(++++) UNEXPECTED SOUND BLENDS

Berwald: Septet for clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, violoncello and double bass; Quartet, Op. 1, for piano, clarinet, horn and bassoon; Serenade for clarinet, horn, viola, violoncello, tenor and double bass. Franz Ensemble (Maximilian Krome, clarinet; Rie Koyama, bassoon; Pascal Deuber, horn; Sarah Christian, violin; Yuko Hara, viola; Tristan Cornut, violoncello; Juliane Bruckmann, double bass; Kiveli Doerken, piano); Patrick Vogel, tenor. MDG Scene. $18.99 (SACD).

Brandon Ridenour & Ben Russell: Songs for the End of Time Vol. 1. Founders (Ben Russell, violin/voice; Brandon Ridenour, trumpet/voice; Yoonah Kim, clarinet/voice; Hamilton Berry, cello/voice; Greg Chudzik, bass/voice). Founders Music. $15.

Robert Spillman: Spring Rain—Seven Poems of Sara Teasdale (2018); Four Songs from “Otherwise: Eight Poems of Jane Kenyon” (2016); Why I Have a Crush on You, UPS Man (2015); Frank La Forge: Seven Songs (1906-1925); Two Pieces for Piano (1912); Lori Laitman: Two Arias from “The Scarlet Letter” (2014). Emily Martin and Ariana Wyatt, sopranos; Richard Masters, piano. Albany Records. $16.99.

     There is certainly nothing new about composers experimenting with previously unknown or at least rarely heard instrumental combinations and sounds. Heinrich Biber did it in Battalia in 1673; Jean-Féry Rebel did it in Les Élémens in 1737; Beethoven did it in Wellington’s Victory in 1813; Tchaikovsky did it in The Nutcracker in 1892 – to such good effect that the then-new celesta (invented only in 1886) quickly became a near-standard not only in classical music but also, over time, in other fields: it is used in Hedwig’s Theme in the Harry Potter films and in the introduction to Won’t You Be My Neighbor in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. In all these cases, composers had specific reasons for pushing the limits of what had been previously accepted instrumentation and sounds: Biber and Beethoven sought to reflect warfare, Rebel wanted to give a sonic impression of chaos, and Tchaikovsky was looking for a highly distinctive sound to make the Sugar Plum Fairy stand out as a character and a dancer. There was no self-aggrandizement in these experiments – they were genuine attempts to expand musical horizons and carry the audience to new realms.

     Franz Berwald had similar motivations in some of his unusual chamber-music combinations, which sound refreshingly innovative on a new MDG Scene SACD. Berwald’s music was so forward-looking for its time, especially in the comparative musical backwater of Stockholm, that he was ostracized by the musical establishment and ended up making his living not as a composer or violinist but in such far-afield areas as orthopedics, glass making and lumber. The Septet of 1817 – written when Berwald was 21 – uses a technique that the composer would later apply in his symphonic output as well: instead of a separate Scherzo, he incorporates scherzo-like material into the middle of the three-movement work’s central slow movement, resulting in a movement marked Poco Adagio that adheres to that tempo only at the start and end. On the other hand, the instrumentation of the Septet, unlike its structure, was unexceptional for its time. Not so the combination used by Berwald in his Quartet, Op. 1, which dates to 1819. Mixing the piano with three wind instruments as Berwald did was something genuinely new, and he himself referred to the “rather unfamiliar system” of the work and to “a new way of treating the instrumental texture.” The fact that the piece sounds tame by modern standards is itself testimony to the success of what Berwald attempted: the piano, which could easily dominate the piece, plays a mostly subsidiary role, and in this work as in the earlier Septet, Berwald interpolates a bit of scherzo-like material into the central (and in this case quite short) movement. And then there is the Serenade of 1825, where both structure and instrumentation are genuinely surprising. This is a piece of chamber music featuring a tenor voice and arranged as if it is an operatic scene – and it includes clarinet, horn, and the very unusual string combination of viola (no violin), cello and double bass. Berwald was quite explicit about the emotive effects he sought here, noting dramatically that “the clock strikes four” at one point in the score and, at a piano tremolo, “drums roll.” The tenor’s text makes the singer a sort of heroic Everyman, willing to risk all for his country but himself conquered by love – the only power that can defeat him. Patrick Vogel sings the tenor part with suitable feeling, and the members of the Franz Ensemble, here and throughout the disc, play with plenty of skill and enthusiasm, highlighting Berwald’s innovations without overdoing them or drawing too much attention to the unusual aspects of the music – or to the performers themselves. The result is a recording that effectively explores some little-known music whose experimental elements are only part of what makes its sound so attractive.

     The performances are equally adept, but the experimentation is much less convincing and much more driven by self-involvement on a CD featuring the group called Founders interpreting, or rather reinterpreting and rearranging, Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps. In the name of somehow modernizing or expanding or rethinking Messiaen’s religiously driven work, written in a Nazi concentration camp for the performers and instruments available there (clarinet, violin, cello, and piano), Quatuor pour la fin du temps is a deeply felt and, when well performed, transcendent experience, pulling listeners both into Messiaen’s mandated-by-circumstances sound world and into his attempt to rise above his personal situation and bring the performers and any listeners with him. What the members of Founders do, apparently with all due respect and certainly without any insult intended, is turn the music into a hodgepodge of narrative, Sprechstimme, jazz riffs, rock material, and various flourishes and skitters that take the original quartet into areas where it was never intended to go – and, more importantly, that interfere with its communicative potential instead of enhancing it. It is difficult to understand just what, beyond a sort of “look at us and listen to what we’re doing” experience, the members of Founders – led by co-composers Brandon Ridenour and Ben Russell – hope to accomplish with what they have done here. The addition of voices intoning portions of Revelation, which inspired Messiaen, adds nothing to the music, and the form of delivery of the words distracts from the instrumental communication. The repeated lapses into styles distinct from and in some ways hostile to that of Messiaen also pull from rather than add to the communicative quality of the original music: those who already know Quatuor pour la fin du temps are unlikely to get much from this revision, unless they are looking for variety for its own sake. It seems more likely that the Founders group wants to bring Messiaen’s music and feelings to people who have not yet encountered Quatuor pour la fin du temps on their own, and who would be unlikely to pay attention to it if it were not dressed in enough pop-culture musical trappings to lie more easily on their ears than the original would. It is the apparent sincerity of Founders’ intentions, and the uniformly high quality of their performance in the service of what Ridenour and Russell have created, that make this a (+++) release. But it does not really point listeners to the original – if it did, that would be a valuable service, since Quatuor pour la fin du temps very much deserves to be heard and experienced by as many people as possible, both for its sheer musical quality and for the fact that it is a reminder of the circumstances under which Messiaen wrote it. Realistically, though, this new arrangement is unlikely to bring additional people to Messiaen’s original work, and if it does, they will be disappointed to discover that it lacks this version’s bells and whistles (not quite literally, although there is plenty of electronic enhancement in the Ridenour/Russell version). This release is titled “Vol. 1,” and it is hard to imagine what might follow. Something far more attentive to the sound and meaning of the original music would be welcome.

     The contrast between the Founders release and an Albany Records CD featuring songs by three American composers quite clearly shows the limits of sound experiments made largely for their own sake, or for the sake of the performers. Here the music uses the traditional elements of classical songwriting – voice and piano – plus some material for piano alone. Robert Spillman (born 1936) varies the sound world skillfully in Spring Rain, generally by adapting the piano part, having the keyboard instrument do as much scene-setting as accompaniment. Richard Masters takes on this dual role with considerable skill, establishing the songs’ moods – sometimes in only a bar or two – so Emily Martin can sing (actually sing, not declaim) Sara Teasdale’s poetry. In the four Jane Kenyon poems from Otherwise, Martin’s part is more varied and less atmospheric; the matter-of-fact words of the title song are a particularly effective collaborative effort between voice and piano. The blues-inflected Why I Have a Crush on You, UPS Man is as amusing as would be expected from its title and makes a particularly pleasant conclusion to this disc. The Spillman material contrasts interestingly with works by Frank La Forge (1879-1953), whose Seven Songs are drawn from disparate places – one even comes from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, that source for so much notable material by Mahler; indeed, the music contains a rather Mahlerian cadence. Ariana Wyatt is the soprano here, delivering the words with considerable drama – in fact, the settings tend to be somewhat overdone on the vocal side, with the piano often serving as a calming influence, bringing some placidity to verbiage that, sometimes in English and sometimes in German, is frequently discomfiting. This is a curious song cycle – although not really a cycle per se, having been created over nearly two decades. So-called “art songs” are something of an acquired taste in classical music, and the specific mixture of material here is odd enough to keep the CD at the (+++) level. The century-plus span of the material, rather unexpectedly, does not result in dramatic aural differences as the disc proceeds. This is partly because Masters effectively grounds the music throughout, although it is hard to understand any particular reason for including La Forge’s Two Pieces for Piano (the first marked Improvisation, the second Gavotte & Musette) on the disc. The chance to hear Masters’ playing on its own rather than in a largely subsidiary role is welcome, confirming the quality he brings to his support of the singers; but the piano-solo music somewhat diffuses the effect of the vocal material. That material also includes two arias from The Scarlet Letter by Lori Laitman (born 1955), sung by Martin. One is from Act I, “Beyond All Price.” The other is from Act II, “This Canopy of Trees.” They are sung and played well enough, but their narrative clearly depends on the plot of the opera, and neither aria feels entirely self-contained, with the result that they fit somewhat uneasily with the rest of the vocal material here. As a whole, the CD is a fine-sounding one that nicely showcases both the singers and the pianist. But it does not really hang together either thematically or musically – indeed, the arrangement of the material works against any cohesiveness, with the works presented in the sequence Spillman/La Forge songs/La Forge piano solo/Spillman/Laitman/Spillman. There are some undeniably attractive sounds here, but the disc as a whole will have a somewhat limited appeal.

(+++) THE NEW SAME OLD STORY

Unicorn Island. By Donna Galanti. Illustrated by Bethany Stancliffe. Andrews McMeel. $13.99.

     There are pluses and minuses to the standardization of storytelling for specific age groups. On the one hand, preteen readers can know almost exactly what to expect of a story within the first few pages, since they will recognize elements they have seen many times before. If they have liked similar material in the past, they will probably like the new book they have just picked up. On the other hand, there is a sameness and often a blandness to plot lines that foundationally vary very little from book to book, taking young readers through the same gyrations again and again without opening up new horizons. Realistically, though, that is more of an adult concern than one for the intended readers of books such as Unicorn Island, which is yet another of the traditional-book versions of stories from a digital library for kids called Epic! (Yes, with exclamation point.)

     Unicorn Island has many of the tropes of preteen fantasy. Protagonist Samantha Wells wants nothing more than to stay put in Brooklyn, where she and her musician mom have lived for a year; so of course readers will know that won’t happen. It’s just Sam and her mom living together, since her father “had abandoned them when [Sam] was born” – another very familiar element of stories like this one. Sure enough, Sam’s mother gets a great opportunity to perform for two months in Europe (she plays the flute in orchestras), and “they don’t have accommodations for children,” so Sam will have to spend the upcoming summer at the home of her Uncle Mitch, whom she does not know at all. Again, this kind of story arc is extremely familiar, so much so that it takes only a dozen pages to set it all up – because, of course, this background is not the point of Unicorn Island.

     The point becomes quite clear soon after Sam is hustled off to Foggy Harbor, South Carolina, which “looked like the loneliest place ever” after the big city. It turns out that Uncle Mitch never agreed to have Sam stay with him, but somehow his message to Sam’s mother, “I’m glad you’re okay,” was interpreted as it being okay for Sam to stay with her uncle for the summer; and while this makes not a lick of sense, it scarcely matters, since the point is to have Sam feeling like the proverbial fish out of water, isolated and alone and with no friends and just generally in a miserable situation (but not a seriously threatening one: this is not that kind of book).

     Of course, cellphone communication is intermittent-to-absent in this isolated area, so there is no way for Uncle Mitch to reach Sam’s mom and somehow have Sam leave; so both have to make the best of things, even though, as her uncle soon ominously says to Sam, “there are darker dangers here than you can ever imagine.”

     And there you have it: the mystery underlying the plot of Unicorn Island and the first hint of how Sam will be key to handling those “darker dangers” through her relationship with, of course, unicorns. Sam soon makes a friend named Tucker Thompson – his mother is the town veterinarian – and together Sam and Tuck explore Uncle Mitch’s house, finding, in the basement, a magical clock that proves Uncle Mitch is a “fog keeper,” which is a mysterious and important role.

     Then, unsurprisingly in a book like this one, Uncle Mitch mysteriously disappears, and a mysterious and previously invisible island shows up out of what had seemed to be a perpetual fog bank, and on the magical island are magical beasts – unicorns and wyverns – and it turns out that Uncle Mitch plays a crucial role in preserving and helping them. And, by the way, they can communicate telepathically with Sam. The rest of the plot is just as predictable: there is a baby unicorn, it is sick, Sam and Tuck save it with help from Tuck’s mom, and Sam realizes that what she wants out of life is to become a fog keeper and protect the magical creatures forever. But there remains darkness out there, great darkness, and it is – well, it is to be explored in the next book in this series, because of course this is only the first entry in a sequence that is sure to continue going in unsurprising directions but, for that very reason, will be highly enjoyable for young readers who will be able to anticipate pretty much everything that will happen but not how everything will happen. Straightforwardly written and unassumingly illustrated, Unicorn Island is nothing special: its purpose is simply to entertain young fantasy lovers for a while with an easy-to-read, easy-to-follow story, and it fulfills that purpose just as well as do the many other fantasy books with essentially the same reason for being.

(++++) SPECIALTY ITEMS

Rossini: Overtures arranged for Mandolin Quintet—“L’Italiana in Algeri,” “Il Viaggio a Reims,” “La Cenerentola,” “La Scala di Seta,” “Il Signor Bruschino,” “Il Barbiere di Siviglia,” “Tancredi,” “La Gazza Ladra.” Quintetto a Plettro “Giuseppe Anedda” (Emanuele Buzi and Norberto Gonçalves da Cruz, mandolins; Valdimiro Buzi, mandola; Andrea Pace, guitar; Emiliano Piccolini, contrabass). Brilliant Classics. $9.99.

Lowell Liebermann: Gargoyles, Op. 29; Four Apparitions, Op. 17; Nocturne No. 10, Op. 99; Miloslav Kabeláč: Eight Preludes, Op. 30; Liszt: Totentanz; Schubert: Variations on a Theme of Anselm Hüttenbrenner; Busoni: Fantasia Contrappuntistica. Lowell Liebermann, piano. Steinway & Sons. $24.99 (2 CDs).

Visca L’Amor: Catalan Art Songs. Isaí Jess Muñoz, tenor; Oksana Glouchko, piano. Bridge Records. $14.99.

     Genuinely funny instrumental classical music is exceedingly rare. Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals certainly qualifies, along with Ibert’s Divertissement. If you know how works of the Classical era were constructed, Mozart’s Ein Musikalischer Spass is hilarious, but it is too esoteric for most people to find it highly amusing nowadays. And then there is Rossini, a master of extremely funny vocal music – Largo al factotum is pretty much a prototype – whose instrumental works are often almost evocative of laughter, but not quite. Until now, that is. The Rossini overtures arranged for mandolin quintet, played superbly by Quintetto a Plettro “Giuseppe Anedda” on a new Brilliant Records CD, are almost impossible to hear without laughing aloud. They are that silly, that ridiculous, that absurd, that absolutely hilarious – and yet they are quite true to Rossini’s spirit, and are arranged for the mandolin ensemble with high seriousness and considerable dedication to preserving the sound of the music and the balance of the original orchestral parts. These arrangements come across as comic in the extreme – and entirely in a good way. The seriousness of some overtures’ introductory material here sounds vastly overdone, almost tongue-in-cheek. The “Rossini crescendo” occurrences, in which repetitive material gets louder by the addition of new instruments, sound in this recording like an in-joke among musicians who have decided to let the whole audience chuckle with them. The elements that are borderline funny in the original orchestration, such as the use of bows to strike music stands in Il Signor Bruschino, cross over that border with enthusiasm here. The occasional forays into lyricism come across as snickers. The frequent abrupt contrasts between piano and forte simply seem silly. The music on this CD is exceptionally well-known, and that is a big part of the fun: because the works are so familiar, and so close to funny in their original form, listeners who know the music already will spend most of the hour-plus of this disc smiling when they are not laughing out loud. True, the performers are serious musicians, and the arrangements are done with considerable skill; also true, listeners who are not already highly conversant with the music probably will not find it exceptionally funny, although they will surely enjoy the sound of the material. And it is a trifle odd that the overture to Tancredi, the one serious opera represented here, is just as amusing as the openings of the other, comic works. Yet to call this disc an acquired taste is not quite right: it is an unusually seasoned version of music that will be especially delicious to listeners who have already acquired a taste for Rossini and, indeed, may have reached the point of over-familiarity with many of his overtures. It is very, very unlikely that even the most-devoted Rossini fans will know his overtures in the guise in which they appear here. For making this thrice-familiar music sound genuinely new as well as genuinely amusing, Quintetto a Plettro “Giuseppe Anedda” – and the arrangers who created the versions of the overtures heard here – deserve a tremendous amount of credit and applause.

     If the Rossini CD is a specialty item because of its unusual way of handling well-known music, then a new two-CD Steinway & Sons release featuring pianist/composer Lowell Liebermann is a specialty item for the way it handles music that is both familiar and less-known. This is one of those highly personalized releases that have become increasingly common as performers have sought to curate their own recitals in the hope that audiences will share their fascination with specific works presented in specific combinations. The approach is often too self-involved to reach out successfully, becoming a kind of musical navel-gazing. But when it works, it can provide considerable insight into the performer as well as the music on offer. And it works very well indeed in this case – thanks largely to the fact that Liebermann, himself a composer as well as a virtuoso pianist, has assembled pieces that work well in and of themselves, and also work well in the specific environment in which they are proffered here. The key to this is the inclusion of three works by Liebermann himself: Gargoyles to open the two-CD set, Four Apparitions in the middle, and Nocturne No. 10 as the final piece. Gargoyles (1989) clearly shows, in its four movements, Liebermann’s skill at tone-painting and grotesquerie, especially in the opening Presto and concluding Presto feroce. The suite’s sensibility and pianism place it firmly in the line of such masterly 19^th-century pianist/composers as Liszt and Alkan. Four Apparitions (1985) shows in other ways how attracted Liebermann is to the offbeat and supernatural, with the music here more spooky and ethereal than overtly grotesque: some descriptive words in the tempo indications are fragile, misterioso and legatissimo. And Nocturne No. 10 (2007) combines elements of the two suites, being a night-picture with more dissonance than one would expect in a nocturne, but not so much as to produce a nightmarish effect. The three Liebermann works are in the Romantic tradition but exist well beyond it harmonically, and they blend and contrast well with four other pieces – three by well-known composers and one by the far-less-familiar Miloslav Kabeláč (1908-1979). A prominent Czech composer whose career was hamstrung by the Communist rule of his nation during his creative life, Kabeláč is best known for his eight symphonies and other orchestral music. But the Eight Preludes (1956) show him to be skillful in piano writing, in which he shares considerable thoughts and feelings with Liebermann: the individual pieces are of the same general length as those in Gargoyles and Four Apparitions, and they explore similarly evocative feelings and impressions – Ostinato, Meditation, Dreams, Chorale, Nocturne, Soaring, Aria, and Impetuosity. Liebermann plays them as if their worldview and his are closely matched – which, indeed, sounds as if it is the case. But Liebermann goes well beyond miniatures when presenting the three other works offered here. Liszt’s Totentanz (1864) gets the usual demonic fury and outstanding playing that it requires, but there is rhythmic subtlety and careful contrast of sections in Liebermann’s rendition that give the work an extra level of heft. Schubert’s Variations on a Theme of Anselm Hüttenbrenner (1817) uses a theme from a string quartet by Hüttenbrenner (1794-1868) that the composer himself made the basis of four variations – but that Schubert expands into 13. The rhythm of this theme, one long note and then two short ones, recalls that of the Allegretto from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, and sensitivity to that rhythmic heritage is a key to what Schubert does and what a performer must do to present the piece effectively. Again, Liebermann rises to the occasion, showing here as in his own music how thoroughly he understands the role of rhythmic variation (and other forms of variation) in producing a well-constructed piece that satisfies both in concept and in performance. And then there is the longest piece on this release, by far: Busoni’s amazing Fantasia Contrappuntistica (1910), a vast homage to Bach’s Die Kunst der Fuge that can take more than half an hour to play and that requires the pianist not only to show mastery of fugues (the work contains four of them) but also to handle the variation form with care and sensitivity (the work contains three variations). This is a vast canvas and something of a monster to perform, and can be difficult to keep cohesive, since the 12 parts in which it is written can easily seem like individual (if related) works. Liebermann’s demonstrated compositional and performance skill with the forms of suite and variations is put fully to the test here, and serves both the pianist and the music very well. The performance is grand, on the slow side without dragging, and requires Liebermann to delve into Busoni’s musical structure while remaining cognizant of the foundational elements of Bach underlying it. The piece is played with great élan and feels like the climax of this entire release – indeed, it is followed only by Liebermann’s own Nocturne, which comes across less as encore than as peroration. Liebermann gives this two-CD set the overarching title of “Personal Demons,” but it is more than an exploration of the demonic: it is a release that takes listeners through a virtuoso’s musical journey in which his own compositions reflect, build upon and expand – or at least explore – some fascinating works of earlier composers and composer/pianists.

     Even more of a specialty release than the Rossini and Liebermann discs, a new Bridge Records compilation of 20^th-century and 21^st-century Catalan art songs is so rarefied that the (+++) CD will appeal only to a small subset of music lovers. In and of themselves, classical songs have limited appeal, with a few exceptions here and there (some of Schubert’s, for example). But although the entire genre is a touch obscure, the aim of this recording is to delve into far greater obscurity by offering an entire CD of songs by Catalan composers with whom audiences are almost sure to be wholly unfamiliar: Eduard Toldrà (1895-1962), Ricard Lamote de Grignon I Ribas (1899-1962), Narcís Bonet (born 1933), Frederic Mompou Dencausse (1893-1987, the only slightly familiar name here, generally known simply as Frederic Mompou), Elisenda Fábregas (born 1955), and Joan Comellas (1913-2000). So if neither the genre nor the specific composers will likely reach out to many listeners, how will this recording find an audience? Song lovers in search of new experiences will be interested in it, as will people with family roots in the Catalan region (northeastern Spain and southeastern France). The CD should also appeal on the strength of the performances: Isaí Jess Muñoz has an even, well-modulated lyric-tenor voice that he uses to fine effect to elicit strong expressions of emotion, especially when the subject is love – as it often is in these songs. And pianist Oksana Glouchko makes a fine partner, playing with confidence and engagement throughout the disc. The recording quality is another part of the attraction here: singer and accompanist sound as if they are ideally spaced to maximize the individual and collaborative elements of the performances. The songs themselves are quite good, emotional without being overly sentimental, written to showcase both the expressiveness of the underlying Catalan poetry and that of the singer. All the compositions here are high-quality, although nothing stands significantly above everything else. There are many pleasures to be heard on this CD, but all require some “if” qualification: if you like art songs in general, if you are interested in those of more-recent vintage, if you would like to explore regional music you have probably not heard, if you would like to experience the creations of unfamiliar composers, and if you consider a disc running just 45 minutes to be a reasonable length for purchase, then you will find much to enjoy in Visca L’Amor.

(++++) TANTALIZINGLY TICKLISH TALE-TELLING

Max & the Midknights 2: Battle of the Bodkins. By Lincoln Peirce. Crown. $13.99.

     Amid the many medieval marvels, remarkable romances and splendid sagas of times gone by, the wizardly wonders of Max & the Midknights have, alas, gone unreported and unrecognized. “Methinks it is past time for reading about Max to become a pastime,” must Lincoln Peirce have thought, and forsooth, lo and behold, and ods bodikins, the original tale of the redoubtable renegades now spawns a sequel with some very odd bodkins indeed.

     “Whence comes this and by what method?” you may well ask; and, well, it is a good question, if awkwardly phrased, and none but Lincoln Peirce can know the complete answer in the fullness of time.

     So: the creator of the long-running and longstanding Big Nate comic strip has produced the second illustrated novel – not quite a graphic novel, but a novel with ample illustrations – featuring the almost-knights of Byjovia and their redoubtable if not quite fearless leader, Max. Although Max is a girl and comic-strip Nate is a boy, the resemblances between the two are many and varied, not only attitudinally but also through their facial expressions, such as the one-eye-wide-open-and-one-a-straight-line-or-tiny-circle one used by Peirce to convey a combination of befuddlement and disapproval (a useful expression for Max as early as page 8 of the new book, and then on page 25, and on page 102, and – you get the idea).

     The Midknights all return for Battle of the Bodkins, perhaps a bit worse for wear since their original rescue-the-king adventure but as determined as ever to do derring-do, save Byjovia, and generally yuck it up a bit along the way. This time, though, they have to save Byjovia from themselves, which somewhat complicates matters. The “bodkins” of the title – a variation on the old word “bodikins,” which in the form of “ods bodikins” was a mild oath some 300 years back – are evil twins of the good guys, doppelgängers representing all sorts of badness while the Midknights represent all sorts of goodness. But the bad guys look exactly like the good guys, or almost exactly like them; and, at least sometimes, they sound just like them, too, or almost just like them. So you can’t tell the players without ye olde medieval scorecard, which is part of the point and part of the fun.

     Like the first Max & the Midknights book, Battle of the Bodkins really is a lot of fun, partly because of its echoes of Big Nate and partly because of the way it diverges from the comic strip. Both books are briefly introduced by Nate himself, and the characters in the Max books clearly parallel ones in Nate’s contemporary sixth-grade world, from the short and rotund Kevyn, who invents the concept of a library in Battle of the Bodkins and resembles the short and rotund Chad in Big Nate, to Max’s feckless troubadour uncle, Budrick, a close parallel to Nate’s feckless father. On the other hand, Peirce has fun varying the elements of everyday life faced by Nate (school, classmates, teachers) and Max (magicians, griffins, kings and queens). The result is that the Max & the Midknights books are fun whether or not readers know Big Nate, being both different enough and similar enough to engage those who are or are not familiar with Peirce’s other work.

     Battle of the Bodkins has many of the same underlying attitudes and characteristics as the first Max book and the Big Nate strip: friendship, working together, that sort of thing – all quite age-appropriate for the preteen audience at which Max & the Midknights is aimed. But there is enough quirkiness in Battle of the Bodkins to make the book enjoyable in some ways that are quite different from those in Big Nate – for instance, by having Max’s knight-school class be carried on an assignment “to find our way home from the middle of nowhere” by magical clouds, to which the would-be knights ascend on rope ladders. Wondering what makes the things go, Max says, “I don’t understand cloud technology.”

     Peirce’s imagination runs rampant, if not riot, in Battle of the Bodkins, with all sorts of concepts that are just weird enough and silly enough to give the book its constant mixture of amusement and amazement. Nothing in it is to be taken at all seriously (well, except maybe for the foundational paean to friendship and working together), but both the writing and the illustrations are so neatly done – and work so well together – that the second book in this series is every bit as much fun as the first. The faux-medieval setting lets Peirce come up with concepts far too far-out for modern life, such as the wizard who, Max explains, “uses fruit to communicate. He and I once had a long-distance conversation on a banana.” And then there is another wizard, “who accidentally turned himself into a pastry” (he got “roll” when he wanted “troll”), who appears at an opportune moment to play the bagpipes. Peirce scatters this sort of whimsy throughout a book that also contains enough adventure to keep readers turning the pages – which is the whole point, of course. The Max & the Midknights books are a delightful spinoff from the world of Big Nate, with Max being every bit as appealing a central character in her “ye olde” adventures as Nate is in his thoroughly modern ones.