(++++) SOMEWHAT SPLENDID

Beethoven: Piano Concertos Nos. 1-5; The Creatures of Prometheus—Overture. Garrick Ohlsson, piano; Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra conducted by Sir Donald Runnicles. Reference Recordings. $34.98 (3 SACDs).

     There exist innumerable recordings of the “canonic five” piano concertos by Beethoven – which, along with 2020 being the 250^th anniversary of his birth, may be one reason for the increasing recent attention to his other 2½. Those are a “youth concerto” in E-flat now referred to as No. 0, the Op. 61a piano version of the Violin Concerto, and the 258 bars of a D major concerto that if completed would have been his only relatively late work in the form (1814-15). There is, however, always room for yet another cycle of the traditional five Beethoven piano concertos in their traditional numbering (although No. 2 was written before No. 1) – provided that the performances have some unusual, interesting and/or insightful views of the music. The new release featuring Garrick Ohlsson and the Grand Teton Music Festival Orchestra under Sir Donald Runnicles certainly qualifies, providing some highly personal perspectives on the music – especially the first four concertos.

     There is nothing historically informed here, no period instruments or period practices, and Ohlsson unashamedly plays a modern Steinway. The orchestra is modest by modern standards (54 players) and consists of highly adept musicians who do not usually perform together but who gather for the Grand Teton Music Festival in Wyoming, where these recordings were made. The setting may help explain the sense throughout of cordial, amiable music making, much of it expansive: these are by and large relaxed performances, sometimes a bit lacking in intensity, that tend to drift pleasantly through familiar environs. And if familiarity with the music is what helps the musicians play it so assuredly, it is surely also an element of Ohlsson’s ease with the concertos, recorded here when he was 74 years old (in 2022) – he learned one of these concertos when he was only 14, and his 60 years of engagement with the music definitely inform his relationship with it.

     We know a bit about Ohlsson’s history with these concertos because he contributes one of the essays in the enclosed booklet – which also offers remarks by Runnicles, a straightforward once-over-lightly discussion of the music (by Scott Foglesong), and some enthusiastic comments by producer Vic Muenzer, who is a major force here. The SACD sound of this Reference Recordings release is one of its very best features: Muenzer and his team produce an ambience that allows listeners at home (whether they have the full SACD experience or the CD version) to become part of an intimate set of performances by a close-knit group that comes together with a sense of old friends making music for the sheer joy of it.

     The interpretations of the concertos fall, no doubt unintentionally, into two parts, Nos. 1-3 and Nos. 4-5. No. 1 features very warm orchestral sound from the start and a perky piano entry in the first movement. The pacing is slow, not really con brio, and Ohlsson occasionally slows matters down even a bit beyond the basic leisurely pace. He plays with more delicacy than is usual on modern concert grands, avoiding too much pedal and thus showing the Mozartean influences in the movement. The balance between piano and orchestra is exceptional, a product both of the performers and of the engineering of the recording. There is a chamber-music feeling to much of the movement, at least until the cadenza, which grumbles a bit too much in the lower register and really is a bit over-extended in a movement that lasts a very unhurried 19 minutes. The second movement has a warmly pastoral feeling, with the primary impression of collaborative pleasure – certainly nothing competitive between soloist and ensemble. Ohlsson spins out the melodies as if he has all the time in the world, and the movement comes across as an essay in gentleness. There is finally some get-up-and-go in the finale, where the clarity in the piano is noteworthy (no pun intended): every grace note, other ornamentation, and all the runs are crystalline – an approach that Ohlsson sustains throughout the entire cycle.

     No. 2 opens with notable (again, no pun intended) delicacy and, again, slow pacing. The warmth of sound is perhaps a bit much for this modestly scaled movement, and the tempo is again not really con brio. Here too Mozart-inherited elements are brought to the fore, but a little more liveliness would have been welcome. There is nothing taut here – everything flows smoothly. The cadenza starts very deliberately, with Ohlsson caressing every note; there is nothing show-off-ish – even the chords are modestly struck, never pounded. The movement lasts 15 minutes and is a bit lacking in verve despite the excellent playing. The second movement is quite Romantic-sounding at the start, almost swooning – an unusual approach for early Beethoven. There is a nocturne-like feeling in the piano, which creates a sense of meandering and an almost autumnal quality. Toward the end, the piano notes just hang there in what sounds like the antithesis of virtuosity: it is all beautiful but somewhat somnolent. The finale’s bouncy opening provides a strong contrast, although everything is still presented with delicacy. Ohlsson and Runnicles downplay any drama here: the feeling is one of drifting pleasantly through note-filled groves of harmony.

     No. 3 opens with better first-movement pacing, and the suitable darkness of the minor key is handled well but not overdone. Again, matters are expansive once the piano enters, with Ohlsson taking care to be sure all individual notes are clearly audible in turns, trills and runs. The cascading in the cadenza is almost Chopinesque here, and Ohlsson really dwells on that cadenza, giving this movement (like the opening one in No. 1) the feeling of a solo-piano recital. However, the entry of timpani to end the cadenza – an effect looking forward to Op. 61a – is particularly well-handled. The second movement has a quiet, almost hesitant start, and here as in No. 1, it is played as if there is near-infinite time for the music to unfold. The delicacy throughout is so pronounced that the music often sounds as if it is about to stop altogether and fade away; but it never quite does. The delicate shadings of volume are especially well-done – again, a collaborative effort of performers and engineers to exceptionally fine effect. The finale features especially good orchestral elements, with the trumpets particularly strong. The precision of piano notes is yet again the most salient characteristic here. The balance between solo and ensemble, which is especially important in this movement, is managed very well, and the quiet orchestral portions are notable for their clarity – with the eventual coda bright and well-paced.

     The approach in the first three concertos would seem especially apt for the fourth, but here Ohlsson and Runnicles have a surprise for listeners. The first movement of No. 4 is paced more briskly than would be expected based on Nos. 1-3. Still nicely balanced and played with enthusiasm, it is offered as a true Allegro without Beethoven’s modifier moderato. Although soloist and conductor remain attentive to details, the movement is less emotional than might be expected, with fewer proto-Romantic overtones – it is actually a little on the cool side. The enthusiastic cadenza is presented with less rubato than the earlier ones and a touch more emphasis on sheer virtuosity, but it is still played with sensitivity. In the second movement, the sense of the piano “calming” the orchestra is less pronounced than usual, because even in this movement the level of cooperation between soloist and ensemble is so great. There is less orchestral intensity than usual in this movement, with plenty of warmth from the piano – in all, a feeling of relaxation rather than conquest. The finale is upbeat and enthusiastic, with a genuine sense of joy, even exhilaration. Here the orchestra actually dominates the proceedings, the piano taking on more of an obbligato role. This ebullient movement is the happiest in any of these five concertos, and it certainly sounds that way here. Beethoven specified that this movement’s cadenza must be short, and it is – and less attention-getting than those in the earlier concertos. It leads to a coda that is very bright and emphatic.

     No. 5, the “Emperor,” starts with an impressive flourish, and here again the first movement is brisk. Ohlsson uses the pedal less sparingly here than elsewhere – a contrast with the orchestra, which sounds thinner and clearer throughout the smartly paced proceedings. The movement is stately, with strong rhythmic emphasis and even flow, and does sound regal – but is more straightforward than several other movements in this release: there is nothing revelatory here. The quiet parts of the cadenza-like section near the end are the most interesting. The second movement comes across as a pleasant pastoral interlude. It is not very emotional – well-played but rather superficial. It proffers no particular insights but sounds very pretty. The very slow fade toward the end is the best part. And then comes the finale – which at the start is quite fast, a surprise in this set of recordings. The unexpected burst of speed at the opening leads to a strongly accented, fast-flowing performance in which the runs are not quite as precise as they are elsewhere and the whole seems a bit rushed. Certainly it is not magisterial. There are welcome touches of delicacy in the higher reaches of the piano, and the back-and-forth between soloist and ensemble is well-handled throughout. As a whole, though, this interpretation is the blandest and most straightforward of the five as heard here.

     The three-SACD set concludes with a five-minute encore in the form of the overture to The Creatures of Prometheus, in which the orchestra really shines – from the strongly accented opening through the very clear articulation of the scurrying strings in the quickly paced main theme.

     There is a great deal of excellence throughout this exceptionally fine-sounding set, but there are missteps or odd decisions here and there, not only in the performances but also in the presentation. For instance, it is genuinely bizarre that the set does not provide timings for the movements of the concertos or even for entire individual concertos – it only lists the total time of each disc. And some of the written material is on the vapid side, such as the offhand dismissal of Op. 61a by calling it “an ill-advised attempt at refashioning the great Violin Concerto for piano [that] squats glumly between the fourth and fifth piano concertos.” This sort of thing is unworthy of a release that, if it is determinedly and unapologetically old-fashioned in eschewing contemporary understanding of historical performance, is nevertheless packed with excellence in the playing, thoughtfulness in the interpretations, and a sound world that befits Beethoven by allowing all the pleasures of his musical thinking – and the Ohlsson/Runnicles interpretation of it – to come through with uncompromised quality.

(+++) COMPOSER-PERFORMERS, AND THE CELLO

Christoph Croisé: Cello Concerto No. 1; Voyage Exotique; Clarinet Trio; Cello Sonata No. 1. Christoph Croisé, cello; Kammerorchester der Niederlenzer Musiktage; Annette Jakovčić, cello; Damien Bachmann, clarinet; Oxana Shevchenko, piano. AVIE. $17.99.

Music from the Iranian Female Composers Association. Brian Thornton, cello; Katherine Bormann and Alicia Koelz, violins; Eliesha Nelson, viola; Callisto Quartet (Paul Aguilar and Rachel Aguilar, violins; Eva Kennedy, viola; Hannah Moses, cello); Amahl Arulanandam, cello; Nathan Petitpas, percussion. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

Lee Weisert: Recesses; Similar Speeds. Lee Weisert, piano, guitar, percussion, and electronics. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     Many contemporary musical creators are as eager to showcase themselves in performance roles as in their compositions. There is, of course, a very longstanding tradition of this: a great many classical works in the past 400 years, and even earlier, were written by composers who also performed them or were part of their performances, and famous music of many types was created by and for composer-performers through the 19^th century (think of Liszt or the Strauss family) and into the 20^th (Rachmaninoff, for one). In more-recent times, listeners have largely become accustomed to performers presenting music by composers other than themselves – but the composer-performer tradition continues in some quarters, if in somewhat different ways from those of the past. Thus, cellist-composer Christoph Croisé (born 1993) offers four of his own works, all written between 2020 and 2022, on a new AVIE disc. The four-movement Cello Concerto No. 1 sets up a main theme that carries through the whole piece; frequently places the violin antagonistically against the cello; and reaches into non-classical acoustic realms through the prominent inclusion of a drum set. The second movement is intensely soloist-focused, with Croisé playing almost continuously and engaging in a very extended cadenza. The third movement nearly eschews classical structure altogether, its sound world that of the electronic dance music of techno clubs. The finale is speedy, dramatic, rhythmic in multiple ways, and intense at times while being nearly lyrical at others – it is something of a stylistic mash-up, and is the most effective portion of the concerto. The Clarinet Trio follows a somewhat analogous path in its three movements. The first movement features themes that flicker in and out, quickly replaced by others, without any particular development. The second focuses as much on the cello – which opens the movement with an extended solo – as on the clarinet, which does not exactly play second fiddle (so to speak) but which functions as the cello’s partner. The finale’s bossa nova beat is appealing and, as in much of the music on this disc, functions as a cross-genre element underpinning the material. Cello Sonata No. 1, like the concerto, is in four movements; also as in the concerto, the first movement sets out the thematic material that will be explored throughout. Croisé effectively contrasts strongly accented and rather ominous sounds with milder, quieter material that never quite counters the darkness. The second movement is gentle and surprisingly sweet: here Croisé takes advantage of the warmth and beauty of the cello’s sound in a way that he does nowhere else in any of the works on this CD. The third movement’s sounds are a strong contrast, strong and anguished and at times verging on the unpleasant. The finale is closer in mood to the third movement than the second, dissonant and unevenly rhythmic – like other finales on this disc, it has dance elements, but the ones here are of the danse macabre variety, even if not truly spooky. In some ways the most interesting piece on this disc is the most cello-focused of all: Voyage Exotique is a two-cello “Grand Duo” whose four movements carry listeners to distinctly different auditory realms and interweave the cellos so effectively that the piece seems to call on more sonorities than can be contained in a mere two instruments. The movements have interesting titles that, far from being arbitrary, provide listeners with some clues as to what is going on. Blu Rhino Track is by turns rhapsodically nocturne-like and strongly rhythmic. A Train to Ugudu Yelu journeys to an imaginary place on imaginary tracks in what sounds a lot like wave motion. Tarantula Spiritualis is more about the spider than the tarantella dance inspired by its bite: the web-spinning has both cellos producing electronic-sounding elements. The finale, Black Mamba Island, moves from spiders to snakes and actually has some of the rhythmic feeling of a tarantella – but, in the main, has the two cellos imitating the sounds and movements of venomous serpents. Croisé and his colleagues play all four works on the disc with enthusiasm, and the music itself – a generous helping of it, 80 minutes in all – has many points of interest through its intermingling of forms and its unashamed self-display as a stylistic mélange.

     The cello also plays a major role, both as a solo instrument and with others, on a New Focus Recordings CD offering six works by Iranian female composers, assembled and primarily performed by Cleveland Orchestra cellist Brian Thornton. Mahdis Golzar Kashani’s And the Moses Drowned is an extended single movement for string quartet, intended as a “cause” piece responding to the Syrian war but interesting to hear without needing to know its provenance. It includes two Largo sections alternating with two Vivace ones, the slower material’s mournful drama contrasting with the faster elements’ strong rhythmic drive. Nina Barzegar’s Vulnerable is for solo cello and is built on contrasts of technique and speed; it is somewhat too stretched-out to be fully effective, but its more-animated latter portions are well-thought-through. Nasim Khorassani’s Growth, for string trio, is textural rather than melodic or harmonic, and uses the interplay of instrumental sounds effectively. Niloufar Iravani’s three-movement The Maze for string quartet (played here by the Callisto Quartet) uses different modes and meters in each movement and comes across as a kind of journey through compositional techniques – in which the finale, Mysterious, is particularly intriguing in its channeling of Ives’ The Unanswered Question. Anahita Abbasi’s Sirventès for cello (Amahl Arulanandam) and percussion (Nathan Petitpas) is a study in sound, using the cello in a percussion context and the percussion to provide structure rather than merely emphasis. It is an interesting aural experiment whose appeal is more intellectual than visceral. Thornton’s cello, absent from the Iravani and Abbasi works, returns for the last piece on the disc, Mina Arissian’s three-movement Suite for Cello. This solo piece lies more naturally on the cello than anything else on the CD, and most fully allows the instrument to express its ingrained melodiousness and richness. A technical tour de force, the work does not sound as if it is trying to transform the cello into something beyond its inherent nature: it allows expressiveness to flow smoothly through multiple emotional peaks and valleys, with Thornton’s elegant phrasing and careful evocation of mood helping the material connect more directly with listeners than will likely be the case for the other pieces heard here.

     Unlike cellist Croisé, cellist Thornton did not compose the works he interprets – but Lee Weisert (born 1978) did compose the pieces he and colleagues present on another New Focus Recordings release. His instrument, however, is not the cello: Weisert holds forth on piano, guitar, percussion, and electronics, along with participants Allen Anderson (modular synthesis), Nicholas DiEugenio (violin), Jonathon Kirk (electronics), Melissa Martin (vocals), and Matthew McClure (saxophone). These instruments invite listeners to a very eclectic collection of sounds indeed, and that is just what Weisert provides in Recesses and Similar Speeds. Nearly the entire CD is devoted to Recesses, which is subdivided as Recesses I and Recesses II, the first of them being further broken into two portions. To anyone not thoroughly versed in, familiar with and enthusiastic about electronic music, all the material is going to sound very much alike. The first part of Recesses I has the usual background-ish electronic sounds with some foreground material such as children’s voices and occasional snippets of orchestral strings. The second part also mixes electronically generated tones (more individualized in this section) with vocal bits and pieces and occasional far-in-the-background consonances over which the foreground electronic waves wash incessantly. Recesses II starts as if it is growling, then turns into a series of unsurprising clicks, grunts, taps and individual piano notes, all within  the usual outer-space-sounding envelope of so much electronic music. In all, the Recesses elements take up 45 of the 51 minutes on the disc, which turns Similar Speeds into a kind of six-minute encore presented purely by Weisert. The work sounds like a procession of electronically generated and/or enhanced gamelan or other metallophone material, with frequent rhythmic changes that provide more-interesting variability than anything in Recesses – and the added plus that Similar Speeds is so much shorter that it spends much less time dwelling on its sonic profile. All this music is for a very narrow, strongly committed audience that is determinedly avant-garde and wedded to the notion of the power of electronics to produce engaging audio material. Those self-regarding cognoscenti will find much in this material to intrigue them. But anyone who is not already a member of the “in” group is highly unlikely to be drawn into it by experiencing anything on offer here.

(++++) EVERYDAY WONDERS

You Are a Honey Bee! By Laurie Ann Thompson. Illustrated by Jay Fleck. Dial. $18.99.

You Are a Raccoon! By Laurie Ann Thompson. Illustrated by Jay Fleck. Dial. $18.99.

     There are so many children’s books about animals that focus on the faraway and exotic that it is a real pleasure to encounter a series showing the fascinations of critters much closer to readers’ homes – maybe even in their back yards. The Meet Your World series is aptly titled, since it tells kids stories about their world, not somewhere far away that they may never visit and that is inhabited by admittedly fascinating creatures that, however, they may never get to see except in books or videos.

     Laurie Ann Thompson handles the Meet Your World books about bees and raccoons exactly the same way, from birth through maturity – and while Jay Fleck’s illustrations certainly anthropomorphize the features and expressions of bees and raccoons, just as Thompson’s words imbue the animals with human thoughts and attitudes, the underlying science and basic appearances are correct and make for solid introductions to worlds that coexist with the human one and, at the same time, are part of it.

     The bee book features a huge-and-round-headed bee with a near-constant smile – wholly unrealistic, but correctly colored – that emerges from its birth cell in the hive and goes about the various parts of its life. To relate the bee’s activities more closely to human ones, Thompson uses action words and Fleck then shows how human kids do things described by those same words. For instance, the bee chomps out of its cell and wiggles through the hole it makes – and Fleck shows a picture of a boy going “chomp!” on a doughnut and a girl doing a “wiggle!” with her body. Later, when the growing bee squeezes royal jelly from its head to feed wormlike bee babies, Fleck shows a boy going “squeeze” while putting mustard on a hot dog. And so on, page after page. Factual material is sprinkled throughout the book but always kept personalized: “You are twelve days old. You pull wax from glands on your belly and use it to build.” Later, when the bee leaves the hive to gather nectar from flowers – “It’s time to FLY to them!” – Fleck shows, in the margin, a girl with a superhero-style cape pretending to fly. Smiling kids enact whatever words are used to describe the bee’s activities, such as “waggle, turn, waggle, turn” for the bee’s dance to show other bees where to find nectar-rich flowers. The cute pictures of bees and cute pictures of children make a visual connection between bee and human, even as the use of the same words to show bee and human activities reinforces the notion that bees and humans inhabit the same world. The book is, of course, vastly oversimplified, but never to the point of scientific inaccuracy, and its efforts to show bee-human similarities, however overstated, should help the youngest readers appreciate the remarkable nature of their everyday world.

     The raccoon book uses exactly the same techniques. It starts with “you” being a newborn raccoon: “You can’t hear or see, and you are hungry.” With a sniff, wiggle and whine (all also shown being done by kids in the page margin), the adorable infant suckles milk from a happily smiling mother raccoon and grows until, “After a few weeks, your ears open. Then your eyes.” And then raccoon training begins, as the mother raccoon guides the baby outside the den, shows how to find food, teaches hunting, and encourages play with her other growing babies – and, yet again, when the text says “jump, wrestle, chase,” there are pictures of smiling kids happily jumping, wrestling and chasing. The book takes the raccoon through its first winter and notes that when it is again spring, “You are an adult now, and you know how to survive on your own.” That specific sentence is not given a parallel with anything involving human children, but it does complete a nicely structured introduction to the birth and first year of a raccoon’s life, and once again, as with the bee book, shows the interesting if usually-invisible-to-humans events occurring in the natural world that people share with not-people.

     Both these books have some helpful back-of-the-book material that goes beyond the basic stories. These include “fun facts” (plus, in the bee book, a glossary); a section on why honey bees/raccoons are important; and a “how to help them” final page. There is also a participatory activity in each book: “Be a Honey Bee!” and “Be a Raccoon!” Each gives a bit of additional information and then encourages kids to behave as a bee or raccoon would – for instance, by hiding something and then trying to do a bee-like wiggle dance to explain to someone where the hidden object is. Just informative enough for the youngest readers and just full enough of enjoyable pictures and ideas to balance the factual information, these Meet Your World books really do serve as age-appropriate introductions to critters that are quite as remarkable as exotic ones even though they are decidedly more often seen.

(++++) FILL IN THE NOT-BLANKS

Alien Worlds: Color Cosmic Kingdoms. By Kerby Rosanes. Plume. $17.

Immortal Ink: A Tattoo Coloring Book. By Tania Maia, El Rose and François Gautier. Plume. $16.

     The amazingly intricate art of Kerby Rosanes really does not require color: his black-and-white renditions of worlds real, surreal and almost real stand on their own as fascinating studies of things that are or are not, could be or could not be. Yet Rosanes’ art is also wonderful to color, which is why his many coloring books for adults are inevitably so impressive. Rosanes lays out worlds that are tremendously detailed and worth poring over to study with close attention, yet can be made even more expressive – and more personalized – by anyone interested in taking the time and effort to add color to them. In the case of Alien Worlds, Rosanes really does offer up worlds, albeit nothing like the genuine extraterrestrial ones discovered on a near-constant basis by scientists. Rosanes’ imagination focuses on worlds that just barely possibly might be and on the sorts of creatures that just barely possibly might inhabit them, or might have inhabited them in the past. This is all fantasy, not science fiction, despite the space-travel trappings of the book and the way Rosanes ties it together by having a solitary space-suited astronaut as the human explorer of each of the worlds. There are 10 places portrayed in Alien Worlds, and each is explained in a single sentence at the start of the book. For instance, “The Futuristic Planet” is “an artificial marvel with advanced cities and high-tech aliens,” while “The Steampunk Sphere” is “a mechanical world filled with sentient, steam-powered automata.” At the very end of the book, in a section called “The Astronaut’s Log,” Rosanes lists and discusses all the creatures found by the solitary astronaut on all the worlds visited in the book – lending further depth to a presentation that goes far beyond the notion of a mere coloring book. There is one significant flaw in the presentation, though, and it is one that appears in other Rosanes books as well: both the table of contents and the final “log” refer to specific pages, but the book’s pages are not numbered – which makes no sense at all and makes cross-referencing specific worlds and creatures far harder than necessary. Aside from that design error, there is nothing with which to find fault here as Rosanes lets his imagination roam as far as it wishes. One page features a five-eyed, vaguely leonine creature with a flower-shaped crest; one shows two-headed, dragon-like creatures with powerful but butterfly-like wings; one two-page spread shows the astronaut sitting on the edge of a platter-like surface, observing surroundings consisting of spike-topped buildings and creatures that seem on the border between the animate and the mechanical; one portrays a toothy being with four large legs plus two small grasping limbs, the upper part of its head appearing to be a skull and its back looking as if it is perpetually on fire; one shows a fascinating feathered-serpent-like creature embedded in a gigantic crystal. And there is a great deal more than this. The detailing on every page is simply remarkable, or rather complexly remarkable, since there is nothing simple about Rosanes’ art or imagination. This is a book that artists of all sorts can study with care for a considerable time, reveling in the astonishing complexity of each wholly impossible world and the way in which Rosanes makes each of them seem almost plausible. And it is a book that colorists can delight in for who-knows-how-long, since the extreme elaborateness of every page presents nearly infinite possibilities for turning these remarkable black-and-white imaginary realms into remarkable multicolored ones.

     It would take an incredibly skilled tattoo artist to transform even a small element of Rosanes’ work into body art – but the intricacies of tattoos are really of a different order. Tattoos are by no means to everyone’s taste – for every person who regards them as a form of bodily expression, there is one who sees them as disfigurement. Still, there is no doubt about tattoos as forms of artistry, and it is not necessary to want them on one’s own body in order to find them fascinating to examine, understand and, yes, color. Immortal Ink is interesting not only for showing black-and-white tattoos that colorists can explore and personalize as they wish, but also for explaining a bit about various types of tattoos and their different uses and expressive intents. The categories shown and discussed are Americana, Illustrative, Blackwork, Neo-Traditional, Steampunk, Surrealism, Japanese, and Sketch – and the book’s pages are numbered, so finding any category is simple. The sections’ titles do not really explain the nuances of the various tattoo styles, but the introduction to each section does that well. Blackwork, for instance, refers to “anything drawn using only black ink” and is “characterized by strong, simple, clean lines and powerful use of negative space.” Japanese tattoos have “vibrant colors and creative shading” and feature imagery that “is often a way to honor folklore or tradition.” Sketch tattoos look “as if the artist has sketched them onto the skin” and “can evoke a feeling of movement and complexity.” The explanations are not confined to the start of each section: every individual tattoo shown gets its own short but informative discussion. Thus, the lantern (in “Americana”) “symbolizes a quest for knowledge and finding a true path in life.” The wolf (in “Neo-Traditional”) represents “power, loyalty, and valor.” The elephant (in “Steampunk”) “symbolizes wisdom, strength, loyalty, and the ability to carry great weight with dignity and strength.” The descriptions of individual tattoos will be of greatest interest to people who are actually contemplating getting them or who know someone who has one and are wondering about its underlying meaning – although it is worth pointing out that the explanations in Immortal Ink are not necessarily the only ones relevant to the specific tattoos shown in the book. Like the pages of Rosanes’ Alien Worlds, those of Immortal Ink invite close attention (although not quite at the Rosanes level), contemplation, and a wide variety of responses, since these 45 tattoos range in appearance from items of complex beauty to ones with a genuinely sinister air. Colorists, whether or not they themselves have or would consider any of the tattoos here, can use Immortal Ink to let their own creativity flow in terms of accentuating or downplaying specific elements of each tattoo – and, if they are so inclined, to create a color palette that they themselves might at some point consider wearing, or at least admiring on the skin of someone else.