(++++) ACTIVE FUN

Word Play. By Adam Lehrhaupt. Illustrated by Jared Chapman. Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic. $17.99.

Monsters on Machines. By Deb Lund. Illustrated by Robert Neubecker. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $6.99.

     It is no small feat to combine a lesson in grammar with a story that is enjoyable entirely on its own. But that is exactly what Adam Lehrhaupt has done in Word Play. The approach is disarmingly simple: show kids playing together, having agreements and disagreements, and eventually getting along just fine. The catch here is that each child represents a part of speech, and each does just what that part of speech indicates. There is a girl named Verb who constantly does things: climbs, slides, twirls and so forth – “climbs,” “slides” and “twirls” all being action words, which is to say verbs. And there is a boy named Noun who cannot do anything, but can be a person, place or thing. It is the initial conflict between Verb and Noun that is the heart of the story here. Why conflict? Because the other “word kids” watch and react to Verb and Noun. Interjection says “wow!” Adjective uses adjectival phrases such as “impressive display” and “crushing blow.” And Adverb chimes in with phrases including words such as “very” and “brilliantly.” Verb gets annoyed as Noun transforms himself into various things – for instance, “Noun becomes this place” (a tall building in a city) and “Verb reacts” by stomping monster-like through the streets. When the other “word kids” respond positively to Noun’s transformations, “Verb sulks.” As the story goes on, each character speaks in accordance with his or her part-of-speech role. Thus, it is Adjective who comments on “a giant, frightening bee” that, says Adverb, is “coming dangerously close.” The problem is that while everyone else can run from the bee, Noun cannot: “Noun can’t DO anything. He is stuck.” It falls to Verb to rescue Noun and drag him to safety – establishing their connection and friendship. Word Play, which includes Jared Chapman illustrations that give each “word kid” a different look and show each in a different color, is a very clever lesson that barely comes across as a lesson at all – except for the “parts of speech” explanatory list given at the start and end of the book, outside the narrative pages. Even Lehrhaupt’s dedication is in the spirit of his story. It reads, “For Kerri, my adjective noun. I verb you adverb adverb.”

     The kids in Deb Lund’s Monsters on Machines are transformed in a different, monstrous way. Scaly, pointy-eared, fang-toothed, lizard-skinned, hairy and horned, the four characters – Dirty Dugg, Gorbert, Stinky Stubb and Melvina – are mini-monsters engaging in a big construction project that requires use of a “fiendgrubber,” “crushermusher,” “roller masher,” “ghostergrader” and other avowedly monstrous equipment. Originally published in 2008 and now available in paperback, Monsters on Machines manages to keep the goings-on suitably icky but tastefully safe at the same time: all these monsters carefully put on hard hats, work gloves, earplugs and heavy boots before starting the job. None of the protective clothing prevents the little monsters from having a great time: “Flinging dirt like tornadoes, they holler and hoot./ (Monsters love getting grimy from hard hat to boot.)” Robert Neubecker’s exuberant illustrations nicely complement Lund’s rhyming text as the monsters build a “Custom Prehaunted” house so big that readers must turn the book sideways to see the whole thing – complete with cupola, snarling-beast decorations and an eye-poppingly clashing color scheme. After the project is done, though, the little monsters become a lot more like non-monstrous little kids – in behavior if not appearance. Their monster mom shows up with food and sets the table neatly, although she does then tell the little ones that it is fine for them to eat their “monsteroni and cheese” with “their hands and their feet.” Which they do – after which the four crawl onto Mama Monster’s lap for story time, followed by a nap, followed by very careful cleanup “so all’s tidy and neat.” Lund describes the foursome as “an organized earthquake reshaping the ground,” but at heart they are simply kids, and it is easy to see why little would-be monsters (even ones without horns, fangs and three eyes) will enjoy the adventures of this adorably awful construction quartet.

(++++) FACTS FOR FUN

Animal Planet Chapter Book #3: Bugs! By James Buckley, Jr. Liberty Street. $14.99.

Animal Planet Chapter Book #4: Snakes! By James Buckley, Jr. Liberty Street. $14.99.

     There is no shortage of factual books combining brief lessons in animal appearance and behavior with illustrations and photos that make the information visually appealing. But James Buckley, Jr.’s considerations of bugs and snakes stand out in this crowded field. The reason is that these books do not devolve into visually striking but informationally vapid “factoid” volumes in which the pictures overwhelm the text and the amount of material communicated is comparatively small. Buckley actually provides narrative chapters about the creatures that, although visually attractive (the books are nicely designed and sized well for small hands), really do focus mostly on content. Thus, one chapter in Bugs! begins, “Dragonflies have lived on Earth for more than 300 million years. Over that time, they have not changed much. …Dragonflies have four wings. Each wing can move on its own.” And so on. The start-of-chapter illustration is not just thrown in, either: it shows a dragonfly that seems to be doing a handstand, with the caption explaining that “that’s how it cools off when it gets too warm.” Certainly there are plenty of “factoid” sections as well as narratives, but at least there are narratives. A “factoid” entry here, for instance, is a “Fact File” dubbed (rather irritatingly) “Rockin’ Roaches.” Here Buckley explains that “while many say ‘Eww!’ about cockroaches, we should also say ‘Thanks’” because cockroaches are helpful ecologically as “recyclers” that “pass nutrients from the [dead] animals they eat into the soil and plants when they poop.” Cockroaches, this section points out, are even sold as food for people in Asia: they “are inexpensive and high in protein.” The balance of explanatory chapters with facts-at-a-glance entries is quite well handled here. So is the context. Buckley does not just comment that the loudest insect is the African cicada but also notes that the cicada’s noise level of 106.7 decibels is “louder than a motorcycle.” And he points out that the smallest known insect, the parasitoid wasp, is 6/1000 of an inch long, which is “smaller than a poppy seed.” The placing of statistics within context this way is not always done in Bugs! But when it is, it makes the information easier to understand. Buckley also includes some questions that encourage young readers to think about the answers, asking, for example, how many parts an insect leg has (five, all of which are explained) and whether insects can see color (some can; an experiment that proved this is briefly described). Although Bugs! is by definition a once-over-lightly book, it is not quite as light as other introductory books about the natural world, and as a result makes a better introduction to its topic than do similar books that focus far more on visual impact than on communicating information.

     The strengths are the same in Snakes! These creatures are endlessly fascinating to children and adults alike, even though, when you think about it, they simply “look like a tube,” as Buckley says. Snakes look so different from most other animals that there are nearly endless ways of showing what is special about them – for instance, while humans have 33 vertebrae and 24 ribs, “snakes have as many as 585 vertebrae” and “the longer the snake, the more vertebrae it has,” with internal organs that “are long and thin to fit its tubelike shape.” Buckley offers the usual reassurances about snakes not being interested in harming people, notes that “only about 20% of the snakes in the world are dangerous to humans,” and adds that “more people are hurt by insect stings than by snakebites.” The book nevertheless has quite a few photos of venomous snakes – many of which have unusual, even spectacular appearances that make them far more interesting to look at than the majority of non-venomous, often very plain-looking snakes. An especially interesting chapter here, “Moving Around,” discusses the different ways snakes are able to go places despite their lack of limbs: the familiar serpentine or slithering movement, rectilinear motion (using belly muscles so the body stays almost in a straight line while moving), concertina (using a series of curves to move forward), and sidewinding. There is also information on how snakes swim and, in a few cases, are able to glide by flattening their bodies to catch updrafts as they move from branch to branch in trees. What snakes eat – and how they eat – is always a fascinating topic, and is nicely handled here, complete with photos of one snake wrapped around lizard prey and one that has just swallowed an egg that is more than twice the width of its body. There is even an amazing photo of a large Indian python swallowing a deer. Buckley does a good job of including some scientific terminology and explaining it straightforwardly – for instance, that the shedding of skin by snakes is called sloughing and the single scale that protects snakes’ always-open eyes is known as a brill. The way snakes’ forked tongues work, the special senses that snakes have, the location of heat pits in snakes that have them – all these things and more are nicely explained here. And there are some fascinating photos, such as one showing a pile of corn snakes of many different colors (“morphs”) that encapsulates both the variety of snake colors and the animals’ striking and often beautiful appearance. Like Buckley's book on bugs, the one on snakes makes a fine introduction to its topic and manages to be meatier and more appealingly written than many others that handle the same information in ways that focus primarily on visual elements to the detriment of their factual content.

(++++) DUE EAST OF INDIANA

R.J. MacCready #1: Hell’s Gate. By Bill Schutt and J.R. Finch. William Morrow. $9.99.

R.J. MacCready #2: The Himalayan Codex. By Bill Schutt and J.R. Finch. William Morrow. $26.99.

     Just to get the inevitable comparisons out of the way quickly: yes, the protagonist of these novels is indeed very much in the Indiana Jones mold, except that to the extent that any sort of home base matters here (which it doesn’t very much), it would be farther east than Indiana, more of a New York thing. The reason is that both Bill Schutt (real name and a real-life vertebrate zoologist) and J.R. Finch (a pseudonym reversing the initials of the novels’ protagonist) are New Yorkers. And unlike globe-hopping, heroic World War II era anthropologist Indiana Jones, globe-hopping, heroic World War II era R.J. MacCready is – well, a zoologist, of course.  And to get one other thing out of the way, the authors will surely not object if readers amuse themselves by mentally pronouncing the protagonist’s name as “make-ready,” since the authors themselves surely had that idea in their own minds when naming the character. Or should have had it.

     The manifest absurdities of the Indiana Jones stories were a great deal of the fun, but these MacCready novels only appear to be filled with manifest absurdities: Schutt and Finch base them on sound science. At the end of each book, they offer explanatory material about the research from which they extrapolate, and if they take an occasional liberty in the name of slam-bang action – for instance, bringing back an extinct species or two – that is perfectly justifiable in the service of a couple of doggone good and doggone thrilling stories.

     So much for the preliminaries. The main action – and there is plenty of it – takes place in areas quite far from New York (or Indiana, for that matter). Hell’s Gate happens to be a real place in South America, but Schutt and Finch give it a kind of Lost World eeriness in the context of a wartime mystery in their first book, originally published last year and now available in paperback. The story takes place in 1944, when MacCready is sent to the Amazon to find out why a Japanese submarine headed there and became grounded in mud. He is given the task only after a crack team of Rangers is sent to Brazil and disappears. It turns out that this is no ordinary sub: it is gigantic, with a hanger big enough to hold three bombers. Mac guesses that the sub was headed for Hell’s Gate (Portão do Inferno), a mysterious area where, in our real world, Percy Fawcett – whose treks inspired his friend Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and whose personality inspired, yes, Indiana Jones – vanished mysteriously in 1925 while searching for the Lost City of Z. In Hell’s Gate, the huge sub has been abandoned by its Nazi crew, which turns out to be a serious mistake, as the soldiers are picked off one by one by creatures known to the natives as chupacabra. These monsters are both vampiric and strangely sentient, able to take over parts of their victims’ brains; and no, this is not as far-fetched as a brief description makes it seem. Mac picks up some help in his search, which is a bit of good luck, since he is not familiar with the jungle and it turns out to harbor, among other things, giant man-eating turtles. Mac’s helpers are a long-lost friend named Bob Thorne and Thorne’s wife, Yanni, and if they are less interesting than Mac, that is a minor matter, since everything here is less interesting than Mac, who is not only smart and bold but also funny and sarcastic; and yes, yes, that is yet another Indiana Jones tie-in. In any case, Mac, Thorne and Yanni soon enough uncover a particularly dastardly Nazi plot involving missile launchers that could bring Nazi victory on the Russian front and, not so incidentally, destroy entire U.S. cities. There is no Ark of the Covenant secreted here, but there are plenty of other things that strain credulity to an almost equal extent – except that Schutt and Finch are remarkably meticulous in basing the speculative elements on sound science. Hell’s Gate also features some remarkably well-done descriptive passages that make the settings come alive and help readers feel they are going along with the characters through exotic and almost always dangerous (although frequently beautiful) locales. A fantasy-adventure with some echoes of Heart of Darkness, of Stephen King, of Michael Crichton, and even of Dracula, the book is not especially distinctive in style except for its attentiveness to scene depiction. But the strength of Mac as a character, the pure evil of his opponents, the bizarre but fact-based situations and creatures he encounters, and a pace reminiscent of that of H. Rider Haggard (who, like Doyle, was a friend of Percy Fawcett) combine to make Hell’s Gate a genuine page-turner whose balancing of suspense and science is expertly done – and whose conclusion opens the way to a sequel that readers will be eager to explore.

     And that sequel is The Himalayan Codex. Now it is 1946, and postwar rebuilding is in full swing. Mac is still recovering from the Hell’s Gate adventure and the toll it took on him in multiple ways – Schutt and Finch provide enough backstory to make it possible to read this book without knowing the earlier one (although their hints are so tantalizing that anyone who enjoys the second book will certainly want the first). Now, postwar, Mac’s civilian life has him at the Metropolitan Museum of Natural History (a portmanteau museum: there really is a Metropolitan Museum of Art, and New York has a Museum of Natural History as well). Mac is presented with some unusual jawbones believed to be from a dwarf mammoth that appears to have had two trunks. The mammoth, it is thought, came from a remote part of a remote land, Tibet – from an area known to local residents as the Labyrinth. All of Tibet is now under imminent threat of Communist takeover, making any journey there extremely perilous. But there may be something else, something even more valuable than an unusual mammoth, in Tibet: evidence of remarkable assertions contained in a partial codex written by Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder, possibly describing an encounter with the Cerae, or Yeti. And the Yeti, if they exist, could hold the key to an entirely new understanding of human evolution, for they may have the ability to speed up the evolutionary process. Mac agrees to go to Tibet and find out just what is there – as much to help himself forget some of the horrors he encountered in the Amazon as to enlarge his and humanity’s knowledge. Schutt and Finch again pull in peril after peril here – for instance, there is some creature out there that even the Yeti seem to fear – and they also create an interesting juxtaposition of Pliny’s travels and Mac’s. For example, Pliny encounters the Cerae and naturally reaches for his sword – which, it turns out, he does not have. And that is a good thing, because the companion who does have it is quickly dispatched. Many centuries later, one of Mac’s co-explorers barely escapes instant death when his weapon is knocked out of his hand just in time by another member of the party. This sort of parallelism makes The Himalayan Codex into, in effect, two separate, intertwined adventures – and that makes for echoes not of The Lost World, as in the first book, but of Journey to the Center of the Earth, in which the modern-day (Victorian) explorers follow an earlier adventurer’s trail. (There is even a passing reference to Journey to the Center of the Earth here, although not in a parallel-adventures context.) As in Hell’s Gate, there are all sorts of elements in The Himalayan Codex that identifiably draw on earlier authors’ work; but, once again, Schutt and Finch use these elements in their own way and absorb them into a distinctive story (if, once more, not an especially distinctive writing style). There is a cinematic quality to The Himalayan Codex in the way the narrative cuts back and forth from Pliny’s time to Mac’s, and there is so much going on during the adventure that readers will find themselves visualizing scenes almost as if they were reading a screenplay rather than a novel – helped, once again, by some well-done descriptive passages that enhance the tale-telling without slowing it down. The novel has a number of supernatural or near-supernatural elements and a great deal of flat-out adventure, in some ways even more than Hell’s Gate possesses, and once more there is an extended note at the end that renders much of the apparent implausibility plausible. Although Mac has plenty of antecedents and Schutt and Finch tread territory already well-marked by earlier writers of thrilling adventures, Hell’s Gate and The Himalayan Codex nevertheless have a genuinely original feeling about them, thanks to their firm grounding in science and the authors’ regard for scenic accuracy and for motivations that, although sometimes stretched thin, never reach the breaking point. These are vivid novels, highly entertaining books whose apparently outlandish elements suggest that they are not to be taken seriously – except that they have a foundational basis in facts that makes the books more thoughtful, and more worrisome, than their fast pace and breezy surface style suggest on a first reading.

(++++) COMPLETE AND INCOMPLETE

Shostakovich: Complete Concertos (Piano, Violin, Cello). Lukas Geniušas and Dmitry Masleyev, piano; Sergey Dogadin and Pavel Milyukov, violin; Alexander Buzlov and Alexander Ramm, cello; Tatarstan National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Sladkovsky. Melodiya. $44.99 (3 CDs).

Mahler: Symphony No. 5. Minnesota Orchestra conducted by Osmo Vänskä. BIS. $19.99 (SACD).

Bruckner: Symphony No. 9. Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Riccardo Muti. CSO Resound. $19.99.

     An ambitious and wonderfully conceived recording that fully repays the boldness of its approach, Melodiya’s release of the complete concertos of Shostakovich with the Tatarstan National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Alexander Sladkovsky sheds new light on practically every movement of these works. The six young soloists are all recent International Tchaikovsky Competition winners, and unsurprisingly, each of them has technique to spare and a formidable grasp of the intricacies of this music. Somewhat more unexpectedly, each already has his own well-considered thoughts on the concerto he performs, viewing it not simply as a display piece but as a work whose structure and emotional underpinnings are worthy of exploration and require a specific form of emphasis and understanding. The soloists’ styles are by no means interchangeable – the contrast between the two cellists is particularly pronounced – and every performer shows why he has already attained major prizes and is at the start of what promises, in each case, to be a first-rate international career. Lukas Geniušas is particularly enamored of the sarcastic elements of Piano Concerto No. 1, delivering a fleet and strongly accented performance. Dmitry Masleyev makes Piano Concerto No. 2 good-humored without the snappishness of its predecessor, and fully explores the work’s lyrical elements. Sergey Dogadin blends his solo part carefully with the orchestral elements of Violin Concerto No. 1, putting virtuosity at the service of a generally balanced solo-ensemble sound. Pavel Milyukov accepts the density and gloom of Violin Concerto No. 2 and finds within the work a balance of forces that remains unresolved at the end. In Cello Concerto No. 1, Alexander Buzlov takes an approach akin to that of Geniušas in the first piano concerto, emphasizing the music’s ragged edges – but also allowing the finale to bloom in full expressiveness. Alexander Ramm takes a very different approach to Cello Concerto No. 2, making this work, which can easily seem overwhelmingly tragic, into a more-restrained display of emotional weariness whose effectiveness is abundantly clear at the music’s conclusion. Sladkovsky is a superb partner for all the soloists, working with each of them to produce orchestral sound and balance that fit each individual interpretation to excellent effect. And the orchestra is quite good, a touch ragged at times but for the most part assured and comfortable with the music, and with first-rate players handling soloistic elements of the concertos (in particular Dmitri Trubakov on trumpet in Piano Concerto No. 1). This is a remarkably fine release that thoroughly explores Shostakovich’s concerto output and sheds considerable new interpretative light on it.

     The new BIS recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 with the Minnesota Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä is the start of a planned complete-Mahler-symphony cycle. On the basis of this first reading, the cycle is likely to offer some insight into these now-standard-repertoire works, but may have quirks that will render it a (+++) endeavor – that being the rating for this particular recording. Vänskä’s reading gets off to a very strong start, the first and second movements (called Part I by Mahler) being rhythmically solid and emotionally intense, although the second movement backs off a little bit from the heightened potency of the first. But with Part II of the symphony – the third movement – things get a bit flabby: Michael Gast’s horn playing is fine, and the overall pace of the movement is good, but Vänskä makes the whole thing rather too episodic, and as a result the movement’s power and its ability to stand alone as a “Part” of the symphony are less than evident. And Part III of the work, consisting of the fourth and fifth movements, is a disappointment, for all of what is evidently its excellent intent. The lovely fourth movement, confusingly called “Adagietto” but then given the tempo indication Sehr langsam (“very slowly”), is taken practically as a Largo here: it is so slow as to be nearly soporific, the manifest beauties of its long lines largely lost as Vänskä focuses on bringing out minute details – which he does quite well – at the expense of the movement’s overall flow and structure. Mahler’s Fifth bears some resemblance to Beethoven’s – Mahler deliberately begins his with the famous rhythm that opens Beethoven’s Fifth – and the earlier symphony does have a well-known passage, at the end of its third movement, in which the orchestra almost seems to go to sleep as it is readied for the outburst of the finale. Perhaps Vänskä sees some parallel between what Beethoven did and what Mahler planned, but if so, the conductor takes it too far. And while Beethoven certainly wakes things up at the start of the finale of his Fifth, adding trombones and other instruments that have not appeared earlier, there is no such awakening in the finale of Vänskä’s Mahler Fifth. The jovial, even jubilant, forthright character of this rondo never gels: the finale starts a bit dully, as if shaking off the somnolence of the preceding movement, and while the proceedings are pleasant enough, there is no perkiness anywhere and no sense of triumphant assertion even in the chorale toward the end. This is a recording that starts well but goes steadily downhill as it progresses: nicely played, for sure, and sensitive to many of the nuances of Mahler’s lovely orchestration, but ultimately not structurally or emotionally convincing.

     Nor is Riccardo Muti’s version of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, on the orchestra’s own label, a fully convincing reading. Muti uses the traditional incomplete, three-movement version of the symphony – even though Bruckner quite clearly planned this as a four-movement work and completed the vast majority of the finale – and in the June 2016 concert from which this live recording is taken, Muti concluded the evening with the Te Deum, which Bruckner himself said could be used to complete the symphony. Thankfully, Muti does not take that suggestion here: the Te Deum is a poor fit structurally as well as musically with the three completed movements of the Ninth, and Bruckner was likely referring to its compatibility on a spiritual level rather than a musical one (the symphony is dedicated “to my dear God”). So Muti follows the tried-and-true tradition of regarding the three-movement Ninth as a complete work – a tradition deeply rooted at the Chicago Symphony, which gave the U.S. premières both of Bruckner’s Ninth (in 1904) and of the Te Deum (in 1892). The issues with Muti’s performance are more or less the opposite of those involving Vänskä’s reading of Mahler’s Fifth: Muti starts things out somewhat less impressively than he concludes them. The first movement is held in firm control and offers some particularly good playing from the brass – a longtime strength of this orchestra. But the passion, the mystery, the religious fervor of this movement are missing. This is a studied reading, a calculated one, powerful and sonically impressive but never as emotionally involving as the movement can be – until the final string phrases, which have an admirably gauged pleading quality. The weirdly flickering Scherzo gets similar treatment, but it fits this movement better, with vehemence bordering on malevolence in the main sections and a pleasantly whimsical handling of the trio that does not, however, completely escape a sense of underlying unease. It is only in the third movement that Muti really comes into his own here. The striving ever upward, the harshness of the sonic environment, the intensity of the full-orchestra outbursts, the strength of the climactic dissonance, the fragility of the very end – all these come through with a genuinely impressive level of power and involvement in which the winds are especially effective. As an inconclusive conclusion, this is a superior rendition of the movement, although the performance as a whole still gets a (+++) rating – which would have been higher if matters throughout were at the level they attain in the third movement. There are many fine readings of the truncated Bruckner Ninth available, and this is definitely one such. For Bruckner lovers, it is also worth paying some serious attention to recordings that include attempted completions of the finale, the recent one led by Gerd Schaller on Profil (using his own reconstruction of the finale) being particularly convincing. Fans of Muti and lovers of the very fine sound of the Chicago Symphony will not be disappointed in Muti’s Bruckner Ninth, which is impressive in many ways even though it does not stand head-and-shoulders above other very fine readings of the incomplete version of the composer’s final symphony.

(+++) BACH AND BEFORE (AND AFTER, TOO)

Back Before Bach: Musical Journeys. Piffaro, the Renaissance Band. Navona. $14.99.

Bach: Solo Works for Marimba. Kuniko, marimba. Linn Records. $27.99 (2 CDs).

Bach: Prelude and Fugue in E-flat, “St. Anne”; Franck: Pièce Héroïque; Barber: Adagio; Eric R. Stewart: Sonetto; Healey Willan: Introduction, Passacaglia & Fugue. Felix Hell, organ. MSR Classics. $12.95.

Xavier Jara Guitar Recital. Naxos. $12.99.

     Although Renaissance music is an acquired taste for many 21^st-century listeners, those who have acquired it will be absolutely delighted by a new Navona release featuring one of the best Renaissance-music-playing ensembles around, the Philadelphia-based band Piffaro. This is a CD with a remarkable number of tracks – 38 – and some fascinating ways of presenting the music of composers both well-known (Bach, Praetorius) and almost completely unknown (Heinrich Finck, ca.1445-1527; Johann Ghro, 1575-1627; and others). The works heard here are all short, many running less than one minute and none as long as three. But what Piffaro has done is to arrange the pieces into suites of sufficient length to make a particular point or highlight a specific approach to something musical. The most intriguing of these groupings offers eight settings of the same tune, Christ ist erstanden, starting with an anonymous piece from around 1480 and ending with Bach’s chorale from the cantata BWV 276. The works clearly progress from the intricate and contrapuntal, in which the basic theme is treated freely, to the more clearly organized and harmonically sophisticated settings of Bach and Praetorius. This fascinating compendium, which opens the CD, is followed by gatherings labeled Innsbruck, Ich Muss Dich Lassen (four items); A Solis Ortus/Christum Will Sollen Loben Schon (eight pieces); two suites of German dances (four dances apiece); The World of Chromaticism (five pieces); and A Song from Andernach along the Rhine (five works). The inclusion of old German popular songs is intriguing – very little music of this type has survived – and the variety of the dances collected within the two suites is remarkable. Piffaro’s members wield their dulcians, shawms, sackbuts, krumhorns, bagpipes and more with tremendous skill and enthusiasm, and the percussion plays an especially prominent role in some of the most upbeat works here, notably the dances. The sound of pre-Baroque music takes some getting used to for those not already familiar with it: it is a sound distinguished by the differing sound-production qualities of these ancestors of oboes, bassoons and brass instruments, as well as by differences in the structure of the music itself. Anyone curious about Renaissance music and not yet convinced by it will find this a wonderful introduction, and the ability to hear ways in which pre-Bach music gradually metamorphosed into that of Bach’s time is especially welcome. Listeners should, however, be aware that the printed content of the CD is not at the same level as the musical material: one composer, Stephen Mahu, is listed as having lived from about 1490 to about 1591 (the correct year is 1541); and the dates of another, Samuel Scheidt, are given as 1587-1684 (the correct year is 1654).

     One distinguishing feature of Bach’s music is the frequency with which it is performed on instruments different from those for which Bach conceived it. There is a longstanding argument to the effect that Bach’s works are so musically pure that the means of communicating them almost does not matter – a viewpoint it does not pay to examine too closely, since (for example) the detailed contrapuntal effects that Bach brilliantly elicited from the harpsichord are simply not reproducible on, say, a modern piano. Or a marimba. Yes, Bach on the marimba – that is the point of a new two-CD Linn Records release featuring the excellent percussionist Kuniko Kato (who goes by only one name). Kuniko is as comfortable playing Bach as she is with ultra-modern music written or transcribed for the marimba: she is expert at eliciting sounds of all sorts from the instrument and showing the extent to which it is capable of communicating quite a wide variety of emotional shadings. Bach has been performed on plenty of other unexpected instruments – the accordion and the banjo, to name two – so the decision  to play his music on the marimba, if a bit odd, certainly has precedent. And the playing itself here is very fine indeed. The repertoire and sheer length of the program, though, are enough to give one pause. Preludes open each disc – the first from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I on the first CD, the C minor prelude BWV 999 on the second – but everything else comes from two specific and very grand cycles. The first CD includes Cello Suites Nos. 1, 3 and 5; the second, Violin Sonatas Nos. 1-3. Thus, Kuniko’s performances – she did the transcriptions herself – are not simply examples of interesting ways in which Bach’s music can be heard in an unfamiliar sonic environment, but are in effect arguments that the broad, deep and extensive material written by Bach for the cello and violin can be heard with equal effect and equal effectiveness on the marimba. To say that this is a matter of opinion is to understate the case very considerably. This is bound to be a polarizing release: it runs a totality of two-and-a-half hours, which is a very long time for anyone other than a marimba fancier to listen to this particular instrument; and while there is no denying the skill of the arrangements and the excellence of Kuniko’s technical performance, the sonic world here is so dramatically different from anything that Bach conceived or wrote for that it takes, at the very least, a lot of getting used to – likely more than is needed to become comfortable and familiar with the sound of Renaissance instruments and the music written for them. In many ways, this release is simply a curiosity, a way of showing that, yes, Bach can be played on the marimba, and played very well indeed. Whether Bach should be played on the marimba is very much a matter of opinion: what listeners get here is indeed Bach, in some ways, and is certainly not, in others. The two short Preludes are intriguing in this guise, but the much longer works that are the main point here sound decidedly strange unless one is inclined to listen to the performances again and again in order to absorb the sound world in which Kuniko performs this music.

     It is, of course, far more traditional to play Bach on the organ and other instruments for which he in fact composed. There is nevertheless something unusual in Felix Hell’s organ recital on a new MSR Classics release, not because of Bach’s “St. Anne” prelude and fugue – which Hell handles very well indeed – but because of the other music with which the Bach is offered. This is a highly personal program by any measure, the Bach being presented along with a well-known César Franck work from 1878; an extended Baroque-form piece from 1916 by prolific but little-known Anglo-Canadian composer Healey Willan (1880-1968); an arrangement by William Strickland of Samuel Barber’s famous Adagio from his Op. 11 String Quartet of 1936; and a world première recording of a piece written in 2012 by Eric R. Stewart (born 1985). This is thus an anthology disc even though a single performer plays everything on it. It must be said that Hell is quite a performer: he handles all the varying works and varying styles with aplomb, his pedal work is first-rate, and he seems quite as comfortable with the grandeur of Bach as with the warmth of Barber and the more-contemporary sound of Stewart. Sonetto was written for Hell, who collaborated with Stewart on it, and the work’s four-section structure gives Hell plenty of chances to offer varied textures and changing registration. The work is interesting if not ultimately particularly moving; it comes across as rather cool despite its fairly free-flowing structure, while Willan’s piece seems warmer despite the composer’s use of old-fashioned and potentially constricting forms. The reality is that, like all anthology releases, this one has higher and lower points, elements that some listeners will find more congenial than others – who in turn will have their own preferences among the works. The pieces will not be to all listeners’ taste, but it is hard to fault Hell’s performances of any of them.

     In a somewhat analogous vein, it is easy to appreciate the virtuosity of guitarist Xavier Jara in another recital that spans hundreds of years, opening with three works by Shakespeare contemporary John Dowland and including pieces by three living composers: Dreams from Summer Garden Suite by Sergio Assad (born 1952); Elegy by Jeremy D. Collins (born 1986); and Mysterious Habitats and Sonata No. 3 by Dušan Bogdanović (born 1955). Sprinkled among these pieces are one by François Couperin; a set of variations by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968) and a movement from his Caprichos de Goya; and an elegy written by Alan Rawsthorne (1905-1971) and completed by guitarist Julian Bream. Stylistically, this Naxos CD is more of a mishmash  than is Hell’s organ recital: there is little apparent rhyme or reason to the arrangement of the works on the disc, unless “contrast and more contrast” is the guiding light here. Certainly everything is played very well indeed: Jara has considerable technique and considerable sensitivity to the nuances of the music. When straightforward technical brilliance is called for, Jara has it to spare; when what is needed is a quieter kind of virtuosity (for the Rawsthorne and Assad works) or playing more sensitive stylistically to the period in which the music was written (for the Dowland and Couperin pieces), Jara has that as well. It is the four-movement Bogdanović sonata, placed last on the CD, that most fully gives Jara a chance to contrast his abilities in warm, inward-focused music and bright, outgoing material; and he rises skillfully to the occasion. This is, in fact, a CD that is more about Jara than it is about any of the composers heard on it: the music allows Jara to show his skill quite clearly, but the program as a whole does not hang together especially well – like Hell’s CD, this is an anthology disc rather than one with a consistent theme or an underlying reason for being beyond the performer’s personal preferences. Guitar players, in particular, will enjoy and admire what Jara has done here, but listeners for whom the musical material matters more than the person presenting it will find the release somewhat lacking.

(++++) THEMES AND SILLY VARIATIONS

Jack and the Beanstalk and the French Fries. By Mark Teague. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $17.99.

Tales from the Deep: That Are Completely Fabricated—The Twentieth “Sherman’s Lagoon” Collection. By Jim Toomey. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.

Happy as a Clam: The Twenty-First “Sherman’s Lagoon” Collection. By Jim Toomey. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.

     There is a certain virtuosity involved in coming up with recognizable situations that are stretched so far out of shape as to be amusing but not so far as to be unrecognizable. Pushing things almost to the limit for kids – and maybe to the limit for adults – is a pretty fair recipe for humor. But this works only if the limit-pushing is handled with sufficient skill. Mark Teague has shown such skill again and again in his wonderful pictures for the How Do Dinosaurs… series, written by Jane Yolen. And he shows equal ability on his own in the writing and illustrations of Jack and the Beanstalk and the French Fries. The premise is simple enough and, when you think about it, quite logical. That huge beanstalk that grew from the magic beans that Jack got for the family’s cow took him into the clouds, true. But before it took him there, wouldn’t it be logical for a beanstalk to produce some, you know, beans? And since the whole story starts with Jack and his mother being desperately poor and desperately hungry – which is why they have to sell the cow in the first place, being disinclined to butcher it and not having refrigeration to preserve the meat in any case – wouldn’t it make sense for Jack and mom to eat the beans from the beanstalk and not have Jack go gallivanting about with giants and fee-fi-fo-fum and all that? Teague starts Jack and the Beanstalk and the French Fries with the actual beginning of the fairy tale, right through the point at which Jack’s angry mom tosses the supposedly useless beans out the window. But then, Teague is off and running in a different direction. In fact, Jack is off and running, leaping downstairs in the morning so enthusiastically that he seems literally to be flying through the air, his feet never touching the wooden steps leading down to the kitchen. Hunger gone! Problem solved! End of story!! Umm….no. There’s trouble afoot, and it starts quickly. Yes, yes, “Jack ate the porridge” that his mother made from the beans from the stalk, writes Teague, adding, “It wasn’t the best thing ever, but it beat starving.” True enough, and the beans are so plentiful – this is a giant beanstalk, after all – that there are enough to keep the whole village from starving, and Jack’s generous mom makes sure the “nutritious and delicious” vegetables are given to everyone. And given and given and given. Uh-oh. Soon there is a groundswell of anger against Jack as the purveyor of beans, of which everyone is soon very tired indeed. Teague shows Jack running lickety-split away from an angry crowd of school bullies and other classmates who are sick of all beans, all the time. Well, apparently no good deed, such as saving everyone from starvation, goes unpunished. So eventually Jack climbs the beanstalk to get away from the townsfolk – meeting, in passing on the way up, an exceptionally large praying mantis – and sure enough, he gets to the clouds and the giant’s home and walks into a room where Teague is careful to show a goose that lays golden eggs, a singing harp, and bags of gold. But those are from a different version of the story. In this one, the giant gets only as far as “fee fi fo” before asking his wife what’s for lunch and becoming thoroughly disenchanted when told they are having beans. Again. Soon giant and Jack are both complaining loudly about beans all the time, and now that they have something in common, they become friends – and Jack brings the giant down to ground level (scaring away the bullies) and the two, together, plant a vegetable garden. And that takes care of the nothing-but-beans problem. And that brings us to potatoes, which after all are vegetables. Hence the eventual appearance, on the very last page, of the French fries of the title – with Jack holding up a gigantic plate of them (as big as he is) while a giant hand pours “Ye Olde Tomato Ketchup” onto them. It is altogether a happy, and inarguably silly, ending.

     There is never a definitive ending to Jim Toomey’s Sherman’s Lagoon books, since they are compilations of Toomey’s comic strip and the strip just goes on and on and on. And that is a good thing, because Toomey seems capable of essentially infinite variations on the activities and personal shortcomings of Sherman the exceedingly dim shark, his much more sharklike wife Megan, Hawthorne the dishonest and money-grubbing hermit crab, Fillmore the lovelorn and over-intellectual sea turtle, and various other deep-sea denizens that are as likely as not to end up being Sherman’s dinner. And that does not even count the “hairless beach apes” (deemed “humans” in some quarters) on whom Sherman snacks from time to time. Toomey finds all sorts of new ways to twist life in Kapupu Lagoon in the two latest collections of the strip. In Tales from the Deep: That Are Completely Fabricated, Fillmore guest-lectures at an English class and, when he asks the students to write a sentence using a semicolon, discovers that the only way they know to use it is by creating a winking emoticon. Sherman and Megan journey to Australia to commiserate with the blobfish, which has been voted the world’s ugliest animal, only to be told, “In our blobfish culture, ugly is beautiful. We celebrate ugly.” Ernest, the eyeglasses-wearing all-around fish brain and mischief-maker, gets together with Sherman to steal a spaceship after the two are taken to Jupiter’s moon Europa  (this makes weird sense in context). Ernest discusses ocean acidification – Toomey has a genuine concern about the oceans and manages to introduce some serious topics amid the hilarity – and Sherman asks if he can blame his lousy golf scores on it (leading Ernest to ask, “Are you running out of excuses?”). In Happy as a Clam, the lagoon denizens encounter a cartoonist who draws a comic strip about a shark, “Norman’s Reef” – a bit of self-referential humor there – and find themselves disappointed to learn that cartooning is “just work,” although it does have compensations (such as the ability to turn Sherman into a giant bratwurst in one panel). Megan laments that she will never be as a cute as a seal, so, Sherman explains, “she eats a lot of seals.” Sherman and Fillmore take a trip to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which really exists and is a matter of ecological concern – another bit of reality intruding into Toomey’s unreal world. Sherman meets a Navy-built underwater drone, a robotic shark that folds out into “a quality gas grill.” Fillmore laments his inability to enjoy a meal even as fine as “truffle-infused shiitake mushrooms garnished with fresh chives,” while Sherman delights in chowing down on a dead seagull. Hawthorne learns to play the bagpipes so he can make money by getting paid not to play them. And so on. There is a lot of “and so on” in Sherman’s Lagoon, and Toomey shows no sign of letting up – which is a good thing, since adults as well as children need all the amusement they can get. Variations upon silliness are much appreciated as long as they result in variations upon laughter. Chortles and guffaws, for example, are acceptable.

(++++) NOW ON BOARD

Sheep Trick or Treat. By Nancy Shaw. Illustrated by Margot Apple. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $7.99.

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat! By Lucille Colandro. Illustrated by Jared Lee. Cartwheel Books/Scholastic. $6.99.

     Books that work well in their original form for kids can work equally well when republished as board books – if their stories are simple enough to fit the board-book format and their illustrations are involving enough to look good in board-book size, which is usually much smaller than that of the original book. Sheep Trick or Treat is a case in point. It is 20 years old, an age that may surprise parents who recall it from their own earlier years. The original 1997 version offered plenty of sheeplike Halloween fun, and the new edition presents the same in board-book format. Many Halloween-themed books for kids can be enjoyed all year, but this one is particularly closely tied to trick-or-treat time and therefore will be most fun in the fall – after which it can be put away until next year. The funniest part of Nancy Shaw’s story and Margot Apple’s illustrations is the beginning of the tale, as the sheep look for ways to create Halloween costumes for themselves. They sew “a costume for a giant ape” into which two of them will fit, and they shape their own wool “in pointy clumps/ to make a dinosaur with bumps,” and one becomes a mummy and another a caped and fanged vampire. The procession of the sheep toward “the Dell,” a nearby farm, is delightfully daffy, but trouble looms in the form of a wolf awakened by the noise of the sheep passing along the path. The sheep get suitable trick-or-treat snacks from the farm animals, such as apples, oats and sugar lumps from the horses, but turn down the spiders’ offer of a dried fly. Then the sheep head home – but they are not the only disguised animals out and about this night: there are wolves out there in (what else?) sheeps’ clothing. No worries, though – the sheep hide, then reveal their “scary lit-up faces,” and the wolves scatter, or rather “skedaddle,” as Shaw puts it, so the sheep return safely to home with their Halloween haul. Sheep Trick or Treat has an easy-to-follow story and pictures as enjoyable as those in all the Shaw/Apple sheep books, making it a fine seasonal board-book entry.

     Lucille Colandro and Jared Lee are a reliable team as well, and the board book from them this autumn – originally published in 2005 – is also suitably seasonal: There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Bat! Colandro’s poetry does not scan as well as Shaw’s, and Lee’s illustrations rate high for silliness but do not match Apple’s for warmth and charm. Still, kids who enjoy the antics of the swallow-anything old lady will have fun with this entry in the series, which starts with her swallowing a scared-looking bat, continues with a wide-eyed owl swallowed from back to front, and then a cat and even a ghost – which looks more alarmed than one might expect a ghost to be (that old lady is really something). The reasons for the sequence do not flow particularly well here – for example, the ghost is supposed to chase the cat and the owl is supposed to shush the bat – but the point, if there is one here, is not logic but sheer ridiculousness. The old lady manages to choke down a goblin, some bones, and finally a wizard, after which she yells a super-loud “TRICK OR TREAT!” and everything, inevitably, comes flying out of her mouth and scatters. That leaves the old lady, her hair very mussed indeed, with only a small, ladylike “Burp!” at the book’s end. None of this makes even a lick of sense, but it is not supposed to: the complete nonsense of the story and bounciness of the illustrations will be plenty to engage kids of board-book age. And unlike Halloween candy, the book has no calories – not that kids should be encouraged to emulate the old lady by swallowing it!

(++++) MAGICAL UNREALISM

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. By Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. William Morrow. $35.

     A huge and sprawling novel of more than 750 pages, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. is a mashup of fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction, character comedy, magical realism, and a very impressive amount of genuine thoughtfulness. Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland have worked together before, on the interactive project The Mongoliad, but both are better known as solo authors – he of science fiction, she of historical novels. The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. manages to transcend both genres, always in an involving way and frequently with tongue in cheek. Just consider the title: would anyone want to work for an organization whose name practically guarantees its extinction? Would anyone want to create such an organization? Even in jest or semi-jest? Of course the answers are all “yes” or there would be no book. But there is one, and quite a book it is.

     The narrative begins suitably, in medias res, with Melisande Stokes (interesting first name) writing from the year 1851 to an audience in the future, which is her past. Yes, this is a time-travel book, complete and replete with all the paradoxes that implies. But wait – there’s more. Mel got back to Victorian England courtesy of a hyper-secret black-budget government entity – yes, one of those, the sort of outfit that has construction jobs done by people who all introduce themselves as Max and technology handled by people who all gives their names as Vladimir. But wait – there’s more. Mel is in her current predicament – the deep-seated culture clash involving her feelings about lacking modern toothpaste and wearing a corset surely comes from Galland – thanks to the machinations of a mysterious  operative named Tristan Lyons (another interesting first name, and could that last name be portentous?). Lyons is, among other things, a passable physicist, which in this context means he can see ways to bend and rearrange 21^st-century physics but gets sufficiently lost in the details so that they need to be explained to him – an excuse for someone, presumably Stephenson, to throw in some exegesis that is crucial to the plot but does not slow down the action all that much.

     But wait – there’s more. The reason for twisting and contorting physics has to do with the possibility of using the multiverse to reinstate, umm, magic. Don’t blanch – the world (worlds?) created in The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. include one in which magic does not exist at all (a variation on our own modern one, but not actually ours) and one (ones?) in which it most assuredly does, but is about to wink out of existence because of developments in, well, physics. And if all this sounds extremely complex, with plots piled on plots and a bewildering variety of potential loose ends that will require tying up eventually, that is simply because the novel is extremely complex, with plots piled on plots and all the rest of it. Hence the 750-plus pages. And a cast list at the end. And a glossary, also at the end, which will help readers unravel the many fascinating acronyms – this is a book in which acronyms play an unusually large role, and D.O.D.O. is but the first of a long line of them (the glossary is two single-spaced pages long).

     Multifaceted and exceptionally stylish, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. is expertly paced throughout, from its start as, of all things, a linguistic puzzle (Mel is a linguist recruited by Lyons to translate documents from a multitude of languages, for mysterious governmental purposes), to its continuation in venues as scattered in time and space as 16^th-century Antwerp, 13^th-century Constantinople, and mid-19^th-century San Francisco. The authors have clearly had great fun with the details here as well as the overarching plot – their enjoyment is evident not only in the matters of corsetry and toothpaste but also through the inclusion of several genuine historical figures plus several bankers named Fugger who did not exist but certainly could have been descendants of Jakob Fugger (1459-1525), our-world banker extraordinaire and possibly the richest man who ever lived. True, not everything works: the book is for the most part filled with wry and even erudite humor, but the introduction of a straight-from-central-casting idiotic bad guy named Les (get that first name) Holgate, after 250-some pages, seriously undermines the carefully constructed world and personality set that has been so expertly crafted until that point. Stephenson and Galland, having created nuanced characters rather than caricatures, did not need boring, unoriginal bull-in-a-china-shop idiocy from the Pentagon – here initially called the Trapezoid, one of many indications that the primary world here is not exactly our world – and it is disappointing that they chose to introduce it. Yet the badly spoiled flow of the book caused by the use of this character recovers even from this.

     The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. crosses plenty of genres: there is a bit of steampunk, some clever use of the whole “language” theme (with which the book both starts and ends), a touch of traditional mad-scientist trappings, plus the whole magic-and-witchcraft thing, and even some puttering around in the land of ethnic cliché. What unites the whole sprawling potential mess and prevents it from flying off the narrative tracks are two crucial things: characters’ voices that genuinely differ from each other and carry aspects of the story beautifully (through media including letters, journals, official white papers, PowerPoint presentations, an extended poem in the alliterative style of Beowulf, and more), and a core of humanity that emerges again and again throughout the novel – almost of its own accord, it seems, but in reality because of the considerable skill of this authorial team. The human elements have always given speculative fiction its staying power, and they are the ties that bind here, both in matters of conflict and in ones of the heart. Thoroughly engaging and involving, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. practically throws its complete unbelievability in readers’ faces and dares those who pick it up to find it an incomprehensible mishmash. It could easily have been just that, but Stephenson and Galland, against all odds, make the whole thing work so wonderfully that “I can’t believe that” is quickly and permanently transformed into “I can’t believe I believe that.” Both fiction and metafiction, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. claws its way through multiple categories to establish itself in a lineage that includes, among many other works, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – whose creator, readers may or may not recall, caricatured himself within that tale as a dodo.

(+++) TEARJERKING

The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan-American Highway. By Teresa Bruce. Seal Press. $16.99.

One Hundred Spaghetti Strings. By Jen Nails. Harper. $16.99.

     The era of soap operas may be over – those glacially paced, long-running TV shows depended on women spending their days at home in front of television sets – but the underlying notion of creating fiction designed to tug at people’s heartstrings seems eternal. And there are few better ways to do that than to draw on unresolved family issues, both present and past. You Can’t Go Home Again is the title of a posthumously published Thomas Wolfe novel, but the best encapsulation of this phenomenon is an earlier one, courtesy of the often-enigmatic Gertrude Stein, who discovered her Oakland, California, house no longer in existence and commented of the place, “There’s no there there.” And so it is for Teresa Bruce, who, however, turns the Wolfe title 180 degrees around by asserting that “you actually can go home again” if you “accept impermanence” and, as a certain generation would have put it, “let it all hang out.” That is what Bruce writes about in The Drive, an account of her honeymoon trip with her husband, Gary, and their 16-year-old arthritic dog, Wipeout, along the Pan-American Highway – the longest road in the world, running an incredible 16,000 miles from Alaska to the southern tip of South America (albeit with a 100-mile gap that prevents motoring from Central to South America). This is very much a First World, proto-hippie, wow-I’m-cool adventure, and reader reaction to it will depend on whether individuals feel the author really is cool or is simply being self-indulgent and broadcasting her belief in her self-importance. She and her husband both have good jobs, which would very much be the envy of many of the people they encounter along the road, and they cavalierly quit them so they can go in search of Bruce’s past and spend “a year without  deadlines, assignments, and a steady paycheck.” The premise here – the trip took place in 2003 – is the re-creation of a trip Bruce took as a child, with her family, 30 years earlier, during which her mother carefully kept a journal of places visited, breakdowns that occurred, kindnesses that were shown, and so forth. So the newly unemployed (and who cares about such things?) newly-marrieds start out in Oregon and plan to drive to the southern tip of South America, revisiting places that Bruce last saw 30 years earlier and recapturing as much of that Sixties/Seventies vibe as they can. Bruce seems primed for it, writing at one point of an “absentee landowner, undoubtedly vegan and chakra-mindful, [who] formed a weaving cooperative for women widowed by the Guatemalan civil war”; at another of whether her “father’s ordeal [on the first trip] earned us some kind of karmic hassle pass.” Readers hungry for this sort of language will be well-fed in The Drive. Speaking of which, Bruce writes about keeping a food journal, since that is what her mother did, so readers learn that breakfast was pineapple bread in 2003 and orange-chocolate bread in 1973. There is a serious family matter underlying this flighty journey, as Bruce tries to reconnect in some way with the spirit of her little brother, John John, who died in an accident at the age of three. It is this foundational element that gives The Drive its tearjerker designation and, to some extent, prevents it from coming across as just another wowie-zowie Jack-Kerouac-wannabe story. Again and again, as impervious as they seem to be to the desperate poverty of the nations through which they travel, Bruce and her husband are forced to confront delays and necessary bribes and thoroughly uncharming encounters that Bruce insists were in fact charming because they were so, you know, earthy. Eventually, in Ecuador, after finding a way to get back their ratty and ancient camper (a vehicular symbol of their chosen rather than endemic poverty), Bruce writes, “I understand in this moment that there is no way I should have expected to drive it away without redistributing some of the privilege and power it represents. A bribe to our eyes is simply delayed compensation to others.” But this modicum of self-awareness is pretty much all that Bruce absorbs. She is determined, determined, to find the actual camper in which her family traveled 30 years earlier, even though “this continued, willful resurrection of every frightening memory of my childhood belittles its joys and erases the good of the Samaritans who stepped in to lift my seven-year-old spirits” after John John’s death. The book needs a climax, of course, so yes, it ends when Bruce does find the original camper, and gets the closure she has sought, and it is all thoroughly heartwarming and designed to produce an extended sigh of “awwwwwwww” from readers. Those of a more practical mindset, though, will have learned that while there may be a highly personal reason to drive the Pan-American highway, there are many, many, many more reasons to stay far, far away from it and from the sorts of people who willingly abandon a life of privilege and comparative wealth to roam a road that bisects areas of extreme poverty and grinding deprivation, a place where no one is ever likely to have the luxury of making the sorts of choices that led Bruce to begin The Drive.

     A kind of food journal of a different sort comes from Jen Nails in One Hundred Spaghetti Strings. In fact, the whole book is a kind of fictional food memoir for young readers. Bruce’s real-life travelogue is written for adults and structured novelistically, giving it a distinct story arc even though it is a work drawn from the author’s life. But writers of emotion-soaked books for younger readers often prefer to produce actual novels, so the authors can pluck the heartstrings at exactly the right moments – as Nails does in her food-focused menu of a narrative, which is intended for ages 8-12. The central character here is 11-year-old Steffy Sandolini, a fifth-grader with a talent for cooking and a heaping helping of family problems – those are built into pretty much all tearjerkers, for all ages. Steffy and her older sister, Nina, who is 13, have been living with Auntie Gina, but Gina wants to move in with her boyfriend, Harry, and the girls’ wayward father has now shown up – after previously abandoning the sisters – to join the group. As if that wasn’t enough of a recipe for angst, Steffy’s mom lives in an assisted-care facility because she has a traumatic brain injury suffered in an accident that is one thing that led Steffy’s dad to disappear. The other thing is addiction, which he tries to hide. Obviously there are plenty of opportunities here to explore emotional upheavals, and Nails goes through them systematically if not always smoothly – the chapters are named for various dishes that Steffy prepares in trying to cope with life and find her way in the world, and the result is a kind of cafeteria-style presentation in which events that follow each other are not always seamlessly connected. Steffy’s reason for using cooking as a coping mechanism has to do with her mother’s old Better Homes and Gardens cookbook, in which Steffy finds handwritten notes as well as printed recipes. The attempt to regain the past in order to build a better future thus uses a “notes from an earlier time” theme similar to that in The Drive. Steffy thinks of her family as ingredients, and the book is essentially about her attempts to whip up something nutritious, if not necessarily delicious, from what life has handed her. The metaphor is rather strained, and it eventually subsumes the story: the final 40 pages of the book are not narrative but “all the recipes I made this year.” The story itself does not come to a rousing or even especially satisfying conclusion: Steffy raises some big questions but does not answer them particularly well, and although that leads to considerable poignancy and accurately reflects how real life works, it makes for a less-than-satisfying wrapup in novelistic terms. One Hundred Spaghetti Strings is carefully designed to elicit readers’ emotions, especially those of preteens with a strong interest in cooking – although that is likely a rather limited audience. The book has some nicely seasoned elements but, as a whole, its flavor is a bit off.

(+++) VARIETIES OF VOCALS

Brahms: Die schöne Magelone. Nikolay Borchev, baritone; Boris Kusnezow, piano. Genuin. $18.99.

Decades: A Century of Song, Volume 2—1820-1830. Anush Hovhannisyan, soprano; Sarah Connolly, mezzo-soprano; John Mark Ainsley, Robin Tritschler and Luis Gomes, tenors; Christopher Maltman, baritone; Malcolm Martineau, piano. Vivat. $18.99.

Gordon Getty: The Canterville Ghost. Alexandra Hutton, soprano; Jean Broekhuizen, Denise Wernly and Rachel Marie Hauge, mezzo-sopranos; Timothy Oliver, tenor; Jonathan Michie and Anooshah Golesorkhi, baritones; Matthew Treviño, bass; Oper Leipzig and Gewandhausorchester conducted by Matthias Foremny. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).

Jonathan David Little: Sacred and Secular Choral and Polychoral Works. Navona. $14.99.

Brian Belet: Compositions for Computer, Live Instruments, and Voice. Ravello. $14.99.

     It would be logical to assume that composers seeking a genuine connection with audiences would turn, above all, to the human voice, enhancing the usual communicative power of speech with music that would emphasize and underline arguments and emotions. This is not quite right, though. Although many composers do use the voice this way, others treat it as simply another instrument, focusing on how it sounds rather than on what is being said – or use it to present the narrative basis of a story whose emotional underpinnings are then captured and enhanced by instrumental accompaniment. It is this latter approach that Brahms takes with Die schöne Magelone, a curious song cycle that comes as close as anything in Brahms’ oeuvre to opera. It is not an opera, not at all, but much of the vocal writing is operatic or near-operatic, the 15 songs are collectively substantial in length (50-plus minutes), and the underlying story is definitely the stuff of opera librettos. Unfortunately for modern listeners, that story is completely obscure today, and is not well told by the songs themselves. The songs are contained within a work by Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) called The Romance of Magelone the Fair and Peter Count of Provence, but Tieck’s plot is quite intelligible without the songs (which Tieck and Brahms both called “romances”); the vocal material forms an adjunct to the story rather than an integral part of it. Without knowing the story, though, the songs’ meanings are obscure. For most listeners today, the music – vocal and instrumental – is the reason to hear Brahms’ Magelone cycle, and the meaning is at best secondary, at worst insignificant. And it is as a purely musical experience that the performance on Genuin, by baritone Nikolay Borchev and pianist Boris Kusnezow, excels. Borchev’s pronunciation of the German text is not always idiomatic, but his involvement in the music comes through strongly throughout the cycle, and Kusnezow’s excellent pianism places him in full partnership with the singer and, indeed, at times in the forefront of the collaboration, his instrument commenting forcefully on the verbiage. Brahms created these songs with considerable care, for example using simple strophic form only for a single brief song expressing the forthright feelings of a secondary love interest who is not really much of a challenge to Magelone. The other strophic songs are varied each time verses are repeated – and many songs are in rondo-like ternary or expanded ternary form rather than being strophic at all. It is possible to admire Brahms’ elegant structuring of individual songs and the cycle as a whole even while noting that the word “cycle” is a bit of a misnomer here: for those unfamiliar with Tieck’s work – in which some of these “romances” occur within the narrative and others are commentaries upon it – the overall sequence and its individual parts will have little real meaning. Yet for all that, Die schöne Magelone is a fascinating and unjustly (if  somewhat understandably) neglected work, and one very much worth hearing in a performance as good as this one.

     If Brahms’ Magelone is a somewhat rarefied experience, so, to an even greater degree, is a Vivat CD series called Decades: A Century of Song. The century referred to is the 19^th. The series’ first volume included songs from 1810 to 1820, and the second volume offers ones from 1820 to 1830. There are nine by Schubert, three by Glinka, three by Bellini, two by Carl Loewe (1796-1869), and one each by Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Louis Niedermeyer (1802-1861). Lovers of lieder will certainly enjoy this mixture of the familiar and less-known, and all the songs are performed with relish and emotional understanding by first-class singers. The mingling of musical cultures here – Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Russia – in interesting, and the specific selections contain some surprises: Mendelssohn’s lasts only a minute and a half, while one of Loewe’s is six minutes long and the offering from Niedermeyer lasts seven-and-a-half (longer than anything here except Schubert’s Ellens Gesang). As an exploration of classical song in various geographical areas during one specific decade, this CD is quite intriguing. It is also quite distinctly limited as to likely audience interest: it seems primarily intended for listeners who have already decided that they want to collect the entire decade-by-decade series of discs.

     Gordon Getty’s one-act, one-hour opera The Canterville Ghost is also a targeted rather than general-interest release. It is quite well-done in its handling of Oscar Wilder’s novella, his first published story (1887): Getty has a fine sense of the contrast between Old World and New World that lies at the heart of the tale, in which Americans move into a haunted castle and refuse to be frightened by the resident ghost. Getty is not the first contemporary composer to create an opera based on this story: Alexander Knaifel did so back in 1966. And the novella has been adapted in many other media, including film and television. So Getty’s handling of it as a rather traditional opera, using his own libretto, is quite fine but on the straightforward side. In Wilde’s story, the American family’s 15-year-old daughter, Virginia, eventually helps the ghost find peace and move on to the next world, and the way in which she and the ghost learn from each other is ultimately the point of the story. Virginia is not exactly heroic, however – she is simply willing to take the ghost seriously. Getty casts Virginia (Alexandra Hutton) in a rather more heroic mode than is strictly necessary, and as a result the ghost (Matthew Treviño) is somewhat less the center of attention than he is in Wilde’s tale. In operatic terms, this certainly works, and the two characters’ voices are particularly well contrasted (she being the only soprano in the cast and he the only bass). Wilde’s story itself repays multiple readings, since it includes the clash of values between Old and New Worlds, the meaning of growing up, and some meditations on life, death and love. Getty’s opera is more of a surface-level treat, but it is a treat nevertheless – for those interested in a story with 19^th-century sensibilities being clothed in contemporary musical dress (the opera was first performed in 2015). The PentaTone recording is very fine, and opera lovers looking for something new – and not musically overstated – will find The Canterville Ghost involving, if not particularly haunting.

     Getty’s musical language is essentially tonal, his essential focus being on communicating the meaning of the words of his libretto. Other contemporary composers, however, handle the human voice differently, often drawing as much attention to it for its own sake as to what it is saying. A new Navona recording featuring works by Jonathan David Little moves more in this direction. There are six pieces here, three sacred and three secular – but one of them, Woefully Arrayed, is offered first as a very extended (25-minute) sacred piece and then a second time, at the CD’s conclusion, with the sacred elements removed and the music therefore becoming secular and being reduced in length by half. Little’s approach to choral music calls attention to itself as much as to what the singers are saying. For instance, he likes to position singers above and around the audience, which is scarcely a new technique, even in sacred music (Wagner, for example, used it to excellent effect in Das Liebesmahl der Apostel), but which Little makes integral to much of his work. Kyrie and Gloria on this CD are both sonically impressive and show understanding of older vocal forms, but some of their pauses and strong contrasts between loud and soft passages draw greater attention to Little’s compositional techniques than to the words of the singers. On the secular side of things, Wasted and Worn, intended as a memorial to painter John William Godward (1861-1922), features some beautiful vocal writing but little sense of either mourning or celebration of Godward’s life. That Time of Year, a sensitive setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, is more effective, although the layering of voices tends somewhat to obscure the gorgeous cadences of the bittersweet poem. The various performers here handle the music well, and many elements of Little’s works are effective and even affecting; but taken as a whole, the pieces tend to distract attention from the words rather than use the vocal lines and ranges to focus more strongly on the meaning of the texts.

     Little is, however, more traditionally respectful of the voice than is Brian Belet, whose music on a new Ravello disc is far more concerned with electronic manipulation of vocal sounds than with using humans’ vocal capabilities as a conduit for better communication with other humans. Belet is a performer on computerized electronic equipment, using the Kyma System to produce tones and soundscapes not otherwise to be found in nature. In one of the 10 works here, Remembering Allen, it is Belet’s own voice that is combined with Kyma, while in Name Droppings there are multiple voices used, and in Sea Lion Mix the voices and Kyma are indeed mixed with the barks of sea lions. Belet creates musical soundscapes in which the human voice is simply a tool used to create and evoke sounds: two of the pieces here, Difference (No Doubt It Queues) and  An Abstract (Differences (Queues)), contain nothing but a computer- processed voice. Like many other contemporary composers, Belet draws attention to himself and the presumed cleverness of his constructs through titles, here including (Disturbed) Radiance for piano and Kyma and Still Harmless [Bass]ically for electric bass and Kyma. For listeners not already enamored of computerized and electronically modified sound environments, a little of Belet’s material will go a long way, and the preponderance of Kyma will wear thin quickly: it appears as integrally in Lyra for violin and Kyma as in Summer Phantoms: Nocturne for piano and Kyma. The pieces here were recorded over nearly two decades, from 1997 to 2016, and all are in a single continuous movement except the three-movement System of Shadows, which is for C trumpet, B-flat flugelhorn and the inevitable Kyma – and which considers celestial phenomena with a 21^st-century version of sounds of the sort that were innovative when produced by György Ligeti 50-plus years ago and by Edgard Varèse a full century in the past, but are now rather passé. In the works of Belet and other, similar composers, the communicative potential of the human voice is beside the point: its sonic production and Belet’s ability to manipulate it are what this material is all about. Seventy-plus minutes of this kind of treatment of voice (and instruments) will be far more than enough for all but the most dedicated fan of music whose craftsmanship is undoubted but whose ability to put non-superficial messages across to listeners is quite beside the point.