(++++) PETS PLUS PEOPLE

Dirt + Water = Mud. By Katherine Hannigan. Greenwillow/HarperCollins. $17.99.

Fly Guy Presents: The White House. By Tedd Arnold. Scholastic. $3.99.

     Amusing adventures add up to a lot of learning when pets and kids get together in books that not only tell stories but also promote “official” school topics in ways that can be a lot more appealing than the ones used in classrooms. The additive imagination of a girl and dog is a good example in Katherine Hannigan’s Dirt + Water = Mud. The book’s inside front and back covers, and the pages facing them, are maps of the area where the girl and dog are spending the day playing. The map key shows just where the giant mud puddle is and also makes it clear that the tree house is an airplane and the flowerpot is a queen’s crown. Kids can read the map before, during or after the book’s adventures. Of course, they do not have to use it, but it does “map to” the book’s events and make it more fun to follow them. The story starts with the girl making that big mud puddle, jumping into it, and splashing about until she is a complete mess – as the dog says “Ah-roo?” (helpfully translated by Hannigan as “are you okay?”). The girl invites the dog into the puddle, the two friends splash about and make a gigantic mess, and thus we have “mud + splash + splatter = very mucky.” Obviously it is time to get clean, so we move on to “hose + high up = shower,” with the girl turning on a garden hose and holding it above their heads to wash the mud off. Then comes the next bit of play, with a sheet from a clothesline, a stick, and the aforementioned flowerpot adding up to “her majesty, the queen (+ knight).” The adventures-in-addition theme is carried through the book, even when things go a bit awry: the excited girl climbs up to her tree house (= airplane), but the dog cannot get up there and is left on the ground to bark and whine and say, in dog language, “I miss you! Please come back to me!” But soon the friends are reunited, and playtime – with minor misunderstandings here and there – continues throughout the day, until the tired-out best friends head for home, the dog already asleep in the girl’s arms, as visions of tomorrow’s possibilities (dinosaur, spaceship and more) are scattered around the final pages. With just two characters, only a few words, and a very simple “play day” story, Hannigan does a wonderful job of showing the ties that bind in friendship and the amusing ways that math and imagination can mix to produce a whole batch of delightful adventures. Sum fun!

     The learning is somewhat more straightforward in Fly Guy Presents: The White House, the latest book in which Tedd Arnold uses Fly Guy and his boy, Buzz, to give young readers some real-life information. Of course, a fly narrator is not exactly ordinary, as is shown when he contributes to the book by referring to the president as “prezzz!” and the president’s home as being a “big houze!” The Fly Guy Presents books are always thin, but they manage to pack in a good deal of information of both the expected and unexpected sort. Any book about the White House will give its address, explain that the president of the United States lives in it, explain that it contains 132 rooms, and mention that the British set fire to it during the War of 1812. Arnold naturally includes all this. But he also makes it a point to give the name of the architect (James Hoban), the number of gallons of paint needed to keep the building white (570), the number of seats in the White House movie theater (46), the number of doors in the building (412), and the year when the name “The White House” was made official (1901, by Theodore Roosevelt). A list of some White House pets naturally mentions the menagerie of Teddy Roosevelt’s kids (hyena, pig, snakes, badger and more), leading Fly Guy to ask, “No pet flyzz?” Well, no, but Arnold does include a picture of the White House beekeeper. Fly Guy Presents: The White House offers the usual informative-amusing-and-offbeat approach that other Fly Guy Presents books use to intrigue young readers about the real world. It even contains a couple of pages about supposed White House ghosts – fitting, somehow, in a factual book narrated by a cartoon boy and his pet fly.

(++++) ANIMALS AWAY!

Chicken in Space. By Adam Lehrhaupt. Illustrated by Shahar Kober. Harper. $17.99.

Paddington Sets Sail. By Michael Bond. Illustrated by R.W. Alley. Harper. $16.99.

Gary’s Garden. By Gary Northfield. David Fickling Books. $7.99.

     Animals of all sorts have adventures of all sorts in children’s books of all sorts – including these. Chicken in Space is not really about a chicken in space, but about the power of imagination. In the book, a chicken named Zoey (who, Adam Lehrhaupt immediately explains, “wasn’t like the other chickens”) plans to go to space and then imagines doing so. Zoey has a friend, Sam, who happens to be a pig, and whose main interest is not space exploration but pie. No matter: Zoey can dream big enough for them both. And she does, despite the skepticism of the local dog, eyeglasses-wearing mouse, and cow. Zoey appears to read a lot of corporate motivational posters, although kids ages 4-8 will not realize that.  For example, Zoey says one issue is not a problem but an opportunity; then, when she and Sam actually get into “space” – that is, use a basket topped with balloons to rise a bit off the ground – Zoey redefines a flying baseball as an asteroid, a kite as a comet, and birds as “alien attack ships.” Later, after the basket crashes (Zoey calls it “a perfect landing”), Sam gets to tell the other animals about the asteroid, comet and alien ships, and “everyone was impressed.” Asked just how they made their remarkable space journey, Sam explains that “Zoey always finds a way,” and sure enough, she even finds a way at the end to get Sam the pie he has been hoping for throughout the book – it is a moon pie, of course. The gentle absurdity of Chicken in Space, highlighted by Shahar Kober’s amusingly appropriate illustrations, may even encourage kids in the target age range to indulge in some big dreams themselves.

     Paddington Bear’s goals tend to be much more modest, despite his original journey from “darkest Peru” to London back in 1958, when Michael Bond wrote the first book about him. One of Paddington’s numerous small adventures takes place in Paddington Sets Sail, which is in the “I Can Read!” series as a Level 1 book (“simple stories for eager new readers”). Because the book was actually done by Bond and frequent Paddington illustrator R.W. Alley, not by others “based on” Bond’s work, the story, simple as it is, has plenty of soft-pedaled charm. It is a beach story – Paddington’s first-ever trip to the beach, in fact – and involves a sand-castle contest in which Paddington makes the best castle he can, puts his hat on top of it, and then, tired by all his work, falls asleep. When the tide comes in, it knocks the castle down and sweeps Paddington out to sea in his pail, clutching his little shovel as if it is an oar – with his bemused expression, directed right at readers, being the book’s most-amusing illustration. Of course, Paddington does not get far, and is soon hauled in by a helpful fisherman who snags the pail with a hook. Paddington ends up a celebrity – other beachgoers think he has floated in from far away – and then is reunited with the Brown family for the trip home. The book manages to be true to its reading level and to the spirit of Paddington-style adventures at the same time – a winning combination.   

     The adventures in Gary’s Garden are also mundane, and they are rather strange, too. Gary Northfield – who pictures himself as a bearded guy sitting in a lawn chair and doing not much of anything – imagines the worms and caterpillars and butterflies and birds and spiders and stick insects and snails and other garden denizens having all sorts of conversations and taking part in all sorts of activities just beyond human ken. In this series of short, illustration-driven stories that collectively make up a simple graphic novel, the events are small-scale – and so is the lettering, a fact of which adults who may want to read with their children should be aware. Some of the brief stories are standalones, while others present recurring themes. One tale, for example, is “First Legs,” in which a tadpole (whose name, readers learn at the book’s end, is Jennifer) is the very first to grow a pair of legs, and thoroughly enjoys zipping about among the other, legless tadpoles. But soon, all the rest grow a first pair of legs – and then a second pair, which Jennifer does not. This leads to a “sigh” at the end of the story and a later piece called “Last Legs,” in which Jennifer strains mightily to grow more legs and ends up, instead, with – a head of hair. Elsewhere is the story of Ronald the Spider, an enthusiastic entertainer who plays to a captive audience of insects caught in his web; and there is a two-part tale in which “Professor Ladybug Zarpov” discovers the bizarre land of Zarpovia (actually the inside of Gary’s house) and explores it along with “Larry Ladybug, lord of the jungle” (introduced in an earlier story) and “John Ladybug, explorer of Mars” (ditto). There is also the story in which Rupert the squirrel gathers worms for a mole who is too nearsighted to catch them and is therefore eating Rupert’s acorns – except it turns out that the mole is not nearsighted but is simply a vegetarian. There are also meetings of the camouflage and mimicry clubs, causing some confusion for bugs that are not sure what the difference is. And so on. There is nothing profound in Gary’s Garden and, for that matter, nothing exceptionally amusing – but the series of offbeat antics featuring small-scale adventures and small-scale adventurers will please kids looking for stories told from unusual angles and with a series of humorous twists.

(+++) THE LONG GOODBYE

The Long Earth 5: The Long Cosmos. By Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter. Harper. $25.99.

     Fans of the late Terry Pratchett will want – oh, how they will want! – the conclusion of The Long Earth series to be a spectacular windup, a fitting capstone of some sort to Pratchett’s long and distinguished career. They would be the same fans who wanted Raising Steam, the last of the main-sequence Discworld books, to be wonderful and magic-filled and a summing-up of all the marvels that Pratchett invented and envisioned. Alas, what The Long Cosmos and Raising Steam have in common is that while both are perfectly serviceable novels that would be considered to “have promise” if written by an unknown author, neither is much more than adequate in a Pratchett context; and neither has sufficient heft – or, for that matter, sufficient lightness in the form of the satirical cleverness of which Pratchett was such a master in earlier years – to be dubbed a “classic” or to repay multiple readings.

     This is not intended as a gloom-and-doom appraisal. The Long Cosmos is fine, really. It reintroduces characters with whom readers of this five-part series have become familiar, even if they have never been ones with whom anyone can strongly identify or come to care deeply about: Joshua Valienté, whose adventures are the core of the series; Sister Agnes, revived from the dead and determined to return there once her new work on Earth – or many Earths, that being the premise here – is done; Lobsang, the distributed intelligence with powers that sometimes seem godlike but at other times seem all too constrained by human feelings; the trolls, those noble savages who are not savage at all and whose wisdom exceeds that of humans in so many not-understandable-by-humans ways; and the Next, whose knowledge and wisdom exceed those of humans in ways that are understandable, resulting in ongoing suspicion if not outright conflict.  The interactions of the characters in The Long Cosmos are plausible within the design of The Long Earth series, and the eventual outcome of those interactions is sensible and satisfying enough to bring the sequence to a perfectly reasonable close.

     The real problem here is one of expectation. We expect (or expected) better than this from Pratchett. Stephen Baxter, while a competent writer, is in no way as distinctive an authorial voice or as clever a plot designer or language user as Pratchett, and although it is impossible to be sure how much of The Long Earth flows from Baxter and how much from Pratchett at a time when his creative powers were diminishing (as Raising Steam shows), The Long Earth for the most part reads too conventionally and moves in too many expected directions for it to feel like a Pratchett series. It is also much too long: the five books feel padded, then padded again – the whole plot would have made a solid single long novel, perhaps a pair, maybe a trilogy, but even with millions upon millions of not-quite-Earths on which to set stories, The Long Earth feels insufficiently rich and inadequately packed with events and characters to go on for five books. Furthermore, to the detriment of The Long Cosmos, the authors killed off two of the most-interesting series characters by the end of the fourth book, The Long Utopia: prickly, good-hearted and multi-world-spanning explorer Sally Linsay, and Shi-Mi, the artificial cat that, like Lobsang (and, for that matter, like Pinocchio), simply wanted to be a real one. There are glimmers of personality and attractiveness in the remaining characters, but there is really no one, not even Joshua, with whom readers can readily identify: even Joshua, after thousands of pages, seems more a figurehead protagonist than a fully formed human being.

     What The Long Cosmos tries to do is to explore some of the grand questions of humanity’s meaning (if it has one) and importance (if any) – questions that the great SF authors have been asking for well over a century. To do this, Pratchett and Baxter create a specific way to widen the story. The Long Earth concept has always included a lot of arbitrary, unexplained elements. One such is the reason the authors give such exact numbers to various planets where events take place: why those numbers? The Long Cosmos gives a rather-too-cute answer for certain planets but not for the approach in general. And it does not even try to explain other elements of the story, such as the reason travel from world to world is possible for people and some but not all objects (notably, iron cannot be carried). But one unexplained item that does become crucial in this series finale is the apparent impossibility of world-to-world communication: it has been true throughout The Long Earth sequence that you can go to an alternative Earth but cannot tell anyone you are coming, and no one can invite you into another world or warn you away. The Long Cosmos is built around a violation of this lack of interworld communication, as the enigmatic message “Join Us” suddenly shows up throughout the linked Earths, in whatever language or form particular people and groups need it to be in for comprehensibility. Fans of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick will likely think, appropriately, of 2001: A Space Odyssey, although – to give Pratchett and Baxter credit – the authors do not simply adopt the “advancement of humanity” notion (which in any case long predates 2001) but adapt it in several ways.

     The Long Cosmos is, in essence, about the response of individual characters and the human race (and the troll race and the Next) to the “Join Us” call. Joshua pretty much sits things out at first, being tended by trolls after breaking his leg and thus developing his insights through greater understanding of troll society. The Next are central to the plot, having realized that the “Join Us” message includes instructions on assembling a continent-size computer simply called The Machine; this in turn requires them to obtain the help of “dim-bulbs,” which is what they call ordinary humans. The Next – individually and collectively – are less interesting than Joshua and several other characters, so there is a certain disconnect of effectiveness between the main and subsidiary plots here, although Pratchett and Baxter are skilled enough to pull everything together eventually. For readers of a somewhat cynical bent, the notion of The Machine may recall Fredric Brown’s wonderfully pithy short-short story, Answer, in which humans build the most powerful, gigantic computer possible and ask it whether there is a God – to which it replies, “Yes, now there is a God.” That is not quite where the far-more-discursive story of The Long Earth ends up, but where the five-book sequence that concludes with The Long Cosmos does go is less clever and insightful, and much less chilling, than where Brown took readers in just a few hundred words in 1954. In the final analysis, there is nothing particularly “wrong” with The Long Cosmos, and it does a good job of bringing its over-long novel sequence to a satisfactory conclusion. But readers, whatever they may think of Stephen Baxter, have long since become accustomed to Terry Pratchett being far more than satisfactory. The Long Earth, including The Long Cosmos, is simply not memorable enough to feel like a story (or set of stories) to which readers will return again and again – neither in the short term nor in the long run.

(+++) RETAKING CONTROL

The Meals to Heal Cookbook: 150 Easy, Nutritionally Balanced Recipes to Nourish You During Your Fight with Cancer. By Susan Bratton and Jessica Iannotta. Da Capo. $18.99.

     One of the serious psychological elements involved in cancer is the feeling that your body is no longer your own – that it has been “taken over” by the disease and that, in fact, the disease is “in charge of” your life. The impression is exacerbated by the reality that cancer treatments can be time-consuming – and not only the treatments themselves, but also the time needed to go to doctors or medical facilities to receive them, to wait to be seen, and so on. The result is that a lot of one’s waking time can be tied up by and with cancer – and one’s mental time gets tied up as well, with thoughts about the disease, the treatment, the prognosis, the reactions of friends and family, and more. So anything that can restore a cancer patient’s sense of control over his or her life can be a genuine aid to healing.

     Furthermore, a frequent effect both of cancer and, sometimes to an even greater extent, the treatments for cancer, can be appetite disturbance, which may range from having no interest in food at all to finding formerly delicious foods nausea-inducing or simply so bland that it is hard to muster the enthusiasm to eat them – or, indeed, anything. It is this aspect of the cancer fight that Susan Bratton and Jessica Iannotta address in their over-optimistically titled The Meals to Heal Cookbook. The meals in this book will not heal cancer or even slow its spread, but they do have the potential to keep cancer patients occupied doing something positive – preparing the meals means asserting control over one aspect of life – and may, by strengthening the body and thus its immune system, help marshal the body’s own defenses as a supplement to whatever therapy doctors are prescribing.

     Many of the specific recipes in The Meals to Heal Cookbook will be familiar to vegetarians – the book has a strong vegetarian orientation and will be of little value to those who prefer a mixed diet (it contains only a single recipe that uses shrimp, for example). The details of ingredients and food preparation are also middle-of-the-road for vegetarian cookbooks, expecting readers to know or familiarize themselves with buckwheat groats, agave nectar, hemp milk and more. However, where Bratton and Iannotta excel is in understanding that people fighting cancer may not have the time or inclination (or strength) for extensive food preparation: many of the recipes are time-consuming, but some can be prepared quickly, and a special icon indicates which those are. Even more important is the list of nutrition-related side effects of cancer and/or cancer treatment that the authors provide with every recipe, in a bar along the side of the page. They suggest, by using plus signs next to specific feelings, what side effects a particular recipe can help counter. This list of side effects is reasonably comprehensive and very helpful in choosing specific recipes to try. It includes lack of appetite; nausea, vomiting or heartburn; constipation; diarrhea; fatigue; mouth sores; dry mouth; chewing or swallowing difficulty; taste aversion, with separate categories for sweet and for sour-and-bitter; lack of taste; and being bothered by smells.

     Few cancer patients will experience all these side effects, much less all of them at the same time – response to the disease and to treatment changes as therapy progresses – but virtually all people with cancer will encounter some of these side effects some of the time. There is no chapter list giving recipes for specific side effects, but the book’s layout allows readers to use the pages as a flip book to find side effects containing a check mark and then look at whatever recipes turn up. If your primary complaint is mouth sores, for example, and you are looking for something in the “Soups & Stews” chapter, a quick flip-through turns up “cool cucumber avocado soup,” “Tuscan white bean vegetable stew,” and “carrot ginger soup with cashew cream,” among other recipes; and the flipping shows not to try “orzo kale soup,” “asparagus potato curry,” “sweet potato black bean chili,” or other recipes in which the “mouth sores” box does not contain a check mark.

     The recipes themselves are laid out very clearly, with the ingredient list set off from the instructions, prep time and cooking time clearly given at the start of each recipe, and a nutritional analysis provided at the end. Commentary is brief and to the point: hummus and cucumber tartine “is a great light meal for those looking to consume small, frequent meals to manage symptoms and improve nutritional intake,” for instance, and for those considering “baked tofu and broccoli over wild rice,” when “experiencing diarrhea or nausea try replacing the broccoli with well-cooked zucchini or squash and substitute mild white basmati rice.” The types of food given in The Meals to Heal Cookbook are not unusual, ranging from breakfast items to salads, sandwiches, main courses, side dishes, sweets and more. And, as noted, neither are the recipes themselves highly unusual, at least for committed vegetarians. But the purpose of The Meals to Heal Cookbook is not to create new and exciting foods or to help readers find ways to make mealtime more interesting. The book is intended specifically to help people with cancer regain control of a basic element of life – eating, and thus providing the body with the fuel it needs – in a way that acknowledges the special challenges caused by cancer and cancer treatment. For that particular special-needs audience, the book is useful, well-presented and sensitive to the difficult realities of everyday life with a disease whose course and treatment alike can both seem overwhelming.

(+++) THE POWER OF VOCALS

Pergolesi: Stabat Mater; Vivaldi: Sinfonia “Al Santo Sepolcro,” RV 169; Nisi Dominus, RV 608. Silvia Frigato, soprano; Sara Mingardo, contralto; Accademia degli Astrusi conducted by Federico Ferri. Concerto. $16.99.

Dan Redfield: A Hopeful Place. Kristi Holden, soprano; Hollywood Studio Symphony conducted by Dan Redfield. Navona. $14.99.

Paula Diehl: Works for Large and Small Ensemble from 1982-2015. Navona. $16.99 (2 CDs).

     The voice’s ability to communicate emotions intertwined with and more specific than those expressed by instruments has been a basic element of musical composition for centuries, with neither vocal nor instrumental elements of many pieces being paramount – instead, they interact to enhance each other. Composers such as Pergolesi and Vivaldi were well aware of ways to maintain focus on words while using instruments to accentuate texts and expand the impact of the vocals themselves. Whether Pergolesi did this completely successfully in his Stabat Mater is a matter of opinion and, to some extent, a matter of taste. The work is quite popular now and became so not long after the composer’s death – but it is undeniably a comparatively light and operatic treatment of the text, placing it in much the same position as the much later Stabat Mater by Rossini, which also seems on the light side and certainly lacks the gloom that Germanic composers bring to the subject. In our more-secular-than-Pergolesi’s age, the operatic vocal treatment of the Stabat Mater texts is precisely what makes the work appealing (the same is true of Rossini’s Stabat Mater, for that matter). It may simply be that Italian religious expressions, even when dealing with topics as emotionally deep as those in the Stabat Mater, simply take a less gloom-laden view of the material, perhaps with an eye on the blissful eternity ushered in by Christ’s sacrifice rather than the deep pain of his crucifixion. Certainly the performance by Accademia degli Astrusi under Federico Ferri, on the Concerto label, does not lack for emotion, and there is considerable subtlety in the playing as well as the soloists’ singing. Pergolesi’s work is paired a bit oddly with Vivaldi’s early Nisi Dominus (preceded by a sinfonia that bridges the vocal pieces). This extended, ambitious nine-movement setting of Psalm 126 is a rather uneasy mixture of styles and scoring, including two simple continuo arias, one aria in siciliana style, an accompanied recitative, a Gloria that is fascinatingly dark and is not only the longest movement but also the most impressive one, and other material as well. Here too the performance is quite well done, but the Pergolesi and Vivaldi fit rather uneasily together, although the skill of the respective composers in merging and mingling vocal and instrumental material cannot be gainsaid.

     Three centuries on, composers continue to search for ways to use vocal and instrumental elements of their works to strengthen and supplement each other. Nowadays they often look to multiple musical styles to express different elements of a work’s overall emotion. That is Dan Redfield’s approach in A Hopeful Place, a nine-movement song cycle that, unlike Pergolesi’s and Vivaldi’s focus on the promises of religion, is firmly rooted in life in Earth. The work, heard on a new Navona release, traces the full life of a woman, from birth to death, using some of the same operatic techniques employed by Pergolesi – very much updated, to be sure – and combining them with jazz (a favorite of contemporary composers), musical-theater style, and (especially in meditative sections) more-traditional classical approaches. The text, by John Gabriel Koladziej, is absolutely central to communicating the emotions of the work, and while it is not exceptionally thoughtful or moving, it is more than adequate for its and the composer’s purpose. Some listeners may find the expressiveness of A Hopeful Place to be quite appropriate, but others may consider the obviousness of its verbal and musical elements a bit much: the enthusiasm of Childhood, the teenage angst of Words They Never Say, and so on. The movement called Vocalise, as its title indicates, features vocal sounds but no words, and is especially effective as a result; the Vocalise theme appears in several other places and helps knit A Hopeful Place together. The work’s title comes from its seventh movement, which draws on the pain felt by so many after the terrorist murders in New York City on September 11, 2001, and the struggle to regain a sense of hope afterwards. Redfield conducts his music skillfully, and the cycle is well sung by Kristi Holden, who gave the work its first performance, in 2010. The elements of pain and hope toward the end are carefully and clearly communicated both vocally and instrumentally – but they are also, like the feelings explored earlier with greater ebullience, presented in rather obvious ways.

     Things are much less obvious in the music – both vocal and instrumental – of Paula Diehl, one of the composers who insist (like Schoenberg in his time and Harry Partch more recently) that existing methods of music-making are inadequate for what they want to express and that they must therefore invent new ones. Obviously a listener’s interest in and comfort with these new methods is a major determinant, perhaps the major determinant, of the music’s effectiveness. Diehl’s approach, a system called “Separation,” uses what Diehl calls “interlocking fourths” (not the same thing as the “stacked fourths” employed by other composers, including Copland). The objective is to create music that highlights the unique elements of individual instruments and the human voice so as to combine them more effectively. Listeners, of course, cannot be expected (much less required) to know what a composer is doing to create a given piece, and have the right to judge based on their experience of a work rather than the method of its construction. The vocal works on a two-CD Navona release of Diehl’s music are On Wisdom and Prosper the Word, two choral pieces performed by the Slovak Radio Chorus; and Wedding Day and Anyone, which are songs featuring Bradford Gleim, baritone, and Chiharu Naruse, piano. The choral works are filled with strong dissonance and atonality both in the voices and in the organ part (played by Albert Goken), and feature the sorts of interjections (vocal and instrumental) associated with dramatic moments in film and TV scores. The baritone-and-piano pieces have a singsong quality that is not quite Sprechstimme, and both proceed at a slogging pace that drags on their potential for effective communication. The remaining pieces here are orchestral on the first CD and chamber music on the second. The works for orchestra include In Hand (Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Petr Vronský), Right of Way (Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Robert Stankovsky), Till the Walls Fall (Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Vladimír Válek), and Insiders (Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vit Micka). The chamber pieces are Gambit (Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra Chamber Players conducted by Vronský), On Course (Moyzes Quartet), Gusts (for solo piano, played by Naruse), Illumination (Robert St. Cyr, organ, and Jonathan Roberts, piano), and Meeting Places (again, Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra Chamber Players conducted by Vronský). Interestingly, Diehl does have a distinctive style that establishes itself throughout these pieces, which were written (as the release’s title indicates) between 1982 and 2015. It is surely her self-created compositional technique that renders these works recognizable. But it also renders them very much the same – there is little to distinguish a piece with one title from a piece with a different one, and generally not much that is distinctive even from movement to movement with a given work. In addition, there is something exceptionally grating about the instrumentation and the highly angular, stop-and-start nature of the non-thematic material of which these works are built. Listeners who find any of Diehl’s pieces congenial or involving will likely be pleased by all of them; conversely, those who are not attracted to her particular compositional method and the sounds that it produces in one instance are unlikely to find any of these pieces, whether instrumental or vocal-and-instrumental, especially attractive.

(++++) SIMPLE, OR MAYBE NOT

Superhero Instruction Manual. By Kristy Dempsey. Illustrated by Mark Fearing. Knopf. $16.99.

This Is the House That Monsters Built. By Steve Metzger. Illustrated by Jared Lee. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $9.99.

     Nothing could be easier than becoming a superhero, Kristy Dempsey explains to kids ages 4-8: just follow her step-by-step instructions, nicely illustrated by Mark Fearing, and you can be superbly super in no time! Well, it all seems to make sense. There are merely seven steps to follow – but you must do them in order and complete them all satisfactorily. All right, thinks the boy in Superhero Instruction Manual who is reading Superhero Instruction Manual. First, choose a super name by combining your favorite color with your favorite animal. Easy enough. Then pick a partner/sidekick. Uh-oh: complication. The boy’s annoying sister wants to be chosen. But the boy wisely picks the family dog, Fluffy, instead. Third step: assemble a super disguise with, say, unitard, pool goggles and bath towel. (This must be working. Page after page has comic-book-style balloons containing words such as “pow!” and “boom!”) Fourth, find a super hideout – say, a treehouse with a sign on it saying “No Sisters.” Fifth, choose a superpower – you have to discover this one for yourself, as the boy learns when, for example, he decides to run super-fast and discovers that Fluffy can easily outrun him, and tries to be invisible to grab some cookies but learns that his mother can see him all too clearly. Well, let’s move on to the sixth step: store super-energy by eating lots of pancakes and sneaking a snack to the hideout; and ignore the sister, who has been following along through all the steps and watching everything. And finally it is time for the seventh step: “Save the world!” Umm. Oops. Slight issue here: sidekick Fluffy gets out of his collar and leash and goes on a merry squirrel chase, completely messing up many people’s pleasant day in the park as he careens along a dotted line reminiscent of the one made famous in Family Circus cartoons. Fluffy breaks things, knocks things over, messes things up, and is generally as un-super as it is possible to be – and when the boy runs into the park after him, hoping to be “surrounded by adoring fans begging for your help,” he gets quite a different and very annoyed reception. Now what? The answer comes from an unexpected quarter: the boy’s sister, who shows up to help straighten everything out, proving that “there are all kinds of heroes” and earning her way to a super partnership and a changed treehouse sign that, at the book’s end, says, “Sisters are Super.” A happy – and funny – ending for all, including Fluffy, who is seen with the kids in the tree house, looking askance at, of course, a squirrel.

     The house is a very different one in Steve Metzger’s This Is the House That Monsters Built, a pre-Halloween book that starts with a simple Jared Lee illustration of a dark house atop a hill, with both house and hill seeming to have baleful-looking eyes. Well, this is just a simple story about the house and those in it. It starts with “the mummy who raised the wall” in the house. Then there is “the spider who started to crawl” and “shocked the mummy who raised the wall.” Hmm. Getting a bit complicated. Next is “the werewolf who put in a door,/ That stopped the spider who started to crawl,/ That shocked the mummy who raised the wall.” Uh-oh. We are well on the way to a monstrous version of “The House That Jack Built,” with each succeeding occurrence building on all the ones that have come before. That means, before long, things are going to get very complicated indeed! And so they do. There is a “skeleton who nailed down the floor,” and then “Frankie who brought in a chair” (Frankenstein’s creature, that is). Frankie’s appearance changes the rhyme scheme – and soon enough, Metzger shows why, since next there is a “black cat who jumped in the air.” Later we encounter “bats who hung from a beam” and “a zombie who let out a scream,” and onward to a ghost, a witch, a vampire, and then – what else could there be? It turns out that the house is visited by the scariest thing of all: children in Halloween costumes! Sure enough, the kids prove to be the ones who started the whole chain of events that gets longer and longer, in traditional house-that-Jack-built style, with Lee’s illustrations (which are never scary at all) getting wilder and wilder as the story continues. Everything concludes with a page on which kids again see the falling-down house from the first page, but this time with all the characters from the book poking their heads (or other body parts) out here and there, smiling and waving. The monsters may not build a very neat house, but the one that Metzger and Lee show them building is packed with plenty of fun – even though the story is a lot more complicated than it seems to be at first.

(++++) CHARACTERS TO LOVE

Dear Dumb Diary, Deluxe: Dumbness Is a Dish Best Served Cold. By Jim Benton. Scholastic. $12.99.

What This Story Needs Is a Munch and a Crunch. By Emma J. Virján. Harper. $9.99.

     Some characters in kids’ books are worth visiting again and again for the sheer joy of being in their presence, however temporarily. One such is Jamie Kelly, erstwhile student at Mackerel Middle School and determined diarist, courtesy of chronicler Jim Benton, whose offbeat humor has found a perfect foil in Jamie through umpteen softcover books with frequently hilarious black-and-white illustrations. Now, lo and behold, there is a hardcover book “by” Jamie, with frequently hilarious color illustrations. And the production values have not gone to her head – well, not to any extent beyond the one in which all special events (and some not-so-special ones) go to her head. A quick glance at the book’s back cover, in which Jamie’s BFF Isabella and BEF (best enemy forever) Angeline appear within ice-cream cones, with the ice cream dripping down their heads, is enough to show that Jamie’s wit, wisdom, and wiseacre-ness are quite undeterred in this more-elegant format. To understand Jamie, it is only necessary to note what she writes about Angeline: “Sure, on the outside, she’s all beautiful and smart and kind to people, but when you go way down deep inside – way down deep – you discover that she’s actually more beautiful and smart and kind.” Jamie cannot stand this, but she knows “it’s terrible to hate somebody for being wonderful,” and to make matters worse, “while you’re standing there, simmering in your own hate gravy, you are actually becoming worse because that’s what hate simmering does to a person.” How much worse? Jamie’s illustration makes that abundantly clear. Yet Jamie is lovable despite her flaws, or actually because of them, because she is at heart well-meaning, rather sweet, inclined to do good rather than bad things, and 100% un-self-aware (maybe even 110%). Jamie is constantly trying to figure the world out and constantly illustrating the things in it that make no sense. For instance, she cannot understand why adults consistently buy ugly cars even though dealerships put the cool ones right out where the adults can see them while buying the ugly ones. She also does not  know why adults will avoid “the gorgeous and exciting cupcake” (shown with considerable makeup and a broad smile) and instead opt for “her homely and quiet cousin, the muffin” (shown in plain brown, wearing glasses and carrying a book). Most of the fun of the Dear Dumb Diary series, which is mainly for girls ages 8-12, comes from Jamie’s incessant misunderstanding of everything and everybody – despite which she manages to do a fair amount of good, often in spite of herself. Dumbness Is a Dish Best Served Cold does go beyond the 18 (not really umpteen) previous Dear Dumb Diary books in some ways, but those ways make sense. For example, angelic Angeline turns out to be a bit money-hungry here, for what turns out to be a good reason. Besides, when she comes up with a way to make some money, it is a do-good one: creating plates with designs made according to federally recommended food-consumption guidelines, so cafeteria servers can give kids the right amounts of the right foods and kids can eat correctly balanced meals. But the plan fails, because kids won’t eat the foods they don’t like, and that makes Angeline uncharacteristically glum. Then it turns out there is a reasonable reason for this, the same one that made her money-focused in the first place: her father got fired and money is currently tight. So there is a bit of a serious undercurrent to this Dear Dumb Diary book – abetted, however, by illustrations such as the one showing Jamie with halo and angel wings, raising her right hand, explaining that she is “never to blame” and noting, “Any way you look at it, you should just look at it my way.” That is, of course, what Dear Dumb Diary does, and it does it mighty well. Everything works out just fine at the end, of course, but what is especially good is the way it works out, which is via – among other things – three laugh-out-loud drawings of Jamie, Angeline and Isabella being “bizarrely qualified” to solve their financial problem, “like a mythological hero who was made up of three people.” There is, however, a late-in-book crisis involving Jamie’s dog, Stinker, that results in Jamie giving up all the money she has made, but also results in her finding something that may result in making it all back, and then – well, it is all delightfully complicated and delightfully Jamie and delightfully Dear Delicious Diary, or whatever Benton feels like calling it. Kids will definitely call it fun.

     A less-complicated character in less-complicated stories, Emma J. Virján’s Pig in a Wig is plenty of fun in her own, milder way. The third Pig in a Wig book, What This Story Needs Is a Munch and a Crunch, revolves around a picnic (no, not “pig-nic,” although that would have been a neat touch). The book opens with the pig in the kitchen, baking bread and pouring punch and packing everything up for a picnic lunch with two friends, a squirrel and a rabbit (who brings, of course, carrots). The three friends have a great time eating and playing games (catch, kite flying), until a sudden thunderstorm breaks up the whole outdoor event. “What this story needs now is a mad dash!” writes Virján, as everybody grabs everything grabbable (with some of the food getting soggy, but that cannot be helped), and all head away to “another place to eat” – inside the Pig in a Wig’s house. The simple tale is told simply and ends with a simple solution to an everyday problem, and Virján’s illustrations offer some pleasant touches, such as the friendly-looking bugs that come home with the three friends so that the in-house picnic still has an outdoorsy feel (one insect is even seen flying over to inspect the flowers that the pig keeps in a vase). Drawn in uncomplicated style and sporting easy-to-understand expressions, the Pig in a Wig is an always-pleasant character whose not-too-challenging adventures are made cuter by the enormous red wig she always wears (it is half as tall as she is). Kids ages 4-8, especially early readers and ones in the lower part of that age range, will find the central character as attractive here as in What This Story Needs Is a Pig in a Wig, the first book, and What This Story Needs Is a Hush and a Shush, the second.

(+++) FANTASIES IN OTHER WORLDS AND OURS

The Witch’s Child, Book 1: Julia Vanishes. By Catherine Egan. Knopf. $17.99.

Forever Beach. By Shelley Noble. William Morrow. $15.99.

     The opening book of Catherine Egan’s The Witch’s Child sequence has enough plots in it to be the start of multiple series, not just one. It is a fantasy, set in a world where magic definitely exists but is definitely dangerous – mostly to those who practice it, who are publicly drowned in so-called Cleansings. It is a coming-of-age novel about 16-year-old Julia, who has the ability to become unseen – not invisible, just unnoticed – and may have inherited it (and who knows what else) from her mother, who was drowned for being a witch. It is a murder mystery: someone or something is stalking the streets and environs of Spira City, killing people apparently randomly. It is a power-of-the-pen tale, quite literally: the banned witches exercise their evil (or perhaps not so evil) powers by writing things down. It is a 21^st-century version of those Victorian Gothic tales of wives and relatives kept in the attic, except that here it is more a matter of weird beast creatures kept in a basement. There are so many plot strands here that it is easy to become confused, knowing that they will all be patched together as the series progresses but suffering, during this first entry, from never being quite sure what connects to what else and how. Furthermore, the book is a kind of alternative-world story as well as a fantasy: It is almost but not quite historical fiction, with familiar our-world elements twisted just enough to show that this is another place. For example, “‘It was Girando’s telescope that struck the first blow against the old beliefs, three hundred years ago,’ said Frederick, smiling at me. ‘Before that, even educated people believed that all the power in the world was of the world. Earth, fire, air, water – the spirits or gods called Arde, Feo, Brise, and Shui.’ …He points at one of the smallish spheres. ‘That is out planet, Earth. Do you see? We are not even the largest of the planets circling the sun. Here is the moon, circling us. This nearest planet to us is Merus, the Red Soldier. And here is Valia, the Silver Princess, Earth’s twin.’” On top of all this, the book is a family drama – not only because of Julia’s dead mother but also because she has a crippled brother, Dek, who cares deeply for her and is very smart; he is not much developed in this first book but may become more important later. Indeed, there is a lot that is not highly developed here: the entire book feels like a setup for later ones. What rescues Julia Vanishes from mediocrity, though, is the skill with which Egan paints her characters in a few lines and with a few descriptive phrases – plus the character of Julia herself. She is the typical strong female protagonist found in many books for teenage readers (this one is for ages 14 and up), but she is far from a “good” character: she is a thief and spy, and proud of it, using her ability to be unnoticed to further her exploits and coming only gradually to believe that maybe there is more to life that ferreting out or removing other people’s knowledge and possessions. Julia narrates the book, but there are also third-person-narrative chapters that advance the story. Some readers will find them useful, while others may consider them stylistically intrusive, but they do provide a perspective beyond Julia’s and give information of which Julia herself cannot possibly be aware. Readers’ attraction to this book will be almost wholly dependent on how they respond to Julia. Strong but flawed, knowledgeable about some things but ignorant about many others, skilled but in ways that readers are meant to perceive as negative (the spying even more than the thievery), she has a strong personality, a cynical view of the world, and even, apparently, the ability – rare in novels for this age range – to make difficult romantic decisions without going through a hundred pages of angst. There is too much happening in Julia Vanishes for readers easily to take hold of everything Egan is doing or planning, but those willing to grasp Julia herself as the story’s anchor will find the book well worth reading and its coming sequels much to be desired.

     Speaking of the hundred-pages-of-angst style of writing, Shelley Noble has it down pat in Forever Beach, which is actually angst-drenched for nearly all its 400-plus pages. The book is an old-fashioned heart-tugger, a weepy story whose contemporary twists do nothing to disguise its fusty insistence on the importance of warm friendships to resolve a plot and the use of unbelievable coincidence to move it along. The modernity, what there is of it, comes from this being a single-mother adoption story, not the sort of thing the Victorians would deem suitable for mass consumption. The would-be adoptive mom, Sarah Hargreave, deeply loves her foster daughter, Leila; but in the middle of the adoption process, Leila’s drug-addicted biological mother, Carmen Delgado, reappears unexpectedly and petitions the court for the return of her daughter. The reappearance and the heartbreak it causes Sarah are not surprising or coincidental – such things do happen, rather often, in the foster-care and adoption systems. But then, to avert the loss of Leila, Sarah and her social worker seek the help of a prominent family lawyer, Ilona Cartwright – who turns out to be someone with whom Sarah grew up in, yes, a group foster home. And not just any someone: Ilona, then with the name Nonie Blanchard, was Sarah’s best friend forever, until suddenly she wasn’t: a wealthy family adopted her and she left Sarah’s life forever. Now the two, after feelings of betrayal that, it turns out, go both ways, are thrown together for the sake of Leila, and must confront their personal pasts as well as Leila’s future and the vagaries of the adoption process and foster-care system. Oh – and tossed into the mix, almost as an afterthought, is Sarah’s longtime boyfriend, Wyatt, whom she has been keeping at arm’s length while totally focused on adopting Leila. Essentially, the book is about friends who do and do not stand with someone who is undergoing a major life change and significant emotional turmoil; and it is about coming to terms with one’s own past and the resentments of childhood that have a way of hanging on well into one’s adult years. It is a tearjerker for sure, following a predictable story arc that leads to a confrontation between Sarah and Carmen, the abduction of Leila, her rescue thanks to another of those convenient coincidences, and an eventual happy ending. Yes, books like Forever Beach can be cathartic, and anyone involved in the foster-care or adoption system in any way will find parts of this one to which to relate. But Noble lays everything on so thickly and paints her characters with such obvious brush strokes that the story has less power than it might with surer plotting and deeper characterization. It is effective at manipulating readers’ emotions, but by the end, readers may not be pleased at the extent to which they have been manipulated.

(+++) OH DAD, POOR DAD

Rocking Fatherhood: The Dad-to-Be’s Guide to Staying Cool. By Chris Kornelis. Illustrations by Aaron Bagley. Da Capo. $13.99.

How to Be a Man (and other illusions). By Duff McKagan, with Chris Kornelis. Da Capo. $15.99.

     Apparently Guns N’ Roses co-founder Duff McKagan is now a world-renowned expert on manliness and fatherhood. He not only has his own book on the subject but also provided the forward to Rocking Fatherhood by Chris Kornelis. According to Kornelis’ book, it is apparently very important to have a way of “staying cool” amid the ups and downs and towering emotions of incipient fatherhood. If that is indeed your goal, Kornelis’ week-by-week guide is available to help. Kornelis tries relentlessly to be amusingly upbeat – the Aaron Bagley illustrations are a big help with this – but actually manages to produce a rather honest and useful parenting guide, almost in spite of himself. There is an underlying cheat code here: the weeks Kornelis chronicles are those of his wife’s second pregnancy, so anyone who marvels at how much cool stuff Kornelis learned needs to understand that he had practice. The “cool” notion itself is a rather juvenile one, but the discussions in the book are more on the adult side, even when Kornelis tries to keep them light. For instance, regarding swaddling, he writes, “How tight is tight enough? You know how tight taco truck employees wrap those burritos? That’s how tight you are going to wrap up your baby. Seriously. And, no, there is no such thing as a good ‘loose’ swaddle. That’s an inadequate swaddle. That’s a failed swaddle.” That is, presumably, an uncool swaddle. A cool one also involves using a “Metallica: Ride the Lightning” T-shirt for swaddling, which is what Bagley’s four-part illustration shows. In the last part, the baby is happily asleep. But what Bagley does not show is a screaming, twisting, inconsolable baby at the start of the process – this one looks at most a bit grumpy. Apparently real-baby behavior that makes swaddling appropriate just isn’t cool. Still, Kornelis’ heart is certainly in the right place: “Pregnancy and parenthood have become minefields of industry and alarmism, which is why expectant parents hear ‘having a baby changes everything’ more often than ‘having a baby is pure joy.’” Indeed, one chapter title here is “Having a Baby Doesn’t Change Everything,” which is nice to know. Other chapter titles try to keep things light: “Don’t Let Her Microwave Bologna,” for example, and “It’s OK. Nobody Else Knows How They’re Going to Make It Work, Either.” But the underlying information here, despite Kornelis’ penchant for finding people in the music industry to quote (no surprise there: he is a music journalist), is genuinely helpful for those who find the style of its delivery amusing rather than, say, irritatingly coy. Kornelis deals with sex and birthing courses and finances and free time (impossible to find but necessary) and how important it is to “Take Studies, Recommendations, and (Especially) Books with a Grain of Salt.” Bravo for that, and it applies to Rocking Fatherhood as much as any other book. There is plenty of solid advice here; how much of it you absorb will depend on whether or not you find Kornelis’ style as warmly (or coolly) inviting as he wants it to be.

     Kornelis came by his McKagan forward honestly: he helped McKagan write his own book. Kornelis may not be credited on the front or back cover, but there he is on the copyright page. Apparently someone thinks, probably correctly, that McKagan’s name alone is needed to sell How to Be a Man to people who consider McKagan the epitome of manliness, or at least a proof that rock-and-roll fame is sometimes survivable. The very structure of this book’s title is intended to cash in on the popularity of McKagan’s previous book, It's So Easy (and other lies), which told how he got sober at the ripe old age of 30, then went back to school and fell in love and became a father and basically discovered that all the ultra-conventional stuff against which rock musicians rail at considerable length was really a lot better than dying of a heroin overdose at age 20: “There isn’t nobility in dying before you get old.” Anyone who thinks “well, duh” about that statement is not in this book’s intended audience. The book is for dyed-in-the-wool McKagan fans who are prepared to go “oh, wow” at such discoveries as the importance of staying humble, the need to pick the right person with whom to have children, and the value of looking at yourself in the mirror each night and asking yourself basic questions about whether you did the best you could that day. The book is chatty and conversational, with a style notably reminiscent of the style of Rocking Fatherhood, but it is much less of an advice book – even though it has plenty of advice in it – than it is a book for people who will pay attention to the advice specifically because of its source. McKagan deserves credit for escaping the sex-drugs-and-destruction spiral for which rock music has been well known for many decades. He told about that escape in his previous book, which as a result was more gripping than this one, in which his escape is accomplished and he is reveling in being a 50-year-old father who practices his profession, music, with far more care and maturity than he did in his 20s. The lessons here are mostly common-sense ones, and while it is true that common sense is scarcely a common commodity, the extent to which McKagan plays up the revelatory discoveries in his own life is uncalled-for. Fans are as likely to get the book for McKagan’s advice on albums to own and books to read as they are to get it for life suggestions. Come to think of it, the albums-and-books elements come across more smoothly and sincerely than does much of the advisory material.

(++++) SOLOS AND DUOS

Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 2; An die ferne Geliebte (transcribed by Liszt); Czerny: Erste fantasie auf motive aus Beethovens werken; Nocturne in E-flat; Mendelssohn: Variations Sérieuses. Gwendolyn Mok, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.

Kate Moore: Stories for Ocean Shells. Ashley Bathgate, cello. Cantaloupe Music. $15.

Copland: Sonata for Violin and Piano; Two Pieces for Violin and Piano; Korngold: Much Ado about Nothing—Suite from the Incidental Music; Marietta’s Lied and Tanzlied from “Die Tote Stadt.” Yuriy Bekker, violin; Andrew Armstrong, piano. Navona. $14.99.

Scene Rustique: Twentieth-Century Oboe Works by Hedwige Chrétien, Mary Chandler, Marina Dranishnikova, Gloria Wilson Swisher, and Madeline Dring. Leslie Odom, oboe; Soomee Yoon, piano. Navona. $14.99.

Steven Winteregg: Journeymen’s Songs. Navona. $14.99.

     It is a particularly salutary experience to hear composers’ music on the instruments for which they wrote it – not only music of the Baroque era, which is where “historically informed” performances began, but also music of much later times, right into the 20^th century, when gut strings remained the norm and there was much more portamento than is now customary. And when a performer is as good as pianist Gwendolyn Mok on a new MSR Classics release, there is pleasure both from the readings themselves and from the context in which they are presented. Mok’s disc is called “The Spirit of Beethoven,” and for once, this is an “overview” title that actually fits the music and does not feel forced. Mok first offers a very early Beethoven piano sonata, played on a 1985 reproduction of a 1795 Louis Dulcken fortepiano, and Mok’s rendition shows quite clearly how deeply rooted Beethoven was in the Classical era before beginning to move music into new directions. The fortepiano itself – decidedly worth hearing in, among other music, all the Beethoven piano concertos – has a sound quite different from that of a modern concert grand, as well as a much smaller compass of notes. Beethoven used it to its fullest extent, but that is nowhere near what modern pianos can bring to bear – and this music sounds all the better, all the more realistic in a strange time-traveling way, when performed on the sort of instrument for which Beethoven wrote it. This is equally true for Liszt’s transcription of the song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte, played here on an 1823 Broadwood & Sons instrument that by that time was called a pianoforte rather than a fortepiano. Liszt himself used even-more-substantial instruments than this one, but the Broadwood & Sons sound has clear transitional elements to it, being fuller than that of earlier fortepianos but without the scope or resonance of instruments that were yet to come. Mok uses the same pianoforte for Beethoven pupil Carl Czerny’s Erste fantasie auf motive aus Beethovens werken, a rather slight work that nevertheless deserves to be better known for its pleasantries as well as its effective use of Beethoven’s thematic material as its basis. Mok then moves to a third instrument for another Czerny work, Nocturne in E-flat, Op. 547 (Czerny was amazingly prolific). Switching to an 1868 Érard for this piece is a particularly happy decision, even though this pianoforte was built 11 years after Czerny’s death. The reason this works so well is that it gives listeners a chance to hear the music of this close Beethoven associate on two very different-sounding instruments, thus emphasizing both the transitional nature of Czerny’s own works and the influence Beethoven had over succeeding generations. The CD concludes, still on the Érard, with Mendelssohn’s Variations Sérieuses, Op. 54, a work with a more-tenuous connection to Beethoven than Czerny’s variations, but one showing quite clearly how Mendelssohn, like other composers of Beethoven’s time and immediately thereafter, adapted elements of Beethoven’s pianistic thinking and made it their own. Mendelssohn was 18 when Beethoven died and had already produced a considerable body of work, much of it influenced more by Haydn and Mozart than by Beethoven – but these variations show him reaching for greater intensity in the Beethoven mode, while filtering  Beethoven’s influence through his own, already well-developed piano style.

     The Cantaloupe Music CD of music by Kate Moore is as determinedly up-to-date as Mok’s is decidedly focused on Beethoven’s time. Here the solo instrument is the cello, with Ashley Bathgate performing an hour-long, six-piece sequence that composer Kate Moore calls Stories for Ocean Shells. Written over a 20-year period, the individual elements sometimes have the cello playing alone and in relatively straightforward mode, sometimes stretch the instrument in fairly typical contemporary ways, and sometimes combine the cello’s warm and rich sound with electronic elements that are intended to supplement the instrument but have a tendency to detract from its tonal beauty. For example, the work’s overall title is taken from its second, eponymous element, in which the cello line climbs above thick and rather eerie-sounding electronics that aurally get in the way of Bathgate’s impassioned playing. The pieces within Stories for Ocean Shells are of varying interest as well as varying structure: “Velvet,” for instance, is a moderately effective mixture of cello with electronic sounds, while “Homage to My Boots” is less interesting – and requires an audience to know that the work connects with Moore’s travels for it to have any significant connection with listeners. This is a (+++) CD featuring some fine cello playing and some good writing for the instrument: Moore herself plays the cello. The musical material, however, is on the thin side and is often rather ordinary in its insistence on mixing elements that do not go together particularly well.

     Aaron Copland and Erich Wolfgang Korngold, on the other hand, came up with well-joined elements of various sorts in their music for violin and piano, with the works on a new (++++) Navona CD played with verve and style by Yuriy Bekker and Andrew Armstrong. These pieces are rarely performed, and the violin used by Bekker is rarer still: it is a 1656 Stradivarius (called the “ex-Nachez”) that has not been recorded before. The violin’s wonderful tone is scarcely a surprise, given its provenance, but the contrasts built into the music are enough to make listeners sit up and take notice. Copland’s Two Pieces for Violin and Piano, for instance, dates to 1926 and is redolent of the influences that make earlier Copland music so attractive: folk tunes, blues and jazz. The pieces themselves offer a strong contrast between the Nocturne and the Ukulele Serenade. But both are tonal and pleasant to hear, which gives them a strong contrast with the Sonata for Violin and Piano of 1943. This work seems almost to play against the wonderful tone of the Stradivarius, much as Moore’s music at times seems at war with the cello’s warmth. And Copland’s piano part here is decidedly modern and technique-oriented, making extended use of parallel chords made of stacked perfect fourths – creating a foundation for the three movements that is quite different from what most listeners associate with Copland’s more-popular works (and perhaps explaining this sonata’s comparative obscurity). Copland’s music is paired interestingly with works by Korngold that are even earlier than Copland’s Two Pieces. The suite from Much Ado about Nothing dates to 1921 and offers four attractively structured, if rather straightforward, excerpts from Korngold’s incidental music to Shakespeare’s play. Here the violin and piano merge and discuss as frequently as they take on the roles of dominant and subsidiary instrument – although when they do assume those roles, the violin is clearly in charge. There are also two transcriptions here of songs from Korngold’s 1920 opera, Die tote Stadt, and they offer attractive and often-warm moments in which the violin sings as a substitute for the missing human voice. The CD is intriguing both for its repertoire and for the sound of the violin, and the playing by Bekker and Armstrong is very fine throughout.

     Twentieth-century duos of a different sort are presented on a Ravello release called Scene Rustique and featuring Leslie Odom and Soomee Yoon. Here too there are some interesting pieces, all of them written by woman composers and all of them receiving world première recordings. The works vary considerably in style and mood. Hedwige Chrétien’s Scene Rustique, which gives the disc its title, is a series of variations on a pastoral, four-note theme with a slight Mozartean flavor – the composer has a penchant for ornamentation and uses it to dress the theme up in a variety of ways. Mary Chandler’s Three Dance Studies for Oboe and Piano offers a trio of very short movements (the concluding Magyar lasts barely half a minute) with clear rhythms. Marina Dranishnikova’s Poème contains many neo-Romantic elements, such as strong emotional expression and frequent metrical changes, that bely its date of 1953 – it is intended to express the feelings of a tragic love affair, which it does through a generally dark mood and disturbed-sounding syncopated sections. Gloria Wilson Swisher’s Salutations is lighter music, along the lines of Chandler’s work, with three brief movements giving the oboe more chances than usual to offer proclamations and even, per the title of the second movement, Fanfares. The CD concludes with two works by Madeleine Dring, Danza Gaya and Italian Dance, which are both fairly straightforward dance tunes that invite the oboe to bubble along above pleasant piano accompaniment.  This (+++) CD will be of interest to oboists looking to extend their repertoire and to listeners who fancy a chance to hear less-known 20^th-century oboe music, but even those who really enjoy the rather slight works and the very fine playing will likely be disappointed to find that the disc lasts only 30 minutes – a genuinely paltry length for a full-priced CD.

     At 54 minutes, the new Navona CD of music by Steven Winteregg is more reasonable in duration; and this disc too seems directed in large part at instrumentalists who want to expand their repertoire. In this case, however, non-performers will also find much to enjoy. The CD features trumpeter Daniel Zehringer on B-flat and C trumpets and flugelhorn, and the works call for instrumental forces ranging from solo C trumpet (African Fanfare) to solos on all three instruments (the five-movement Reflections of Quoheleth) to C trumpet and piano (The City, with pianist Steve Aldredge) and flugelhorn and cello (Two Souvenirs, the cello here played by Franklin Cox). The album title does not come from any specific work but from the overall notion of travel both geographic (with references to places ranging from Chicago to several Chinese cities) and musical (through use of the various trumpets and different accompanying forces). The geographical references of African Fanfare and the two movements of Two Souvenirs (first Postcard from Narbonne, then Train to Nowhere) are at least reasonably clear from the titles, and The City is supposed to be a musical reflection on Chicago. The name Quoheleth sounds like something out of H.P. Lovecraft but is actually biblical (the reference is to Ecclesiastes); this is the piece on the CD that most clearly shows the differing colors of which trumpets of various types are capable, making it especially intriguing for performers. There are also two works here with more-extensive accompaniment. One is China Crossing, whose four movements are Beijing, Hangzhou, Shanghai and Hong Kong; here the writing is for a brass quintet including Zehringer and Eric Knorr, trumpets; Jonas Thomas, horn; Gretchen McNamara, trombone; and Thomas Lukowicz, tuba. The referents to the specific cities are not particular evident, but the ensemble writing is attractive and the four movements are short enough not to wear out their welcome. Finally there is the intriguing, if somewhat overly cute, Popular Variations on a Classical Theme, in which Zehringer plays C trumpet and flugelhorn and is accompanied by Jerry Nobel on percussion and Don Compton on bass. The six movements are built around the well-known theme from the Largo of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” and the idea is to compare and contrast that theme with ones from specific later decades: the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The idea is fun, and hearing Dvořák varied in multiple tempos and juxtaposed with Benny Goodman’s Sing, Sing, Sing, the Marcels’ Blue Moon, TV’s Green Acres, the Village People’s Macho Man, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera is just outlandish enough to be intriguing. But the piece is essentially a “one-trick pony,” and even though none of the movements is very long (the six combined last 13 minutes), what Winteregg is doing is obvious enough so it wears rather thin after a while. Still, as a whole, listeners, especially but not only trombonists, will consider this a (++++) CD for its cleverness, the number of ways Winteregg finds to use the lead instruments, and the first-rate playing of Zehringer in every one of these pieces.

(++++) QUARTETS AND MORE

Abrazo: The Havana Sessions. Ansonica. $16.99 (2 CDs).

Fred Broer: String Quartet No. 8; Piano Pieces Nos. 2, 5, 6 and 8. New England String Quartet (Julia Okrusko and Nelli Jabotinsky, violins; Lilit Muradyan, viola; Ming-Hui Lin, cello); Karolina Rojahn, piano. Navona. $14.99.

Elliott Miles McKinley: String Quartet No. 7; Three Portraits. Martinů Quartet (Lubomír Havlák and Libor Kaňka, violins; Zbyněk Paďourek, viola; Jitka Vlašánková, cello); SOLI Chamber Ensemble (Stephanie Key, clarinet; David Mollenauer, cello; Ertan Torgul, violin; Carolyn True, piano). Navona. $14.99.

Loretta K. Notareschi: String Quartet OCD. Playground Ensemble String Quartet (Sarah Whitnah and Leslie Sawyer, violins; Donald Schumacher, viola; Richard vonFoerster, cello). Disegni Music. $10.

Last Lap: 21^st Century Music for Trombone Ensemble. Tromboteam! (Jennifer Griggs, John Grodrian, Ben McIlwain and Sarah Paradis, tenor trombone; Craig Watson, bass trombone). MSR Classics. $12.95.

     Ever since Haydn turned the string quartet into a conversational composition in which musicians wordlessly discuss, develop and resolve themes and arguments, the quartet and other chamber ensembles – sometimes string groups, sometimes not – have been excellent ways to communicate a wide variety of emotions. The conversational chamber approach eventually evolved into jazz, and the intermingling of jazz and classical musical elements remains today a fertile field for composers. A two-disc set from Ansonica, recorded in Havana not long after the initial warming of ties between the United States and Cuba and given the title Abrazo (“Hug”), shows this particularly well, nearly breathing a metaphorical sigh of relief at the dismantling of long-rigid political walls. The music here will be entirely unfamiliar to almost all listeners, but there is so much joy, bounce and ingenuity in so many of the pieces that listeners will be eager to make the acquaintance of the works and their composers. The first CD in this two-disc set opens with Hot Miami Nights and On an Autumn Day by Timothy Lee Miller, which serve as “cool jazz” introductions to the rest of the material. Next is Bugs & Gas by Don Bowyer, whose amusing style and elaborate syncopations belie the serious reason for the title: it was commissioned in honor of a man who spent his career decommissioning biological and chemical weapons. Jazz Instrumental Suite and Jazz Vocal Suite by Bunny Beck, both arranged by Juan Manuel Ceruto, are closely attentive to multiple Cuban styles in ways that may remind some listeners of Gershwin’s Cuban Overture. The second CD opens with Alarcón Madrigals, Book 3, by Roger Bourland, a work less Cuban in focus than multinational: it uses the bilingual poetry of Francisco X. Alarcón in five well-structured movements. Burlesque by John A. Carollo is another five-movement work, making a strong contrast to Bourland’s through lighthearted humor delivered by the unusual instrumental mixture of trumpet and guitar. Warm Winds in Havana by Margaret Brandman is a pure quartet – it happens to be for saxophones – and has some very evident and pervasive Cuban touches. Coloring with Water by Mel Mobley is also for brass, this time a trio, and proffers interesting sonic combinations throughout its brief duration. Finally, the release ends on a serious note about change, albeit not specifically involving the United States and Cuba. This is After the Fall by Michael Murray, which uses the poetry of Jodi Kanter to express the intensity of loss felt by so many after the terrorist murders in New York City on September 11, 2001. The title of the final movement, “Changing Home,” has resonance not only for all who remember that viciously murderous event but also, in the context of this release, for all who hope for a new and better era of interaction between Cuba and the United States, in spite of the profound political and philosophical differences that remain between the two countries and the checkered history of their relationship in the past.

     Quartet usage is more straightforward on a new Navona CD of music by Fred Boer. The composer’s String Quartet No. 8 is music that sits comfortably in the mainstream of contemporary quartet writing, being generally atonal and moderately acerbic. It features longstanding quartet elements, such as solo passages contrasted with unison ones, and uses a recurrent approach in which orderly, even rather banal elements, such as an ostinato, are set against more angular and argumentative ones. The juxtaposition of energy and lyricism is clearest in the final movement, but all three use this compare-and-contrast approach to some degree. The music is well-made and well-played by the New England String Quartet, but it is not especially memorable. It is paired on the disc with four solo-piano works performed by the ever-diligent Karolina Rojahn, one of the strongest performing advocates of contemporary music for piano. Like the quartet’s movements, the piano works are studies in contrast: No. 2 contains multiple mood changes, No. 5 uses an ostinato-like bass theme and a brighter treble one, No. 6 is playful and makes much use of the instrument’s extreme registers, and No. 8 – the longest piece by far, running 12½ minutes – is mostly dark-hued and agitated until its unexpectedly ethereal ending. Like the quartet, the piano pieces are well-constructed and show strong command of modern compositional techniques, without bending over backwards to sound “different” for the sake of modernity. But also like the string work, those for piano are not especially involving or memorable: they contain interesting elements, but even the shortest seem to go on longer than their elements justify. This is therefore a (+++) CD that will mostly interest listeners already familiar with Boer’s works.

     The situation is somewhat similar as regards the music of Elliott Miles McKinley on another (+++) release from Navona. Here, however, the String Quartet No. 7 (2013) has more colors and shows more influences from varying sources, and it is also substantially longer than Boer’s String Quartet No. 8 or most other quartets, whether contemporary or not. McKinley’s work runs no less than 45 minutes, offering six movements whose titles are supposed to evoke their content and, indeed, actually do so to a greater or lesser extent. “Cathedrals of Light and Shadow” opens the piece and features chords of stacked fifths – the stacked-chord approach is a longstanding one in 20^th-century music, and still popular with some composers. “Scherzo and Fugue” offers just what its title says, and “Three Vistas” contrasts a recitative-like section with more of the stacked fifths. “A Little Dance” moves from a pizzicato opening to a kind of slow dreaminess. “Riding into the Sky,” the longest movement, is most interesting for its strong jazz influence. The brief “Coda: Toward an Endless Golden Sunset” brings back the stacked fifths and eventually, unsurprisingly, fades away. The work is played by the Martinů Quartet, which commissioned it in memory of the ensemble’s founding violist; the work is not particularly viola-weighted, but treats all the instruments more or less equally in longstanding quartet tradition. It is accompanied on the disc by Three Portraits (2012), another work here performed by the group that commissioned it, in this case the SOLI Chamber Ensemble. Like the quartet, this is a more-extended piece than might be expected, lasting more than 28 minutes. And even more than the quartet, this work displays multiple influences in three movements that are all called “Watercolor” and are associated with three months of the year: July, August and September. The contrasts among the movements are the most attractive element of this work: July’s, marked “warm and breezy,” features trills and chords against one ascending theme and one that descends. August’s, marked “reggae-pop,” mingles those two styles in rather ingratiating fashion. September’s, marked “groove variations,” features lively electronics contrasted with mostly static entries from the instruments, and ends in a playful mood. There is much pleasure in McKinley’s music, which does, however, tend to outlast its welcome: the enjoyment wears down before the pieces’ conclusions.

     Enjoyment is not at all the point of Loretta K. Notareschi’s String Quartet OCD, yet another work commissioned by the performers who have now recorded it – in this case, the Playground Ensemble String Quartet. Notareschi here uses not the conversational elements of quartets but their personal ones, employed not by Haydn or Mozart but by Beethoven in some of his quartets and thereafter by many other composers. Notareschi’s work is highly personal and was written for specific purposes – therapeutic ones. It is intended to reflect Notareschi’s experience with postpartum OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), and to draw attention to the condition, which is estimated to affect up to 5% of mothers. Like other trauma-related disorders, such as PTSD, postpartum OCD has distinctive characteristics that nevertheless differ from individual to individual. Notareschi seeks a musical way to display hers and at the same time to draw attention to the condition as it manifests in general. Thus, the four-movement quartet starts with “Intruders,” which aims to showcase the intrusive, obsessive thoughts that are characteristic of the disease and is accordingly full of sudden, violent outbursts. “You Must Think I’m Made of Candy Glass” is a repetitive movement based on the verbal and musical patterns that Notareschi felt compelled to produce obsessively in her mind during her bout with postpartum OCD. “Shame,” the most deeply felt movement, is an expression of the grief and despair the composer experienced because of the condition. “A Second Delivery” brings a message of hope at the end, asserting Notareschi’s recovery while at the same time indicating that it was not easy. Unlike many highly personal pieces, String Quartet OCD works rather well as music, the story arc of disease and recovery fitting fairly neatly into four-movement form. The parallels between music and events in Notareschi’s life are not apparent without knowledge of what she went through, but the music makes it clear that trouble of some sort has been encountered, has led to suffering, and has eventually been overcome. The way in which Notareschi communicates her feelings through music is not, in truth, especially distinctive; that reality, plus the fact that the 20-minute quartet appears as the sole work on a Disegni Music CD, means that this is a (+++) release whose advocacy elements are as likely – or more likely – to be attractive to buyers as are its strictly musical ones. The performers handle the quartet with feeling and intensity, with the result that listeners who do feel a commitment to the cause of postpartum OCD may nevertheless find they do not want to relive Notareschi’s experience through this music particularly often.

     The quartet – actually a quintet, but who’s counting? – is more unusual in its makeup on a new MSR Classics CD featuring the whimsically named Tromboteam! Yes, the name comes with an exclamation point. Actually, this group does perform quartets, such as the James Kazik Trombone Quartet No. 3 heard on this CD. But it also performs in other configurations. All the works here were commissioned by the performers in a single year, 2013, so certainly they have kept composers (and themselves) busy. The whole project started as a Kickstarter campaign – the crowdfunding concept is an intriguing new development for music and musicians, along the lines of self-releasing CDs, now commonplace but much less frequent a few tears ago. The performers gave the composers little direction for their music, beyond time guidelines, so it is no surprise that the works here are of variable intent and quality. In addition to Kazik’s, which is lighthearted (one movement is labeled “Scherzo-ish”) and swift (four movements in nine minutes), the pieces are Kevin McKee’s Last Lap, which gives the disc its title; Nicholas A Drake’s Fanfair Play; Polina Nazaykinskaya’s Pavana; Inez S. McComas’ Spinner; Greg Danner’s three-movement Ice Cream City; Dorn Younger’s Five Cousins; Kathryn Salfelder’s Fanfare and Fugue; and Alan Thiesen’s three-movement Crescent City Postcards. The composers were mostly born in the 1970s and 1980s – the exceptions being Danner (born 1958) and Younger (1940-2015) – and the music shows both the verve and the stylization affecting (or afflicting) classical works by creators of a certain age. What unites the works, admittedly tenuously, is a certain flair for exploring varying sound worlds within the restrictions of trombone capabilities. The pieces call on varying performance techniques to achieve their aural differences, and the performers rise to every occasion with skill and, apparently, good humor. Indeed, the whole CD is bright and upbeat, even when individual elements aim at somewhat deeper emotions (for instance, the third movement of Kazik’s quartet is marked “Tribute,” and the second movement of Thiesen’s work is called “All Last Night Sat on the Levee and Moaned”). Over an hour of Tromboteam! is rather a lot – after a while, a listener may wonder if the punctuation ought to be a question mark rather than an exclamation point – but there are many individual highlights in this (+++) CD, and the exhilaration underlying the whole project comes through to a considerable degree. It would be stretching things to suggest that these trombone quartets and quintets are conversational in the sense of Haydn’s string quartets, but many do show an awareness of where small-ensemble music has come from, even as they seek to move it into new territory.