. The answer, not surprisingly, is that they can do pretty much whatever they wish, offering tonality and atonality, fairly rigid and very free-form composition, material that lies well on the instrument and material that extends and even strains it, pieces distinguished by lyricism and ones that sound harsh, items with classical poise and others with roots clearly in pop music, works that focus on the violin’s ability and ones that supplement the instrument by introducing poetry or even news articles. This is not so much a violin-future collection as it is a violin-present-day one, and it is very hard to imagine that any single piece from this (+++) release will even have much of a future. As Gertrude Stein once said in another context, there is no there there: these trifles impress neither individually nor collectively. If Szewczyk was seeking to assemble a collection of almost three dozen solo works that would collectively offer a portrait of contemporary composers’ handling of the violin, then it is possible to say that Violin Futura was a success. But it is not a musical success, at least in terms of involving listeners. There is nearly two hours of music here, and it is well-nigh impossible to listen to the material straight through – or to pick any particular sequence that makes more sense for these miniatures than any other. A few may suffice as encores from time to time, and some may work as études for violinists looking for technique-honing material beyond the traditional. But unless you are one of the composers represented here, an advocate or funder of Szewczyk’s project, or a fan of the violinist’s playing – which, it must be said, is strong and committed – there is simply no reason to give this recording as much time and attention as it calls for.

     The strings employed by Alex Lubet and Maja Radovanlija for a new recording on Big Round Records are those of the guitar – or rather guitars. The most interesting thing about this release is the variety of instruments it showcases. Lubet’s Aria and Slow Blues are for acoustic guitar; Ein Keiloheinu is for National Reso-Phonic Guitar (yes, there is such a thing) and classical guitar; Eliyahu Hanavi is for soprano ukulele (!) and prepared classical guitar; and Ma Yafeh Hayom is for acoustic guitar and classical guitar. Among the works by Radovanlija, Macedonian Dream is for acoustic guitar and classical guitar; Los Biblicos and Semi-Improvised Nostalgic Study are for classical guitar. There is a lot that is interesting in this music and a lot that comes across as trying too hard – the result being a (+++) rating for the CD. There are bits of blues here and bits of jazz – not surprising in any modern compositions – and there are elements of Jewish (Sephardic) traditional music in the Lubet works with Hebrew titles, although the composer’s sonic environment for those works takes them well outside tradition. There are elements of traditional Balkan and other Eastern European music here, and there is even a direct tie to older classical music in Lubet’s Aria, which is loosely based on Puccini’s O mio babbino caro from Gianni Schicchi. The improvisational sound of many of these pieces is quite deliberate: several of them, not only the one that Radovanlija describes as “semi-improvised,” mix written-down material with improvised elements. The sonic variety here is impressive, and the cleverness with which both composer/performers handle it is interesting, at least for a time. But although the disc lasts only 42 minutes, it seems longer, because for all the instrumental variety that Lubet and Radovanlija seek, for all their attempts to enliven the material through improvising and combining various forms and types of music, there is eventually a sameness to the sound and a repetitiveness to the compositional techniques that make the recording less than fully convincing. More interesting when heard singly than when listened to as part of a full CD, these works show the many ways in which guitars can be combined for sonic variety, but they also indicate the aural and stylistic limitations of doing so.

(+++) MUSICAL MIX-INS

Steve Reich: Mallet Quartet; Sextet; Nagoya Marimbas; Music for Pieces of Wood. Third Coast Percussion (Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin, David Skidmore). Cedille. $16.

Roberto Sierra: Sinfonía No. 3, “La Salsa”; Beyond the Silence of Sorrow; Borikén; El Baile. Martha Guth, soprano; Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra conducted by Maximiano Valdés. Naxos. $12.99.

Joseph Koykkar: Panache; Interfacing; Inside Out; Keyboard Dances; Double Take; Streets and Bridges; Triple Play. Ravello. $14.99.

     Fans of vibraphones and marimbas, fans of the incessant beat of rock music, fans of minimalism, fans of slow-developing thematic material, fans of rhythm above harmony, will all be fans of the new Third Coast Percussion recording of Steve Reich’s music on the Cedille label. This is very definitely “fan” music, the entire CD making no attempt to reach out to anyone not already convinced that Reich’s way is the right way and that Third Coast Percussion’s blend of classical and pop sensibilities and performing styles is as good as it gets. The actual performance is excellent, the four percussionists handing off to or blending with one another with a smoothness that is almost intuitive. But the primary effect of the CD is of an hour of mostly the same thing. Reich’s pulsing rhythms, so repetitious that even telling the difference between the first movements of Mallet Quartet and Sextet (both marked “Fast”) is by no means easy, comes across in a kind of NewAge-y absorptive way, inviting contemplation by those committed to Reich’s techniques and boredom by those who remain unconvinced. Melodic lines have never much interested Reich, with the result that his music seems particularly appropriate for a percussion ensemble; and, again, the playing here is first-rate. But the music rarely goes anywhere – and when it does inch toward a goal, it does so in miniscule steps. This is exactly what Reich wants, and simply hearing the ongoing rhythmic beat of the percussion on this CD is a hypnotically involving experience. Yet the underlying sameness of the material eventually becomes a distraction: it is hard not to wonder, at some point, whether anything is going to happen beyond the repetition. As usual in Reich, something does happen, or some things do, but it takes a long time (measured experientially, not always by the clock) for occurrences to occur. Sonically, the most intriguing work here is Music for Pieces of Wood, which – despite overstaying its welcome – offers some blends and contrasts not heard in the other works. Reich has many fans, and Third Coast Percussion’s members are clearly among them. This CD will not likely create any new ones, but it will firm up the commitment of those already enamored of the Reich ethos.

     The musical blendings in the works of Roberto Sierra on a new Naxos CD consist partly of rethinkings of old forms and structures and partly of new uses of contemporary approaches, Reich’s included. It is easy to see some Reich influence in Beyond the Silence of Sorrow (2002), a setting of six poems by N. Scott Momaday for soprano and very restrained orchestra. The orchestra’s firm delegation to the background leaves it to Martha Guth to declaim the poems, which are really chants, and she does so quite well – to music that acknowledges its minimalist roots through the soprano’s repetitive melody as well as the fading-into-background nature of the accompaniment. The work itself is effectively lyrical, drawing parallels between the fecundity (or lack of it) of land and that of women, ranging from the opening Prayer to the Land through movements called About Me Like a Robe, To Tell You of My Love, A Cradle for This Child, Little Newborn and The Woman Who Walked Here. This is a cycle about love and loss, about fertility and barrenness, about growth and emptiness, the chanted nature of the material lending it an almost mystical aura. The sensitive playing by the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra under Maximiano Valdés helps frame the emotional content. The other major work here is Sinfonía No. 3, “La Salsa” (2005), and here there is some apparent influence of Astor Piazzolla, the Argentinian tango composer who worked both with the dance in its original form and with it in a transformative, concert-hall way. Sierra does something analogous here with a habanera, two danzas by Juan Morel Campos, and line dances from a celebration called the jolgorio. Taking some of the dances’ rhythms at face value while stretching and playing with others, Sierra offers a mixture of stylization and personal interpretation of the dance forms, with particular attention to the works’ rhythmic strength – nicely handled by the orchestra. The CD also includes two works that mix older classical forms with twists of various sorts. El Baile (2012) is a theme and variations based on Bach’s name (the notes B-flat, A, C and B natural) and including references to popular Puerto Rican dances – a rather odd combination that sounds a bit over-clever but has some affecting moments. And Borikén (2005) looks back to Bach’s time not for the composer’s name but for a form he used, the chaconne. The work’s title refers to the original name of Puerto Rico, and the music includes popular and folklike tunes laid atop the Baroque structure. Here too the mixture is a bit forced, but the sound of the work is pleasant and colorful and its overall effect is a positive one.

     Dances of mixed provenance are also among the works featured on a new Ravello CD of the music of Joseph Koykkar. Keyboard Dances (performed by pianists Todd Welbourne and Ilia Radoslavov) includes blues, rock and a bit of boogie-woogie. But Koykkar does more than mix musical genres: he expands them by incorporating computer-generated sounds, as in Triple Play and Interfacing (both featuring solo pianist Welbourne). The rhythmic intensity of Koykkar’s music is ever-present, if not especially distinctive; and the use of electronic or computer-generated sounds is also nothing really new anymore. But Koykkar strives mightily to use multiple techniques and sonic displays for carefully thought-out purposes – Streets and Bridges, for example, is a set of three piano pieces (played by Jeri-Mae Astolfi) intended to represent specific places in Milwaukee. Aside from the four piano works, this CD includes three for chamber groups. Panache, played by the Relâche Ensemble (Bob Butryn, clarinet and bass clarinet; John Dulik, piano; Chris Hanning, percussion; Jon Gaarder, bassoon; Michele Kelly, flute; Ruth Frazier, viola; Douglas Mapp, bass; Lloyd Shorter, oboe and English horn), is bright and upbeat, with distinct jazz rhythms and something of the feeling of a score for a TV show. Inside Out, performed by the Chicago Saxophone Quartet (Wayne Richards, soprano sax; Paul Bro, alto sax; Leo Saguiguit, tenor sax; James Kasprzyk, baritone sax) contrasts a bright, sometimes frenetic first movement with a warmer but still propulsive (if somewhat repetitive) second.  And Double Take, another Relâche Ensemble performance, combines a touch of swing with some film-music sensibilities and a variety of neatly managed percussive effects. Koykkar tries hard to be innovative and succeeds only intermittently, but much of his music is eminently listenable even if its combination of forms and influences is not especially novel.

(++++) SWEETNESS AND BEYOND

Plant a Kiss. By Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds. Harper. $7.99.

Lost & Found. By Brooke Davis. Dutton. $16.

     Small things and small people bloom and blossom in books for young readers and adults alike. Sometimes those books reach for meaning beyond their words, however simple those words (and accompanying pictures, if there are any) may be. Sometimes they find it, as occurs in Plant a Kiss, a lovely little board book in which Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s text is married perfectly to Peter H. Reynolds’ fairy-tale-like drawings to spin a charming little fable in which the phrase “plant a kiss” is taken literally – to very fine effect. “Little Miss/ planted a kiss./ Planted a kiss?/ Planted a kiss.” And the sweet Little Miss waters what she has planted, makes sure it has plenty of sunshine, greets it pleasantly day after day, and waits and waits for it to sprout. Which it does not. Hence: “Doubt./ Pout.” But then: “Sprout!/ SHOUT! SHOUT!” And the friends of Little Miss gather about to see a mostly shapeless golden speckled something-or-other weaving its way from the ground into the air. Little Miss is determined to share the joys of the kiss, despite the misgivings of her friends, and she does just that, sweeping it into a bright red bowl and bringing it to all sorts of people in all sorts of places, “To and fro./ High and low./ Rain or snow./ With a bow!” Until, at last, all is gone – and Little Miss returns to the place where she first planted the kiss – and then, wonder of wonders and delight of delights, the small golden sprout has spread to “endless bliss!” Golden tendrils of love and loveliness pour forth from the planted-kiss spot, leaving Little Miss at the end with plenty of love to spread wherever she may go – which is just what she sets out to do on the final, wordless page. A completely non-preachy way to suggest that love grows when tended properly, and grows even more when given away and shared, Plant a Kiss is everything a fable should be: short, simple, easy to read on a superficial level, yet concealing – barely below the surface – thoughts that go far beyond the words and pictures with which the story, on its most basic level, is told.

     Considerably longer and more elaborate, but still possessing at its core the sensibilities of a fairy tale and a desire to reach out beyond the basics of the story it tells, Brooke Davis’ Lost & Found has a “Little Miss” of its own as its chief protagonist. She is seven-year-old Millie Bird, a red-haired amalgamation of pluck and seriousness whose mother improbably abandons her one day in the ladies’ underwear department of a store. The notion of a child left alone to discover who he or she really is, with the help of (often magical) mentors, is a basic story arc of fairy tales and is the scaffolding on which Davis builds her novel – her first novel, a point worth emphasizing in light of some of the notable weaknesses that accompany the book’s notable strengths. Little Millie, after hiding for a time and discovering that her mum is not returning for her, sets off to find her on the sort of quest journey that is quite typical of fairy tales. She soon crosses paths with two quirky old people, the sort who would be trolls or spirit guides in other fairy tales. One is Karl the Touch Typist, who is 87 and mourning the death of his wife – and who has escaped from a nursing home. He is called Touch Typist because he constantly touch-types letters to his dead wife. The other is a widow named Agatha Pantha, who is 82, has not left her home in seven years, and spends her time shouting insults at whatever she can see from her living-room window. Her name is as descriptive as Karl’s, since in Australia, where Davis is from, Agapanthus perennials – large, flowering plants sometimes called “lily of the Nile” – are often considered to be weeds. Obviously the relationship among these three characters is going to be as symbolic as all get-out. Davis makes that all too clear by introducing oddity after oddity: the red gumboots that Millie always wears, the plastic sidekick named Manny with whom Karl travels, the constant shouting of the cranky Agatha. The purported plot has the three joining forces to search for Millie’s mother, who obviously does not want to be found but is going to be anyway, if these three have anything to say about it. The book is about the journey, however, not the destination, except insofar as the destination is greater understanding of life at the end than at the beginning. Really, the underlying topic of the whole book is less life than it is death: the novel begins disconcertingly and on an unpleasant note with Millie’s dead dog and her parents’ apparent indifference to it, continues as Millie assembles a list of dead things, and goes onward as one thing on the list turns out to be Millie’s own father; and of course there are the dead spouses of Karl and Agatha always in the background as character motivation (or, if not motivation, explanation). The fact that this is a first novel comes through again and again, sometimes gratingly, in Davis’ tendency to lay everything on too thickly: Millie’s repeated notes to tell her absent mother that she is “In here mum,” and Karl and Agatha’s increasingly childish (as opposed to childlike) behavior, all come across entertainingly and even charmingly for a while, but all are done to death – well, not quite to death, but certainly tending in that direction – as the book goes on. And on. It is actually a short novel, but it comes to seem longer through its tendency to belabor the obvious (notably in Davis’ portraits of the elderly characters: it is as if she has had very little contact with the real-life elderly). The total absence of reality in the book – recluse Agatha quickly becomes outgoing as she rapidly and without any real explanation intermingles her life with Millie’s and Karl’s, for instance; and no one ever really tries to track down and rescue the abandoned seven-year-old, for another example – is justified by its underlying fairy-tale structure. That structure also makes it sensible, or at least understandable, to have the three protagonists eventually give up their unsuccessful quest and go back the way they came, sadder and wiser and better connected to each other and all that. But the fairy-tale underpinnings are not enough to salvage the book’s ending, which is abrupt and rather peculiar, as if Davis understood that a book preoccupied with death has to end with something about death, but wasn’t quite sure how to go about it. Davis’ writing tends to be quaint and sentimental when she presumably wants it to be heartfelt, and some aspects of her presentation – such as putting words spoken aloud in italics in the middle of narrative paragraphs, an abrupt and jarring technique – come across as affectations, and irritating ones at that. There are enough charms in the book, especially in some of the characteristics of Millie, to garner it a (+++) rating, but it is scarcely as profound as it wants to be and certainly not as revelatory about the way life is (and the way death is) as Davis intends.

(+++) LOVE AND MARRIAGE

A Practical Wedding Planner: A Step-by-Step Guide to Creating the Wedding You Want with the Budget You’ve Got (without Losing Your Mind in the Process). By Meg Keene. Da Capo. $19.99.

Worm Loves Worm. By J.J. Austrian. Illustrated by Mike Curato. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $17.99.

     They used to go together like a horse and carriage – does anybody even remember that song? – but these days, love and marriage seem to go together only incidentally, or for the purpose of “making a statement,” or as an affirmation of one’s faith (for marriages performed in religious settings) or declaration of independence from spirituality (for civil weddings, beach weddings, mountaintop weddings, etc.). This makes Meg Keene’s A Practical Wedding Planner a touch quaint with its naïve assumption that weddings are “all that,” even though Keene is smart enough to know that sometimes they are all that one needs to take the great leap into losing your mind (hence Keene’s subtitle). Keene posits that A Practical Wedding Planner will be used as an encyclopedia, not read cover-to-cover as a guidebook, and that is a good thing, since the sheer amount of detail and option discussion and expert opinion and “pro tip” material will quickly become overwhelming to anyone who tries to read the book straight through. In truth, not all of what is here is necessary for wedding planning, thank goodness. “If you have a wedding with every single element included in this book, you’re not having a wedding; you’re having some sort of three-ring circus,” Keene opines, and that is a highly useful perspective – except for the fact that some people want to have a three-ring circus of a wedding, and certainly the wedding industry does everything it can to encourage that mindset (it “is mostly trying to sell us more things” – well, duh). A Practical Wedding Planner is a highly useful and plainspoken guide to the intricacies of arranging your own wedding, with some very helpful checklists and spreadsheets in the back that can assist with everything from budgeting to a highly specific timeline for the event (“guests seated for dinner, 6:00 pm; first guests to buffet, 6:10 pm; last guests through buffet, 6:30 pm; toasts—four total, 6:30 pm; first dance, 7:10 pm” – and on and on for a total of 35 entries, each with four columns labeled “when,” “what,” “where” and “who”). There is material here on bridesmaid dresses (“the perfect dress that everyone will like does not exist”) and on buying a wedding gown from China: “Dress will generally be made from a cheap fabric. …Detailing will be sub-par. Workmanship will generally be a little shoddy. …But alright [sic] already! You’re a woman of daring and risk, and you want to give this thing a whirl! Here is what you need to know….”  And so on. And so on. And so on. Want to know what to expect of a DOC (“Day-of Coordinator”)? That’s here. Pluses and minuses of “officiants,” whether clergy, civil servants, officiants-for-hire or friends and family? Yes, that’s covered. Hiring a DJ and choosing music? Oh yes, that’s here – and it shows some of the predilections and prejudices with which Keene approaches wedding planning, with which it is important to be in sync in order to get value from this book. “The older crowd is going to be out in force for the early part of your set. Play some classics everyone will like early on, then work your way up to that old-school hip-hop after Nana has gone off to bed. ..Your average pop song is long…[so] cross-fade…before that eight-minute song has run its course. …Nobody’s gonna dance if you’re not dancing.” A Practical Wedding Planner strives mightily to be simultaneously up-to-date and sensitive to tradition – the section on addressing wedding invitations is a good example – and ends up being something of a mishmash; but then, encyclopedias always are. The book has a very thorough index, some of whose entries are themselves worth reading: “Colorado, self-solemnizing marriage in,” for example, and “botanical gardens wedding with 65 guests, budget pie chart example for,” and “mason jars, estimating amount of alcohol needed for serving in.” Anyone who thinks the whole wedding-planning concept is faintly ridiculous (maybe not so faintly) will have that impression confirmed here; anyone who takes the whole thing seriously enough to believe that a onetime party somehow has something to do with living with another person for an extended period – a notion right up there with the horse-and-carriage notion of being wed – will also find confirmation.

     And what about love? Oh yeah, that. Well, one would expect a level of charm and simplicity about the feeling in books intended for children, and one would often get it. But just as A Practical Wedding Planner tries to guide adult readers through and among the many intricacies and traps of the love-and-marriage maze, while subtly introducing its author’s own predilections, so some kids’ books seem designed to inculcate values even as they appear, on the surface, to be simple appreciations of love. Worm Loves Worm is one such – an unlikely-on-the-face-of-it advocacy book that families must be careful not to pick up unwittingly, but that some families will find a very useful story of what love and marriage mean in the contemporary United States. Worm Loves Worm looks like pretty much any recent picture book, and it reads that way at the start, too, with two worms deciding to “be married” because they love each other. In the absence of A Practical Wedding Planner, the worms take advice from various insects. Cricket, standing on hind legs, wearing a vest and glasses, and clutching a book, is clearly the right “someone to marry you.” In fact, “That’s how it’s always been done,” Cricket explains. Beetle offers to be “best beetle,” and the Bees say they will be “bride’s bees,” which is all well and good. But what about rings? Worms have no fingers! Well, “we can wear them like belts,” they decide, and since they do not have feet to dance with, they “can just wiggle around.” J.J. Austrian’s point, of course, is that love and marriage transcend the trappings of weddings – an unexceptionable message, to be sure. But then the book turns in an unexpected direction, as Worm and Worm say they both can be the bride and both can be the groom – they are, after all, identical in appearance – and even though Cricket reminds them that “that isn’t how it’s always been done,” Worm and Worm insist on getting married anyway, “because Worm loves Worm.” Somewhere along the way, a cute book about love and marriage has turned into an advocacy work about same-sex marriage, carefully structured by Austrian and illustrator Mike Curato – who himself is in a same-sex marriage – so that the primary message emerges slowly and even a bit slyly, well after all the marriage trappings have appeared in a forthright way. Same-sex marriage is now legal in the United States, but that does not obligate anyone to accept it, agree with it or give children books supporting and advocating it – opponents emphatically do not believe that the statement that “Worm loves Worm” supersedes “how it’s always been done.” Families that do believe in same-sex marriage will find Worm Loves Worm an enjoyably simple explanation of what proponents have said for some time, with pleasant illustrations that end with even the clergyman-like cricket smiling approvingly at the newly married couple. But families that pick up the book on the basis of its pleasant illustrations or the first few pages of text may find themselves surprised to be pulled into the middle of a legal decision that remains highly controversial and, to some people, highly objectionable. This is a book that parents should definitely read on their own before reading it to children or having children read it themselves: it raises issues that, wherever a parent stands on the sociopolitical spectrum, a child is likely to want further explained after the book is over.