(+++) HERE WE GO AGAIN

Domestic Darkness: An Insider’s Account of the January 6 Insurrection, and the Future of Right-Wing Extremism. By Julie Farnam. IG Publishing. $27.95.

     When is enough enough already? In the case of rehashings, retellings and re-evaluations of the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington, D.C., the answer is “not yet and at this rate maybe not ever.” The latest expert/insider/analyst/observer/commentator to wade into this particular morass is Julie Farnam, who was Acting Director of Intelligence for the United States Capitol Police on “that fateful day” (as it tends to be called ad nauseam). To the surprise of absolutely no one who has followed even a smidgen of the coverage of the protest/riot/insurrection (one’s choice of terminology influenced, like everything else on this topic, by one’s politics), Farnam wants to reveal which of the inner workings of government rose to the occasion and which fell short, and why. From her perspective.

     Not surprisingly, Farnam discusses all the ways she was out in front of the events of the day and all the ways her efforts to head off something awful were sidetracked or undermined by others: self-justification and self-praise are de rigueur in books like hers. She became Assistant Director (not yet Acting Director) of the intelligence apparatus of the Capitol Police just before the 2020 presidential election and, as she tells it, promptly set about trying to correct a longstanding circle-the-wagons mentality and culture of silence and non-sharing of information – issues that, of course, she holds responsible for the events of January 6. Farnam’s attention to the inner workings of bureaucracy befits someone who is herself of a strongly bureaucratic mindset – she spent 13 years with U.S. Customs and Immigration Services. But the abstruse details of the perpetual turf wars of the overly complex machinery that is the federal government may be a bit much for non-bureaucrats to follow.

     Ordinary readers will likely pay more attention to the unsurprising (even if true) reasons Farnam cites for being unable to get her proposed procedural reforms to take hold: she was a woman in a largely male environment and did not have a police background. That is about all that readers looking for a good-vs-evil axis beyond Farnam’s police-vs.-extremists formulation will find here, although there are certainly hints of mistakenness (bordering on venality) here and there – for instance, Farnam says the chief of the Capitol Police, Steven Sund, left the force understaffed through missteps that Farnam says could have been avoided. Sund, however, has written his own book about the January 6 events, and to say that his version of what happened differs from Farnam’s is an understatement.

     To Farnam’s credit, unlike many authors of “they messed up by not listening to me” self-excusing books about January 6, 2021, she does own up to mistakes she herself made, notably by becoming romantically involved with another law-enforcement person – who, it turned out, was leaking information to some of the January 6 protesters/rioters/insurrectionists and eventually faced federal charges for doing so.

     Actually, leaks like that one are the most interesting elements of Domestic Darkness: the fact that some in law enforcement funneled information to leaders of the January 6 events is troubling and would certainly argue for much harsher discipline against law-enforcement personnel who abuse their positions and betray their oaths. That is not, however, where the prescriptive portion of Farnam’s book goes. Although she does call for harsher penalties for those who abuse power, she mainly trots out the usual notions of tracking the bad guys (and gals) more closely, designating more groups as terrorists, cracking down on violence, and so forth. And her book’s subtitle aside, there is really nothing of note in it about “the future of right-wing extremism.” There is, however, a little bit about her own future after January 6, 2021. Did she move into the position of Director (not Acting Director) of Intelligence when the Capitol Police realized the quality of her analyses and recommendations? Not at all: in a March 10, 2022, press release, “United States Capitol Police (USCP) Chief Tom Manger announced the selection of Ravi Satkalmi as the USCP’s new Director of Intelligence” and said that “Ms. Farnam will continue to serve as the Assistant Director of the Division.”

     Farnam resigned from the USCP in May 2023. It is a safe bet that the bureaucratic infighting, the perpetual internecine warfare that is a primary characteristic of the huge and sprawling federal government and all agencies within and related to it, the cliques and agendas and mismanagement, did not depart with her, and will still be very much in evidence when the next major challenge arises – by which time even more books will surely have been written about this previous event, since it seems that enough is never really enough.

(++++) PLEASURES OF THE INCONSEQUENTIAL

Theodor Kirchner: Piano Music. Lowell Liebermann, piano. Blue Griffin Recordings. $24.99 (2 CDs).

Haydn: Baryton Trios, Volume 2—Hob. XI: Nos.6, 35, 67, 71, 93, and 113. Valencia Baryton Project (Matthew Baker, baryton; Estevan de Almeida Reis, viola; Alex Friedhoff, cello). Naxos. $13.99.

Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges: Sonatas for Violin and Fortepiano, Op. 1b, Nos. 1-3. Andrew McIntosh, baroque violin; Steven Vanhauwaert, fortepiano. Olde Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     The story of Fürchtegott Theodor Kirchner (1823-1903), to give him his full name, is one of those what-might-have-been musical tales that came to naught, or almost naught, but certainly did not need to. Kirchner was highly admired by precisely the musical intelligentsia that should have paved the way for his work to be widely accepted: Schumann praised him in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik; Mendelssohn’s recommendation got him the position of organist in Winterthur, Switzerland; Liszt, Wagner and others thought highly of him. Clara Schumann had an affair with him. Brahms, Gade, Grieg and others raised 30,000 marks on Kirchner’s behalf in 1884, so he could pay off his debts. But right there is part of the reason for Kirchner’s now-nearly-total obscurity: a dissolute lifestyle almost totally lacking in diligence or application to the work of composition or to his much-praised abilities not only as organist but also as pianist and arranger (he arranged a number of Brahms’ works). Lowell Liebermann, himself a gifted pianist/composer, has done Kirchner a major favor by rediscovering half a dozen of his piano groupings and making them available in finely honed, thoroughly sensitive readings on the Blue Griffin Recordings label. The first disc of the two-CD set includes the set of 15 Skizzen – Kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 11, and the nine Legenden – Dichtungen für das Klavier, Op. 18. The second disc has Nachtbilder – Zehn Charakterstücke, Op. 25; the four Notturnos, Op. 28; the five Ideale – Clavierstücke, Op. 33; and Vier Elegien für Pianoforte, Op. 37. The fact that these six works, all of which date to the 1870s, are made up of 47 separate pieces, points clearly to Kirchner as a miniaturist, and indeed that is a large (although not complete) element of his musical personality. He was quite adept at writing micro-miniatures lasting only a minute or so (he wrote a total of some 1,000 piano pieces), but he was also capable of expressing himself at greater length than the six collections played by Liebermann would indicate – although he never wrote for orchestra and created only two larger-scale chamber works (a string quartet and piano quartet). In any event, this excellent recording is as fine an introduction to Kirchner’s music as is likely to be encountered anywhere. Certainly many of the pieces here fall at least loosely under the somewhat less than complimentary designation of “salon music,” pleasantries of no great consequence. But some have greater emotional heft, and even the less-consequential ones show Kirchner’s considerable skill in all the Romantic-era short forms: for instance, the nicely contrasted seventh and eighth of the Skizzen, marked Im ruhigem Walzertempo and Ruhig, sanft, perfectly encapsulate aspects of the time period. The pieces in Legenden are no longer than those in Skizzen but are weightier, and as deeply Romantic as can be – they do not refer to specific circumstances, but invite listeners to conjure some for themselves. Likewise, the Charakterstücke are highly expressive, ranging from the intense and dramatic to the gentle and lyrical to the pathétique (the longest is labeled Mesto). It is easy in this set to hear the reasons Liszt and Brahms, so different pianistically in so many ways, could both find elements of Kirchner’s music to admire. The four Notturnos are for the most part gentle and pleasantly soporific, the third and fourth both possessing definite elements of lullabies. The Ideale are more rarefied, their sweetness tempered by thoughtfulness that, however, leaves their flow unimpeded. And the Elegien – more thoughtful than sad, more crepuscular than dark – are warmly expressive throughout. None of this is deeply meaningful music, most of it falling into the category of endearing trifles. But all of it lies very well on the piano, is tenderly cohesive, and reaches out emotionally to the 21^st century in ways that even the works of better-known Romantic-era composers often do not.

     Unlike Kirchner, Haydn is of course extremely well-known – but his extensive production for a long-obsolete instrument, the baryton, is almost never heard, given that almost no one plays the baryton anymore and playable instruments of Haydn’s time have not survived. The members of the Valencia Baryton Project are doing a real service to music and to Haydn by reviving the composer’s more than 120 trios for baryton, viola and cello – the large number resulting from the fact that Haydn was, after all, a composer employed by the Esterházy family to make music on command, and Prince Nikolaus was a strong advocate of the baryton and apparently a fine performer on it. Haydn not only created numerous works for his patron – many of them in the key of A, in which the baryton sounds particularly good – but also approached his assignments with his usual creativity. The baryton is essentially a bass viol with two sets of strings: gut strings played with a bow and wire strings that vibrate sympathetically with the bowed ones and can be plucked by the performer’s left thumb. Haydn had the sympathetic strings tuned a full octave higher than had previously been the case – allowing his employer’s baryton to stand out more clearly from the viola and cello when playing trios. This was a good 18^th-century example of managing one’s boss – and it also made for some elegant, poised and distinctive-sounding music. The new Naxos recording of a selection of Haydn’s baryton trios features three in A (Nos. 6, 35 and 71), one in G (No. 67), one in D (No. 113), and one in C (No. 93). All the works were created from the mid-1760s to the early 1770s, and all are in three movements – though here too Haydn was not formulaic, opening three of these six with slow movements and placing the minuets (which all the pieces contain) last rather than second in two cases. To the modern ear, the baryton – which was never especially popular even in its own time – has a somewhat strange sound, largely because of the difference between the gut and wire strings but also because the use of sympathetic strings throughout produces a different aural environment from that to which listeners are accustomed. Each trio on this fascinating disc has distinctive elements. For example, the longest, No. 113, starts with a very extended Adagio in which the metallic strings actually lead off the movement, producing a depth of feeling that Haydn is careful to balance with two much lighter movements and a genuinely perky conclusion. And No. 93 has a witty, syncopated first movement and a very short (90-second) finale built on an especially catchy tune. There is much to discover and much to enjoy here, including the finding that Haydn’s creativity shows itself as clearly in his lesser works as in his more-significant ones.

     A composer of Haydn’s time, working in Classical style, who is now nearly as obscure as Kirchner, is Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-1799). He is primarily remembered today because he was biracial and free – illegitimate, but acknowledged by his wealthy white father and given his father’s last name. Saint-Georges was appointed by King Louis XVI as a royal guardsman and joined the National Guard in Lille after the French Revolution – but was imprisoned for 11 months during the Reign of Terror because of his royal connections. He was so well thought of in musical circles that he was sometimes called the Black Mozart – yet his music is almost unknown today. A short but well-made Olde Focus Recordings offering of three of Saint-Georges’ sonatas for violin and fortepiano at least makes it possible to hear 43 minutes’ worth of his work and will likely whet listeners’ appetite for more. The release includes three two-movement sonatas published in 1781, and is greatly helped by being played in period style on the instruments for which the music was written – there is a very distinctive sound to the baroque violin that is missing in more-modern instruments, and (even more to the point) the fortepiano is so different from the modern piano, so much closer to the harpsichord in many ways, that the blending of string instrument and keyboard in these works is nothing like what it would be if a modern piano were to be used. All three of these sonatas have longer and faster first movements followed by briefer not-quite-as-quick second movements: nothing here is really slow and there is no attempt to delve into anything emotive, much less deep. The first sonata is in B-flat, the second in A, and the third, interestingly, in G minor – although it moves quickly to the relative major and spends most of its time there. The pieces are excellently balanced, written very idiomatically for both instruments, and clearly show Saint-Georges to have been adept with the musical forms of his time – albeit without doing anything to expand or transform them, as Haydn and Mozart did. Andrew McIntosh and Steven Vanhauwaert are truly excellent advocates for this music, playing it with assurance and conviction and bringing out the sonatas’ many charms. It would be stretching things to say that this is important music – neither are Kirchner’s miniatures or Haydn’s baryton trios – but certainly more works by Saint-Georges would be worth hearing, and in fact the biggest criticism of this CD is that it is over much too soon. Hopefully there will be more to come from McIntosh and Vanhauwaert, and more chances to explore and enjoy Saint-Georges’ obvious compositional skills.

(++++) THE TIMELESS AND THE TIMELY

Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 13, 16, 18, and 22. James Brawn, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.

Magical Christmas Fantasies. Caroline Fischer, piano. Genuin. $16.

     At last, James Brawn is eight-ninths of the way through his decade-long exploration of Beethoven’s piano sonatas on the MSR Classics label: his versions of 27 of the 32 sonatas are now available. These recordings have been a very long time coming, trickling out at irregular intervals that have made it frustrating for listeners who appreciate Brawn’s way with the music to wait for the next in the series – or even to know when it will become available. Brawn’s skill in this music is such that the extended intervals between discs seem not only unnecessary but also somewhat capricious – doubly so in light of the entirely illogical arrangement of the sonatas on the discs. The seventh volume in the sequence happened to be one that made sense, containing Sonatas Nos. 30-32 – or would have made sense if it had been the final release. But now we have the eighth volume, and it delves into four sonatas composed between 1800 and 1804, and having no particular reason for being presented in this mixture. The quirkiness of the ongoing releases is a shame, since the playing is so good: Brawn has an unusually well-developed sense of balance between the highly dramatic aspects of the sonatas and their more-delicate, more-lyrical elements, and that balance is much in evidence in this penultimate recording. Brawn has a fine sense of the foundational structure of No. 13, Op. 27, No. 1, labeled “Quasi una fantasia” and dating to 1800-1801. Beethoven wanted the four movements of this work played without a break, turning it into an extended “story arc” with improvisational-sounding elements – and while Brawn does separate the movements, he keeps a clear sense of how they interrelate to form a cohesive whole. In No. 16, Op. 31, No. 1 (1801-1802), the scale is larger: it has three movements rather than four, but lasts 27 minutes, while the duration of No. 13 is 15½. What Brawn does well with the greater length is to showcase this sonata’s opportunities for grander gestures and deeper emotions, especially in the very extended Adagio grazioso second movement. Here Brawn brings out a mixture of sweetness and tenderness that truly makes the movement central to the sonata’s expressiveness. Next on this CD is No. 18, Op. 31, No. 3 (“The Hunt”), the third in the same grouping (in another of the many oddities of Brawn’s sequence, No. 17, “The Tempest” and the second of these three, was on Volume 3 of these releases). The stylistic similarities between Nos. 16 and 18 are quite clear in Brawn’s readings, but what really draws a listener’s attention is the emotional differences between the works: they are expressive using similar techniques, but their overall effect is quite different, and Brawn manages to show this quite clearly. The final sonata on this disc, No. 22, Op. 54 (1804), is a two-movement work that is one of the less frequently played of the sonatas – at least in part because it is overshadowed by its immediate neighbors, No. 21 (“Waldstein”) and No. 23 (“Appassionata”). In some ways No. 22 seems like half a sonata, beginning with a minuet and moving to a finale. In other ways, though, it is fully cohesive, and interesting in its presentation of movements that are strongly contrasting in several ways: triple vs. double time, improvisational sounds vs. moto perpetuo, strict vs. free harmonic shifts. Brawn does not try to make this brief sonata more grandiose than it is, but he clearly understands its innovative aspects and is also well aware of a kind of underlying humor that is all too rare in Beethoven. There is a timelessness to the entire set of Beethoven’s sonatas, for all that they were written at so many different points in the composer’s life. Brawn has a sure sense of their similarities as well as their differences, and his latest exploration of a few of them continues to show his own sensitivity to their structure and communicative styles. It is unfortunate that the skill of the interpretations is so much at odds with the very-long-drawn-out release of Brawn’s cycle, and the peculiarity of the content mixtures on most of the individual discs.

     Interpretative skill and an unfortunate element are also mixed on a Genuin recording featuring Caroline Fischer – a CD that self-limits through its title, which ties it directly to a specific seasonal holiday and implies that the music is seasonal as well. Some of it is, to be sure, but this is not one of those trying-to-be-cute-and-upbeat recordings featuring arrangements of popular songs – CDs designed to be trotted out once a year and then ignominiously stored. The 14 works on this disc include three by Bach – one from Orchestral Suite No. 3 and two from cantatas (BWV 147 and 208). There is the always-delightful set of variations on Ah, vous dirai-je, Maman by Mozart. There is a touch of Schumann and a bit of Tchaikovsky. And there are some small items of exceptional tenderness and beauty, including fantasies on Silent Night and Zu Weihnachten by Gustav Lange (1830-1889), and Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen by Otto van Walden (1871-1924). The mixture of familiar and virtually unknown music is one of the attractions of this enchanting disc. Fischer’s playing is another. Even though some of these pieces are trifles, she refuses to treat them as such, allowing each work to take center stage long enough to introduce itself, deliver its pleasantries, and yield the limelight to the next. Nothing here is lengthy: Mozart’s 13-minute variations last longer than anything else, followed by the strongly accented and virtuosic Weinachts-Fantasie by Robert Leonard (1868-1916), which is nine minutes long. But while many compendiums of shorter works come across as if they are essentially a series of encores, the effect here is different: Fischer treats each piece as an exploration of a small world that then becomes part of something larger – the Christmas season. So, yes, the seasonal specificity is what knits together this wide-ranging recital, but not everything here needs to be considered strictly Christmas-focused – not the Mozart variations, certainly, and not the charming Drei Nüsse für Aschenbrödel by Karel Svoboda (1938-2007), and certainly not the march from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker, a work that certainly has strong seasonal associations but that is worth listening to anytime. It is a pleasurable experience to hear Fischer’s sensitive treatment of all of these pieces, and there is certainly nothing wrong with the collection being designed for a specific time of year. But the playing is so good, and the mixture of material so enjoyable, that one can only hope the disc outlasts the brief time period for which it is designed and continues to deliver musical pleasures throughout the year.

(+++) DREAMS COME TRUE?

Wish: The Deluxe Junior Novelization. Adapted by Erin Falligant. Random House. $10.99.

Wish. Adapted by Suzanne Francis. Illustrated by the Disney Storybook Art Team. Golden Books. $10.99.

     Someone in the vast Disney organization, bless his or her heart, actually remembers When You Wish Upon a Star, the marvelous song by Leigh Harline (music) and Ned Washington (lyrics) that won Disney the 1940 Academy Award for Best Original Song – the first Disney song to win an Oscar. Unfortunately for pretty much the whole world, although the song, out of context, remains Disney’s “signature tune” and appears, in whole or more usually in part, in many guises, the superb animated feature for which When You Wish Upon a Star was created, Pinocchio (1940), has now somehow frightened the politically correct crowd in the Disney universe and has been downplayed to the point of disappearance, leaving the world a little bit poorer in imagination. This is not as great a travesty and injustice as the total whitewashing – and that is exactly the right word – of Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah (1946), by Allie Wrubel (music) and Ray Gilbert (lyrics), which won Disney’s second Academy Award for Best Original Song and which the modern, small-minded Disney plutocrats (again, exactly the right word, although it should probably be capitalized) have done their best to consign to utter oblivion.

     Well, a few remnants of wishing upon a star do remain here and there, and have made their way into the new Disney film Wish, a less-than-magical treatment of a magical theme that hits the right notes for the current Disney leadership without actually asking the audience to, you know, think or feel except in the most obvious ways. It has the now-standard heroic darker-skinned female protagonist with the now-standard ultra-supportive family, the now-standard faithful and mildly amusing animal companion, and the now-standard evildoer who is instantly identifiable by being a) male and b) handsome (keys to identifying bad guys in Disney films at least since Beauty and the Beast back in 1991). Sweet do-gooder Asha lives in a land specifically created so people will be safe and have a chance to have their fondest wishes granted; being 100% selfless, all she wants is to have her grandfather’s wish be chosen for fulfillment on his 100^th birthday; that does not happen, because the ruling king, Magnifico (obviously evil: just check out that name!), worries that Asha’s grandfather’s wish might somehow jeopardize the kingdom (which makes no sense, but does not have to make sense in modern Disney); so Asha, who has instantly realized the underlying rottenness of Magnifico’s treatment of wishes, makes a wish on her own. She wishes, yes, on a star, which promptly comes down to the land of Rosas (where all this takes place) and, after several mild adventures, ensures that Magnifico victimizes only himself and all the people get a chance to make their own wishes come true.

     Jiminy Cricket, what a plot mishmash! Still, the film has some attractive visual elements, the cardboard characters are as easily relatable as are most characters in current movies (not only Disney ones), and the plump little yellow star that eventually bestows a magic wand (!) on Asha is as sweet as can be. Unlike many older Disney films but very much like many recent ones, Wish is strictly for kids. The actual ages to which it is intended to appeal are not entirely clear: Asha is 17 (although very young for a teenager), but the plot and most characters seem aimed at kids in the 4-8 age range. So for those who do fancy the film and want to revisit it in books after seeing it on screen, there are options based on moviegoers’ ages. The Deluxe Junior Novelization is a straightforward retelling of the movie’s plot, including a small bound-in poster and eight pages of scenes from the film. The oldest fans of the film, likely in the preteen age group, will find it satisfying as a remembrance of the movie. The Golden Book version of Wish is a 28-page encapsulation of the tale, mostly using art derived from the film to tell the story – with some connective tissue in the words. It will be fine for younger children, who are more likely than older ones to be fans of the movie.

     To be fair to Disney-as-it-is, there is nothing inherently wrong with formulaic filmmaking except that it is, you know, formulaic. Today’s youngest film viewers know nothing of Disney’s history in the movie business and have likely never seen the classics that made the company what it is today. In fact, modern Disney is assiduously trying to keep today’s kids from becoming attached to the older films by making those movies difficult or impossible to see and by directing today’s young audiences either to live-action remakes of classics or to all-new, simple films such as Wish. Still, there must be at least a few people within Disney with a modicum of knowledge of the company’s genuinely creative past. And they must have had a wry chuckle or two at the fact that the people of Rosas eventually overcome Magnifico by, of all things, singing. Just don’t expect to hear Cliff Edwards, the voice of Jiminy Cricket, crooning When You Wish Upon a Star.