(++++) THE REAL AND THE SORT-OF-REAL

Frankie. By Mary Sullivan. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $12.99.

Shell, Beak, Tusk: Shared Traits and the Wonders of Adaptation. By Bridget Heos. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $16.99.

     Frankie is the story of a real dog, more or less: it starts with an adoption from an animal shelter and is dedicated by Mary Sullivan “to Sue, Leslie, Cali, and Barkley, for adopting Frankie.” But the story is told with cartoon drawings and Frankie’s imaginary thoughts as she moves to her new home and settles in there, not without some difficulty – so it is not 100% real. Nevertheless, every bit of the story is quite clearly recognizable to anyone who has ever brought a dog home, in particular anyone who has ever brought a second dog home. It is the first dog, here named Nico rather than Barkley, who is Frankie’s main problem. Frankie is an adorable black-and-white bundle of enthusiasm, perhaps a Jack Russell terrier or JRT mix, with stand-up-straight ears as big as her entire head; Nico is larger, mostly brown, and with a perpetual scowl. Unfailingly upbeat, Frankie explores her new home and tries to find things to call her own: “Frankie’s ball?” she wonders as she looks at a red-and-white polka-dotted ball, and “Frankie’s bone?” for a teething bone, and so on. But every single time, Nico shows up, takes the item away, and asserts, “No. Nico’s ball” and “No. Nico’s bone.” And so on. Frankie becomes increasingly downcast until she sees yet another possible toy for her; then she is every bit as enthusiastic as the previous time. But Nico is totally unaccepting of this intruder, yanking a blanket from under her and flopping on top of her in the dog bed. “Poor Frankie,” writes Sullivan, showing all the things Frankie wants but cannot have. “No nothing,” laments Frankie. But then, in all capital letters, “FRANKIE’S IDEA!” And off streaks Frankie around the house to assemble her own pile of objects: a ball of yarn, a bone-shaped toilet-tissue roll from the trash, a sock for a rope toy, even a cardboard box for her very own bed. Frankie and Nico find themselves on opposite sides of the room, protecting their turf and glaring at each other – until there comes a cry of “FRANKIE!” and the hyper-happy new dog in the house goes running toward it. And there stands Frankie’s human companion (only her legs are visible) with all sorts of non-makeshift things just for Frankie – everything with a tag reading “Frankie” on it, and everything looking so desirable that now Nico walks over with a slight smile, gazing at one of the toys and saying, “Nico’s frog?” And Frankie’s answer? The last page has Nico playing with the frog and Frankie playing with the red-and-white polka-dotted ball, each acknowledging the other in a heart-shaped thought balloon. This is clearly the beginning of a beautiful friendship – and a realistic-yet-amusing way of showing how dogs adapt to each other. And to top off the story, the back cover of the book jacket shows the real-life Frankie on whom the book is based – and notes that, yes, Frankie was fostered by Sullivan, who does indeed have a dog named Nico. The line between reality and almost-reality gets mighty thin here.

     The animals in Bridget Heos’ Shell, Beak, Tusk are entirely of the real world, and the photos of them (by a variety of photographers) show their distinguishing characteristics quite clearly. Certain of those characteristics are what the book is all about: Heos here discusses convergent evolution, in which unrelated animals may over time develop very similar characteristics because they have similar needs regarding food gathering or self-protection. The result, for example, is that both anteaters and aardvarks have long, super-sticky tongues that they use to slurp up insects – even though anteaters live in South America and are related to sloths, while aardvarks live in Africa and are related to elephants. Some of Heos’ chosen comparisons are unexpected and fascinating: although readers will not be surprised to learn how strong a parrot’s beak is, the opposite page surprisingly shows an octopus – which has a parrot-like beak that is “the only hard part of its body.” Heos explains that both creatures need the beak to get food: the parrot to crush nuts and seeds, the octopus to break the shells of crabs and mollusks. Unfortunately, Heos also here commits one of several narrative missteps when she points out that the parrot’s bite is “five times stronger than the bite of a deadly python.” Pythons are not “deadly” in the sense readers would usually expect – they are non-venomous constrictors – and, in fact, certain pythons are often kept as pets. The snakes are certainly deadly to the animals they eat, but that is not the way Heos means this; she could have chosen a better comparison. At another point, Heos confusingly writes that “the mole cricket got its name because its forelegs look like a mole’s, which it uses to dig underground just like its namesake.” To be clearly understandable, that would better have read, “…look like a mole’s. And like a mole, this cricket uses its forelegs to dig…” But if Heos’ writing is not always of the best, the book’s topic and the way the photos show how convergent evolution works in a wide variety of creatures and circumstances are uniformly intriguing. The book is short and discusses only 10 paired examples, but those are more than engrossing enough to arouse young readers’ curiosity and inspire them to learn more about convergent evolution elsewhere.

(+++) MOVING ON

Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, 4^th Edition. By William Bridges, Ph.D., with Susan Bridges. Da Capo. $16.99.

     Although published by Da Capo in a division called “Lifelong Books,” the new edition of Managing Transitions is actually an example of a beyond-lifelong book: William Bridges died in 2013, and this iteration of a book that originally dates to 1991 was prepared by his widow and consulting-business colleague. Although somewhat adapted for the increasingly frenetic pace of the Information Age and the companies striving to succeed and grow in it, the book retains the essential insights of earlier editions and shares their significant pluses and somewhat less prominent weaknesses.

     The book’s title and subtitle are a trifle misleading, implying a certain equivalence between transition and change, when in fact Bridges’ basic argument is that the words refer to very different matters: “change” is situational and essentially external, while transition is a psychological “three-phase process that people go through as they internalize and come to terms with the details of the new situation that the change brings about.” Thus, change is comparatively fast and reasonably easy to pinpoint; transition is slow, individualized, and takes place over time, often considerable time.

     Managing Transitions is specifically about workplace change, although elements of the book could be applied to personal circumstances as well – even more so now that so many people carry their work with them, figuratively and sometimes literally, wherever they go and at all times. The three basic elements of transition that Bridges identifies are ending/losing/letting go, “the Neutral Zone,” and a new beginning. The first of these requires separation from old ways of thinking or behaving to which people have become attached – the parallel between business processes and psychological counseling is especially clear here – with the result that staff members can become scared, depressed, anxious, confused and otherwise unable to handle the necessary movement to whatever new circumstances have arisen. One of Bridges’ best insights has to do with the importance of respecting this phase by creating a clear demarcation between then and now – and treating the past with respect rather than dismissiveness, thus helping make up for the sense of loss that people are sure to feel when the way things used to be (which worked very well for some time for them and the company) is no longer satisfactory (which is not the same as no longer being valued).

     Getting this first phase right is crucial to moving into the rather inelegantly named “Neutral Zone” (something along the lines of “Transition Zone” would have been better and clearer). Here, risk and opportunity are in balance as people vacillate between the old that is gone and the new that has not yet fully taken hold. This is the time for exploring alternative ways of doing things so that the new beginning – in which employees take on new, more-suitable-for-the-future identities and behaviors – can form and solidify. Interestingly, Bridges makes a distinction between “start” and “beginning,” arguing that starts are scheduled and result from decisions, while beginnings occur gradually and on a schedule determined by psychological adaptation rather than fixed timetables.

     Bridges’ emphasis on the human side of change is what still makes Managing Transitions a strong book, and the specific tools, lists and recommendations here remain highly useful and reasonably easy for companies to implement. However, the way Bridges parses his important distinctions between “change” and “transition,” and between “start” and “beginning,” is less than fully clear and smacks somewhat of semantic nitpicking. He is also somewhat unclear about how the three transition phases work, at one point saying they must occur in order and at another point saying they can all take place in overlapping fashion, essentially at the same time. Also, the emphasis here on individual psychological transitions, a significant strength in some ways, becomes a weakness to the extent that Managing Transitions does not effectively show how major change, especially rapid change, has huge effects beyond the individual – that is, effects on employees’ collective identity and on a company’s shared values and behaviors. The imbalance between the individualized emphasis of this book and the collective emphasis of many others is salutary to the extent that other change-management books tend to overlook individual psychological impact unless it looms so large as to disrupt the whole working environment. However, companies are ultimately collections of individuals functioning in ways that are greater (one hopes) than the sum of the individual parts. Bridges’ redressing of the balance between individual and company-wide effects of change and transition is a very good thing, but his comparative neglect of the real-world nature of companies as collective entities makes Managing Transitions less readily applicable to the often-frenetic pace of workday circumstances than it might have been, whether in its original incarnation or in its latest update.

(++++) UNUSUAL AND UNUSUALLY ATTRACTIVE

Haydn: Symphony No. 6, “Le matin”; Symphony No. 82, “L’ours”; Violin Concerto No. 4. Aisslin Nosky, violin; Handel and Haydn Society conducted by Harry Christophers. CORO. $18.99.

Haydn: Symphony No. 7, “Le midi”; Symphony No. 83, “La poule”; Violin Concerto No. 1. Aisslin Nosky, violin; Handel and Haydn Society conducted by Harry Christophers. CORO. $18.99.

Haydn: Symphony No. 8, “Le soir”; Symphony No. 84; Violin Concerto No. 3. Aisslin Nosky, violin; Handel and Haydn Society conducted by Harry Christophers. CORO. $18.99.

     A daring and delicious presentation of Haydn, these three live-recording CDs from the Handel and Haydn Society under Harry Christophers offer something quite different from the normal approach to recordings of this music and are unalloyed successes in their handling of it. The Society was founded in 1815 to perform music that was then old (Handel) and then new (Haydn), and while it is in many ways quite different today – no, there are no 200-plus-year-old musicians – its commitment to the music of its original time is strong and sure two centuries later. But this is not just another original-instrument, historic-performance-practice group. It is one that thinks about music in context: the context of the time in which it was originally written, the context of today’s audiences, and the context of certain specific pieces within the overall musical output of a particular composer.

     It is this last context that is especially apparent and enlightening on three CORO discs that offers performances from 2013, 2015 and 2016. The works here are the three early symphonies that Haydn certainly conceived as a trilogy, but spread over three CDs instead of offered on a single one; the three surviving violin concertos that are certainly (well, almost certainly) by Haydn; and the first three of the six “Paris” symphonies. This is a rather aberrant way to present this music, but by taking chances and offering it like this, Christophers and the orchestra make an unusually trenchant case for the similarities and differences among various Haydn works, and give listeners an unusual opportunity for a clear comparison of what stayed the same during Haydn’s career and what changed, sometimes a great deal.

     This is scarcely a perfect approach, if any such exists. For example, the 30-or-so-piece orchestra is just the right size for the early symphonies and concertos, but not for the “Paris” symphonies, which were written for an orchestra much closer in size to a full-scale modern one, with 40 violins and 10 (!) double basses. But what the Handel and Haydn Society lacks in sheer heft, it more than makes up for in clarity, responsiveness, and the sheer verve and joy that permeate all these performances. This is unusually apparent in the concertos, which are not among Haydn’s most-significant works. For years, nine violin concertos were attributed to him; eventually it was determined that only four of the nine were authentic; one of those four was lost; so there are now three remaining, oddly numbered Nos. 1, 3 and 4. Of them, No. 4 remains somewhat doubtful in authorship, although it has enough Haydn flavor so that it is most likely the earliest surviving concerto rather than one created by someone else. What is delightful here is that Aisslin Nosky refuses to treat any of the concertos as throwaways or minor works, insisting that their poise, balance, elegance, and sense of fun make them worthy Haydn offerings despite their uncontested “throwback” nature as to structure. The concertos, placed between the symphonies on all these discs, thus provide some aural breathing space for listeners as well as being finely wrought pleasantries in their own right.

     Symphonies Nos. 6, 7 and 8 are among the most virtuosic that Haydn ever wrote, containing a wealth of solo passages for violin, cello, double bass, bassoon, flute and horn. They were intended to impress Haydn’s then-new employer, Prince Paul Anton Esterházy, and likely also to engage the appreciation of the orchestra members, with many of whom Haydn was on friendly terms. There is a sense of camaraderie in these symphonies that stands out time and time again and that seems particularly well-suited to the approach of the Handel and Haydn Society players. The symphonies have a bit of tone painting – a sunrise here, some birdsong there, a storm elsewhere – but they are not really any sort of program music in the way that, say, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 would later be. Instead, they show Haydn shaping the form of the symphony itself, determining what to carry over from earlier times and what to introduce that is new, how to balance groups of instruments against each other, when to allow solo passages to stand out, and so forth. The Handel and Haydn Society treats them as essentially expanded, virtuosic chamber music, a stance that fits the music very well indeed.

     More than 20 years later, Haydn had fully solidified symphonic structure in essentially the form in which composers still use it today. The first three “Paris” symphonies show this quite clearly: there is a sureness to the themes and their development, a careful arrangement of keys, strikingly clear modulation from one to another, and orchestral balance that seems so right and natural that it is hard to believe it scarcely existed a few decades earlier. The subtitles of Symphonies Nos. 82 and 83 are not by Haydn – he did assign those of Nos. 6, 7 and 8 – but it is musically clear why those subtitles were thought up in the 19^th century. It is also clear that Haydn was not consciously imitating a bear, a hen or anything else in these expanded, beautifully formed and often wryly, wittily amusing works of pure music. Christophers and his players present the symphonies with strength, clarity, rhythmic certainty, and exemplary sectional balance, so the music flows with a sense of inevitability that makes Haydn’s occasional, characteristic veering in unexpected directions that much more attractive. All the performances on these CDs are ones of great style, wonderfully informed historic authenticity, and enjoyment of the music, a totality of approach that renders these works, even the best-known among them, fresh, new, and thoroughly engaging.

(++++) CHANGES IN THE CHAMBER

Mendelssohn: Piano Trios Nos. 1 and 2. Julia Fischer, violin; Jonathan Gilad, piano; Daniel Müller-Schott, cello. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

Brahms: Piano Quintet; Schumann: String Quartet No. 1. Menahem Pressler, piano; Pacifica Quartet (Simin Ganatra and Sibbi Bernhardsson, violins; Masumi Per Rostad, viola; Brandon Vamos, cello). Cedille. $16.

Henri Marteau: Serenade, Op. 20; Clarinet Quintet, Op. 13; Alexander Zemlinsky: Trio, Op. 3. Members of the Phoenix Ensemble. Navona. $14.99.

Sergio Cervetti: Chamber Music. Navona. $14.99.

Alla Elana Cohen: Chamber Music. Ravello. $14.99.

Michael G. Cunningham: String Quartets Nos. 1-7. Navona. $19.99 (2 CDs).

     The attraction of the conversational and intimate nature of chamber music transcends the eras in which individual pieces are written, but certainly the nature of the conversation changes over time. Mendelssohn’s two piano trios, the first from 1839 and the second from 1845, share minor-key construction (D minor and C minor, respectively), a strong piano part that at times overshadows the strings, and elegant interweaving of the three instruments. But the topics, so to speak, of the trios are quite different, and it is the balance of similarities and differences that comes through so well on a new PentaTone release featuring Julia Fischer, Jonathan Gilad and Daniel Müller-Schott. There is lightness and exquisite balance throughout the recording, abetted by unusually clear SACD sound. But there is also a firm understanding of the differences between the two works. The first is filled with joy and lyricism, but has a yearning and wistful undertone that the performers bring out with particular skill: the first movement, after all, is marked Molto allegro agitato, and the underlying agitation is apparent here. The second trio is darker, more imbued with the implications of its minor key, and features a seriousness evidenced by a quotation from Bach’s Herr Gott, Dich fürchten wir alle. There is greater chromaticism in this trio, a move further away from the classical models that Mendelssohn always respected and employed in variously modified form throughout his life. Fischer, Gilad and Müller-Schott play the works with carefully modulated intricacy, pacing them well and successfully balancing their poise with their heartfelt emotion. As conversations go, these are unusually thoughtful ones.

     Schumann dedicated his String Quartet No. 1 to Mendelssohn; it was written midway between Mendelssohn’s trios, in 1842. Its short and fleet Scherzo is especially Mendelssohnian, but the work as a whole has poise and balance that are reminiscent of much of Mendelssohn’s music, and a certain sunniness of disposition that shines through again and again, especially in the lovely and gently flowing Adagio, despite the quartet’s home key of A minor.  A sparkling new recording by the Pacifica Quartet on Cedille plumbs all the depths of the music while keeping the conversation among the instruments flowing easily and in a spirit of superb cooperation – the ensemble work of the members of this quartet is remarkable for balance and style. Yet as good as it is, the Schumann rendition is surpassed by that of the Brahms Piano Quintet, in which Menahem Pressler, who was 90 years old when this performance was recorded in 2014 and is now 93, joins the much younger string players in a knock-your-socks-off reading whose intensity, involvement, strength and emotional punch are nothing short of extraordinary. This is well-known music that these players seem to know, and feel, better than just about anyone else who has recorded it. How is it possible that Pressler has never recorded this piece before? His technique seems made for it, precise and emotive and exceptional both in the way it blends with the strings as appropriate and with the way it stands out from them when that is apt. From the wonderfully expansive first movement, its warmth and cragginess equal factors in its effect, to the lovely respite of the Andante, un poco Adagio (perfectly paced here), through a Scherzo that aspires to the heights of emotional conveyance, to a finale that glides with apparent effortlessness from beauty to beauty, this is an exceptional reading that every lover of this music will be delighted to hear. Pressler and the Pacifica Quartet shed new light on the quintet again and again through a superb mixture of technique and musical understanding. Anyone who thinks there is nothing more to be learned from the instrumental conversation in this captivating work deserves to spend time with this revelatory performance. This CD has all the hallmarks of an honored “legacy” recording – which, given Simin Ganatra’s departure from the quartet and Menahem Pressler’s age, it is likely to become.

     Written during Brahms’ lifetime but far less frequently performed than Brahms’ chamber music, Alexander Zemlinksy’s Trio, Op. 3 is for a complement of instruments quite different from those used by Mendelssohn in his trios: clarinet (Mark Lieb on Navona’s new recording), cello (Alice Yoo), and piano (Wayne Wang). This is a highly involving and emotionally expressive work with distinct late-Romantic flavor, as befits a piece written in 1896. The extended first movement, as long as the second and third together, grows and develops in ways that highlight the aural similarities of clarinet and cello while allowing the piano to interject brighter sounds and more directly compelling arguments – in contrast to the sweeping lyricism of the other two instruments. The second movement is a rather placid Andante, its expressiveness fairly ordinary, but the concluding Allegro is a gem: bright and warm, filled with interesting rhythms and unusual turns of phrase, all delivered with wonderful ensemble writing that nevertheless maintains the clarinet as first among equals. The other two works on this disc are even less-known than Zemlinsky’s. They are by Henri Marteau (1874-1934), a French violinist and composer whose Clarinet Quintet, Op. 13 (1908) has a distinctively French sound that is immediately apparent in the way the clarinet plays off against the strings at the start of the work. The performers here are Lieb, who is founder and artistic director of the Phoenix Ensemble, and Ensemble members Igor Pikayzen and Bryan Hernandez-Luch (violins), Eva Gerard (viola), and Carrie Bean Stute (cello). The performers successfully seek a sense of difference within similarity in this music, whose overall pacing is moderate in all four movements: tempo indications for the first two include the word moderato, while those for the third and fourth include sostenuto. The music does tend to meander rather too much from time to time, while having a disconcerting stop-and-start quality at other times. The result is a work that feels as much like a suite as a carefully shaped piece of chamber music. There is a kind of monochromaticism to the instrumental sound that can be pleasantly lulling but that drags after a while – and this is not a short work (it runs 32 minutes). The relative lack of attention that has been given to this piece is easier to understand than is the comparative neglect of Zemlinsky’s. The total absence of attention to Marteau’s Serenade, Op. 20 (1922) is, however, much harder to comprehend: this is the world première recording of the piece. This really is a suite, its four movements only loosely connected and its moods shifting while remaining essentially lighthearted. It is a nonet for winds, which in itself makes the work unusual. The performers are Catherine Gregory and Andrew Rehrig (flutes), Arthur Sato and Michelle Farah (oboes), Lieb and Moran Katz (clarinets), Angela Shankar (bass clarinet), and Daniel Hane and Edward Burns (bassoons). From the clever opening Entrata, the work moves to a sweet little Adagietto, a Scherzino that bubbles along infectiously, and a concluding Tema con variazoni that is well-crafted, clever and altogether winning. Lieb and his ensemble deserve considerable credit for essaying these less-known works and showing just how much pleasure listeners can find in unfamiliar chamber music.

     Chamber works are much more recent and use many more instrumental combinations on a new Navona CD featuring Sergio Cervetti’s music and a disc from Ravello devoted to pieces by Alla Elana Cohen. These are (+++) recordings that will primarily appeal to listeners already familiar with the composers and interested in their particular way of handling their respective ethnic heritages. Cervetti’s roots lie in France, Italy and South America, and the six pieces hear draw on all of them. Two are for solo piano and are performed by the composer: Some Realms I Owned (2010) and I Can’t Breathe (2014, for piano and percussion). The first of these is largely tonal, declamatory and rather repetitive; the second is dissonant, jazz-inflected and quite short (just over two minutes). There is also an interesting work here for solo harpsichord: Ofrenda Para Guyunusa (2011), played by María Teresa Chenlo. One of the remaining works is a clarinet quintet that barely sounds as if it uses the same instruments employed by Zemlinsky. It is called And the Huddled Masses (2015), and its complexities of sound and expression – typical for much contemporary music – are such that it requires a conductor (Enrique Pérez Mesa) in addition to Alden Ortuño Cabezas (clarinet), Leonardo Pérez Baster and Luis Alberto Mariño Fernández (violins), Yamed Aguillón Santa Cruz (viola), and Lester Monier Serrano (cello). Unceasingly dissonant and multithematic, it is more a collection of sounds that a structurally unified piece of music – although the multiplicity of elements appears to be included by design. The dissonance in Sunset at Noon (1995), for violin (Vit Muzik) and viola (Dominika Mužíková) fits the material better: this is a four-movement work in which each movement is marked “In Memoriam” of a different individual. The first, second and fourth movements of this 18-minute piece are largely what one would expect for a memorial work: slow and somber. The third, however, is a pleasant surprise, upbeat and propulsive, with attractive pizzicato elements, presumably reflective of the personality of the person in whose memory Cervetti created the music. The final movement is explicitly labeled Hymn, and sounds like one; but the very last piece on the disc is even more explicitly hymnlike, being an a cappella setting of Lux Lucet in Tenebris that dates to 2002 and has a distinctly Baroque sound as performed by the Kuhn Choir conducted by Marek Vorlicek. Listeners familiar with Cervetti’s compositional versatility will get a considerable dose of it here.

     The heritage on which Cohen draws is a Jewish one, and her approach to composition is almost self-consciously inventive, as if she tries through instrumental combinations and even through works’ titles to communicate just how creative the material is. In fact, all the works here – each of them consisting of multiple short movements – contain interesting and even clever elements, but after a while the cleverness seems somewhat forced and the music comes across as if Cohen is trying a little too hard. For example, there is a vocal work on this CD, but the difference between Cohen’s approach and Cervetti’s is evident from the very first notes. Cohen’s piece is called “Inscriptions on a Bamboo Screen” series 4 for soprano and viola in 6 movements (with addition of cup gong in the last movement), and it is performed by the composer (lyrics and cup gong), Rachel Schmiege (soprano), and Alexander Vavilov (viola). The most interesting element here is not the vocals but the combination of cup gong with plucked viola in the final movement. There are three pieces here in a series that Cohen calls “Inner Temple.” They are “Inner Temple” volume 2 series 1 “Brachot” (“Blessings”) for string quartet in 3 movements, played by Marissa Licata and Melissa Bull (violins), Alexander Vavilov (viola), and  Sebastian Baverstam (cello); “Inner Temple” volume 1 series 12 “Brachot” for Chamber Orchestra in 3 movements, whose 10 performers are Bianca Garcia (flute), Izumi Sakamoto (oboe), Todd Brunel (clarinet), Timur Rubinshteyn (timpani), Aaron Trant (vibraphone), Matt Sharrock (marimba), plus the quartet of Licata, Bull, Vavilov and Baverstam; and “Inner Temple” volume 1 series 11 “Shabbat Nigunim” in 4 movements, this one featuring 11 performers – the same 10 as in the previously mentioned work plus the composer on piano. The instrumental combinations are a big part of what Cohen employs as communicative devices: the complex intertwining of individual instruments and instrumental groups comes across as enough purpose for these works to have – the specific matters they communicate are secondary to the way they communicate them. This is a very different approach to chamber music from that of earlier composers or, indeed, many other contemporary ones. This is clear throughout the CD, but perhaps particularly so in Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano “Red Lilies of Bells, Golden Lilies of Bells, White Lilies of Bells” in 3 movements, with Licata on violin, Baverstam on cello, and the composer on piano and providing the recitation of a Russian poem – twice, once in the original language and then, after a central instrumental section, in English. The two remaining works on this CD are Triptych for Chamber Orchestra “Homage to Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais,” with some performers heard elsewhere and some different ones: Garcia, Sakamoto, Brunel, Rubinshteyn, William Manley on vibraphone, Sharrock, Licata and Ethan Wood on violins, Vavilov, Baverstam, and the composer on piano; and a work that comes as something of a relief from the complexly planned multi-instrument ones, “Hoffmanniana” series 3 for solo Cello in 4 movements, nicely played by Baverstam. The musicians certainly give their all to this music, and Cohen herself handles her piano parts and other roles well, but the CD comes across as strictly a limited-interest item for audiences that already know what Cohen seeks to communicate and how, and want to hear a considerable amount of it at one time.

     The instrumentation is much more traditional and straightforward in the seven quartets of Michael G. Cunningham heard on a new two-disc release from Navona. The quartets were written over nearly half a century, from 1959 to 2005, and show very definite changes in Cunningham’s compositional style. They also show ways in which his style did not change, such as fondness for glissandi and other special sounds. The quartets are given in the order in which they were composed, a wise decision that allows fans of Cunningham’s music – clearly the target of this (+++) release, which offers too much material from this single composer to be appealing to listeners not already interested in his output – an easy way to trace his compositional thinking over quite a long time. All the performers handle the music with skill: the Sirius Quartet (Nos. 1 and 2), Moravian Quartet (Nos. 3 and 7), Pedroia Quartet (no. 4), New England String Quartet (No. 5), and Millennium Quartet (No. 6). Except for the first quartet (1959), all these works have titles: No. 2 (1967) is “Three Satires,” No. 3 (1975) is “Partitions,” No. 4 (1985) is “Interlacings,” No. 5 (1988) is “Aggregates,” No. 6 (2001) is “Digital Isorhythm,” and No. 7 (2005) is “Back Home.” The titles are in some cases reasonably good guides to Cunningham’s intentions, but not always. Individual quartets and, indeed, individual movements contain distinctive elements that make them stand out: the lyrical second movement of No. 1; the unison proclamation that opens No. 2; the play of glissandi against pizzicati in No. 3; the second, Scherzo movement of No. 4, which sounds a bit like Mendelssohn run through a blender; the juxtaposition of trill and glissandi in the first movement of No. 5; the odd combination of march-like certainty and drifting in the finale of No. 6; the surprisingly long lines of the first movement, Con Carita, of No. 7; and many more. Listeners who enjoy explorations of stretched tonality, outright dissonance, rhythmic strength (with frequent rhythmic variation), and a skilled and thoroughly modern approach to writing for string quartet will find the musical conversations embodied by these works to be involving ones with clear contemporaneity in evidence throughout.

(++++) PIANO SOLOS PLUS

Scriabin: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1-10; Vers La Flamme. Peter Donohoe, piano. SOMM. $29.99 (2 CDs).

Vaughan Williams: Piano Music (complete). Mark Bebbington and Rebecca Omordia, piano. SOMM. $18.99.

CME Presents, Volume 2: Paul Reale—Music for Two Pianos and Piano Four Hands. Carl Patrick Bolleia, Min Kwon, Patricio Molina, Enriqueta Somarriba and Jiayan Sun, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.

Ruth Lomon: Piano Music. Eileen Hutchins and Ruth Lomon, piano. Navona. $14.99.

     There are many reasons for the absence of a significant number of cycles of the complete piano sonatas of Scriabin – a compendium including Vers La Flamme, which was intended as the 11^th sonata but published (for financial reasons) before it had quite been molded into that form. (The numbered sequence omits two very early works, a Sonata-Fantaisie from 1886 and a Sonata from 1889.) It is not just the formidable difficulty of the sonatas that holds pianists back – after all, virtuoso players do not hesitate to confront Beethoven’s late sonatas or those of Liszt, and even Alkan’s astonishingly complex pieces have their champions. Numerous pianists play a Scriabin sonata here or there, not only as a display piece but also to show the highly distinctive nature of Scriabin’s treatment of the piano and of music in general. But a complete cycle requires more than virtuosity and needs a greater analytical understanding and emotional commitment than most pianists are willing, or perhaps able, to provide. A Scriabin cycle is really three separate cycles. The first four numbered sonatas, the only ones in multiple movements, are essentially Romantic in style, although the fourth is so compressed that it looks ahead to the later single-movement works. Nos. 5, 6 and 7 (the seventh actually written before the sixth) are increasingly wild and bizarre, from the extraordinary opening of No. 5 to the passages marked “surge of terror” in No. 6 and the calls in No. 7 for playing with “heavenly voluptuousness” and “dark majesty” (Scriabin titled No. 7 “White Mass”). The last three numbered sonatas are a kind of set, all dating to 1912-13 and exploring increasingly rarefied and at times nearly unintelligible experiences, as in Scriabin’s description of No. 10 as “a sonata of insects. Insects are born from the sun, they are the kisses of the sun.” And finally, Vers La Flamme carries performer and listeners toward the sun, or at any rate the flame (as its title says), intending to show in music Scriabin’s conviction that Earth would eventually be destroyed by an increasing concentration of heat – the whole work is essentially an extended crescendo. Between his synesthesia and his peculiar philosophical musings, Scriabin is at best a very difficult composer to approach, whether one is a performer or a listener. Yet his sonatas represent the best way to try to understand him and his worldview: they change as he changed in thought patterns and orientation. An expert performer must be able to go on this philosophical/literary/musical journey with the composer and must guide the audience through it as well: playing the notes, however accurately, is not enough (some otherwise excellent performances of the sonatas fall down in this exact regard). The prodigious technical demands of the music are in a sense its least difficult elements: the underlying thought patterns that produced the music are in some ways more difficult to fathom and interpret. What all this means is that Peter Donohoe’s cycle on SOMM is an exceptional accomplishment. Donohoe is a first-rate pianist by any measure, and he is a thoughtful pianist as well: these sonatas are not just note sequences to him – they are communications that happen to occur through music but that overlap other forms, such as visual art, color and literature (and if that sounds a bit like synesthesia, the resemblance is purely intentional). Individual sonatas stand well on their own here, including (for example) the clear Russianism of the early ones; but the sonatas also make sense when grouped (for example, No. 7 and No. 9, the latter not labeled “Black Mass” by Scriabin but by someone else, and nevertheless providing a fitting counterpoint to the former). And the works communicate, above all, as a total sequence, taking listeners on a fascinating and byway-studded journey from 1892 (No. 1) to 1914 (Vers La Flamme) – a journey into Scriabin’s mind and mysticism, one that is exceptionally difficult to complete in a single sitting: the sonatas last almost two-and-a-half hours, and their length is scarcely the biggest barrier to immediate comprehension. Donohoe’s Scriabin cycle bears hearing again and again, in and out of sequence. It repays listeners with an extraordinarily involving and remarkably complex musical experience.

     There is nothing this intense in the piano music of Vaughan Williams, offered in its entirety on another SOMM recording – this one featuring Mark Bebbington as solo pianist and Bebbington plus Rebecca Omordia for the duets and two-piano works. Although some of this music was written while Scriabin was alive, it inhabits an entirely different sonic universe, and a far more recognizable one. Much of it is pastoral in character, and there is little here that bears comparison with Vaughan Williams’ work in symphonies, operas, choral music, folk songs – even film music. On the other hand, there is some wonderful Impressionism here in The Lake in the Mountains and some genuine stature and creativity in Introduction and Fugue for Two Pianos, which, remarkably, has never been recorded before. There are two solo-piano treatments of religious material, Bach’s BWV 649 (Ach bleib’ bei uns, Herr Jesu Christ) and Orlando Gibbons’ Song 13. And there is a surprisingly effective six-movement set of miniatures (with some distinctly Baroque referents) called A Little Piano Book, along with a pleasant but more-surface-level Suite of Six Short Pieces. And then there are two items labeled Fantasia that will be familiar in other guises to a great many listeners: a two-piano version of Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and a piano-duet approach to Fantasia on Greensleeves. Both of these are curiosities that add very little to the better-known versions of the music, but other pieces here give fascinating glimpses of a side of Vaughan Williams that the composer himself explored to only a limited degree. The Lake in the Mountains, the Introduction and Fugue, and A Little Piano Book are all interesting and at times surprising works. Vaughan Williams actually wrote rather frequently for piano, but not for piano as a solo (or duet) instrument: the piano accompaniments of his songs, for example, show a sure-handed understanding of the instrument’s capabilities. This very-well-played survey of all his music that is only for piano (or pianos) nevertheless provides insight into the composer that it would be difficult to get in any other way. It will be especially intriguing for people who think they already know the full scope of Vaughan Williams’ music interests – it will be a pleasant surprise to realize they do not.

     There is some very different music for two pianos and piano four hands in the second CME Presents release from MSR Classics. CME is the Center for Musical Excellence, which helps gifted young pianists obtain advanced musical education in the United States. That is a laudable goal, and there are five of these skilled pianists heard on the disc, in various combinations. Unlike the first CD in this series, which offered a large series of brief encores by well-known and less-known composers, this recording is devoted entirely to the music of Paul Reale (born 1943). The difference is not quite as extreme as it might at first appear, since there are 15 tracks making up the eight pieces here, and many of them are quite short (including two that last less than a minute apiece). Furthermore, although nothing here is as well-known as the works by Brahms, Barber, Rachmaninoff, Milhaud and Piazzolla on the earlier CME disc – or the encores of Over the Rainbow and Moon River thrown in at that CD’s end – everything is tonal and easy to listen to without being in any way “easy listening.” All these works are world première recordings, and most of them have aptly descriptive titles whose touches of humor also appear in the music itself: Drowsey Maggie; Serge P (think Prokofiev, specifically but not slavishly his Op. 56: this is in three movements plus two Entr’actes); World of a Bengal Child; CPE (think Bach); Chorales II; Minuet in G Whiz (an unusually clever title); Little Screamers; and Watchman, Tell Us of the Night Fanfare (think Ives: this is a two-and-half-minute work for two pianos, eight hands). Friends and family of the five pianists, and those already familiar with Reale’s music, are the most likely audience for this CD, along with those knowledgeable about CME and anxious to further its mission. Because of its somewhat limited reach, and because there is little that is genuinely distinctive (or could be expected to be distinctive in this repertoire) among the pianists, this is a (+++) CD. But it is one with a great deal to recommend it – including some particularly well-made music that is designed to please contemporary audiences without needing to resort to stilted and stale “modern” compositional techniques.

     Those techniques are, however, part and parcel of the piano music of Ruth Lomon as heard on a (+++) CD from Navona. Approaches that Reale assiduously avoids, Lomon wholeheartedly embraces, for instance by using prepared piano for Five Ceremonial Masks, whose five movements are intended to represent five Navajo masks and are presented here twice – once played by Eileen Hutchins and once, with equal style but somewhat different emphasis, by the composer herself. Hutchins is the pianist for the remainder of these works, one of which, Esquisses, has some (probably unintentional) sense of throwback to Scriabin in its attempts to evoke impressions and colors through unusual compositional touches – notably in the first movement, which tries to imitate European tower bells and express the impression left after hearing them. Also here is a self-referential work called Sunflower Variations, in which Lomon offers a theme and 10 variations – the theme being from a song for contralto and viola that Lomon previously wrote. Actually, the contralto-plus-viola sound might be more intriguingly evocative than some of the piano sounds on this recording. Certainly Lomon has a sure sense of string writing: the one piece here that is not for solo piano, Shadowing Piano Quartet, shows that. This is performed by Hutchins with Katherine Winterstein (violin), Scott Woolweaver (viola), and Patrick Owen (cello). The string writing is skillful, and the three movements – all designed to evoke, one way or another, the notion of moving about so quietly and carefully that one can see without being seen, like wolves or (as the second movement has it) “the shyest angel” – are audibly related but sufficiently different to make the piece as a whole an involving one. Lomon’s music that takes a straightforward approach to instrumental capabilities, perhaps stretching them but not actively working against their usual timbre and style, comes across here as more effective than the music that requires artifice and artificiality to draw attention to its subject matter.

(++++) PERILS GRAND AND GLORIOUS

Kid Beowulf #2: The Song of Roland. By Alexis E. Fajardo. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.

Will Wilder #2: The Lost Staff of Wonders. By Raymond Arroyo. Crown. $16.99.

     Alexis Fajardo’s second foray into the realm of the old-English epic poem, Beowulf, is no longer about the old-English epic poem, Beowulf, and it scarcely matters. Fajardo very loosely based his first graphic novel in this series, The Blood-Bound Oath, on the original poem, reinterpreting the whole central theme of Beowulf in significant ways so the book could be aimed directly at 21^st-century preteens and young teenagers. The whole notion could easily have been both silly and depressing, but Fajardo handled it so well that it turned out to be merely silly – and in some respects not silly at all. Fajardo made Beowulf and Grendel into brothers, and yes, that was the silly part, but Fajardo twisted the legend enough to make this foundational premise barely plausible and, more importantly, to turn the first book in the series into a journey both of geography and of self-knowledge. In The Song of Roland, Fajardo turns his sights to – well, to The Song of Roland, a medieval epic as important to the French as Beowulf is to the British (it is probably worth pointing out that the French conquered England some years after Beowulf was written). The Song of Roland is a tale of heroism, battle, tragedy and hubris, lightened, rearranged and considerably altered (to the point of including roller coasters) in Fajardo’s retelling. Scholars of medieval literature will cringe, and are entitled to, but what Fajardo does so well here is to make these very old stories interesting and, believe it or not, relevant, by emphasizing characters’ relationships and interrelationships and by having them use modern slang and have adventures as likely to be comic as serious. The Song of Roland, Fajardo-style, is fun, something that can scarcely be said of the original. The tie-in to Beowulf and to the previous graphic novel comes because Beowulf and Grendel have been banished – that happened at the end of the first book – and have headed to Francia to find their uncle Ogier. Francia is a mess, and its greatest hero – that would be Roland – isn’t helping matters much until Beowulf and Grendel, taking a break from their personal squabbles, help get Roland better focused so he can lead the drive to defeat the Saracens and their leader, Marsilion. There are a couple of almost-meaningful female characters here – scarcely the case in the old sagas of heroism, but welcome in a 21^st-century graphic novel – and also here are an elephant that turns into a weapon when a specific word is spoken, and a giant, and various other trappings of myth that make Fajardo’s The Song of Roland complex, intricate and fast-paced.  No, it is not accurate, not at all, but Fajardo knows it is not, and that counts for a great deal. Like the previous book, this one contains some fascinating material after the story ends, including notes on Fajardo’s tributes to Peanuts, the Bone saga, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, plus an excellent list of sources that Fajardo used for his work and that young readers who become intrigued with Beowulf, Grendel, Roland and the other characters can look up on their own. Also as in the first book, the two colorists are significant contributors to the visual impact of the storytelling: Jose Mari Flores handles the main story, and does it in suitable tones that complement the narrative well – while the prologue, a simplified verse retelling of The Song of Roland, is colored by Brian Kolm with an entirely different palette, a striking one that brings those pages to life with exceptional skill. In fact, it is just possible that Fajardo’s skillful storytelling and adept rewriting of old tales and legends will succeed in getting modern, screen-focused, instant-gratification-obsessed preteens and teens interested in old stories that unfold at a fair more leisurely pace but that really do offer themes of war and peace, friends and enemies, good and evil, that are just as relevant today as they were – admittedly in very different form – well over a thousand years ago.

     Raymond Arroyo dips back even further in time for his Will Wilder series – all the way to Biblical days. And he gives The Lost Staff of Wonders, which follows the series’ first book, The Relic of Perilous Falls, more spiritual resonance than is usually found in adventures for preteens. Beyond that, though, this is pretty much the usual fantasy mixture of evil elements, dire dangers, fantastic family secrets, scenes of fear and worry and (almost) doom, plus the standard mentors and companions and nemeses. Headstrong 12-year-old Will Wilder (“headstrong” also describes Fajardo’s Beowulf, Grendel and innumerable other 12-year-old protagonists) in the first book caused an accident that seriously injured his brother; in this second book, he manages, through carelessness, to allow the Staff of Moses to be stolen from his family’s museum of wondrous and mystical objects. Will falls under immediate suspicion as being the thief, which of course readers know he is not, but he has to locate and defeat the actual thief before all the plagues of Egypt, called down by the staff, descend on the town of Perilous Falls. Indeed, some arrive rather soon: a river running with blood, frogs with teeth, and a plague of gnats (rather than locusts). Those are more than enough for Will and the town, thank you. Will is not alone or without help in his difficulties: his sister is a healer and his brother can glow brightly enough to chase demons away – a useful ability in light of the fact that the family museum is also the headquarters of the demon-fighting Brethren. Also available to assist is Aunt Lucille, as attractively offbeat a character here as in the first book. But the hunt for the missing staff is only part of what Will must deal with: his friend, Max Meriwether, has been dreaming of a rising evil that will target Will. Could this be connected with the theft of the staff? Well, of course – the book may have some intricacies of plot and a large number of characters, but Will remains dead center (an apt way to look at him in this case), and all the occurrences eventually trace back to or revolve around him. Some of the supernatural elements here are unusual, and the mystery is well-handled despite elements of obviousness (a new faith healer in town – hmm, what could that mean?). The unsurprising elements of the book make it a (+++) novel: in particular, there is nothing at all unusual in a protagonist who is good and loyal and right-thinking despite being impatient, careless and undisciplined.  Still, the pacing and writing here are good, and readers who enjoyed the first book in the series, much of which was clearly designed to set up later stories, will be glad to see the in medias res nature of The Lost Staff of Wonders and to be carried along on a fast-paced, unbelievable but frequently thrilling adventure.

(++++) KLUTZ KLEVERNESS KONTINUES

Make Your Own Soap. By the editors of Klutz. Klutz. $21.99.

Circuit Clay: The Easiest Way to Learn about Electricity. By the editors of Klutz. Klutz. $21.99.

     Klutz, now the “books-plus” crafts-project division of Scholastic, has specialized in good, clean fun for many years, ever since it was a scrappy little independent West Coast company. So it was probably inevitable that there would eventually be a crafts-project offering such as Make Your Own Soap. After all, what could be better and cleaner fun than this? Intended for kids as young as six – but fun, really, for all ages, and that includes adult ages – this kit contains, as always with Klutz, both the instructions for doing the projects and essentially all the items needed to complete them. In this case, that means there is a box bound to the back of the instruction book and containing soap base, a soap mold with six shapes, a pleasant coconut-papaya scent, color tablets, cosmetic-grade glitter, even stickers to dress up the soap bars – and a gift box and ribbon to use in giving them away. But why would you do that? After all the work, kids and parents alike will probably want to keep and use the soaps themselves. Well, all right, not “all the work” – as usual with Klutz offerings, the projects are not especially difficult. But doing them is really satisfying. Parents should know that the soap projects are best done by child and adult together, or at least with the adult hovering nearby, since soap making requires heat (microwave or stovetop heat in this case), rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle (not included), and a cutting board and knife. In fact, the instructions specifically tell kids to find “a responsible adult assistant” for soap-making. Klutz provides its usual bit of science along with its how-to-do-it narrative – noting, for example: “Bubbles are just pockets of air wrapped in layers of water and soap. The soap makes a kind of water sandwich (water is the filling and the soap is the bread).” And while kids, ahem, digest that, they can proceed to learn how to make seven slightly larger soaps or 10 smaller ones, in multiple colors and with great shapes such as a star, an emoji cat, and a cupcake. Along the way, the instruction book explains how soap works and why you need it rather than plain water to get clean (soap “is like the chemistry cool kid who hangs out with everyone, to mingle and wash away the dirt”). There are a few surprising and delightful extras here, too, such as “soap-powered experiments” using two included paper boats in a race, with whatever liquid soap you may have at home as fuel. An unusually involving project, this soap-making one has only one flaw: kids are likely to enjoy it so much that they will want to make even more Klutz-style soaps after they use up the ingredients here. Hmm. Could that be a Klutzian sales strategy?

     Of course, parents can always distract their soap-loving kids, at least those ages eight and up, with a different Klutz offering – for instance, Circuit Clay. This is, in its way, every bit as clever as the soap-making kit. Electricity and water do not mix, of course; and interestingly, the packaging of this “books-plus” offering is opposite that of the soap project, with the electricity instruction book bound to the back of the box of needed items rather than the front. What is inside the Circuit Clay box is some really amazing stuff that makes this one of the cleverest Klutz offering of recent times. Instead of wires, this electricity-use creation uses conductive clay, which is pretty much what it sounds like: clay that conducts electricity. Four colors of this special clay are provided, along with white insulating clay and, as a source of electricity, a battery pack powered by four AA batteries (which Klutz does not include). With what is included, plus some household items – dental floss to cut the clay, toothpick and pencil to shape it, plastic bags or containers to store it, and so on – kids can make clay sculptures that they can decorate with paper punch-outs (included) and illuminate with LEDs (20 included, in five colors). As always, there is science as well as fun here, and in fact Circuit Clay is pretty much all science, packaged enjoyably so learning becomes fun: “A circuit is a loop that allows an electric current to flow through it. …So what is electricity? When a bunch of electrons start moving in the same direction, they create an electric current.” There is a wonderful hands-on demonstration here of what a short circuit is and how it works, and there is a well-written troubleshooting checklist to go through if the suggested projects do not go as planned. The projects themselves include a few spacey ones (rocket, UFO, shooting star, astronaut) and some down-to-earth ideas (flower, jack-o’-lantern). Kids can even make a cupcake with flashing light on top or a snowman with illuminated eyes. As in many Klutz crafts-project offerings, there are somewhat-more-complex things to make later in the instruction book, including a window showing a nighttime scene with twinkling stars; a police car topped with red and blue lights; and, at the very end, a dragon with glowing eyes and tongue. Unlike the elements of the Klutz soap projects, which will be used up by the time kids finish the instruction book, the ones in Circuit Clay will have some remnants that can be stored – and the clay can be reworked to do new things, allowing kids to have their own flights of fancy after completing the specific ideas suggested in the instruction guide. In both soap-making and circuit design, though, what is klear is the kontinuing kleverness of Klutz.

(++++) DEATH, DOOM, AND OTHER DELIGHTS

The Wrong Dead Guy. By Richard Kadrey. Harper Voyager. $24.99.

     There is only one Richard Kadrey, and all things considered, that is probably a good thing. It could destabilize the universe if there were more than one creator of absurdly outré, laugh-out-loud magical ridiculousness that is decidedly not for kids and probably not for most adults who would pass as normal if the light is right. Actually, Kadrey is doing a pretty good job of destabilizing it on his own. It’s not exactly our universe, but it’s close enough so we should be grateful that…well, grateful that it’s not exactly our universe.

     Kadrey writes picaresque “caper” novels with noir overflowing, a scriptwriter’s sense of pacing through dialogue, and perfectly poised descriptive passages that alone are worth the price of admission: “If money wanted to take a few weeks off, kick back, and catch some rays, it would do it in Carrwood, a pretty little private community in the verdant hills north of Los Angeles. Carrwood had more security than the Kremlin. Invading rats and squirrels found inside the gates weren’t poisoned, but trapped, packaged, and shipped to a small, but well-staffed rodent retirement community outside Palms [sic] Springs. To say that Carrwood was affluent was like saying the sinking of the Titanic was a bit of a whoopsie.” Occasional typos aside, Kadrey parades a full panoply of carefully crafted whoopsies in his magic-infused thriller-plus-cops-and-robbers adventures that are sufficiently indescribable so that it would help to have a few new adjectives available. In their absence, “Kadreyish” probably covers them all.

     Consider: The Wrong Dead Guy is Kadrey’s second book about a magic thief called Coop. No, he is not magic – in fact, he is immune to magic, which is kind of a superpower, since what he does is steal magic, or magical objects. This is good, except when his immunity does not quite work or except when he has to use it in the service of the government Department of Peculiar Science, where he is employed because if he refuses to be employed there, he will be sent back to prison, which he was sent to in the first place because of the machinations of Morty, with whom he is now working. Oh, Coop also has a girlfriend, Giselle, who broke up with him, broke his heart, and now works with him at DOPS, and they are back together, and everything is sweetness and light, which in a Kadrey book means you just know everything is going to hop a handbasket and head straight to you-know-where.

     Where it all goes in The Wrong Dead Guy is to a rundown museum that happens to possess the mummy of an Egyptian wizard named Harkhuf; DOPS wants the mummy for its own purposes. Coop and team head off to steal it in “a police van courtesy of the DOPS. Not that it was a real LAPD vehicle. It was Coop’s understanding that the DOPS had 3-D printed it. It was also his understanding that they could also print human organs, five-lens spider-friendly glasses, robot parts, and – for office picnics – geometrically perfect s’mores.” The heist goes fine, but unfortunately Harkhuf is not quite dead and has interests of his own, chief among them the revival of his girlfriend, Shemetet, so the two of them can take over the world and all like that there. Coop, like Kadrey’s better-known protagonist Sandman Slim, has a tendency to be tasked with world-saving and a tendency to object to being so tasked. In order to accomplish the task this time, he also has to deal with a dead but revived professor who is now half cat and half octopus and who is on his side, and a dead but revived nasty piece of work named Nelson who works at DOPS as a mook (essentially a zombie with a day job) and has plans of his own, which, when they go awry, do so in rather sinister ways: “It wasn’t so much having to spend the rest of the night cleaning bits of Albertson out of the shredder and light fixtures that bothered him; it was that now he couldn’t murder anyone himself. The manual was very clear on that point. No department below field operations was allowed more than one shredding, decapitation, immolation, or consumption of an employee by a hostile entity – human, animal, or cyborg – per quarter.”

     Throw in some wealthy wacko wannabe environmentalists, some DOPS Auditors who have a tendency to get inside the brains of people they examine, settings such as the used-car dealership to end all used-car dealerships and the Hollywood Golden Bungalows (“a hangout for the endless waves of starry-eyed musicians that washed up on L.A.’s shores like so many dead whales”), a “Hang in there, baby” motivational Post-it featuring a drawing of “a dragon in an evening gown eating what appeared to be a washing machine full of bowling shoes,” and a hyper-conservative TV news operation that “seems to have been created by Lex Luthor for Mad Max villains and Vlad the Impalers who want to return to the gold standard, replace preschool with toddler coal mining, and balance the budget through Bigfoot hunts and free-market organ harvesting,” and you have a small idea of what Kadrey is getting at.

     Oh, and don’t forget the transformed elephant, or rather what is transformed into the elephant.  “Why can’t I do business with normal thieves who want to steal things and not have everybody know who did it?” laments Coop at one point, then adding, “Of course, normal thieves don’t rush across town so they can stake out a trust-fund hit squad with their stolen elephant.” And this is what passes for introspection in The Wrong Dead Guy. But really, none of this is Coop’s fault – he just happened to wander into a Richard Kadrey novel, or rather two of them if you include The Everything Box, in which Coop first appeared and first saved the world. You will be happy to hear that he saves it again this time. Apparently. And apparently this is a good thing, although it is a touch sad to realize that with Harkhuf apparently being really dead and gone this time, there will be no one else available to say, “I promise you eternal torment if you do not deliver to me a chocolate brownie.” At least until Kadrey’s next book.

(+++) CHOOSE YOUR SUBTITLE

The Toddler Brain. By Laura A. Jana, M.D. Da Capo. $27.

     Parents who bemoan the fact that children do not come with instruction manuals have not spent enough time at bookstores or book-selling Web sites. There are tons of instruction manuals out there, and while it is true that a baby does not come prepackaged with any particular one, there are so many choices that parents can easily spend all their nonexistent spare time while raising an infant reading about all the ways they should be raising an infant but probably aren’t. The objective appears to be to make parents, who likely feel inadequate in many ways already, feel even worse.

     Well, to be fair, maybe that is not the objective, but it can certainly be the result. There is just so much out there purporting to know exactly what should be done to raise the best, smartest, happiest, most well-adjusted, best-prepared-for-the-future child that parents may be forgiven for wondering how their own parents – much less grandparents – managed to get through their child-rearing years without all the perfectly reasonable and undoubtedly accurate guidebooks available today.

     While wondering, they can read a book such as The Toddler Brain – as soon as they get past a title that seems determined to make them feel even more deficient than usual. Laura Jana’s work appears to have both a subtitle and a surtitle, or subtitle and sub-subtitle, or just an attempt to cram as much information onto the title page as possible so parents can be overwhelmed even before starting the text. One subtitle reads, “Nurture the Skills Today That Will Shape Your Child’s Tomorrow,” thereby warning parents that whatever they are currently doing is probably not nurturing the right skills or not nurturing them in the proper way. The other subtitle reads, “The Surprising Science Behind Your Child’s Development from Birth to Age 5,” thereby noting that everything in The Toddler Brain is based on science and therefore to be implicitly trusted, and if you don’t get with the program right now, you risk having a child who is woefully unprepared for the world by his or her fifth birthday.

     At the foundation of Jana’s book is in fact the notion of what sort of world our children need to prepare for, and in this respect the book is both insightful and timely. Jana, a pediatrician, believes that old-fashioned linear thinking, while appropriate to the now-ending Industrial Age, is inadequate for the increasingly interconnected Information Age and for whatever age will follow it. Perhaps two-thirds of today’s toddlers, she asserts, will grow up to do jobs that do not even exist today – an intriguing statistic if by no means an unexceptionable one. Preparing today’s young ones for the latest iteration of the coming brave new world requires parents to look at and practice parenting in a completely different way from the way their parents and their parents’ parents looked at and practiced child-rearing – as if today’s parents did not feel time-pressed and hamstrung enough.

     Jana has a somewhat overly cute way of presenting her recommendations. Instead of focusing on IQ, she argues, parents need to focus on QI, which is not only IQ backwards but also, as qi, means “life force” or “energy flow” in Chinese. Jana pronounces the letters as “key” to indicate that they refer to key elements of raising a child today, but qi is actually pronounced “chee,” although it is indeed a key element in traditional Chinese medicine. In Jana’s methodology, parents seeking to give their children QI skills need to focus on seven areas: Me, We, Why, Will, Wiggle, Wobble, and What If. There is no acronym for these, but there is plenty of description. In simplest form, Me involves self-awareness and self-control; We is people skills for an increasingly team-oriented world; Why refers to questioning and curiosity; Will is self-motivation; Wiggle has to do with a kind of physical and intellectual restlessness that makes action possible; Wobble is a form of resilience that makes it easier to learn from failure; and What If involves imagining ways in which the world could change and how an individual can be part of that change. Even in this very compressed form, these QI skills seem like a tall order, and indeed they are – with today’s parents having no readily available place to turn to learn and implement them except, ahem, The Toddler Brain.

     Jana’s focus on getting infants ready for eventual entry into the business world, and specifically into a fast-changing one that may make demands of them that it never made of earlier generations, is an unusual and welcome one in parenting books. She is clearly smart and thoughtful, and her ideas are by and large intriguing ones, if somewhat curiously or even tortuously expressed. However, her expectation that time-pressed, financially insecure, sleep-deprived new parents will be able to absorb an entirely new way of thinking about raising infants and then take steps to implement the method is wholly unreasonable. The Toddler Brain is actually a good book for pre-parenting: people considering having a child in the next several years and looking for a guide to what to do after the child is born will find many fascinating concepts here – although even they may be hard-pressed to implement Jana’s ideas after they actually become parents. “Reading books to young children can be a way to promote just about all the QI Skills,” notes Jana at one point. Reading her book is the way to learn about those skills and get basic guidance on how to help your children or children-to-come gain them. But any way you look at it, reading and absorbing and adjusting and simply coping with everyday life will take a great deal of time that parents – especially those with children under age five – are very unlikely to possess in abundance. The unfortunate result is that people who already may feel overwhelmed by the unending demands of child-rearing may feel even more so as they absorb Jana’s views on the best way to shape a toddler’s future life.

(++++) SYMPHONIC EXPANSIONS

Beethoven: Symphony No. 9. Klara Ek, soprano; Elisabeth Jansson, alto; Thomas Cooley, tenor; Liao Changyong, baritone; Ars Nova Copenhagen, Latvian Radio Choir and Copenhagen Phil conducted by Lan Shui. Orchid Classics. $13.99.

Liszt: Faust Symphony. Steve Davislim, tenor; men of Chorus Sine Nomine and Orchester Wiener Akademie conducted by Martin Haselböck. Alpha. $18.99.

     There is always a rationale for yet another of the umpteen-plus recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and the reasoning behind the new release on Orchid Classics (of a performance from 2013) is unusually intriguing. This completes the three-volume Beethoven cycle featuring the oddly named but very adeptly performing Copenhagen Phil under Lan Shui. Shui’s approach to the whole set of symphonies is an intriguing mixture of the contemporary and the historically informed: the orchestra uses modern string instruments with historically accurate reproductions of brass and timpani, resulting in a sonic blend that is different from that heard on any other recording. And Shui’s approach to the music combines modern and older elements as well: contemporary scholarship suggests that Beethoven’s tempo indications, contrary to what was thought a few years back, are likely to be what he really wanted, and that the old canard suggesting that he had a defective metronome is not accurate. So Shui uses the tempos that Beethoven’s score suggests, even when they result in performances that require listeners to make some adjustments in their expectations. Actually, the chance to hear familiar music differently is one of the big pluses of Shui’s cycle. And Shui’s thoughtfulness about the music comes through clearly. He considers the Ninth to be less symphony and more oratorio, for example, and conducts it that way, with the first three movements assuming a decidedly lower profile than the finale. This is an arguable approach and one that other conductors have tried with greater or lesser success. It perhaps overstates the case for the finale to some extent – a true oratorio would make the first three movements more of a prologue to the finale than a strong set of declamations, as for instance in the case in Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2 (Lobgesang), a work from 1840 that is directly based on Beethoven’s Ninth and one clearly designed to blur the boundary between symphony and oratorio (although, just to confuse matters further, Mendelssohn actually called it a “Symphony-Cantata”). Beethoven certainly laid the groundwork for works such as Mendelssohn’s, but whether he planned the Ninth itself as a symphony expanded into an oratorio is certainly debatable. Shui makes a strong case for the approach, though, and his chosen instrumentation helps him do so: the strings are brighter than those of Beethoven’s time, while the brass sounds more subdued and the overall orchestra seems more balanced than in performances using all-modern instruments. The first three movements are full of fine highlighting, again made possible much of the time by the instruments chosen, and Beethoven’s tempos work quite well – the Scherzo, notably, is fleet rather than heavy and portentous. As for the finale, the solo quartet blends very well together and stands out effectively against the chorus, and Shui makes intelligent choices about the interrelationship of the individual voices, this being a matter of perpetual debate in Beethoven’s Ninth and one without any absolutely clear “right” approach. This performance does make the finale a grand capstone to the symphony, and if it perhaps underplays the importance of the first three movements slightly even though they collectively account for two-thirds of the symphony’s length (in contrast to the first three movements in Mendelssohn’s later work), it does so in the service of a vision that is well-thought-out and one regarding which Shui, the singers and the orchestra seem to be in complete agreement --  resulting in a thoughtful, interesting and highly involving performance.

     By the time Liszt wrote his Faust Symphony, 25 years after Beethoven’s death, the symphonic landscape had changed and in some ways enlarged dramatically – thanks in large part to Beethoven and, in particular, to Beethoven’s Ninth. Like Berlioz, Liszt felt that the symphony after Beethoven had to develop in entirely new directions; and the Faust Symphony, which lasts even longer than Beethoven’s Ninth, shows just how far Liszt stretched the medium. This three-movement work is really a series of three intimately connected tone poems rather than a symphony in any structurally recognizable form. Liszt referred to the three parts as character sketches, and he developed them in some highly innovative ways. It is scarcely a surprise that the forward motion and constant striving of the music representing Faust stand in strong contrast to the quiet, gently graceful and drifting music representing Gretchen. But what is surprising are the methods Liszt uses to limn the characters. Faust’s music at one point includes an extremely early example of something approaching atonality and twelvetone, then harks directly back to Beethoven through use of the key of C minor, associated with Fate ever since Beethoven’s Fifth. The Faust movement is complex, long and frequently difficult for the ear to grasp, while the one representing Gretchen is simple, graceful and structurally straightforward. And the third movement, representing Mephistopheles, is a wonderful and groundbreaking concept, denying Mephistopheles any theme of his own while portraying him through a series of distortions of Faust’s themes, musically showing this tempter as one who twists and distorts scholarship, striving, love, and all the other characteristics that Liszt assigns to Faust in the first part of the symphony. This is a simply brilliant stroke of characterization and one that expands the Faust Symphony into a work as genuinely philosophical in its medium as Goethe’s Faust is in the medium of poetry and drama. Liszt caps his work, which is primarily drawn from the first part of Goethe’s, with a vocal conclusion that uses the last lines of the second part of Goethe’s Faust – the same lines, mystically celebrating the “eternal feminine,” that would later conclude and exalt Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. Martin Haselböck conducts the Faust Symphony with intensity, understanding and an excellent sense of pacing on a new Alpha release. And the concluding vocal section – which returns, in a transformative way, to some of the Gretchen music, showing it to be less naïve and one-dimensional than it seems at first – is especially impressive. Indeed, it actually sounds like an anticipation of Mahler, who would expand the form of the symphony even beyond anything by Beethoven or Liszt, while managing to anchor his own works in the very different ones of both earlier composers.