tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-144300802017-03-23T19:13:33.114-04:00INFODAD.COM: Family-Focused ReviewsAt INFODAD, we rank everything we review with plus signs, on a scale from one (+) [disappointing] to four (++++) [definitely worth considering]. We mostly review (+++) or better items. Very rarely, we give an exceptional item a fifth plus. We are independent reviewers and, as parents, want to help families learn which books, music, and computer-related items we and our children love...or hate. INFODAD is a service of TransCentury Communications, Inc., Fort Myers, Florida, infodad@gmail.com.The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.comBlogger3277125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-52639429861168097812017-03-23T08:52:00.000-04:002017-03-23T15:18:21.498-04:00(++++) A STAR IS BORN, OR MAYBE HATCHED<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Olga and the Smelly Thing from Nowhere.</i> By Elise Gravel. Harper. $12.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>There are lots and lots of stories out there about kids who are not very good with other kids, or with adults, but who are super-good with something else, such as animals. But this book is not like all the others.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>There are lots and lots of stories out there in which the pictures and text are equally important even though the works are not exactly graphic novels, being more of a hybrid form in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dear Dumb Diary</i> mode. But, again, this book is not like all the others.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>And there are lots and lots of stories out there where an alien being or otherwise unimaginable creature of some sort <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> imagined and turns out to be very important indeed, or at least very interesting, or very strange, or some combination of those. But, yet again, this book is not like all the others.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Why not? Because Elise Gravel’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Olga and the Smelly Thing from Nowhere</i> combines elements of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all three</i> of the “lots and lots of stories” designed for preteens, and is hilarious – as well as slightly, ever so slightly, meaningful.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>It all starts with the unusually weird title, which turns out to refer to a thing that turns up in Olga’s trash can one day. It smells like the trash, or maybe the trash smells like it; it is hard to be sure. The thing is the size of a piglet and has pink, trash-covered fur, plus a long, skinny, rat-like, prehensile tail. It says nothing but “meh” (constantly) and is terrified of bananas. It is in love with Olga’s Michael Jackson poster, does not speak Spanish, and does not seem to want to eat anything – not even Olga’s favorite food, macaroni and cheese with pickles. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Olga and the Smelly Thing from Nowhere</i> features Olga trying to find out more about the smelly thing: she is a budding scientist, as she does not hesitate to explain (repeatedly), and her idol is Jane Goodall. Olga is initially fascinated by the smelly thing, which she has not yet seen, because she discovers that its poop is “the size of green peas, and shiny like marbles, but multicolored, like Skittles.” So, yes, there is a bunch of poop-related stuff here, which is scarcely surprising in an amply illustrated book for ages 8-12. But Olga’s interest in poop is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">scientific,</i> not scatological, so there is purpose to it, all right?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Anyway, Olga – who likes to wear the same sack-like dress all the time and does not like to wear socks or shoes – explores the likes and dislikes of the smelly thing, which she dubs Olgamus Ridiculus (a pretty good name, all things considered), eventually finding out what it likes to eat (olives, which she discovers while visiting a store that sells, among other things, tuna flavored toothpaste and transparent diapers). But Olga fails to discover what the smelly thing actually is, despite a library trip during which she consults <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Weird Animals, Strange Animals, Bizarro Animals, Strange Life Forms, Cute Animals,</i>and so on. It is during this library visit that Gravel shows her desire to have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Olga and the Smelly Thing from Nowhere</i>be a bit more than its title and plot indicate: just as there are multiple references to Jane Goodall in the text, so is there some science in the library trip – Olga learns about the blobfish, naked mole rat, axolotl, tarsier and other strange real-world animals (which, however, Gravel’s cartoons show in not-at-all-real-world ways). True, this is not a major part of the book, but the underlying current of scientific exploration, which includes Olga using the scientific method by taking constant notes on the smelly thing and listing and numbering her observations, makes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Olga and the Smelly Thing from Nowhere</i> a bit more than a pure romp.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Back in the “romp” material, though, Gravel offers hilarious illustrations of differently shaped dogs (because Olga decides to take the smelly thing to the dog park), and one of the funniest pictures in the whole book has Meh (the smelly thing’s name, of course) – threatened by big dogs – “puffing up like a giant puffer fish” and making a “FWEEE-EEEEK!” noise that looks as funny as it sounds when you see Meh making it. Eventually, thanks to Meh, Olga makes friends with some neighborhood girls she has always disliked – this is another bit of underlying seriousness in the book – and learns, among other things, that Meh tries to communicate with flies and only sleeps facing the North Pole. With a combination of ideas, attributes and attitudes like the one in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Olga and the Smelly Thing from Nowhere,</i> can a sequel about Olga and Meh be far behind? Young readers will certainly hope the answer is not “meh” but “no.”</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-64561588605312907982017-03-23T08:49:00.000-04:002017-03-23T08:49:04.014-04:00(++++) ENDING WITH DIGNITY<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life after the Diagnosis: Expert Advice on Living Well with Serious Illness for Patients and Caregivers.</i> By Steven Z. Pantilat, M.D. Da Capo. $16.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>As awful as it is to be diagnosed with a life-threatening disease, it can be almost equally awful to try to negotiate the morass of medical, legal and personal/family issues that follow such a diagnosis – while attempting to make what are literally life-or-death decisions about treatment. Steven Z. Pantilat’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life after the Diagnosis</i> is difficult, at times unpleasant reading, but it is so clear-headed and understanding (and understandable) that it can be an invaluable guide for individuals facing a horrendous diagnosis, family members trying to help, and caregivers trying to figure out the best way to deal with rapidly approaching end-of-life necessities.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Pantilat’s<span class="a-size-base"> writing is clear, easy to understand, and filled with the warmth and caring that are so often absent in modern medicine. As usual in books for lay people about serious medical matters, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life after the Diagnosis </i>is packed with examples taken from the experiences of patients Pantilat has treated – but unlike many such books, this one uses the experiences to highlight real-world issues that readers may very well encounter, and helps in the discovery of the right questions to ask and the sorts of answers that one may expect to get. Indeed, Pantilat’s combination of the frank and honest with the compassionate is what doctors treating patients near life’s end should seek as an ideal. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span class="a-size-base"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>There is detailed advice here on accepting and living with a fatal disease, plus information on how to prepare for the disease’s later stages and how to help loved ones prepare as well. In particular, Pantilat is a strong advocate of palliative care, which he explains with the same clarity that he brings to other topics. “In trying to eradicate an illness, traditional treatments often do more harm than good, especially late in an illness. Palliative care, which is given along with standard medical treatments, provides an extra layer of support that helps patients function better, be more comfortable, and experience less pain and stress. …It reflects the realization that serious illness involves numerous factors, including pain, stress, emotions, spiritual beliefs, culture, finances, nature, and values. Palliative care focuses on the<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> whole person…”</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Indeed, it is through the lens of whole-person focus that Pantilat discusses pretty much everything in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life after the Diagnosis.</i> His approach shows the difference between treating a disease and treating a person who has a disease – which are two very different things.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span class="a-size-base"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Take, for instance, Pantilat’s treatment of hope. He says he tries to find out from his own patients what their hopes are for the rest of their lives – and then find ways to make those hopes come true, within the limited time people have available. For example, he tells of two patients who wanted to live until their children could be married – with neither patient likely to be alive that long. And he shows how the situations were handled: one with an elaborate-as-possible wedding within the intensive care unit of a hospital, the other by moving the wedding much earlier than originally planned. These stories illuminate Pantilat’s trenchant observation, “Often, both doctors and patients misplace their energies. They continue to concentrate on survival and ignore other goals that could still be attained.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span class="a-size-base"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;</span>Pantilat is direct even when saying things that patients, families and caregivers will likely not want to hear. The hope about which he writes is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">directed</i>hope, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">practical</i> hope, not pie-in-the-sky hope for something that is vanishingly unlikely to occur. “When you’re seriously ill, it’s natural to hope for a cure, but a cure may not be possible. If you focus all your time and energy on being cured, it can keep you from taking care of other important business, making crucial decisions, and accomplishing achievable goals. …The pursuit of a cure can undermine the very reason you want a cure: to have more time with loved ones. In the end, you lose out on both.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span class="a-size-base"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life after the Diagnosis</i> is a book that no one will want to need to read; if there is any doubt, just consider that one chapter is called “The News Goes from Bad to Worse,” and it is scarcely the only chapter in which the material discussed is difficult to bear. Consider as well a passing comment such as, “Doctors usually have more information than they share.” This seems obvious when you are healthy – but it can become deeply ominous in the context of a serious illness, as patients understandably wonder, “What is my doctor not telling me? Can I even trust what I hear?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>And then there is the issue of medical jargon, which doctors routinely use and may be more likely to employ as a kind of self-protective mechanism when talking to patients with serious diseases. Pantilat is typically blunt in noting, for example, that “the word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">positive</i> usually means ‘good’” but that “in medicine, positive is often bad,” and also that when a doctor talks about progress or says something is progressive, patients must ask whether things are getting better or worse. Language can feel like a mine field, one among many, when you have a serious illness or a loved one does; it is just one topic through which Pantilat leads readers skillfully. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span class="a-size-base"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The final part of the book explains palliative care in detail and also discusses hospice care (which is not quite the same thing) as well as “Difficult Treatment Decisions and Discussions” (another chapter title). This section may be especially difficult reading. But it provides some of the most valuable practical advice in the book. Pantilat is amazingly clear-headed about end-of-life care, saying that although families often try to protect loved ones from knowing they are dying, patients themselves “know that they’re getting weaker. Patients hear the hushed tones outside their rooms. Everyone treats them too nicely. Family and friends cry when talking to them, and visitors suddenly arrive from the four corners of the earth. Your loved ones don’t cross borders for pneumonia, but they cross the ocean if you are dying from lung cancer.” The plainspoken, knowledgeable comments and advice here are often hard to take, especially if you come to this book only because you or someone you care for has been diagnosed with a serious and probably terminal illness. But at a time of life – the time of its anticipated ending – when there are precious few practical, real-world guides to what to expect, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Life after the Diagnosis</i> can be and will be invaluable. Pantilat’s words may be unwanted in the abstract, but in the concrete, practical reality of extremely serious illness, they are very much needed and will be deeply appreciated.</span></div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-86232291097934242382017-03-23T08:46:00.000-04:002017-03-23T08:46:00.502-04:00(+++) OLD-FASHIONED AND PROUD OF IT<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Pyes, No. 1: Ginger Pye.</i>By Eleanor Estes. Illustrated by the author. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $6.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Pyes, No. 2: Pinky Pye.</i>By Eleanor Estes. Illustrations by Edward Ardizzione. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $6.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Magnificent Mya Tibbs: Spirit Week Showdown.</i> By Crystal Allen. Illustrations by Eda Kaban. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $6.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Magnificent Mya Tibbs No. 2: The Wall of Fame Game.</i> By Crystal Allen. Illustrations by Eda Kaban. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $16.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Not so long ago, books for young readers did not need a lot of plot or action to succeed – they could simply meander pleasantly through family stories, offering low levels of drama and exploration and reveling in characterization rather than events. Hmm. Maybe that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i> a long time ago. Eleanor Estes (1906-1988) created quite a few books of this type, in particular her stories of the Moffats (1940s) and Pyes (1950s), largely based on her own memories of turn-of-the-20<sup>th</sup>-century childhood. In truth, the books have not worn particularly well, being too bound up in their time period to translate well to the far more frenetic pace of life in the 21<sup>st</sup>century. They have an air of faintly faded nostalgia about them and may be better as read-alouds nowadays than as books for preteens to read on their own – their slow pace and gradual unfolding of events are just too different from what young readers are now accustomed to in both literature and life for them to be readily enjoyed. This observation applies to both animal-focused books about the Pyes of Cranbury, Connecticut, the first of which, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ginger Pye</i> (1951), includes Estes’ own pleasant illustrations and was a Newbery Medal winner. Indeed, it was Estes’ only Newbery winner, although three of her other works were Newbery Honor books. Today it is a trifle hard to see what all the fuss was about. The title character in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ginger Pye</i> is the family dog, a puppy that appears and then sort-of-mysteriously disappears. The family is designed to be gently quirky: Mr. Pye is a “bird man” (ornithologist) who is supposed to solve the nation’s bird problems; Mrs. Pye is a homemaker known for being the youngest housewife in town, because she was 17 when she literally bumped into Mr. Pye, who was 35; and the kids, who have little unusual about them and are intended as “everykids,” are 10-year-old Jerry and nine-year-old Rachel. There are also Mrs. Pye’s brother, Bennie, who is only four and became an uncle at age three, and an old cat named Gracie who is able to unlock the front door. The modesty of the story is shown in the way that one of Ginger’s big accomplishments is finding a pencil and bringing it to school; the not-very-hard-to-figure-out mystery of Ginger’s disappearance hints slightly at animal cruelty when it turns out he was tied up in a shed. The book is essentially a slice-of-small-town-life story, written in the time of today’s preteens’ grandparents and set decades earlier – sweet and mostly pleasant in its way, but scarcely likely to engage many modern young readers.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The sequel is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pinky Pye</i> (1958), and this time the title character is a kitten found during the Pye family’s summer vacation on Fire Island. There are a couple of slight twists here, the most interesting being that Pinky can type – a throwback to a really old notion created in 1916 by newspaper columnist Don Marquis, of a cockroach-and-alley-cat pair that contributed humorous social commentary through stories written entirely in lower-case letters, because the authorial cockroach could not hold down the shift key when jumping on the typewriter. The characters were named archy and mehitabel and were illustrated by George Herriman of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Krazy Kat</i> fame. And yes, in some quarters they are still remembered: a wonderful editorial in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Science</i>magazine, of all places, written in 2007, of all years, was said to be dictated by mehitabel and typed by archy. Whether or not Estes intended homage to Marquis through Pinky’s typing, the fact is that the story of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pinky Pye</i> has the same distinctly old-fashioned flavor as the old pieces by Marquis, and the same sense of rather fusty charm. Apt adjectives for this tale are “gentle,” “sweet,” “rambling,” “charming,” “cute,” “light-hearted,” “adorable” – positive words one and all, but indicating a bit of a surfeit of happiness and a distinct lack of drama that many contemporary preteens will find on the dull side. The new paperback editions of these Estes books are welcome, and both books deserve to be called classics of children’s literature; but much like classics of literature for adults, they may be honored by the title while still being rather off-putting to residents of a later time.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Some similar adjectives apply to Crystal Allen’s books about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Magnificent Mya Tibbs,</i> but these books are designed to have more-contemporary flair. The first, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spirit Week Showdown,</i>was originally published last year and is now available in paperback; the second, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wall of Fame Game,</i> is new. Intended for ages 8-12, these books will probably be of most interest to the narrower age range of 8-10, just as Estes’ Pye books are likely to be most engaging for children younger than preteens. In Allen’s novels, Mya is a nine-year-old who is stereotypically well-meaning but prone to making mistakes. She is obsessed with cowgirls and inclined to tell tall tales. In the first book, her predilections get her in trouble and result in her being nicknamed “Mya Tibbs Fibs” and ostracized by the whole school. She also ends up being paired for Spirit Week with the school bully, Connie Tate. Initially desperate to get her friends back – at least the girls she <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thinks</i> are her friends – Mya keeps getting more deeply into minor but, for a fourth-grader, emotionally significant trouble. All this occurs against the background of the upcoming Spirit Week, which means Mya has no choice but to deal with Connie, whom she discovers to be different from what everyone thinks and maybe not so bad at all. Everything ends well, and Allen is careful throughout to put only small bumps in exuberant Mya’s road to understanding, happiness and success.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The second book follows the same pattern, albeit with a few differences. Mya returns, of course, along with her brother, Nugget, and their father and mother. But this time their mom is pregnant, and Mya is eagerly awaiting the birth of her new baby sister, already named Macey. Instead of Spirit Week, this time the challenge is the “Wall of Fame Game,” a rather odd contest in which children’s names are put on a wall if they are able to recite lists of facts. This seems as if it would be off-putting to Mya, and to readers of the books about her, but Allen makes it a big deal and an important part of the plot. Another major element is Mya’s determination to enter her mother in the annual chili cookoff – because one of the competitors, Mrs. Frazier, has commented that Mya’s pregnant mom has to stay off her feet and cannot possibly take part. Mya and her now-friend Connie, another returning character from the first book, work together to get everything to come out just right (this time Mya has a new nemesis, Naomi Jackson). Sure enough, everything does go nicely, if not always in quite the way that Mya expects. That, in fact, is the underlying message of both Mya books: things will be fine and all will be well, but life does not go just the way you want it to. Some young readers, and some parents, may find Mya rather cloying and annoying, with the odd expressions she sometimes uses and her pink cowboy boots; others will consider her quirky in a pleasant way for the 21<sup>st</sup> century, just as the Pye family was pleasantly offbeat for young readers in the middle of the 20<sup>th</sup>.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-18086157089525371442017-03-23T08:43:00.000-04:002017-03-23T08:43:00.181-04:00(+++) UNSWEETENED HISTORY<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sugar Changed the World: A Story of Magic, Spice, Slavery, Freedom, and Science.</i> By Marc Aronson and Marina Budhos. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $10.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Essentially yet another anti-slavery screed, though disguised as a book on history and economics, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sugar Changed the World</i> – originally published in 2010 and now available in paperback – touches on the families of the husband-and-wife authors to try to personalize a story dating back to thousands of years before the Greeks. It was in those times, in New Guinea, that sugar was first cultivated – a laborious process that was largely responsible for pretty much every evil in the world thereafter. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Well, the authors do not say exactly that – not quite – but they make and remake their points about sugar and slavery to such an extent that readers will quickly find they are being lectured, indeed hectored to, rather than informed. This is a real shame, because the photos and illustrations enliven the story and do a great deal to show that history is as much about everyday life, about things we now take for granted, as it is about great battles and famous figures. But the book is so busy portraying slave owners as horrible, bloodthirsty murderers – every single one of them, without a single exception through all the ages in which slavery existed – that they lose track of narrative style (the book is sometimes in third person, sometimes in second person) and lapse frequently into hyperbole: “The punishing work [of cane planting] had just one aim: to plant a crop that would end up taking the life of every worker how touched it.” Really? Sugar cane killed 100% of the people who touched it? The business owners of cane plantations had as their aim the death of every single slave who worked their plantations? That is quite a way to run a business – kill all your workers.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The problem with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sugar Changed the World</i> is that it, like many other books about things that changed the world – guns, oil, birth control pills, Henry Ford’s assembly lines, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and many, many more – never stops insisting that its topic is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the</i> matter of importance. The only one. The Louisiana Purchase, for example, should be called the Sugar Purchase, Aronson and Budhos argue, because Napoleon only offered the land to Thomas Jefferson (who, by the way, was evil because he was a slaveholder) because sugar-producing Haiti had recently gained independence. The whole notion that Napoleon needed the money and was stretched too thin on numerous fronts in and beyond Europe, with Haiti and the Americas being of relatively little importance, gets not even a mention here – it is, or was, all about sugar. Only sugar.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Incidentally, Haiti, celebrated in this book as a republic founded by former slaves, has been an economic basket case since its independence and remains the poorest nation in its region. The authors go out of their way to celebrate the country: “Haiti was born free; human rights won over property rights.” But they have to acknowledge, in some small way, that the new nation was a failure and remains one, since denying that really would fly in the face of fact. Their answer is to say that “Haiti floundered. In part that was because of internal conflicts in which outsiders had no role.” That is it – the sole reference to 200 years of internal warfare, tribal loyalties, corruption, dictatorship, mismanagement, and suppression of the rights of former slaves and their descendants by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i> former slaves and their descendants. Admitting all that would fly in the face of the authors’ nobility-vs.-evil narrative, so they allow the one brief reference and then never bring up the subject again.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Actually, the whole Haiti story brushes anything negative about slaves and former slaves under the rug. Writing of the Haitians’ fight against crack British troops, Aronson and Budhos downplay the role of weather and disease in Haitian victories – although they do acknowledge, in another of their quick mentions, “malaria and yellow fever.” Their emphasis, though, is elsewhere, as they say that “the Haitians were disciplined, smart fighters. …Many of the Haitian soldiers were recently arrived Africans, warriors in their home countries.” Even young readers – the book’s target audience – may pause here to wonder how these excellent and disciplined warriors, scourge of well-trained British fighters, ended up as slaves in the first place. Wouldn’t their fighting and tactical abilities have kept them free in Africa? The answer – that a great many African slaves were enslaved by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i> Africans, from competing tribes, and not by the prototypical ultra-evil white plantation owner – would grate on the authors and undermine their carefully crafted, simplistic narrative, so they deliberately avoid mentioning it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Certainly all authors of histories choose what to put in and what to leave out. But here, the skewed nature of much of the writing undermines the fascinating elements and the sort of behind-the-scenes flavor, so to speak, of a book about a sweet substance with an anything-but-sweet background. Aronson and Budhos go so far as to assert, “Only sugar – the sweetness we all crave – could drive people to be so cruel…” So extreme is this viewpoint that it makes it seem there have never been wars and other forms of violence over land, over gold and other raw materials, over religious beliefs, but only over sugar. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sugar Changed the World</i> is far too limited and one-sided in its presentation to be as useful as it could have been in exploring an important element of history that is rarely covered in students’ history classes. There is a great deal in the book that is genuinely interesting, and students who focus on the illustrative material will by and large have a better experience than those who follow the skewed presentation of events and facts, and perhaps swallow the biased arguments. A spoonful of sugar will do little to help these limited viewpoints go down.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-70907873633545435532017-03-23T08:40:00.000-04:002017-03-23T08:40:03.237-04:00(++++) GUSTAV AND BEYOND<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde.</i>Roberto Sacc<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">à</span>, tenor; Stephen Gadd, baritone; Bamberger Symphoniker conducted by Jonathan Nott. Tudor. $19.99 (SACD).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mahler: Symphony No. 9.</i>Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks conducted by Mariss Jansons. BR Klassik. $16.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alma Mahler: Lieder und Ges</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ä</span>nge; Patrizia Montanaro: Canto di Penelope.</i> Catharina Kroeger, soprano; Monica Lonero, piano. Brilliant Classics. $11.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Mahler’s late works probe the post-Romantic era in ways that make it clear why Schoenberg and others of the Second Viennese School so admired them, yet they straddle the world of the 19<sup>th</sup>and 20<sup>th</sup> centuries in every way that matters – remarkably so, considering the fact that Mahler died before reaching his 51<sup>st</sup>birthday. Even when they are very much works of their time, as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Das Lied von der Erde</i> is of a time when artists of all types were fascinated by Orientalism, they are uniquely Mahlerian in sensibility and in the way they look inward while describing, in elegant musical as well as verbal terms, a variety of external scenes. Mahler designed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Das Lied von der Erde</i> for tenor and contralto or baritone, but the baritone option is rarely used – although Leonard Bernstein famously did so at a time when Mahler’s music was less firmly in the standard repertoire than it is today. Jonathan Nott, an exceptionally attentive Mahler conductor, chooses tenor and baritone for his new <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Das Lied von der Erde</i> on Tudor, and uses the darker color that the combination imparts to this already-dark work to excellent effect. The voices of Roberto Sacc<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">à</span> and Stephen Gadd complement each other very well, and their elocution styles are sufficiently different to maintain a distinction of sound even when Sacc<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">à</span> sings in his low range and Gadd in his high one. Gadd’s is, on the whole, a stronger voice for this work, not only because of its evenness of tone throughout its range but also because Gadd uses it with such subtlety, to the point that parts of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Der Abschied</i> are essentially whispered – but without breathiness. Sacc<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">à</span>is strongest in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Die Trunkene im Fr</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ü</span>hling,</i>conveying a sweeping sense of despairing assertiveness that makes this song, which in less-sensitive hands can sound like a ditty, into something altogether more meaningful, and a fitting setting to precede <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Der Abschied.</i> Unfortunately, Sacc<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">à</span> is overmatched by the opening <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Der Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde,</i> having difficulty projecting above the orchestra and struggling to give different shades of meaning to the repeated line, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod.”</i> Part of the issue here is that Nott really punches this song to the utmost in pacing and sheer volume: the excellent Bamberger Symphoniker simply overmatches the singer. It is a thrillingly intense reading of the song, but a flawed one because it leads Sacc<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">à somewhat beyond his zone of excellence. The remainder of the performance, however, is uniformly well-balanced, sensitively and beautifully played as well as elegantly emoted. As a whole, this is a deeply emotional reading that connects with listeners on a visceral rather than intellectual level – with all the intensity that Mahler surely intended.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Mahler moved on from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Das Lied von der Erde,</i> which he described as a symphony but hesitated to designate as his Ninth, to his actual Symphony No. 9, the last he was to complete. It is fashionable to see this whole symphony as an extended <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Abschied</i> of its own, but it comes across more effectively when handled as a door to a new kind of music, the hints of which become even more apparent in the unfinished Tenth. Mahler in his Ninth is always on the verge of discarding tonality – except when he dips back into it for the work’s most emotive moments. He uses themes that are barely themes at all – except when he develops ones with amazing cleverness, as by transforming the grotesqueries of the third movement into the gorgeousness of the finale by simply (but not really simply) slowing down a theme to a substantial degree. He revisits his much-loved Alpine meadows and abandons them – but not before spinning a lovely second movement whose tempo is designated as being not merely that of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ländler</i> but that of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gemächlichen</i> (leisurely) one. Mahler’s Ninth is a pivotal work, and even though Mahler did not long enough to show in detail what he was pivoting toward, Schoenberg and others certainly figured it out and developed their own direction partly as a result. The </span>Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks plays the Ninth beautifully for Mariss Jansons on a new BR Klassik release, but Jansons himself is not fully equal to the earlier portion of the music. The first movement, in particular, seems formless if not gormless, the thematic drifting clear but the structure within which Mahler created the drift much less so. The movement meanders, but in fact it is a goal-oriented movement, albeit one whose goal is not fully clear until the finale. The remainder of this performance is, happily, better. The second movement is nicely paced and well-balanced. The third is somewhat too well-mannered: Mahler clearly asked that it be played <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sehr trotzig,</i> “very defiantly,” and indeed it is most effective when delivered on the verge of hysteria – but Jansons is altogether too refined for that, here holding matters in check in a way that he does not in the first movement. The result is that there is less contrast than would be ideal between the grotesqueries here and the beauties of the finale – although the finale as Jansons handles it is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">so</i> beautiful that it makes up for pretty much every way in which the other movements fall short. Far from being music of despair or resignation, as it often seems to be, this is for Jansons music of acceptance, of acknowledgment of the inevitable and tremendous composure through understanding its approach. The very end of the movement and the symphony is ineffable here in a way that may well have listeners holding their breath for what comes next. There is no “next” here, of course, and only a partial “next” in the Tenth, but Jansons so whets the appetite for what might have been that the conclusion of this Mahler Ninth leaves behind a feeling of nothing less than awe.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Mahler’s sometime muse and sometime despair, his wife, Alma, has a longstanding reputation as a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">femme fatale</i> for her multiple affairs and her three marriages to artists of distinction (Mahler, Walter Gropius and Franz Werfel). It is easy to forget, though, that she was herself a composer – whose work Mahler forbade her to continue as a condition of their marriage. Later realizing that he had erred, Mahler withdrew the prohibition and encouraged Alma, and she did produce a small volume of music of high but not outstanding quality – likely fewer works and lower-quality ones than she would have written if her muse had not been prematurely stifled before being set free again. The songs offered by Catharina Kroeger and Monica Lonero on a new Brilliant Classics CD are all 14 of those published during Alma’s lifetime (1879-1964). Mostly using the words of contemporary poets – including, in one case, Franz Werfel – the songs do not look beyond the Romantic era in their themes or their structure. Their lengths vary significantly, from one minute to five, but their underlying emotional themes are largely the same and fairly conventional – although the appearance in several of them of erotic tension and a sense of solitude may hint at Alma’s personal feelings. Only the first group of five songs was published during Gustav’s lifetime, in 1910; later came a group of four in 1915 and then a group of five in 1924. But not even the intervening war made for significant changes in Alma’s means of expression: there is considerable feeling in the songs, well communicated by the performers here, but there is simply not enough that is individual in the settings to show Alma as a composer of significance. The songs are interestingly paired with a very different sort of vocal work, a kind of quasi-operatic <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">scena</i> that imagines an extended monologue and tirade by Odysseus’ long-suffering wife, Penelope, after the return home of her husband. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Canto di Penelope</i> is by Patrizia Montanaro (born 1956), and it uses the expected techniques of modern vocal composition, including atonality, declamation, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sprechstimme,</i> and outright acting, all for the purpose of having Penelope complain to Odysseus about her lot during his decades-long absence and about the emotional and sexual neglect she endured through all the years in which he wandered about being heroic. Something of a feminist work, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Canto di Penelope</i> is not musically exceptional, and there is little surprising for the modern era in the attitudes it expresses. Its musical elements are subsidiary to its storytelling and, while they fit the words well enough, they are not particularly notable in themselves. The pairing of Montanaro’s theatrical scene with Alma Mahler’s often-dramatic miniatures encapsulating emotions is actually more interesting than is the music of either composer heard here.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-63776277921348940302017-03-23T08:37:00.000-04:002017-03-23T08:37:03.254-04:00(++++) RETHINKING THE FAMILIAR<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mendelssohn: Violin Concerto; Octet.</i> Liza Ferschtman, violin; Het Gelders Orkest conducted by Kees Bakels; Itamar Zorman, Elina V<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ä</span>h<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ä</span>l<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ä</span> and Corina Belcea, violins; Krzysztof Chorzelski and Marc Desmons, violas; Sebastian Klinger and Antoine Lederlin, cellos. Challenge Classics. $18.99 (SACD).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Schubert: Piano Sonata No. 20, D. 959; Brahms: Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel; David Del Tredici: Ode to Music.</i> Beth Levin, piano. Navona. $14.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Schubert: Winterreise—visualized by William Kentridge.</i> Matthias Goerne, baritone; Markus Hinterh<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ä</span>user, piano. C Major DVD. $34.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bach: Concerto for Two Violins, BWV 1043; Vivaldi: Concerto Grosso, Op. 3, No. 8; Franck: Violin Sonata in A.</i>David and Igor Oistrakh, violins; Gewandhausorchester Leipzig conducted by Franz Konwitschny; Anton Ginsburg, piano. Berlin Classics. $18.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Who would have thought that the thrice-familiar Mendelssohn Violin Concerto would turn out to be chamber music? That is essentially what it sounds like on a new Challenge Classics recording featuring Liza Ferschtman and Het Gelders Orkest conducted by Kees Bakels. On the face of it, there is scarcely a pressing need for yet another disc of this gorgeous but overplayed and over-recorded concerto: its beauties, lyricism, structural inventiveness, warmth and cleverness have been explored many, many times before. But Ferschtman and Bakels actually manage to shine some new light on the work, helped by very fine SACD sound that integrates the solo violin with the orchestra to a greater-than-usual extent, while still allowing it to stand out more than satisfactorily. There is an overall collaborative feel to this performance that is reminiscent of the conversation-among-instruments nature of chamber works, and as a result Ferschtman is able to take some chances that might otherwise not work – for instance, a headlong rush to the end of the first movement that then highlights the bassoon transition to the second in an unusually clear way. The overall feeling of this reading is one of surpassing lyricism and beautifully flowing lines: the performance has a seamless quality that is both surprising and engaging. And as a result, the concerto reading fits very well with a rendition of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Octet</i> that, unlike the concerto performance, was recorded live. Here Ferschtman is joined by members of the Belcea Quartet and other like-minded players, and the ensemble work is an absolute delight, especially in the marvelously lightfooted <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scherzo,</i>which might well derail at this tempo if performed by lesser musicians. The hardest movement of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Octet</i> to bring off is the lengthy opening one, so out of proportion to the other three that it can drag the whole work down – or at least overbalance it and make the later movements seem to come from another, lighter piece. Not so here. The performers’ structural adeptness holds the movement together, and their excellent individuation of parts – Mendelssohn treated all eight instruments separately rather than handling them as four pairs, as would be more usual in an octet – leads to a movement that is expressive in multiple ways but that holds together well when the instruments play in unison. Throughout the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Octet</i> and, indeed, throughout this disc, there is a sense of rediscovering well-known music, of finding little niceties of balance and tempo that bring out elements of the scores in ways just a touch different from the usual. The result is an exhilarating recording that does not exactly break new interpretative ground but that hones the performances of both these gorgeous pieces into subtly shining smoothness.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The rethinking on the Mendelssohn disc is done by the performers, while it is the composers who do it on a new Navona CD featuring pianist Beth Levin. This is most noticeable in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ode to Music</i> by David Del Tredici (born 1937), which takes Schubert’s three-minute song <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An die Musik</i> and crafts an 11-and-a-half-minute fantasy around it. This sort of thing is very much of the Romantic era, but Del Tredici’s piece would never be confused with a similar expansion by Liszt, Thalberg or Kalkbrenner: it does remain largely tonal, but its treatment of the material is quite different from what would have been accorded the Schubert-song foundation in the composer’s own time. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ode to Music,</i>written as recently as 2015, uses the Schubert work as a jumping-off point for Del Tredici’s creation of his own ode. Its relationship to Schubert is not always apparent, but it expands the underlying material in logical and ultimately satisfying ways. In this, Del Tredici somewhat follows in the footsteps of Schubert himself, who in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sonata No. 20,</i> the middle of his three huge and prepossessing final piano sonatas, expands not only upon some of his own earlier works but also upon the sonata model of Beethoven. It is interesting to compare Levin’s handling of this grand and very large sonata with her approach to Del Tredici. She brings expansive flow to the contemporary work, letting it grow well beyond the bounds of the song at its heart; but in the Schubert, she keeps matters tightly controlled, refusing to let the music veer off-track despite a certain lack of formal cohesion that long led to the neglect of this sonata and the two other final ones by Schubert.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>The lyrical concluding rondo – the longest of the four movements in Levin’s performance, its main theme taken from the much earlier Sonata No. 5 and used in vastly more expansive form here – balances the opening movement quite clearly in Levin’s reading, while the poignancy of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Andantino</i>and playfulness of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scherzo</i>provide respite and at the same time add to the sonata’s overall cyclicality. The Schubert and Schubert-based pieces are interestingly joined on this recording by Brahms’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel,</i> which is quite obviously a Romantic rethinking of Handelian material – but a piece in which Brahms took considerable pains to restrain the virtuosity that was expected in variations in the 1850s and with which he himself, as a fine pianist, was certainly familiar and comfortable. Brahms sought something different from virtuosic display here, taking a theme originally written for harpsichord and bringing it into an age in which full, even grand piano sounds were the norm – then insisting that the material be handled with a certain degree of restraint and even delicacy. Levin understands this, and her nicely balanced, very musicianly handling of the Brahms sits particularly well between the Schubert sonata and Del Tredici’s Schubert-based fantasy. This is an unusual combination of material to find on a CD, but Levin’s sensitivity to the differences among the works, as well as their similarities, makes a strong case for all the pieces, both individually and in this particular combination.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Not all rethinkings are quite this felicitous, however. Sometimes a reinterpretation can be a touch too clever for its own good. That is the case with William Kentridge’s illustrated version of yet another Schubert work, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Winterreise.</i>As seen on a new C Major DVD recorded live at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence in France in July 2014, Kentridge’s contribution to these 24 songs is a set of 24 animated films that do not illustrate the music but use it as a jumping-off point for a visual journey of Kentridge’s own. There are parallels here with Del Tredici’s personalized journey through and beyond <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An die Musik,</i> to be sure, but Kentridge’s introduction of largely unrelated visual elements to a work that invites emotional involvement and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">internal</i> visualization does Schubert no good. Schubert’s music itself represents an addition, of course – to Wilhelm M<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ü</span>ller’s poems. But the interweaving of words and music is so expertly done that in a truly fine performance, anything further that is added to the music-and-words combination seems a detraction, or at least a distraction. And the reading by Matthias Goerne and Markus Hinterh<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ä</span>user is a very fine one indeed. Goerne plumbs the emotional depths of these songs from start to finish, his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">legato</i> and dramatic strength equally impressive, and Hinterh<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ä</span>user is a first-rate partner, the piano part interweaving with the poetry, accentuating here, supplementing there, contrasting a bit in another place. Adding such visual elements as an African ibis to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Die Kr</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ä</span>he</i> and creating references to Kentridge’s homeland of South Africa and its troubles may be intended to show the universality of Schubert’s emotional expressiveness; but really, the music itself does that quite well enough on its own. Visuals such as a scene in which a man at a desk struggles to control the mundane multiplicity of elements of his life (shown during <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Im Dorfe,</i> “In the Village”), and one in which Goerne’s shadow is seen taking a shower (during <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wassserflut, </i>“Torrent”), actually make <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Winterreise</i> more earthbound and more stuck in modern times than the original song cycle is in Schubert’s era. This is not to say that Kentridge’s images are ineffective: some, such as melting letters of the alphabet (in a scene in which Kentridge himself walks across pages of a dictionary) and snow made of black-paper confetti (accompanying <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Erstarrung,</i>“Frozen”), are undeniably interesting and can even turn into distractions from the music. But that is exactly the problem: the visuals are either irrelevant to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Winterreise</i> or a distraction from it. Certainly Kentridge has thought through his visualizations carefully, as is made clear on the DVD in a bonus documentary featuring him as well as Goerne and Hinterh<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ä</span>user. But this production is nevertheless a (+++) offering of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Winterreise</i> performance that, without the intruding visual elements, would have deserved a (++++) rating.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The rethinking is of a different sort in a (+++) Berlin Classics reissue of 1950s recordings of Bach, Vivaldi and Franck with David Oistrakh. Performed in 1957 and 1958, the readings here are old-fashioned ones, dating to well before the era of historic performance practices, and they are of interest mainly as historical documents of their own – so listeners need to rethink contemporary expectations as to performance style, orchestral size, etc. Those who do so will hear considerable rapport in the way David and his son Igor play the Bach together, although the lower strings of the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig under Franz Konwitschny sound somewhat undifferentiated and even muddy – likely a function of the recording rather than the orchestra’s playing. This is strong, straightforward Bach of 50-plus years ago, testament to an interesting father-and-son collaboration (although the personalities of David and Igor were generally acknowledged to be very different, the elder Oistrakh being far more easygoing than the younger). The Vivaldi, from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">L’Estro Armonico,</i>is actually more interestingly interpreted than the comparatively bland Bach: the sturdiness of the outer movements stands in strong contrast to the desolate feeling of the central <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Larghetto e spiritoso</i> (this concerto is RV522 – wrongly identified as “RV822” on this recording). The Bach and Vivaldi works together last less than half an hour, so there is a so-called “bonus” that is about as long as both of them together. This is Franck’s oft-played <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Violin Sonata in A,</i> with David Oistrakh and pianist Anton Ginsburg. The performance is all right but not particularly compelling, filled with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">portamento,</i> weighty tone and an overall seriousness that collectively tend to make the music drag – it sounds slower than it actually is, and comes across as a rather inflexible interpretation of music that is best when it flows most easily. Although this disc will be a treat for fans of the Oistrakh father and son, it is a limited-interest item, because enjoying it requires rethinking the niceties of performance as listeners have come to know them in the half-century since these recordings were made.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-6801848714063466922017-03-16T08:47:00.000-04:002017-03-16T08:47:17.645-04:00(++++) THE REAL AND THE SORT-OF-REAL<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frankie.</i> By Mary Sullivan. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $12.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shell, Beak, Tusk: Shared Traits and the Wonders of Adaptation.</i> By Bridget Heos. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $16.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frankie</i> is the story of a real dog, more or less: it starts with an adoption from an animal shelter and is dedicated by Mary Sullivan “to Sue, Leslie, Cali, and Barkley, for adopting Frankie.” But the story is told with cartoon drawings and Frankie’s imaginary thoughts as she moves to her new home and settles in there, not without some difficulty – so it is not 100% real. Nevertheless, every bit of the story is quite clearly recognizable to anyone who has ever brought a dog home, in particular anyone who has ever brought a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">second</i> dog home. It is the first dog, here named Nico rather than Barkley, who is Frankie’s main problem. Frankie is an adorable black-and-white bundle of enthusiasm, perhaps a Jack Russell terrier or JRT mix, with stand-up-straight ears as big as her entire head; Nico is larger, mostly brown, and with a perpetual scowl. Unfailingly upbeat, Frankie explores her new home and tries to find things to call her own: “Frankie’s ball?” she wonders as she looks at a red-and-white polka-dotted ball, and “Frankie’s bone?” for a teething bone, and so on. But every single time, Nico shows up, takes the item away, and asserts, “No. Nico’s ball” and “No. Nico’s bone.” And so on. Frankie becomes increasingly downcast until she sees yet another possible toy for her; then she is every bit as enthusiastic as the previous time. But Nico is totally unaccepting of this intruder, yanking a blanket from under her and flopping on top of her in the dog bed. “Poor Frankie,” writes Sullivan, showing all the things Frankie wants but cannot have. “No nothing,” laments Frankie. But then, in all capital letters, “FRANKIE’S IDEA!” And off streaks Frankie around the house to assemble her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">own</i> pile of objects: a ball of yarn, a bone-shaped toilet-tissue roll from the trash, a sock for a rope toy, even a cardboard box for her very own bed. Frankie and Nico find themselves on opposite sides of the room, protecting their turf and glaring at each other – until there comes a cry of “FRANKIE!” and the hyper-happy new dog in the house goes running toward it. And there stands Frankie’s human companion (only her legs are visible) with all sorts of non-makeshift things just for Frankie – everything with a tag reading “Frankie” on it, and everything looking so desirable that now Nico walks over with a slight smile, gazing at one of the toys and saying, “Nico’s frog?” And Frankie’s answer? The last page has Nico playing with the frog and Frankie playing with the red-and-white polka-dotted ball, each acknowledging the other in a heart-shaped thought balloon. This is clearly the beginning of a beautiful friendship – and a realistic-yet-amusing way of showing how dogs adapt to each other. And to top off the story, the back cover of the book jacket shows the real-life Frankie on whom the book is based – and notes that, yes, Frankie was fostered by Sullivan, who does indeed have a dog named Nico. The line between reality and almost-reality gets mighty thin here.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The animals in Bridget Heos’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shell, Beak, Tusk</i> are entirely of the real world, and the photos of them (by a variety of photographers) show their distinguishing characteristics quite clearly. Certain of those characteristics are what the book is all about: Heos here discusses convergent evolution, in which unrelated animals may over time develop very similar characteristics because they have similar needs regarding food gathering or self-protection. The result, for example, is that both anteaters and aardvarks have long, super-sticky tongues that they use to slurp up insects – even though anteaters live in South America and are related to sloths, while aardvarks live in Africa and are related to elephants. Some of Heos’ chosen comparisons are unexpected and fascinating: although readers will not be surprised to learn how strong a parrot’s beak is, the opposite page surprisingly shows an octopus – which has a parrot-like beak that is “the only hard part of its body.” Heos explains that both creatures need the beak to get food: the parrot to crush nuts and seeds, the octopus to break the shells of crabs and mollusks. Unfortunately, Heos also here commits one of several narrative missteps when she points out that the parrot’s bite is “five times stronger than the bite of a deadly python.” Pythons are not “deadly” in the sense readers would usually expect – they are non-venomous constrictors – and, in fact, certain pythons are often kept as pets. The snakes are certainly deadly to the animals they eat, but that is not the way Heos means this; she could have chosen a better comparison. At another point, Heos confusingly writes that “the mole cricket got its name because its forelegs look like a mole’s, which it uses to dig underground just like its namesake.” To be clearly understandable, that would better have read, “…look like a mole’s. And like a mole, this cricket uses its forelegs to dig…” But if Heos’ writing is not always of the best, the book’s topic and the way the photos show how convergent evolution works in a wide variety of creatures and circumstances are uniformly intriguing. The book is short and discusses only 10 paired examples, but those are more than engrossing enough to arouse young readers’ curiosity and inspire them to learn more about convergent evolution elsewhere.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-2038593516427959482017-03-16T08:44:00.000-04:002017-03-16T08:44:14.321-04:00(+++) MOVING ON<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change, 4<sup>th</sup> Edition.</i> By William Bridges, Ph.D., with Susan Bridges. Da Capo. $16.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Although published by Da Capo in a division called “Lifelong Books,” the new edition of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Managing Transitions</i> is actually an example of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">beyond-</i>lifelong book: William Bridges died in 2013, and this iteration of a book that originally dates to 1991 was prepared by his widow and consulting-business colleague. Although somewhat adapted for the increasingly frenetic pace of the Information Age and the companies striving to succeed and grow in it, the book retains the essential insights of earlier editions and shares their significant pluses and somewhat less prominent weaknesses.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The book’s title and subtitle are a trifle misleading, implying a certain equivalence between transition and change, when in fact Bridges’ basic argument is that the words refer to very different matters: “change” is situational and essentially external, while transition is a psychological “three-phase process that people go through as they internalize and come to terms with the details of the new situation that the change brings about.” Thus, change is comparatively fast and reasonably easy to pinpoint; transition is slow, individualized, and takes place over time, often considerable time.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Managing Transitions</i> is specifically about workplace change, although elements of the book could be applied to personal circumstances as well – even more so now that so many people carry their work with them, figuratively and sometimes literally, wherever they go and at all times. The three basic elements of transition that Bridges identifies are ending/losing/letting go, “the Neutral Zone,” and a new beginning. The first of these requires separation from old ways of thinking or behaving to which people have become attached – the parallel between business processes and psychological counseling is especially clear here – with the result that staff members can become scared, depressed, anxious, confused and otherwise unable to handle the necessary movement to whatever new circumstances have arisen. One of Bridges’ best insights has to do with the importance of respecting this phase by creating a clear demarcation between then and now – and treating the past with respect rather than dismissiveness, thus helping make up for the sense of loss that people are sure to feel when the way things used to be (which worked very well for some time for them and the company) is no longer satisfactory (which is not the same as no longer being valued).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Getting this first phase right is crucial to moving into the rather inelegantly named “Neutral Zone” (something along the lines of “Transition Zone” would have been better and clearer). Here, risk and opportunity are in balance as people vacillate between the old that is gone and the new that has not yet fully taken hold. This is the time for exploring alternative ways of doing things so that the new beginning – in which employees take on new, more-suitable-for-the-future identities and behaviors – can form and solidify. Interestingly, Bridges makes a distinction between “start” and “beginning,” arguing that starts are scheduled and result from decisions, while beginnings occur gradually and on a schedule determined by psychological adaptation rather than fixed timetables.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Bridges’ emphasis on the human side of change is what still makes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Managing Transitions</i> a strong book, and the specific tools, lists and recommendations here remain highly useful and reasonably easy for companies to implement. However, the way Bridges parses his important distinctions between “change” and “transition,” and between “start” and “beginning,” is less than fully clear and smacks somewhat of semantic nitpicking. He is also somewhat unclear about how the three transition phases work, at one point saying they must occur in order and at another point saying they can all take place in overlapping fashion, essentially at the same time. Also, the emphasis here on individual psychological transitions, a significant strength in some ways, becomes a weakness to the extent that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Managing Transitions</i> does not effectively show how major change, especially rapid change, has huge effects beyond the individual – that is, effects on employees’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">collective</i> identity and on a company’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">shared</i> values and behaviors. The imbalance between the individualized emphasis of this book and the collective emphasis of many others is salutary to the extent that other change-management books tend to overlook individual psychological impact unless it looms so large as to disrupt the whole working environment. However, companies are ultimately collections of individuals functioning in ways that are greater (one hopes) than the sum of the individual parts. Bridges’ redressing of the balance between individual and company-wide effects of change and transition is a very good thing, but his comparative neglect of the real-world nature of companies as collective entities makes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Managing Transitions</i> less readily applicable to the often-frenetic pace of workday circumstances than it might have been, whether in its original incarnation or in its latest update.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-68271454330027685842017-03-16T08:41:00.000-04:002017-03-16T08:41:03.553-04:00(++++) UNUSUAL AND UNUSUALLY ATTRACTIVE<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Haydn: Symphony No. 6, “Le matin”; Symphony No. 82, “L’ours”; Violin Concerto No. 4.</i> Aisslin Nosky, violin; Handel and Haydn Society conducted by Harry Christophers. CORO. $18.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Haydn: Symphony No. 7, “Le midi”; Symphony No. 83, “La poule”; Violin Concerto No. 1.</i> Aisslin Nosky, violin; Handel and Haydn Society conducted by Harry Christophers. CORO. $18.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Haydn: Symphony No. 8, “Le soir”; Symphony No. 84; Violin Concerto No. 3.</i> Aisslin Nosky, violin; Handel and Haydn Society conducted by Harry Christophers. CORO. $18.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>A daring and delicious presentation of Haydn, these three live-recording CDs from the Handel and Haydn Society under Harry Christophers offer something quite different from the normal approach to recordings of this music and are unalloyed successes in their handling of it. The Society was founded in 1815 to perform music that was then old (Handel) and then new (Haydn), and while it is in many ways quite different today – no, there are no 200-plus-year-old musicians – its commitment to the music of its original time is strong and sure two centuries later. But this is not just another original-instrument, historic-performance-practice group. It is one that thinks about music in context: the context of the time in which it was originally written, the context of today’s audiences, and the context of certain specific pieces within the overall musical output of a particular composer.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>It is this last context that is especially apparent and enlightening on three CORO discs that offers performances from 2013, 2015 and 2016. The works here are the three early symphonies that Haydn certainly conceived as a trilogy, but spread over three CDs instead of offered on a single one; the three surviving violin concertos that are certainly (well, almost certainly) by Haydn; and the first three of the six “Paris” symphonies. This is a rather aberrant way to present this music, but by taking chances and offering it like this, Christophers and the orchestra make an unusually trenchant case for the similarities and differences among various Haydn works, and give listeners an unusual opportunity for a clear comparison of what stayed the same during Haydn’s career and what changed, sometimes a great deal.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>This is scarcely a perfect approach, if any such exists. For example, the 30-or-so-piece orchestra is just the right size for the early symphonies and concertos, but not for the “Paris” symphonies, which were written for an orchestra much closer in size to a full-scale modern one, with 40 violins and 10 (!) double basses. But what the Handel and Haydn Society lacks in sheer heft, it more than makes up for in clarity, responsiveness, and the sheer verve and joy that permeate all these performances. This is unusually apparent in the concertos, which are not among Haydn’s most-significant works. For years, nine violin concertos were attributed to him; eventually it was determined that only four of the nine were authentic; one of those four was lost; so there are now three remaining, oddly numbered Nos. 1, 3 and 4. Of them, No. 4 remains somewhat doubtful in authorship, although it has enough Haydn flavor so that it is most likely the earliest surviving concerto rather than one created by someone else. What is delightful here is that Aisslin Nosky refuses to treat any of the concertos as throwaways or minor works, insisting that their poise, balance, elegance, and sense of fun make them worthy Haydn offerings despite their uncontested “throwback” nature as to structure. The concertos, placed between the symphonies on all these discs, thus provide some aural breathing space for listeners as well as being finely wrought pleasantries in their own right.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Symphonies Nos. 6, 7 and 8 are among the most virtuosic that Haydn ever wrote, containing a wealth of solo passages for violin, cello, double bass, bassoon, flute and horn. They were intended to impress Haydn’s then-new employer, Prince Paul Anton Esterh<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">á</span>zy, and likely also to engage the appreciation of the orchestra members, with many of whom Haydn was on friendly terms. There is a sense of camaraderie in these symphonies that stands out time and time again and that seems particularly well-suited to the approach of the Handel and Haydn Society players. The symphonies have a bit of tone painting – a sunrise here, some birdsong there, a storm elsewhere – but they are not really any sort of program music in the way that, say, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 would later be. Instead, they show Haydn shaping the form of the symphony itself, determining what to carry over from earlier times and what to introduce that is new, how to balance groups of instruments against each other, when to allow solo passages to stand out, and so forth. The Handel and Haydn Society treats them as essentially expanded, virtuosic chamber music, a stance that fits the music very well indeed.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>More than 20 years later, Haydn had fully solidified symphonic structure in essentially the form in which composers still use it today. The first three “Paris” symphonies show this quite clearly: there is a sureness to the themes and their development, a careful arrangement of keys, strikingly clear modulation from one to another, and orchestral balance that seems so right and natural that it is hard to believe it scarcely existed a few decades earlier. The subtitles of Symphonies Nos. 82 and 83 are not by Haydn – he did assign those of Nos. 6, 7 and 8 – but it is musically clear why those subtitles were thought up in the 19<sup>th</sup>century. It is also clear that Haydn was not consciously imitating a bear, a hen or anything else in these expanded, beautifully formed and often wryly, wittily amusing works of pure music. Christophers and his players present the symphonies with strength, clarity, rhythmic certainty, and exemplary sectional balance, so the music flows with a sense of inevitability that makes Haydn’s occasional, characteristic veering in unexpected directions that much more attractive. All the performances on these CDs are ones of great style, wonderfully informed historic authenticity, and enjoyment of the music, a totality of approach that renders these works, even the best-known among them, fresh, new, and thoroughly engaging.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-28692365115484740342017-03-16T08:38:00.000-04:002017-03-16T08:38:01.498-04:00(++++) CHANGES IN THE CHAMBER<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mendelssohn: Piano Trios Nos. 1 and 2.</i> Julia Fischer, violin; Jonathan Gilad, piano; Daniel M<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ü</span>ller-Schott, cello. PentaTone. $19.99 (SACD).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brahms: Piano Quintet; Schumann: String Quartet No. 1.</i> Menahem Pressler, piano; Pacifica Quartet (Simin Ganatra and Sibbi Bernhardsson, violins; Masumi Per Rostad, viola; Brandon Vamos, cello). Cedille. $16.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henri Marteau: Serenade, Op. 20; Clarinet Quintet, Op. 13; Alexander Zemlinsky: Trio, Op. 3.</i> Members of the Phoenix Ensemble. Navona. $14.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sergio Cervetti: Chamber Music.</i>Navona. $14.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alla Elana Cohen: Chamber Music.</i>Ravello. $14.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Michael G. Cunningham: String Quartets Nos. 1-7.</i> Navona. $19.99 (2 CDs).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The attraction of the conversational and intimate nature of chamber music transcends the eras in which individual pieces are written, but certainly the nature of the conversation changes over time. Mendelssohn’s two piano trios, the first from 1839 and the second from 1845, share minor-key construction (D minor and C minor, respectively), a strong piano part that at times overshadows the strings, and elegant interweaving of the three instruments. But the topics, so to speak, of the trios are quite different, and it is the balance of similarities and differences that comes through so well on a new PentaTone release featuring Julia Fischer, Jonathan Gilad and Daniel M<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ü</span>ller-Schott. There is lightness and exquisite balance throughout the recording, abetted by unusually clear SACD sound. But there is also a firm understanding of the differences between the two works. The first is filled with joy and lyricism, but has a yearning and wistful undertone that the performers bring out with particular skill: the first movement, after all, is marked <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Molto allegro agitato,</i> and the underlying agitation is apparent here. The second trio is darker, more imbued with the implications of its minor key, and features a seriousness evidenced by a quotation from Bach’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Herr Gott, Dich f</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ü</span>rchten wir alle.</i> There is greater chromaticism in this trio, a move further away from the classical models that Mendelssohn always respected and employed in variously modified form throughout his life. Fischer, Gilad and M<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ü</span>ller-Schott play the works with carefully modulated intricacy, pacing them well and successfully balancing their poise with their heartfelt emotion. As conversations go, these are unusually thoughtful ones.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Schumann dedicated his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">String Quartet No. 1</i> to Mendelssohn; it was written midway between Mendelssohn’s trios, in 1842. Its short and fleet <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scherzo</i> is especially Mendelssohnian, but the work as a whole has poise and balance that are reminiscent of much of Mendelssohn’s music, and a certain sunniness of disposition that shines through again and again, especially in the lovely and gently flowing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Adagio,</i> despite the quartet’s home key of A minor. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>A sparkling new recording by the Pacifica Quartet on Cedille plumbs all the depths of the music while keeping the conversation among the instruments flowing easily and in a spirit of superb cooperation – the ensemble work of the members of this quartet is remarkable for balance and style. Yet as good as it is, the Schumann rendition is surpassed by that of the Brahms <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Piano Quintet,</i> in which Menahem Pressler, who was 90 years old when this performance was recorded in 2014 and is now 93, joins the much younger string players in a knock-your-socks-off reading whose intensity, involvement, strength and emotional punch are nothing short of extraordinary. This is well-known music that these players seem to know, and feel, better than just about anyone else who has recorded it. How is it possible that Pressler has never recorded this piece before? His technique seems made for it, precise and emotive and exceptional both in the way it blends with the strings as appropriate and with the way it stands out from them when <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> is apt. From the wonderfully expansive first movement, its warmth and cragginess equal factors in its effect, to the lovely respite of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Andante, un poco Adagio</i> (perfectly paced here), through a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scherzo</i> that aspires to the heights of emotional conveyance, to a finale that glides with apparent effortlessness from beauty to beauty, this is an exceptional reading that every lover of this music will be delighted to hear. Pressler and the Pacifica Quartet shed new light on the quintet again and again through a superb mixture of technique and musical understanding. Anyone who thinks there is nothing more to be learned from the instrumental conversation in this captivating work deserves to spend time with this revelatory performance. This CD has all the hallmarks of an honored “legacy” recording – which, given Simin Ganatra’s departure from the quartet and Menahem Pressler’s age, it is likely to become.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Written during Brahms’ lifetime but far less frequently performed than Brahms’ chamber music, Alexander Zemlinksy’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trio, Op. 3</i> is for a complement of instruments quite different from those used by Mendelssohn in his trios: clarinet (Mark Lieb on Navona’s new recording), cello (Alice Yoo), and piano (Wayne Wang). This is a highly involving and emotionally expressive work with distinct late-Romantic flavor, as befits a piece written in 1896. The extended first movement, as long as the second and third together, grows and develops in ways that highlight the aural similarities of clarinet and cello while allowing the piano to interject brighter sounds and more directly compelling arguments – in contrast to the sweeping lyricism of the other two instruments. The second movement is a rather placid <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Andante,</i> its expressiveness fairly ordinary, but the concluding <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Allegro</i>is a gem: bright and warm, filled with interesting rhythms and unusual turns of phrase, all delivered with wonderful ensemble writing that nevertheless maintains the clarinet as first among equals. The other two works on this disc are even less-known than Zemlinsky’s. They are by Henri Marteau (1874-1934), a French violinist and composer whose <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Clarinet Quintet, Op. 13</i> (1908) has a distinctively French sound that is immediately apparent in the way the clarinet plays off against the strings at the start of the work. The performers here are Lieb, who is founder and artistic director of the Phoenix Ensemble, and Ensemble members Igor Pikayzen and Bryan Hernandez-Luch (violins), Eva Gerard (viola), and Carrie Bean Stute (cello). The performers successfully seek a sense of difference within similarity in this music, whose overall pacing is moderate in all four movements: tempo indications for the first two include the word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">moderato,</i> while those for the third and fourth include <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sostenuto.</i> The music does tend to meander rather too much from time to time, while having a disconcerting stop-and-start quality at other times. The result is a work that feels as much like a suite as a carefully shaped piece of chamber music. There is a kind of monochromaticism to the instrumental sound that can be pleasantly lulling but that drags after a while – and this is not a short work (it runs 32 minutes). The relative lack of attention that has been given to this piece is easier to understand than is the comparative neglect of Zemlinsky’s. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">total</i> absence of attention to Marteau’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Serenade, Op. 20</i> (1922) is, however, much harder to comprehend: this is the world premi<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">è</span>re recording of the piece. This really is a suite, its four movements only loosely connected and its moods shifting while remaining essentially lighthearted. It is a nonet for winds, which in itself makes the work unusual. The performers are Catherine Gregory and Andrew Rehrig (flutes), Arthur Sato and Michelle Farah (oboes), Lieb and Moran Katz (clarinets), Angela Shankar (bass clarinet), and Daniel Hane and Edward Burns (bassoons). From the clever opening <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Entrata,</i> the work moves to a sweet little <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Adagietto,</i> a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scherzino</i> that bubbles along infectiously, and a concluding <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tema con variazoni</i>that is well-crafted, clever and altogether winning. Lieb and his ensemble deserve considerable credit for essaying these less-known works and showing just how much pleasure listeners can find in unfamiliar chamber music.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Chamber works are much more recent and use many more instrumental combinations on a new Navona CD featuring Sergio Cervetti’s music and a disc from Ravello devoted to pieces by Alla Elana Cohen. These are (+++) recordings that will primarily appeal to listeners already familiar with the composers and interested in their particular way of handling their respective ethnic heritages. Cervetti’s roots lie in France, Italy and South America, and the six pieces hear draw on all of them. Two are for solo piano and are performed by the composer: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Some Realms I Owned</i> (2010) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I Can’t Breathe</i> (2014, for piano and percussion). The first of these is largely tonal, declamatory and rather repetitive; the second is dissonant, jazz-inflected and quite short (just over two minutes). There is also an interesting work here for solo harpsichord: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ofrenda Para Guyunusa</i> (2011), played by María Teresa Chenlo. One of the remaining works is a clarinet quintet that barely sounds as if it uses the same instruments employed by Zemlinsky. It is called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">And the Huddled Masses</i> (2015), and its complexities of sound and expression – typical for much contemporary music – are such that it requires a conductor (Enrique Pérez Mesa) in addition to Alden Ortuño Cabezas (clarinet), Leonardo Pérez Baster and Luis Alberto Mariño Fernández (violins), Yamed Aguillón Santa Cruz (viola), and Lester Monier Serrano (cello). Unceasingly dissonant and multithematic, it is more a collection of sounds that a structurally unified piece of music – although the multiplicity of elements appears to be included by design. The dissonance in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sunset at Noon</i> (1995), for violin (Vit Muzik) and viola (Dominika Mužíková) fits the material better: this is a four-movement work in which each movement is marked “In Memoriam” of a different individual. The first, second and fourth movements of this 18-minute piece are largely what one would expect for a memorial work: slow and somber. The third, however, is a pleasant surprise, upbeat and propulsive, with attractive <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pizzicato</i>elements, presumably reflective of the personality of the person in whose memory Cervetti created the music. The final movement is explicitly labeled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hymn,</i> and sounds like one; but the very last piece on the disc is even more explicitly hymnlike, being an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a cappella</i> setting of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lux Lucet in Tenebris</i> that dates to 2002 and has a distinctly Baroque sound as performed by the Kuhn Choir conducted by Marek Vorlicek. Listeners familiar with Cervetti’s compositional versatility will get a considerable dose of it here.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The heritage on which Cohen draws is a Jewish one, and her approach to composition is almost self-consciously inventive, as if she tries through instrumental combinations and even through works’ titles to communicate just how creative the material is. In fact, all the works here – each of them consisting of multiple short movements – contain interesting and even clever elements, but after a while the cleverness seems somewhat forced and the music comes across as if Cohen is trying a little too hard. For example, there is a vocal work on this CD, but the difference between Cohen’s approach and Cervetti’s is evident from the very first notes. Cohen’s piece is called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Inscriptions on a Bamboo Screen” series 4 for soprano and viola in 6 movements (with addition of cup gong in the last movement),</i> and it is performed by the composer (lyrics and cup gong), Rachel Schmiege (soprano), and Alexander Vavilov (viola). The most interesting element here is not the vocals but the combination of cup gong with plucked viola in the final movement. There are three pieces here in a series that Cohen calls “Inner Temple.” They are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Inner Temple” volume 2 series 1 “Brachot” (“Blessings”) for string quartet in 3 movements,</i> played by Marissa Licata and Melissa Bull (violins), Alexander Vavilov (viola), and <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>Sebastian Baverstam (cello); <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Inner Temple” volume 1 series 12 “Brachot” for Chamber Orchestra in 3 movements,</i> whose 10 performers are Bianca Garcia (flute), Izumi Sakamoto (oboe), Todd Brunel (clarinet), Timur Rubinshteyn (timpani), Aaron Trant (vibraphone), Matt Sharrock (marimba), plus the quartet of Licata, Bull, Vavilov and Baverstam; and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Inner Temple” volume 1 series 11 “Shabbat Nigunim” in 4 movements,</i> this one featuring 11 performers – the same 10 as in the previously mentioned work plus the composer on piano. The instrumental combinations are a big part of what Cohen employs as communicative devices: the complex intertwining of individual instruments and instrumental groups comes across as enough purpose for these works to have – the specific matters they communicate are secondary to the way they communicate them. This is a very different approach to chamber music from that of earlier composers or, indeed, many other contemporary ones. This is clear throughout the CD, but perhaps particularly so in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trio for Violin, Cello and Piano “Red Lilies of Bells, Golden Lilies of Bells, White Lilies of Bells” in 3 movements,</i> with Licata on violin, Baverstam on cello, and the composer on piano and providing the recitation of a Russian poem – twice, once in the original language and then, after a central instrumental section, in English. The two remaining works on this CD are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Triptych for Chamber Orchestra “Homage to Jean Cocteau and Jean Marais,”</i> with some performers heard elsewhere and some different ones: Garcia, Sakamoto, Brunel, Rubinshteyn, William Manley on vibraphone, Sharrock, Licata and Ethan Wood on violins, Vavilov, Baverstam, and the composer on piano; and a work that comes as something of a relief from the complexly planned multi-instrument ones, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Hoffmanniana” series 3 for solo Cello in 4 movements,</i> nicely played by Baverstam. The musicians certainly give their all to this music, and Cohen herself handles her piano parts and other roles well, but the CD comes across as strictly a limited-interest item for audiences that already know what Cohen seeks to communicate and how, and want to hear a considerable amount of it at one time.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The instrumentation is much more traditional and straightforward in the seven quartets of Michael G. Cunningham heard on a new two-disc release from Navona. The quartets were written over nearly half a century, from 1959 to 2005, and show very definite changes in Cunningham’s compositional style. They also show ways in which his style did <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not</i> change, such as fondness for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">glissandi</i> and other special sounds. The quartets are given in the order in which they were composed, a wise decision that allows fans of Cunningham’s music – clearly the target of this (+++) release, which offers too much material from this single composer to be appealing to listeners not already interested in his output – an easy way to trace his compositional thinking over quite a long time. All the performers handle the music with skill: the Sirius Quartet (Nos. 1 and 2), Moravian Quartet (Nos. 3 and 7), Pedroia Quartet (no. 4), New England String Quartet (No. 5), and Millennium Quartet (No. 6). Except for the first quartet (1959), all these works have titles: No. 2 (1967) is “Three Satires,” No. 3 (1975) is “Partitions,” No. 4 (1985) is “Interlacings,” No. 5 (1988) is “Aggregates,” No. 6 (2001) is “Digital Isorhythm,” and No. 7 (2005) is “Back Home.” The titles are in some cases reasonably good guides to Cunningham’s intentions, but not always. Individual quartets and, indeed, individual movements contain distinctive elements that make them stand out: the lyrical second movement of No. 1; the unison proclamation that opens No. 2; the play of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">glissandi</i> against <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pizzicati</i>in No. 3; the second, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scherzo</i>movement of No. 4, which sounds a bit like Mendelssohn run through a blender; the juxtaposition of trill and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">glissandi</i>in the first movement of No. 5; the odd combination of march-like certainty and drifting in the finale of No. 6; the surprisingly long lines of the first movement, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Con Carita,</i> of No. 7; and many more. Listeners who enjoy explorations of stretched tonality, outright dissonance, rhythmic strength (with frequent rhythmic variation), and a skilled and thoroughly modern approach to writing for string quartet will find the musical conversations embodied by these works to be involving ones with clear contemporaneity in evidence throughout.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-69370122347772600042017-03-16T08:35:00.000-04:002017-03-16T08:35:12.648-04:00(++++) PIANO SOLOS PLUS<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scriabin: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1-10; Vers La Flamme.</i> Peter Donohoe, piano. SOMM. $29.99 (2 CDs).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vaughan Williams: Piano Music (complete).</i> Mark Bebbington and Rebecca Omordia, piano. SOMM. $18.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">CME Presents, Volume 2: Paul Reale—Music for Two Pianos and Piano Four Hands.</i> Carl Patrick Bolleia, Min Kwon, Patricio Molina, Enriqueta Somarriba and Jiayan Sun, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ruth Lomon: Piano Music.</i>Eileen Hutchins and Ruth Lomon, piano. Navona. $14.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>There are many reasons for the absence of a significant number of cycles of the complete piano sonatas of Scriabin – a compendium including <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vers La Flamme,</i> which was intended as the 11<sup>th</sup> sonata but published (for financial reasons) before it had quite been molded into that form. (The numbered sequence omits two very early works, a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sonata-Fantaisie</i> from 1886 and a Sonata from 1889.) It is not just the formidable difficulty of the sonatas that holds pianists back – after all, virtuoso players do not hesitate to confront Beethoven’s late sonatas or those of Liszt, and even Alkan’s astonishingly complex pieces have their champions. Numerous pianists play a Scriabin sonata here or there, not only as a display piece but also to show the highly distinctive nature of Scriabin’s treatment of the piano and of music in general. But a complete cycle requires more than virtuosity and needs a greater analytical understanding and emotional commitment than most pianists are willing, or perhaps able, to provide. A Scriabin cycle is really three separate cycles. The first four numbered sonatas, the only ones in multiple movements, are essentially Romantic in style, although the fourth is so compressed that it looks ahead to the later single-movement works. Nos. 5, 6 and 7 (the seventh actually written before the sixth) are increasingly wild and bizarre, from the extraordinary opening of No. 5 to the passages marked “surge of terror” in No. 6 and the calls in No. 7 for playing with “heavenly voluptuousness” and “dark majesty” (Scriabin titled No. 7 “White Mass”). The last three numbered sonatas are a kind of set, all dating to 1912-13 and exploring increasingly rarefied and at times nearly unintelligible experiences, as in Scriabin’s description of No. 10 as “a sonata of insects. Insects are born from the sun, they are the kisses of the sun.” And finally, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vers La Flamme</i> carries performer and listeners toward the sun, or at any rate the flame (as its title says), intending to show in music Scriabin’s conviction that Earth would eventually be destroyed by an increasing concentration of heat – the whole work is essentially an extended crescendo. Between his synesthesia and his peculiar philosophical musings, Scriabin is at best a very difficult composer to approach, whether one is a performer or a listener. Yet his sonatas represent the best way to try to understand him and his worldview: they change as he changed in thought patterns and orientation. An expert performer must be able to go on this philosophical/literary/musical journey with the composer and must guide the audience through it as well: playing the notes, however accurately, is not enough (some otherwise excellent performances of the sonatas fall down in this exact regard). The prodigious technical demands of the music are in a sense its least difficult elements: the underlying thought patterns that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">produced</i> the music are in some ways more difficult to fathom and interpret. What all this means is that Peter Donohoe’s cycle on SOMM is an exceptional accomplishment. Donohoe is a first-rate pianist by any measure, and he is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">thoughtful</i>pianist as well: these sonatas are not just note sequences to him – they are communications that happen to occur through music but that overlap other forms, such as visual art, color and literature (and if that sounds a bit like synesthesia, the resemblance is purely intentional). Individual sonatas stand well on their own here, including (for example) the clear Russianism of the early ones; but the sonatas also make sense when grouped (for example, No. 7 and No. 9, the latter not labeled “Black Mass” by Scriabin but by someone else, and nevertheless providing a fitting counterpoint to the former). And the works communicate, above all, as a total sequence, taking listeners on a fascinating and byway-studded journey from 1892 (No. 1) to 1914 (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vers La Flamme</i>) – a journey into Scriabin’s mind and mysticism, one that is exceptionally difficult to complete in a single sitting: the sonatas last almost two-and-a-half hours, and their length is scarcely the biggest barrier to immediate comprehension. Donohoe’s Scriabin cycle bears hearing again and again, in and out of sequence. It repays listeners with an extraordinarily involving and remarkably complex musical experience.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>There is nothing this intense in the piano music of Vaughan Williams, offered in its entirety on another SOMM recording – this one featuring Mark Bebbington as solo pianist and Bebbington plus Rebecca Omordia for the duets and two-piano works. Although some of this music was written while Scriabin was alive, it inhabits an entirely different sonic universe, and a far more recognizable one. Much of it is pastoral in character, and there is little here that bears comparison with Vaughan Williams’ work in symphonies, operas, choral music, folk songs – even film music. On the other hand, there is some wonderful Impressionism here in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lake in the Mountains</i> and some genuine stature and creativity in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Introduction and Fugue for Two Pianos,</i> which, remarkably, has never been recorded before. There are two solo-piano treatments of religious material, Bach’s BWV 649 (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ach bleib’ bei uns, Herr Jesu Christ</i>) and Orlando Gibbons’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Song 13.</i> And there is a surprisingly effective six-movement set of miniatures (with some distinctly Baroque referents) called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Little Piano Book,</i> along with a pleasant but more-surface-level <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Suite of Six Short Pieces.</i> And then there are two items labeled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fantasia</i>that will be familiar in other guises to a great many listeners: a two-piano version of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis</i> and a piano-duet approach to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fantasia on Greensleeves.</i> Both of these are curiosities that add very little to the better-known versions of the music, but other pieces here give fascinating glimpses of a side of Vaughan Williams that the composer himself explored to only a limited degree. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lake in the Mountains,</i> the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Introduction and Fugue,</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Little Piano Book</i>are all interesting and at times surprising works. Vaughan Williams actually wrote rather frequently for piano, but not for piano as a solo (or duet) instrument: the piano accompaniments of his songs, for example, show a sure-handed understanding of the instrument’s capabilities. This very-well-played survey of all his music that is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">only</i> for piano (or pianos) nevertheless provides insight into the composer that it would be difficult to get in any other way. It will be especially intriguing for people who think they already know the full scope of Vaughan Williams’ music interests – it will be a pleasant surprise to realize they do not.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>There is some very different music for two pianos and piano four hands in the second <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">CME Presents</i> release from MSR Classics. CME is the Center for Musical Excellence, which helps gifted young pianists obtain advanced musical education in the United States. That is a laudable goal, and there are five of these skilled pianists heard on the disc, in various combinations. Unlike the first CD in this series, which offered a large series of brief encores by well-known and less-known composers, this recording is devoted entirely to the music of Paul Reale (born 1943). The difference is not quite as extreme as it might at first appear, since there are 15 tracks making up the eight pieces here, and many of them are quite short (including two that last less than a minute apiece). Furthermore, although nothing here is as well-known as the works by Brahms, Barber, Rachmaninoff, Milhaud and Piazzolla on the earlier CME disc – or the encores of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Over the Rainbow</i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Moon River</i> thrown in at that CD’s end – everything is tonal and easy to listen to without being in any way “easy listening.” All these works are world premi<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">è</span>re recordings, and most of them have aptly descriptive titles whose touches of humor also appear in the music itself: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Drowsey Maggie; Serge P</i> (think Prokofiev, specifically but not slavishly his Op. 56: this is in three movements plus two Entr’actes);<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> World of a Bengal Child; CPE</i> (think Bach); <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chorales II; Minuet in G Whiz</i>(an unusually clever title); <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Little Screamers;</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watchman, Tell Us of the Night Fanfare</i> (think Ives: this is a two-and-half-minute work for two pianos, eight hands). Friends and family of the five pianists, and those already familiar with Reale’s music, are the most likely audience for this CD, along with those knowledgeable about CME and anxious to further its mission. Because of its somewhat limited reach, and because there is little that is genuinely distinctive (or could be expected to be distinctive in this repertoire) among the pianists, this is a (+++) CD. But it is one with a great deal to recommend it – including some particularly well-made music that is designed to please contemporary audiences without needing to resort to stilted and stale “modern” compositional techniques.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Those techniques are, however, part and parcel of the piano music of Ruth Lomon as heard on a (+++) CD from Navona. Approaches that Reale assiduously avoids, Lomon wholeheartedly embraces, for instance by using prepared piano for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Five Ceremonial Masks,</i> whose five movements are intended to represent five Navajo masks and are presented here twice – once played by Eileen Hutchins and once, with equal style but somewhat different emphasis, by the composer herself. Hutchins is the pianist for the remainder of these works, one of which, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Esquisses,</i> has some (probably unintentional) sense of throwback to Scriabin in its attempts to evoke impressions and colors through unusual compositional touches – notably in the first movement, which tries to imitate European tower bells and express the impression left after hearing them. Also here is a self-referential work called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sunflower Variations,</i> in which Lomon offers a theme and 10 variations – the theme being from a song for contralto and viola that Lomon previously wrote. Actually, the contralto-plus-viola sound might be more intriguingly evocative than some of the piano sounds on this recording. Certainly Lomon has a sure sense of string writing: the one piece here that is not for solo piano, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shadowing Piano Quartet,</i> shows that. This is performed by Hutchins with Katherine Winterstein (violin), Scott Woolweaver (viola), and Patrick Owen (cello). The string writing is skillful, and the three movements – all designed to evoke, one way or another, the notion of moving about so quietly and carefully that one can see without being seen, like wolves or (as the second movement has it) “the shyest angel” – are audibly related but sufficiently different to make the piece as a whole an involving one. Lomon’s music that takes a straightforward approach to instrumental capabilities, perhaps stretching them but not actively working against their usual timbre and style, comes across here as more effective than the music that requires artifice and artificiality to draw attention to its subject matter.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-44182205004379609402017-03-09T08:54:00.000-05:002017-03-09T08:54:08.270-05:00(++++) PERILS GRAND AND GLORIOUS<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kid Beowulf #2: The Song of Roland.</i> By Alexis E. Fajardo. Andrews McMeel. $12.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Will Wilder #2: The Lost Staff of Wonders.</i> By Raymond Arroyo. Crown. $16.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Alexis Fajardo’s second foray into the realm of the old-English epic poem, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beowulf,</i> is no longer about the old-English epic poem, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beowulf,</i> and it scarcely matters. Fajardo very loosely based his first graphic novel in this series, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Blood-Bound Oath,</i> on the original poem, reinterpreting the whole central theme of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beowulf</i> in significant ways so the book could be aimed directly at 21<sup>st</sup>-century preteens and young teenagers. The whole notion could easily have been both silly and depressing, but Fajardo handled it so well that it turned out to be merely silly – and in some respects not silly at all. Fajardo made Beowulf and Grendel into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">brothers,</i>and yes, that was the silly part, but Fajardo twisted the legend enough to make this foundational premise barely plausible and, more importantly, to turn the first book in the series into a journey both of geography and of self-knowledge. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Song of Roland,</i>Fajardo turns his sights to – well, to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Song of Roland,</i> a medieval epic as important to the French as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beowulf</i> is to the British (it is probably worth pointing out that the French conquered England some years after <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beowulf</i> was written). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Song of Roland</i> is a tale of heroism, battle, tragedy and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hubris,</i>lightened, rearranged and considerably altered (to the point of including roller coasters) in Fajardo’s retelling. Scholars of medieval literature will cringe, and are entitled to, but what Fajardo does so well here is to make these very old stories <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">interesting</i>and, believe it or not, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">relevant,</i> by emphasizing characters’ relationships and interrelationships and by having them use modern slang and have adventures as likely to be comic as serious. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Song of Roland,</i> Fajardo-style, is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">fun,</i> something that can scarcely be said of the original. The tie-in to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beowulf</i>and to the previous graphic novel comes because Beowulf and Grendel have been banished – that happened at the end of the first book – and have headed to Francia to find their uncle Ogier. Francia is a mess, and its greatest hero – that would be Roland – isn’t helping matters much until Beowulf and Grendel, taking a break from their personal squabbles, help get Roland better focused so he can lead the drive to defeat the Saracens and their leader, Marsilion. There are a couple of almost-meaningful female characters here – scarcely the case in the old sagas of heroism, but welcome in a 21<sup>st</sup>-century graphic novel – and also here are an elephant that turns into a weapon when a specific word is spoken, and a giant, and various other trappings of myth that make Fajardo’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Song of Roland</i> complex, intricate and fast-paced.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>No, it is not accurate, not at all, but Fajardo <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">knows</i>it is not, and that counts for a great deal. Like the previous book, this one contains some fascinating material after the story ends, including notes on Fajardo’s tributes to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Peanuts,</i> the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bone</i> saga, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hunchback of Notre Dame,</i> plus an excellent list of sources that Fajardo used for his work and that young readers who become intrigued with Beowulf, Grendel, Roland and the other characters can look up on their own. Also as in the first book, the two colorists are significant contributors to the visual impact of the storytelling: Jose Mari Flores handles the main story, and does it in suitable tones that complement the narrative well – while the prologue, a simplified verse retelling of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Song of Roland, </i>is colored by Brian Kolm with an entirely different palette, a striking one that brings those pages to life with exceptional skill. In fact, it is just possible that Fajardo’s skillful storytelling and adept rewriting of old tales and legends will succeed in getting modern, screen-focused, instant-gratification-obsessed preteens and teens interested in old stories that unfold at a fair more leisurely pace but that really do offer themes of war and peace, friends and enemies, good and evil, that are just as relevant today as they were – admittedly in very different form – well over a thousand years ago.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Raymond Arroyo dips back even further in time for his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Will Wilder</i>series – all the way to Biblical days. And he gives <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lost Staff of Wonders,</i> which follows the series’ first book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Relic of Perilous Falls,</i> more spiritual resonance than is usually found in adventures for preteens. Beyond that, though, this is pretty much the usual fantasy mixture of evil elements, dire dangers, fantastic family secrets, scenes of fear and worry and (almost) doom, plus the standard mentors and companions and nemeses. Headstrong 12-year-old Will Wilder (“headstrong” also describes Fajardo’s Beowulf, Grendel and innumerable other 12-year-old protagonists) in the first book caused an accident that seriously injured his brother; in this second book, he manages, through carelessness, to allow the Staff of Moses to be stolen from his family’s museum of wondrous and mystical objects. Will falls under immediate suspicion as being the thief, which of course readers know he is not, but he has to locate and defeat the actual thief before all the plagues of Egypt, called down by the staff, descend on the town of Perilous Falls. Indeed, some arrive rather soon: a river running with blood, frogs with teeth, and a plague of gnats (rather than locusts). Those are more than enough for Will and the town, thank you. Will is not alone or without help in his difficulties: his sister is a healer and his brother can glow brightly enough to chase demons away – a useful ability in light of the fact that the family museum is also the headquarters of the demon-fighting Brethren. Also available to assist is Aunt Lucille, as attractively offbeat a character here as in the first book. But the hunt for the missing staff is only part of what Will must deal with: his friend, Max Meriwether, has been dreaming of a rising evil that will target Will. Could this be connected with the theft of the staff? Well, of course – the book may have some intricacies of plot and a large number of characters, but Will remains dead center (an apt way to look at him in this case), and all the occurrences eventually trace back to or revolve around him. Some of the supernatural elements here are unusual, and the mystery is well-handled despite elements of obviousness (a new faith healer in town – hmm, what could that mean?). The unsurprising elements of the book make it a (+++) novel: in particular, there is nothing at all unusual in a protagonist who is good and loyal and right-thinking despite being impatient, careless and undisciplined.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Still, the pacing and writing here are good, and readers who enjoyed the first book in the series, much of which was clearly designed to set up later stories, will be glad to see the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">in medias res</i> nature of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lost Staff of Wonders</i> and to be carried along on a fast-paced, unbelievable but frequently thrilling adventure.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-19202783061567128862017-03-09T08:51:00.000-05:002017-03-09T08:51:17.775-05:00(++++) KLUTZ KLEVERNESS KONTINUES<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Make Your Own Soap.</i> By the editors of Klutz. Klutz. $21.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Circuit Clay: The Easiest Way to Learn about Electricity.</i> By the editors of Klutz. Klutz. $21.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Klutz, now the “books-plus” crafts-project division of Scholastic, has specialized in good, clean fun for many years, ever since it was a scrappy little independent West Coast company. So it was probably inevitable that there would eventually be a crafts-project offering such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Make Your Own Soap.</i>After all, what could be better and cleaner fun than this? Intended for kids as young as six – but fun, really, for all ages, and that includes adult ages – this kit contains, as always with Klutz, both the instructions for doing the projects and essentially all the items needed to complete them. In this case, that means there is a box bound to the back of the instruction book and containing soap base, a soap mold with six shapes, a pleasant coconut-papaya scent, color tablets, cosmetic-grade glitter, even stickers to dress up the soap bars – and a gift box and ribbon to use in giving them away. But why would you do that? After all the work, kids and parents alike will probably want to keep and use the soaps themselves. Well, all right, not “all the work” – as usual with Klutz offerings, the projects are not especially difficult. But doing them is really satisfying. Parents should know that the soap projects are best done by child and adult together, or at least with the adult hovering nearby, since soap making requires heat (microwave or stovetop heat in this case), rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle (not included), and a cutting board and knife. In fact, the instructions specifically tell kids to find “a responsible adult assistant” for soap-making. Klutz provides its usual bit of science along with its how-to-do-it narrative – noting, for example: “Bubbles are just pockets of air wrapped in layers of water and soap. The soap makes a kind of water sandwich (water is the filling and the soap is the bread).” And while kids, ahem, digest that, they can proceed to learn how to make seven slightly larger soaps or 10 smaller ones, in multiple colors and with great shapes such as a star, an emoji cat, and a cupcake. Along the way, the instruction book explains how soap works and why you need it rather than plain water to get clean (soap “is like the chemistry cool kid who hangs out with everyone, to mingle and wash away the dirt”). There are a few surprising and delightful extras here, too, such as “soap-powered experiments” using two included paper boats in a race, with whatever liquid soap you may have at home as fuel. An unusually involving project, this soap-making one has only one flaw: kids are likely to enjoy it so much that they will want to make even more Klutz-style soaps after they use up the ingredients here. Hmm. Could that be a Klutzian sales strategy?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Of course, parents can always distract their soap-loving kids, at least those ages eight and up, with a different Klutz offering – for instance, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Circuit Clay.</i> This is, in its way, every bit as clever as the soap-making kit. Electricity and water do not mix, of course; and interestingly, the packaging of this “books-plus” offering is opposite that of the soap project, with the electricity instruction book bound to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">back</i>of the box of needed items rather than the front. What is inside the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Circuit Clay</i> box is some really amazing stuff that makes this one of the cleverest Klutz offering of recent times. Instead of wires, this electricity-use creation uses <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">conductive clay,</i> which is pretty much what it sounds like: clay that conducts electricity. Four colors of this special clay are provided, along with white insulating clay and, as a source of electricity, a battery pack powered by four AA batteries (which Klutz does not include). With what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> included, plus some household items – dental floss to cut the clay, toothpick and pencil to shape it, plastic bags or containers to store it, and so on – kids can make clay sculptures that they can decorate with paper punch-outs (included) and illuminate with LEDs (20 included, in five colors). As always, there is science as well as fun here, and in fact <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Circuit Clay</i> is pretty much <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">all</i> science, packaged enjoyably so learning becomes fun: “A circuit is a loop that allows an electric current to flow through it. …So what is electricity? When a bunch of electrons start moving in the same direction, they create an electric current.” There is a wonderful hands-on demonstration here of what a short circuit is and how it works, and there is a well-written troubleshooting checklist to go through if the suggested projects do not go as planned. The projects themselves include a few spacey ones (rocket, UFO, shooting star, astronaut) and some down-to-earth ideas (flower, jack-o’-lantern). Kids can even make a cupcake with flashing light on top or a snowman with illuminated eyes. As in many Klutz crafts-project offerings, there are somewhat-more-complex things to make later in the instruction book, including a window showing a nighttime scene with twinkling stars; a police car topped with red and blue lights; and, at the very end, a dragon with glowing eyes and tongue. Unlike the elements of the Klutz soap projects, which will be used up by the time kids finish the instruction book, the ones in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Circuit Clay</i> will have some remnants that can be stored – and the clay can be reworked to do new things, allowing kids to have their own flights of fancy after completing the specific ideas suggested in the instruction guide. In both soap-making and circuit design, though, what is klear is the kontinuing kleverness of Klutz.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-87863680870450110672017-03-09T08:48:00.000-05:002017-03-09T08:48:10.912-05:00(++++) DEATH, DOOM, AND OTHER DELIGHTS<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wrong Dead Guy.</i> By Richard Kadrey. Harper Voyager. $24.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>There is only one Richard Kadrey, and all things considered, that is probably a good thing. It could destabilize the universe if there were more than one creator of absurdly outré, laugh-out-loud magical ridiculousness that is decidedly not for kids and probably not for most adults who would pass as normal if the light is right. Actually, Kadrey is doing a pretty good job of destabilizing it on his own. It’s not exactly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">our</i> universe, but it’s close enough so we should be grateful that…well, grateful that it’s not exactly our universe.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Kadrey writes picaresque “caper” novels with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">noir</i> overflowing, a scriptwriter’s sense of pacing through dialogue, and perfectly poised descriptive passages that alone are worth the price of admission: “If money wanted to take a few weeks off, kick back, and catch some rays, it would do it in Carrwood, a pretty little private community in the verdant hills north of Los Angeles. Carrwood had more security than the Kremlin. Invading rats and squirrels found inside the gates weren’t poisoned, but trapped, packaged, and shipped to a small, but well-staffed rodent retirement community outside Palms [sic] Springs. To say that Carrwood was affluent was like saying the sinking of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Titanic</i> was a bit of a whoopsie.” Occasional typos aside, Kadrey parades a full panoply of carefully crafted whoopsies in his magic-infused thriller-plus-cops-and-robbers adventures that are sufficiently indescribable so that it would help to have a few new adjectives available. In their absence, “Kadreyish” probably covers them all.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Consider: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wrong Dead Guy</i> is Kadrey’s second book about a magic thief called Coop. No, he is not magic – in fact, he is immune to magic, which is kind of a superpower, since what he does is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">steal</i> magic, or magical objects. This is good, except when his immunity does not quite work or except when he has to use it in the service of the government Department of Peculiar Science, where he is employed because if he refuses to be employed there, he will be sent back to prison, which he was sent to in the first place because of the machinations of Morty, with whom he is now working. Oh, Coop also has a girlfriend, Giselle, who broke up with him, broke his heart, and now works with him at DOPS, and they are back together, and everything is sweetness and light, which in a Kadrey book means you just know everything is going to hop a handbasket and head straight to you-know-where.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Where it all goes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wrong Dead Guy</i> is to a rundown museum that happens to possess the mummy of an Egyptian wizard named Harkhuf; DOPS wants the mummy for its own purposes. Coop and team head off to steal it in “a police van courtesy of the DOPS. Not that it was a real LAPD vehicle. It was Coop’s understanding that the DOPS had 3-D printed it. It was also his understanding that they could also print human organs, five-lens spider-friendly glasses, robot parts, and – for office picnics – geometrically perfect s’mores.” The heist goes fine, but unfortunately Harkhuf is not quite dead and has interests of his own, chief among them the revival of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">his</i> girlfriend, Shemetet, so the two of them can take over the world and all like that there. Coop, like Kadrey’s better-known protagonist Sandman Slim, has a tendency to be tasked with world-saving and a tendency to object to being so tasked. In order to accomplish the task this time, he also has to deal with a dead but revived professor who is now half cat and half octopus and who is on his side, and a dead but revived nasty piece of work named Nelson who works at DOPS as a mook (essentially a zombie with a day job) and has plans of his own, which, when they go awry, do so in rather sinister ways: “It wasn’t so much having to spend the rest of the night cleaning bits of Albertson out of the shredder and light fixtures that bothered him; it was that now he couldn’t murder anyone himself. The manual was very clear on that point. No department below field operations was allowed more than one shredding, decapitation, immolation, or consumption of an employee by a hostile entity – human, animal, or cyborg – per quarter.”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Throw in some wealthy wacko wannabe environmentalists, some DOPS Auditors who have a tendency to get inside the brains of people they examine, settings such as the used-car dealership to end all used-car dealerships and the Hollywood Golden Bungalows (“a hangout for the endless waves of starry-eyed musicians that washed up on L.A.’s shores like so many dead whales”), a “Hang in there, baby” motivational Post-it featuring a drawing of “a dragon in an evening gown eating what appeared to be a washing machine full of bowling shoes,” and a hyper-conservative TV news operation that “seems to have been created by Lex Luthor for Mad Max villains and Vlad the Impalers who want to return to the gold standard, replace preschool with toddler coal mining, and balance the budget through Bigfoot hunts and free-market organ harvesting,” and you have a small idea of what Kadrey is getting at.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Oh, and don’t forget the transformed elephant, or rather what is transformed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">into</i> the elephant. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;</span>“Why can’t I do business with normal thieves who want to steal things and not have everybody know who did it?” laments Coop at one point, then adding, “Of course, normal thieves don’t rush across town so they can stake out a trust-fund hit squad with their stolen elephant.” And this is what passes for introspection in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wrong Dead Guy.</i> But really, none of this is Coop’s fault – he just happened to wander into a Richard Kadrey novel, or rather two of them if you include <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Everything Box,</i> in which Coop first appeared and first saved the world. You will be happy to hear that he saves it again this time. Apparently. And apparently this is a good thing, although it is a touch sad to realize that with Harkhuf apparently being really dead and gone this time, there will be no one else available to say, “I promise you eternal torment if you do not deliver to me a chocolate brownie.” At least until Kadrey’s next book.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-71642529048719825592017-03-09T08:45:00.000-05:002017-03-09T08:45:01.222-05:00(+++) CHOOSE YOUR SUBTITLE<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Toddler Brain.</i> By Laura A. Jana, M.D. Da Capo. $27.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Parents who bemoan the fact that children do not come with instruction manuals have not spent enough time at bookstores or book-selling Web sites. There are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tons</i> of instruction manuals out there, and while it is true that a baby does not come prepackaged with any particular one, there are so many choices that parents can easily spend all their nonexistent spare time while raising an infant reading about all the ways they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">should</i> be raising an infant but probably aren’t. The objective appears to be to make parents, who likely feel inadequate in many ways already, feel even worse.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Well, to be fair, maybe that is not the objective, but it can certainly be the result. There is just so much out there purporting to know exactly what should be done to raise the best, smartest, happiest, most well-adjusted, best-prepared-for-the-future child that parents may be forgiven for wondering how their own parents – much less grandparents – managed to get through their child-rearing years without all the perfectly reasonable and undoubtedly accurate guidebooks available today.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>While wondering, they can read a book such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Toddler Brain</i>– as soon as they get past a title that seems determined to make them feel even more deficient than usual. Laura Jana’s work appears to have both a subtitle and a surtitle, or subtitle and sub-subtitle, or just an attempt to cram as much information onto the title page as possible so parents can be overwhelmed even before starting the text. One subtitle reads, “Nurture the Skills Today That Will Shape Your Child’s Tomorrow,” thereby warning parents that whatever they are currently doing is probably not nurturing the right skills or not nurturing them in the proper way. The other subtitle reads, “The Surprising Science Behind Your Child’s Development from Birth to Age 5,” thereby noting that everything in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Toddler Brain</i> is based on science and therefore to be implicitly trusted, and if you don’t get with the program <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">right now,</i> you risk having a child who is woefully unprepared for the world by his or her fifth birthday.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>At the foundation of Jana’s book is in fact the notion of what sort of world our children need to prepare for, and in this respect the book is both insightful and timely. Jana, a pediatrician, believes that old-fashioned linear thinking, while appropriate to the now-ending Industrial Age, is inadequate for the increasingly interconnected Information Age and for whatever age will follow it. Perhaps two-thirds of today’s toddlers, she asserts, will grow up to do jobs that do not even exist today – an intriguing statistic if by no means an unexceptionable one. Preparing today’s young ones for the latest iteration of the coming brave new world requires parents to look at and practice parenting in a completely different way from the way their parents and their parents’ parents looked at and practiced child-rearing – as if today’s parents did not feel time-pressed and hamstrung enough.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Jana has a somewhat overly cute way of presenting her recommendations. Instead of focusing on IQ, she argues, parents need to focus on QI, which is not only IQ backwards but also, as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">qi</i>, means “life force” or “energy flow” in Chinese. Jana pronounces the letters as “key” to indicate that they refer to key elements of raising a child today, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">qi</i> is actually pronounced “chee,” although it is indeed a key element in traditional Chinese medicine. In Jana’s methodology, parents seeking to give their children QI skills need to focus on seven areas: Me, We, Why, Will, Wiggle, Wobble, and What If. There is no acronym for these, but there is plenty of description. In simplest form, Me involves self-awareness and self-control; We is people skills for an increasingly team-oriented world; Why refers to questioning and curiosity; Will is self-motivation; Wiggle has to do with a kind of physical and intellectual restlessness that makes action possible; Wobble is a form of resilience that makes it easier to learn from failure; and What If involves imagining ways in which the world could change and how an individual can be part of that change. Even in this very compressed form, these QI skills seem like a tall order, and indeed they are – with today’s parents having no readily available place to turn to learn and implement them except, ahem, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Toddler Brain.</i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Jana’s focus on getting infants ready for eventual entry into the business world, and specifically into a fast-changing one that may make demands of them that it never made of earlier generations, is an unusual and welcome one in parenting books. She is clearly smart and thoughtful, and her ideas are by and large intriguing ones, if somewhat curiously or even tortuously expressed. However, her expectation that time-pressed, financially insecure, sleep-deprived new parents will be able to absorb an entirely new way of thinking about raising infants and then take steps to implement the method is wholly unreasonable. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Toddler Brain</i> is actually a good book for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pre-</i>parenting: people considering having a child in the next several years and looking for a guide to what to do after the child is born will find many fascinating concepts here – although even they may be hard-pressed to implement Jana’s ideas after they actually become parents. “Reading books to young children can be a way to promote just about all the QI Skills,” notes Jana at one point. Reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">her</i>book is the way to learn about those skills and get basic guidance on how to help your children or children-to-come gain them. But any way you look at it, reading and absorbing and adjusting and simply coping with everyday life will take a great deal of time that parents – especially those with children under age five – are very unlikely to possess in abundance. The unfortunate result is that people who already may feel overwhelmed by the unending demands of child-rearing may feel even more so as they absorb Jana’s views on the best way to shape a toddler’s future life.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-15680916516265566112017-03-09T08:42:00.000-05:002017-03-09T08:42:00.770-05:00(++++) SYMPHONIC EXPANSIONS<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beethoven: Symphony No. 9.</i>Klara Ek, soprano; Elisabeth Jansson, alto; Thomas Cooley, tenor; Liao Changyong, baritone; Ars Nova Copenhagen, Latvian Radio Choir and Copenhagen Phil conducted by Lan Shui. Orchid Classics. $13.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liszt: Faust Symphony.</i> Steve Davislim, tenor; men of Chorus Sine Nomine and Orchester Wiener Akademie conducted by Martin Haselb<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ö</span>ck. Alpha. $18.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>There is always a rationale for yet another of the umpteen-plus recordings of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and the reasoning behind the new release on Orchid Classics (of a performance from 2013) is unusually intriguing. This completes the three-volume Beethoven cycle featuring the oddly named but very adeptly performing Copenhagen Phil under Lan Shui. Shui’s approach to the whole set of symphonies is an intriguing mixture of the contemporary and the historically informed: the orchestra uses modern string instruments with historically accurate reproductions of brass and timpani, resulting in a sonic blend that is different from that heard on any other recording. And Shui’s approach to the music combines modern and older elements as well: contemporary scholarship suggests that Beethoven’s tempo indications, contrary to what was thought a few years back, are likely to be what he really wanted, and that the old canard suggesting that he had a defective metronome is not accurate. So Shui uses the tempos that Beethoven’s score suggests, even when they result in performances that require listeners to make some adjustments in their expectations. Actually, the chance to hear familiar music differently is one of the big pluses of Shui’s cycle. And Shui’s thoughtfulness about the music comes through clearly. He considers the Ninth to be less symphony and more oratorio, for example, and conducts it that way, with the first three movements assuming a decidedly lower profile than the finale. This is an arguable approach and one that other conductors have tried with greater or lesser success. It perhaps overstates the case for the finale to some extent – a true oratorio would make the first three movements more of a prologue to the finale than a strong set of declamations, as for instance in the case in Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 2 (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lobgesang</i>), a work from 1840 that is directly based on Beethoven’s Ninth and one clearly designed to blur the boundary between symphony and oratorio (although, just to confuse matters further, Mendelssohn actually called it a “Symphony-Cantata”). Beethoven certainly laid the groundwork for works such as Mendelssohn’s, but whether he planned the Ninth itself as a symphony expanded into an oratorio is certainly debatable. Shui makes a strong case for the approach, though, and his chosen instrumentation helps him do so: the strings are brighter than those of Beethoven’s time, while the brass sounds more subdued and the overall orchestra seems more balanced than in performances using all-modern instruments. The first three movements are full of fine highlighting, again made possible much of the time by the instruments chosen, and Beethoven’s tempos work quite well – the Scherzo, notably, is fleet rather than heavy and portentous. As for the finale, the solo quartet blends very well together and stands out effectively against the chorus, and Shui makes intelligent choices about the interrelationship of the individual voices, this being a matter of perpetual debate in Beethoven’s Ninth and one without any absolutely clear “right” approach. This performance does make the finale a grand capstone to the symphony, and if it perhaps underplays the importance of the first three movements slightly even though they collectively account for two-thirds of the symphony’s length (in contrast to the first three movements in Mendelssohn’s later work), it does so in the service of a vision that is well-thought-out and one regarding which Shui, the singers and the orchestra seem to be in complete agreement --<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>resulting in a thoughtful, interesting and highly involving performance.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>By the time Liszt wrote his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faust Symphony,</i> 25 years after Beethoven’s death, the symphonic landscape had changed and in some ways enlarged dramatically – thanks in large part to Beethoven and, in particular, to Beethoven’s Ninth. Like Berlioz, Liszt felt that the symphony after Beethoven had to develop in entirely new directions; and the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faust Symphony,</i> which lasts even longer than Beethoven’s Ninth, shows just how far Liszt stretched the medium. This three-movement work is really a series of three intimately connected tone poems rather than a symphony in any structurally recognizable form. Liszt referred to the three parts as character sketches, and he developed them in some highly innovative ways. It is scarcely a surprise that the forward motion and constant striving of the music representing Faust stand in strong contrast to the quiet, gently graceful and drifting music representing Gretchen. But what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> surprising are the methods Liszt uses to limn the characters. Faust’s music at one point includes an extremely early example of something approaching atonality and twelvetone, then harks directly back to Beethoven through use of the key of C minor, associated with Fate ever since Beethoven’s Fifth. The Faust movement is complex, long and frequently difficult for the ear to grasp, while the one representing Gretchen is simple, graceful and structurally straightforward. And the third movement, representing Mephistopheles, is a wonderful and groundbreaking concept, denying Mephistopheles any theme of his own while portraying him through a series of distortions of Faust’s themes, musically showing this tempter as one who twists and distorts scholarship, striving, love, and all the other characteristics that Liszt assigns to Faust in the first part of the symphony. This is a simply brilliant stroke of characterization and one that expands the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faust Symphony</i> into a work as genuinely philosophical in its medium as Goethe’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faust</i>is in the medium of poetry and drama. Liszt caps his work, which is primarily drawn from the first part of Goethe’s, with a vocal conclusion that uses the last lines of the second part of Goethe’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faust</i>– the same lines, mystically celebrating the “eternal feminine,” that would later conclude and exalt Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. Martin Haselb<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ö</span>ck conducts the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faust Symphony</i> with intensity, understanding and an excellent sense of pacing on a new Alpha release. And the concluding vocal section – which returns, in a transformative way, to some of the Gretchen music, showing it to be less naïve and one-dimensional than it seems at first – is especially impressive. Indeed, it actually sounds like an anticipation of Mahler, who would expand the form of the symphony even beyond anything by Beethoven or Liszt, while managing to anchor his own works in the very different ones of both earlier composers.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-7161139054578645832017-03-09T08:39:00.000-05:002017-03-10T09:59:10.032-05:00(+++) BEYOND BRASSY<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Perspectives.</i> American Brass Quintet (John D. Rojak, bass trombone; Michael Powell, trombone; Eric Reed, horn; Louis Hanzlik and Kevin Cobb, trumpets). Summit Records. $14.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lightning Fields: New Music for Trumpet and Piano.</i> Jason Bergman, trumpet and flugelhorn; Steven Harlos, piano and celeste. MSR Classics. $12.95.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Flamethrower: New Music for Trumpet, Flugelhorn &amp; Interactive Electroacoustics.</i> Stephen Ruppenthal, trumpet, crotales and flugelhorn. Ravello. $14.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alan Beeler: Sonatas and Soli.</i>Navona. $14.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>It is commonplace in contemporary music to release CDs with “theme” titles rather than ones naming the composers represented, who may be unknown or at best little-known to potential audiences. This results in a focus on performers rather than works performed, and tends to limit the releases to listeners who are either fans of the specific performers or who are fond of the players’ instruments. This is certainly the case with a new Summit Records release featuring the American Brass Quintet – although listeners who <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">do</i>delve into the CD may well be pleasantly surprised at the quality of the compositions here, whether or not they have heard music by these composers before. The opening suite, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shine,</i> by Robert Paterson (born 1970), offers four movements that can be thought of as the classical version of heavy metal, at least in their titles: “Ringing Brass Bells,” “Quicksilver,” “Veins of Gold” and “Bright Blue Steel.” The titles do not necessarily reflect the music perfectly – for example, “Quicksilver” is not exceptionally fast, although it is quick enough to serve as a kind of scherzo – but all four movements show strength in writing for the instruments, and collectively they present the form of a fairly traditional sonata (opening, scherzo, slow movement, finale). The American Brass Quintet is an exceptionally well-balanced group that handles both the individual parts and the ensembles with real style, keeping the music moving smartly ahead without ever rushing it, and giving its essentially surface-level communication a fine polish. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quintet for Brass</i> by Jay Greenberg (born 1991) brings out a warmer sound from the ensemble but is a less-impressive work, prone to stops and starts that make its single movement seem frequently to drag. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cadence, Fugue, Fade</i> by Sebastian Currier (born 1959) is more interesting, with an impressive chorale opening that leads to an unexpectedly lively fugue – which is impressively constructed and gives the performers quite a workout. The conclusion of the piece is a bit of a letdown, but it does give the players a chance to show just how quietly and gently brass can be played. The final piece on the disc is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Canticum Honoris Amicorum</i> by Eric Ewazen (born 1954), and it makes a fine (if rather extended) encore, bright and rhythmic, with themes and accompaniment that lie well on the instruments and have a pleasantly old-fashioned celebratory feel. The CD showcases highly impressive playing in the service of music that mostly repays the obvious care that the American Brass Quintet lavishes on it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>At least one composer represented on a new MSR Classics release may be familiar to listeners who enjoy contemporary music: Michael Daugherty (born 1954) has written in many forms, and his works are heard more frequently than are those of many other modern composers. Here he offers <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lightning Fields,</i> a suite of four movements portraying four locations associated in one way or another with lightning: “Griffith Observatory (Los Angeles, California),” “The Lightning Field (Catron County, New Mexico),” “Marfa Lights (U.S. Route 67, Marfa, Texas),” and “Times Square (New York City).” Daugherty does a good job of using the trumpet to indicate different ways in which lightning (and other lights) may strike or appear, although some repetitiveness both within each piece and in the suite as a whole is inevitable. Jason Bergman has a formidable technique and handles the whole work with apparent ease. This is the piece’s world premi<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">è</span>re recording, and the CD contains three other world premi<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">è</span>res as well: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Catalonia</i> (2003) by Richard Peaslee (1930-2016); <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sonata for Trumpet and Piano</i> (1994/2013) by Daniel Schnyder (born 1961); and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Adventures of…</i> (2016), for unaccompanied trumpet, by Kevin McKee (born 1980). This last is a work for solo trumpet that makes a very fine encore, putting the instrument and its player through all sorts of demands and contortions, all of which Bergman handles with aplomb. The other pieces here include another by McKee, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Song for a Friend</i> (2015), and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sonata for Trumpet and Piano</i> (2009) by Anthony Plog (born 1947) – who, although not as well-known as Daugherty, may be familiar to some listeners, and whose work here shows a strong command of four-movement sonata construction and a good understanding of the capabilities of the trumpet. Bergman switches to flugelhorn – which he also plays very adeptly – for two movements of Daugherty’s work and one of Peaslee’s, the different sound of the instrument helping keep the material interesting. Steven Harlos provides fine piano backup throughout, switching to celeste and creating a particularly unusual sound combination in the third movement of Plog’s sonata. More than anything, this is a recording for fans of fine trumpet playing, which Bergman offers throughout.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Stephen Ruppenthal handles trumpet and flugelhorn very well, too, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Flamethrower,</i>a new Ravello release, is not really about the instruments’ sound. Nor is it really about Ruppenthal’s virtuosity, even though the works here were written for him. Instead, this is by and large a “sonic exploration” disc, for listeners interested in hearing how acoustic brass instruments come across when stretched to the limit and juxtaposed with a wide variety of electronically generated sounds. There is always a certain dated quality to electronic music, despite the much greater sophistication used nowadays to produce it, because there is a hard-to-disguise sameness to electronic sounds no matter how creatively they are made and manipulated. The five pieces on this CD, all of them world premi<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">è</span>re recordings, include one without accompanying electronics: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Velocity Studies V: NGate</i> (2007) by Allen Strange. This work certainly shows Ruppenthal’s ability and the strong jazz influences on his playing. The other pieces here are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Sphere of Air Is Bound</i> (2010) by Bruno Liberda, in which Ruppenthal uses his voice as well as his trumpet and the composer contributes Kyma digital audio processing; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">November Twilight</i>(2011) by Elainie Lillios, with the composer providing interactive electroacoustics and Ruppenthal again performing with his voice and trumpet – plus, in this case, on crotales (small tuned discs); <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Misty Magic Land</i> (2004) by Allen Strange, with the composer on digital media and Brian Belet proffering Kyma digital audio processing; and Belet’s own <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">System of Shadows</i> (2007), with Ruppenthal on both trumpet and flugelhorn and Belet again with a Kyma contribution. There is always a certain otherworldliness to electronic and electroacoustic music, long recognized and used to excellent effect by György Ligeti and other giants of the field. Among the composers here, Belet embraces this element most strongly, with his suite’s three movements called “Aurora Borealis,” “Andromeda’s Dream,” and “Zephyr Apparition.” But all the works partake of this sensibility to some degree, and the result is a kind of sameness of sound despite the differences in the manner in which that sound is produced. This is really a CD for electronic-music fanciers to a greater extent than it is one for lovers of fine brass playing.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Brass figures to a considerable extent in the music of Alan Beeler (1939-2016), as heard on a new Navona CD that is essentially a tribute to the late composer – and something of a hodgepodge of works for one or two instruments. Because every movement of every piece here is quite short, it is possible to fit no fewer than 14 works by Beeler comfortably on the disc. Two of the pieces feature brass instruments: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sonata for Bass Trombone and Piano,</i> with Dalibor Proch<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">á</span>zka and Lucie Kauck<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">á</span>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Octatonic Tuba—Sonata for Tuba and Piano,</i> with Jiří Král and Kauck<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">á</span>. Actually, to the extent that this CD has a theme or focus, it is the piano, works for which dominate the recording: Kauck<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">á</span> performs <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">3 Early Pieces for Solo Piano,</i> while Karolina Rojahn is pianist in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My Identity Suite, Multi-Tonal Suite, Beeler’s Fit ’06, Piano Sonata,</i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">12-Tone Quartal Etude.</i> And then there are works including but not focused on piano: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sonata for Clarinet and Piano,</i> with Aleš Janeček and Kauck<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">á</span>; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Flute &amp; Piano Sonata,</i> with Petr Hladík and Kauck<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">á</span>; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">English Horn Sonata</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oboe Sonata,</i> both with Jennifer Slowick and Rojahn; and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sonata da Camera,</i> with bassoonist Jan Dvořák and Kauck<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">á</span>. There is also a rather delicious piece for solo vibraphone (Ladislav Bilan) called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Something More Cheerful Suite—Variations on a Well-known Tune.</i> The formal variety is striking here, as is the use of so many different instruments and instrumental combinations – all of which Beeler handles with skill, if not always inspiration. The music fits his chosen means of conveying it well in all cases, and if some pieces are less than enthralling, everything is so short that a listener dissatisfied with one movement or even an entire work has only to wait a minute or two for the next, hopefully more engaging one. This is quite clearly a CD for people already familiar with Beeler and wanting a “memory” recording showcasing, in one place, the extent of his involvement and inventiveness in chamber music. The works show Beeler’s comfort in a variety of styles: some have clear roots in 19<sup>th</sup>-century and even earlier music, while others partake directly of the musical esthetics of the 20<sup>th</sup>and 21<sup>st</sup> centuries. Nothing here will likely capture the interest of someone unfamiliar with Beeler and turn the person into a fan, but those who are fans already will enjoy what will likely be, for many of them, a mixture of the familiar and unfamiliar, and a pleasant survey highlighting many of the composer’s interests.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-87982751591968982592017-03-02T08:49:00.000-05:002017-03-02T08:49:11.628-05:00(++++) VISUAL EMOTIONS<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fish Girl.</i> By Donna Jo Napoli &amp; David Wiesner. Pictures by David Wiesner. Clarion. $25.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Big Nate: What’s a Little Noogie Between Friends?</i> By Lincoln Peirce. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>A beautiful, moving, mysterious and mystical story told artfully in graphic-novel form, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fish Girl</i> never reveals exactly who or what the title character is – and that is part of the book’s charm. It starts with an old-fashioned seaside sideshow, in which a man dressed as sea-god Neptune pretends to control the waters in a huge tank where the title character, a protective octopus, and a variety of other sea creatures live. The story is one of gradual self-discovery, as Fish Girl, who cannot speak, hears stories from “Neptune” about her origin, but gradually comes to learn that they are false and he is an exploiter, not her protector. The man’s carefully arranged business setup starts to come apart when an inquisitive 12-year-old named Livia spots Fish Girl, whose job is to let people get glimpses of her but never to be fully seen, so as to preserve the “mystery” on which “Neptune” relies. Gradually Livia makes friends with Fish Girl, even giving her a name – Mira, short for “miracle.” And indeed Fish Girl is a miracle of some kind: she is not exactly a mermaid, because while she looks like one, it turns out as the book goes on that she can shed her tail and scales and have fully formed legs, then regain her part-fish appearance afterwards, all quite unintentionally. Very loosely related to Hans Christian Andersen’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Little Mermaid,</i> although not directly correlated with that bittersweet tale of hope and religious faith, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fish Girl</i> is all about Mira’s growing awareness that she was captured – with the octopus who now shares her tank – when she was tiny, and needs to get herself and her captive friends away from the fisherman who caught them so she can live her own life. That, it turns out, is a life on land, and Mira’s eventual parting from the octopus – a creature of great magic, it turns out, since he can expand to enormous size and power as needed, then return to his usual appearance – is but one of many emotional high points of the story. The writing is well-paced and sensitive, revealing matters in due course and functioning through the words and thoughts of the characters rather than through third-person narrative. That is an effective approach that brings readers strongly into Fish Girl’s world. As for the illustrations, they are beautiful and evocative, and at the same time rather old-fashioned, since David Wiesner does not take advantage of all the intricacies of graphic-novel format: he makes his panels different sizes but keeps them square or rectangular, rather than changing their shape to suit elements of the story; and he keeps his characters within panel borders, in comic-book style, instead of having them burst the panels’ confines and overlap the edges that constrict them. When he needs something huge and intense, Wiesner simply spreads it over two pages and has it bleed to the pages’ edges, as when the octopus destroys the building that has been his and Mira’s prison for so many years. Both Wiesner and Donna Jo Napoli possess a sure storytelling sense and excellent feel for pacing and emotional exploration, with the result that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fish Girl</i> transcends its rather ordinary voyage-of-self-discovery theme to become a beautiful, strange and compelling story in which not all the questions about Fish Girl are ever answered and not all the loose ends are ever tied up – but in which the concluding message of hopefulness and warmth comes through loudly and clearly.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The emotions are much more surface-level in Lincoln Peirce’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Big Nate</i> comic strip and the books that collect it, including the latest, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What’s a Little Noogie Between Friends?</i>The central attraction in all the books, and in the strip, is Nate himself, the 11-or-12-year-old self-proclaimed genius who succeeds at absolutely everything, except when he doesn’t, which is most of the time, which is why Nate spends so much effort reinterpreting life’s ups and downs (especially the downs). Nate’s foibles are always good for laughs: convinced that his soccer team is jinxed, goalie Nate suffers through a defeat by a team that has lost 60 games in a row; his longtime crush, Jenny, finds out she is moving 3,000 miles away; he babysits genius first-grader Peter and is determined to force him into hockey instead of figure skating, a plan that goes about as well as might be expected; he goes to the movies and finds himself sitting next to arch-enemy Gina, because there is only one seat left, and that leads to suspicions that the two are on a date, which of course Gina exploits to Nate’s detriment; and then there are Nate’s usual encounters and misadventures with nemesis Mrs. Godfrey, Spitsy the ridiculous dog, loud and over-dramatic Coach John, and Nate’s own father (who in one sequence is himself a coach of Nate’s team, and whose name we actually find out: Marty). Interestingly, it is not Nate but one of his best friends, Teddy, who in this collection utters one of Nate’s own innermost thoughts: “Why does school always have to be about <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">learning</b> stuff?” Nate spends a great deal of his time trying hard not to learn in school, but the fact is that he does have a good mind when he is properly motivated: the very last strip here has Francis tutoring him and warning him that if he fails an upcoming test, he will be doing summer school with Mrs. Godfrey – at which point Nate not only gives the year of a battle but also the month and day. Nate is not as cool as he wants to be, not as independent, not as successful, and not as lovable – at least to those in his world. But to the many fans of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Big Nate</i> strip, he is every bit as enjoyable and involving a character as can be. It is ironic that he is a comic-strip star even though he is never quite able to be the star of his own life. It is because of Nate’s emotional reaction to all the things that do not go his way – and his resilience in the face of so many reversals – that Nate’s life is so much fun to explore, for readers if not necessarily for Nate himself.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-22628999938815797352017-03-02T08:46:00.000-05:002017-03-02T08:46:02.392-05:00(++++) SMALL AMUSEMENTS<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I Don’t Know What to Call My Cat.</i>By Simon Philip. Illustrated by Ella Bailey. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $16.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Laugh-Out-Loud Awesome Jokes for Kids.</i> By Rob Elliott. Harper. $4.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>No profundity required. Sometimes little things are all that is necessary to create a book that kids will find a lot of fun. Take, for example, the matter of naming a pet. It is a mundane occurrence, no big deal, nothing to get worked up about. But Simon Philip blows it entirely out of proportion in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I Don’t Know What to Call My Cat,</i> and the result is delightful. Ella Bailey sets the tone for the book with wonderful front and back covers that show the faces of cats of all types, colors and dispositions (from sleepy to devilish to eyepatched to human-mustached to Egyptian to hat-wearing to bow-tied and many more) – each given its own appropriate name. But what is the name of the cat that turns up on a little girl’s doorstep one day, complete with umbrella, violin case and small travel bag, and decides to stay? The cat settles into life with the little girl without difficulty, taking over pretty much everything in the house, as cats will. But the girl cannot figure out what to call the cat. She tries the simple “Kitty,” but when she calls out that name, she ends up surrounded by felines from all over. She tries “Princess High-and-Mighty” and dresses the cat accordingly (and hilariously), which leads to the cat climbing a high lamp to get away from the accouterments of royalty. She tries a whole batch of more-straightforward names, but none of them fits – and besides, they are all <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">girl</i> names, and it turns out that the cat is a boy, which only makes the little girl’s life harder. “Mr. Maestro” almost works – it does well with the violin that the cat plays – but when the girl adds her own very different version of music to what the cat is playing, the cat throws off his fancy dress and runs away. Now this “name” book becomes a “search” book, and the quest includes a trip to the zoo, which takes the book in an entirely new direction: a gorilla follows the little girl home and becomes her new pet. And <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">he</i>is easy to name: he paints pictures and signs them “by Steve.” The girl’s outings with Steve are tremendously funny, being filled with cats and catlike figures of all types, with one particular cat (which readers will notice when they look carefully) giving the girl “the feeling we were being watched.” Sure enough, the cat came back – disguised with a mustache and bowler hat – and arranged for Steve to be returned to the zoo. And this time he is sporting a collar with his name, and that name, unsurprisingly, turns out to be Tricky. Misunderstanding to the end, the little girl says the name fits because “he <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i> very tricky to name,” but the cat, winking as he plays his fiddle, knows that the name fits because he is a real trickster – an entirely suitable ending to a book that has one additional bit of cleverness in store: the inside front covers show fish and fishbones (cat food), while the inside back covers show whole and partly peeled bananas (gorilla food). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I Don’t Know What to Call My Cat</i> turns out to be silly and exceedingly clever at the same time.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Much more straightforward and surface-level, Rob Elliott’s latest (+++) collection of groaners and knock-knocks, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Laugh-Out-Loud Awesome Jokes for Kids,</i> follows in the well-worn path of Elliott’s other joke collections. It is a small, light book, easy to carry around, containing an occasional picture of a child or children playing in a way unrelated to the text. The text itself is simply a series of jokes that kids in kindergarten through first or second grade may find amusing and may enjoy telling their friends, although hopefully not too many times. “Why did the boy stop carving the stick? He was a whittle tired.” “Where does a sick sailor go? To the dock-tor.” “What can you break without touching it? A promise.” “Where do cows go for lunch? The calf-eteria.” “Why was the oak tree so proud of his heritage? Because his roots ran deep.” “How does an artist cross the river? He uses a drawbridge.” Pretty much everything here is on the same level, and there is little to distinguish these “awesome” jokes from ones in other Elliott collections with other titles. The books seem mainly designed for kids who aspire to be the class clown, or provide a comedy routine for a school play. Certainly they are not the sort of material that family members would sit still for, at least for very long. And it is hard to see kids using them “spontaneously” (from memory, that is) with many of their peers, although a child who does like these jokes is likely to have friends who will enjoy them as well. These Elliott collections are quite popular, so clearly they have hit a nerve, or tickled one, or something along those lines. Whether “you’ve never laughed so hard in your life,” as the back cover puts it, is an accurate statement, seems questionable. But again, it may depend on who is laughing and under what circumstances. Some adults and older kids, for example, may be laughing at the occasional mistake that crops up in the jokes. For instance, “Why did the egg get kicked out of the comedy club? He was telling bad yokes.” Well, maybe, but for this to be a joke rather than a misspelling, it should be “bad yolks.” If you find that a laugh-out-loud, awesome error, then you may be a candidate for enjoying <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Laugh-Out-Loud Awesome Jokes for Kids.</i></div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-4058011351392209222017-03-02T08:43:00.001-05:002017-03-02T08:43:06.357-05:00(++++) TALES FOR OUR TIME<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shakespeare Retold.</i> By E. Nesbit. Illustrated by Antonio Javier Caparo. Harper. $19.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ronit &amp; Jamil.</i> By Pamela L. Laskin. Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins. $17.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Back in 1897, there appeared, from one of the great children’s writers of the past 150 years, a collection called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Children’s Shakespeare,</i> which was reprinted 10 years later as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare.</i> The author was E. (Edith) Nesbit, best known nowadays for wonderful fantasy adventures such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Five Children and It, The Railway Children, The Story of the Treasure Seekers,</i> and many more. Nesbit wanted to retell Shakespeare’s plays in language that modern children would find accessible, preserving the tales’ drama and some of their intricacy while reducing the barriers to understanding caused by Elizabethan English and the deliberately convoluted way in which Shakespeare often structured his plots. Nesbit gave 20 of the plays her streamlined treatment, including some that are infrequently studied even at the college level nowadays: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Timon of Athens, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale.</i> Nesbit provided a Shakespeare biography, pronunciation guide, and list of famous quotations, too. Now there is a new, slimmer, much abridged edition of Nesbit’s distillation of Shakespeare, called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shakespeare Retold</i>and including illustrations by Antonio Javier Caparo and a biography and timeline by Mariah Fredericks. Only seven of Nesbit’s play summaries are offered: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Macbeth, The Tempest,</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Much Ado about Nothing.</i> Parents familiar with Shakespeare will have a number of understandable quibbles with Nesbit’s presentation. For example, Macbeth becomes “chieftain” rather than “thane,” and Nesbit changes “Macbeth hath murdered sleep” to “Macbeth destroys the sleeping.” And near the end of the tale of Hamlet, Nesbit writes that Hamlet finally kills Claudius, adding parenthetically, “(Which, if he had steeled his heart to do long before, all these lives would have been spared and none would have suffered but the wicked king, who well deserved to die.)” Nevertheless, even if one admits weaknesses in these retellings, with (for instance) the Capulets and Montagues being described merely as “deeply sad” after Romeo’s and Juliet’s deaths, the fact is that Nesbit largely accomplished her purpose: these prose distillations of the seven plays included here are accurate as to plot, explanatory as to motive, and turn the enormous complexities of Shakespeare’s thinking and writing into something approachable and genuinely interesting. The book, after all, is not a Shakespeare book so much as a book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">about</i> Shakespeare and the plays he wrote: Nesbit’s aim was to introduce young children – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shakespeare Retold</i> is for ages 6-10 – to some of the greatest literature of all time by making it intriguing, even at the expense of much of the style and form that make the plays great. Given the sad reality that it is now possible to go through an entire college education without taking a single course in Shakespeare – a consequence of the increased focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics, and of the contemporary view of college as little more than a path to a well-paying job – a book like this may go some small distance to redress the balance that has relegated Shakespeare and other great writers and humanists to little more than an educational afterthought. Caparo’s illustrations are overly romantic, but they are appealing in their own way, and Fredericks’ biography and timeline are nicely done and useful for children who, captivated by the stories that Nesbit retells, find themselves wanting to know a bit more about the man who wrote them and the time in which he lived. Hopefully <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shakespeare Retold</i> will be a door opener, and a mind opener, for quite a number of young readers.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The continuing fascination of Shakespeare’s tales shows itself again and again in works that recast the stories for later ages and place them in different locations. One such is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ronit &amp; Jamil,</i> a (+++) novel in verse – not Shakespearean verse, though, by any means – that takes the Romeo-and-Juliet theme (note the letters that begin the two central characters’ names) and plops it down in modern Israel and Gaza. The idea here is that Ronit, an Israeli girl, and Jamil, a Palestinian boy, are brought together because their fathers work with each other in one of those uneasy but necessary business relationships that pervade everyday life in and near Israel. The two teenagers – older than Shakespeare’s Juliet, who is 13 (Romeo’s age is never specified) – fall desperately in love, and Pamela L. Laskin goes out of her way to balance everything they say, think and feel. This leads sometimes to considerable awkwardness: at one point, Ronit thinks about the fear of being blown up while traveling by bus, by someone who could be a member of Jamil’s family; then Jamil thinks of the possibility of people who would “chop down trees to build settlements,” which is scarcely comparable. But the whole point of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ronit &amp; Jamil</i> is equivalence, to indicate that Israelis and Palestinians are perfectly equal in desires, hopes, fears and motivations. The book will surely appeal to people who believe that; but it is a stance without nuance, one that undermines the very humanity of the young lovers, to write as if each is no more than a mirror image of the other. Laskin also shies away from the tragic ending of Shakespeare’s play, having Ronit and Jamil make the decision to flee the Middle East altogether and perhaps even end up in America, even though “America has problems, too. Every place has problems.” The book insists on ending in uplift and hope – which, in fact, is also how Shakespeare’s play ends, but in that case, to do so requires a double sacrifice beyond anything in Laskin’s novel. Of course, adaptations of Shakespeare’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Romeo and Juliet</i> – itself an adaptation of earlier works – need not be faithful to their source, and some superb modernizings play considerable havoc with Shakespeare: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">West Side Story,</i> for example. But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ronit &amp; Jamil</i> reduces too many complexities to simplicity for this slim book to be wholly satisfying. It does not suggest that love conquers all, but it does say something along the lines of Sir Joseph Porter’s remark in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">HMS Pinafore:</i> “Love levels all ranks.” Yet even Sir Joseph eventually comes to realize, “It does not level them as much as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that.”</i>So it is in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ronit &amp; Jamil.</i> Love may overcome a great deal, but not everything. Reconciliation of Ronit’s and Jamil’s families, and Israelis and Palestinians in general, is not even a flicker of a possibility here: if there is any escape, it is for two people only, leaving society at large no better off than before. That is the exact opposite of Shakespeare’s message, for all that Laskin tries so hard to build her work on his vastly superior one.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-61507673336471102152017-03-02T08:40:00.000-05:002017-03-02T08:40:01.926-05:00(++++) COLLEGE AS COMMODITY<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Colleges That Pay You Back: The 200 Schools That Give You the Best Bang for Your Tuition Buck, 2017 Edition.</i>By Robert Franek, David Soto, Kristen O’Toole, and the Staff of the Princeton Review. Princeton Review/Random House. $21.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Gone are the days in which colleges were supposed to provide a strong general education, the ingredients of a well-rounded person who could live a well-rounded life. No one has time for that anymore, and few have the inclination, anyway. ROI, return on investment, is now what college is all about, and the return needs to be quantifiable, not some evanescent concept such as “learning to be a better person.” There will be plenty of time for that after retirement, assuming one can afford to retire and is inclined at that point to the contemplative life – and not hampered by health issues. But to be able to afford retirement in the far-distant future, one must attain significant financial security for many decades, and that brings us right back to college as training ground for high-paying professions. Or at least ones that quickly pay back the cost of getting the education that is a prerequisite for doing that particular type of work.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>This scenario leads directly to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Colleges That Pay You Back,</i> a no-nonsense analysis of what it costs to attend each of hundreds of schools (including a calculation of how much financial aid those schools provide, since that figures into the cost of attendance), and how high students’ salaries are likely to be immediately after graduation and some years down the road. There isn’t a better book out there for students and families looking to maximize the financial and career impact of choosing a school. To be sure, the book presents the usual disclaimers about not regarding college as purely a way to have more income in adult life: “Your choice of major should not depend solely on your expected starting salary, but also on your academic interests, the subjects you are passionate about, and the type of career you’re interested in.” Even if this is sincerely written, it is worth about as much as most disclaimers, which is to say, not very much, since it is part of the introduction to a section called “Great Schools for the Highest Paying Majors” that neatly quantifies not only the median starting salary for fresh-out-of-college employees but also the mid-career expectation in each field. There are excellent lists of colleges to consider if you are interested in aerospace engineering, architectural engineering, biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, civil engineering, computer engineering, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, materials science and engineering, mechanical engineering, nuclear engineering, petroleum engineering, software engineering, systems engineering, as well as four types of engineering technologies. So many choices! But this is not to say the social sciences are entirely absent: there are lists for economics and international relations. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Colleges That Pay You Back</i> does not intend to be hard-hearted, only hard-headed. Parents who attended college at a time when majors such as psychology, English, philosophy, theater and music were deemed as worthy as those in hard science and business may be startled and may even feel wistful as they peruse this data-heavy, very well-organized look at each school’s student profile, selectivity, financial facts, and career information – the last of which specifically includes an “ROI rating.” Today’s college attendees need to know how to make it in a very difficult, fast-changing workplace, and the book quantifies advantages as much as it can, while also including more-subjective elements such as the quality of each college’s career placement and alumni network – a key element to getting ahead in the contemporary version of “it’s not what you know, it’s whom you know” (non-sticklers for accurate English may say “it’s who you know,” and no one will care). What is interesting is that many of the top 50 places in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Colleges That Pay You Back</i> are exceptionally good all-around schools, so even if you do not take one of the currently favored majors and go into one of the currently hot professions, there is a good chance – thanks largely to strong alumni networks – that you will still do well in life, financially speaking, if you attend one of these schools. That, of course, assumes you can get in and can afford to attend – but given these schools’ outreach to “under-represented” groups and their extensive endowments, that is certainly a possibility for more students now than it would have been a few decades ago.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Nevertheless, the top-listed schools do lean largely in the direction of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Princeton University comes in at No. 1, followed by Stanford, MIT, Harvey Mudd College, and California Institute of Technology. Other schools with a longstanding reputation for overall excellence dot the top-50 list: Harvard (No. 6), Duke (No. 11), Columbia (No. 24), Tufts (No. 31), Johns Hopkins (No. 39). Students may want to search the top-50 list for excellent pay-you-back schools that are somewhat less-known in this context, such as Brigham Young University (No. 18), Hamilton College (No. 21), Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology (No. 29), or Wabash College (No. 38). But before doing that search, and indeed before using <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Colleges That Pay You Back</i> in any way, students need to spend some time looking within themselves and deciding what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">they,</i>not their friends and not some amorphous notion of “society as a whole,” want to get out of attending college. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Colleges That Pay You Back</i> is an excellent resource for those with a straightforwardly economic view of a college education, and there is enough variety in the schools profiled here – not just the top 50 – so students with that viewpoint will find many different ways of accommodating it. But students who see the possibility of something in college beyond the notion of trading college-education dollars for a greater number of employment dollars in the future should not deem this book the ultimate guide. There <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> other reasons to attend college, decreasingly common though they may be, and a student who subscribes to a non-economic model (or not a solely economic one) will find other college guides (including others from the Princeton Review) more congenial than this one.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-60968182419770764142017-03-02T08:37:00.000-05:002017-03-02T08:37:00.706-05:00(++++) NEW EXPLORATIONS<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sibelius: Kullervo; Finlandia; Olli Kortekangas: Migrations.</i> Lilli Paasikivi, mezzo-soprano; Tommi Hakala, baritone; YL Male Voice Choir and Minnesota Orchestra conducted by Osmo V<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ä</span>nsk<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ä</span>. BIS. $39.99 (2 SACDs).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Johan Halvorsen: Violin Concerto; Nielsen: Violin Concerto; Johan Svendsen: Romance.</i> Henning Kraggerud, violin; Malm<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ö</span> Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bjarte Engeset. Naxos. $12.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bach: Organ Music—Fantasia and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542; Italian Concerto, BWV 971; Prelude and Fugue in B minor, BWV 544; Trio Sonata in G, BWV 530; Toccata, Adagio, and Fugue in C, BWV 564; Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, BWV 582.</i> Christopher Houlihan, organ. Azica. $16.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Sibelius’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kullervo</i> dates to 1891-92 and Olli Kortekangas’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Migrations</i> to 2014, but the works have more in common than their 120-plus years of separation would suggest. Sibelius thought of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kullervo</i>as a symphony “in the Finnish spirit,” although it is really more of a gigantic tone poem (over 70 minutes long) based on the Finnish national epic, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kalevala,</i> to which Sibelius would return time and again during his career. A tale of heroism and large-scale mythic events, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kalevala</i> was understandably attractive to a composer who, although always more comfortable in the Swedish language than in Finnish, had a strong affinity for grand gestures and opulent orchestration in the service of Finnish nationalism. In five movements marked <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Introduction, Kullervo’s Youth, Kullervo and His Sister, Kullervo Goes to War,</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kullervo’s Death,</i> Sibelius not only traces the life of the hero but also produces a work on the grandest of scales – and using the unusual vocal forces of a male choir, solo baritone and solo mezzo-soprano. It was a striking idea of Osmo V<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ä</span>nsk<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ä and the Minnesota Orchestra – an ensemble deeply imbued with the Scandinavian heritage of so many residents of its home area – to commission Kortekangas (born 1955) to create a work for much the same forces (excluding only the solo baritone) to acknowledge and celebrate a journey different from but allied to Kullervo’s: that of many Finns to the United States. Wisely, Kortekangas made no attempt here to emulate Sibelius’ style despite the overlap of performers. He chose poetic texts from two collections by Sheila Packa, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Echo and Lightning</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cloud Birds,</i> and used them to produce a work far more modest in scale than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kullervo</i> but hinting at the grand, if mundane, adventures that brought ordinary rather than mythic figures across the ocean and into a new and often very harsh land, where they set down roots anew. Using four vocal sections and three instrumental interludes, Kortekangas manages to convey much of the emotion, from the human-scale heroic to the uncertain, with which the Finnish migration was imbued. Less grand and less compelling then <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kullervo,</i> Kortekangas’ work is nevertheless a fine companion piece that stands well beside Sibelius’ huge tone poem. The strong, committed, thoroughly idiomatic readings on a new two-SACD release from BIS, recorded in splendid sound at three live performances, are just about everything that a listener could desire in these works. And the rousing version of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Finlandia</i> that concludes the release – and uses the male choir for the famed “hymn” section – both sums up and broadens a tribute to Finland and the Finnish people that, although quite specific in design, effectively reaches out to any and all people who have looked for inspiration to their mythic tales and the bravery and pluck of their ancestors.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>What is new on a new Naxos CD is not new at all in one sense – but is quite contemporary in another. The Violin Concerto by Carl Nielsen’s near-contemporary, Johan Halvorsen (1864-1935), dates to 1907-08. But it disappeared shortly after its first performance in 1909. It was rediscovered as recently as 2015 – the year after Kortekangas wrote <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Migrations,</i> making this a very recent occurrence indeed. Halvorsen’s concerto bears a striking resemblance in some ways to Nielsen’s of 1911, but in other ways these two notably Nordic works are quite different. Juxtaposing them in performances as fine as those of </span>Henning Kraggerud with the Malm<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">ö</span>Symphony Orchestra under Bjarte Engeset provides an opportunity to hear and enjoy both the similarities and the distinctions between the two works. Halvorsen’s concerto is more thoroughly lyrical, more imbued with Romantic spirit, and more clearly influenced by Norwegian folk music, featuring definite effects drawn from the Hardanger fiddle. Nielsen’s concerto is broader, significantly larger in scale (running about 50% longer), cast in an unusual two-movement form, and for much of its length almost anti-virtuosic in its determination to highlight the violin’s warmer and more expressive qualities. Kraggerud has clearly studied both works carefully and manages to imbue each with its own individual character while, at the same time, showing the rhythmic and harmonic similarities, along with the roughly comparable overall treatment of tonality, that make a comparison and contrast of the works attractive. The CD includes, as an encore, the lovely 1881 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Romance</i>by Johan Svendsen (1840-1911), a gently lulling piece more thoroughly of the Romantic era than either concerto, and more straightforward than the longer pieces in its simplicity and expressiveness. This is an unusual CD primarily because it offers Halvorsen’s concerto in its world premi<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">è</span>re commercial recording, but it is also unusual for its particularly well-chosen repertoire and for the way in which violinist and conductor alike show their affinity for music of this era and this geographical region.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Organist Christopher Houlihan clearly has great affinity for Bach – it is hard to imagine an organist who does not – but Houlihan’s (+++) handling of half a dozen Bach pieces on a new Azica CD is an example of an exploration that goes astray all too often. Houlihan sees Bach’s music as a template upon which to impose his own notions of how the music should or could go. There is no historic performance practice or understanding here – indeed, Houlihan rather defiantly proclaims through these readings that the “historic” way is not his way and not really Bach’s way, either. Just as some pianists offer Bach with Romantic-era sound and flourishes on an instrument that the composer never knew, so Houlihan takes full advantage of the capabilities of a modern organ to produce swells, registration changes, and impressive crescendos and decrescendos that make the music sound very little like Bach and a great deal like what pop music performers call a “cover” of Bach. This is not Bach with, for example, a jazz overlay, or indeed with any overlay at all: the notes are Bach’s and the works proceed as Bach intended them to in terms of movement sequences and, more or less, tempos. One work, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Italian Concerto,</i> is specifically labeled as being arranged by Houlihan, and listeners familiar with Bach’s original will certainly notice some differences. But where Houlihan’s approach really strikes out on its own is in the four fugues on the CD. Clarity of line is the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sine qua non</i> of this musical form, and that is one of the big reasons for preferring the keyboard instruments of Bach’s own time – harpsichord, clavichord, organ – to those of later eras, which are designed for very different purposes. Houlihan looks for sumptuousness of sound and expressiveness of emotion in these fugues, employing all the resources of his organ (which was built in 1971 and remodeled in 2013) to produce sound that is full, intense and distinctly modern. There is no question that Houlihan shines a different light on this music than do performers more concerned with what Bach wrote and what instruments he wrote for. For that reason, listeners already thoroughly familiar with these works may find the Houlihan interpretations salutary and intriguing. But they are decidedly not the first choice in this music for anyone who wants to hear what Bach planned to communicate, performed in the way that he intended and in which he – a famously skilled organist – surely performed the music himself.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-46623910572111109892017-03-02T08:34:00.000-05:002017-03-02T08:34:02.328-05:00(+++) VOCAL VARIETIES<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Patrick Hawes: Revelation; Beatitudes; The Word; Peace Beyond Thought; Let Us Love; The Lord’s Prayer; Be Still; Quanta Qualia.</i> Leslie De’Ath, piano; John Johnson, alto saxophone; The Elora Singers conducted by Noel Edison. Naxos. $12.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Juliana Hall: O Mistress Mine; Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush; Propriety.</i> Darryl Taylor, countertenor; Susan Narucki, soprano; Juliana Hall and Donald Berman, piano. MSR Classics. $12.95.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Edie Hill: From the Wingbone of a Swan; The Fenix; Cancion de el Alma—En una Noche Escura; Clay Jug; We Bloomed in Spring; Alma Beata et Bella.</i> The Crossing conducted by Donald Nally. Navona. $14.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jonathan Santore: Choral Music.</i>New Hampshire Master Chorale and Manchester Choral Society and Orchestra conducted by Dan Perkins. Navona. $14.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Patrick Hawes (born 1958) is an example of a contemporary composer who continues to draw inspiration from the Bible and to find ways to produce Bible-based choral works that appeal both to performers (amateur and professional) and to religiously inclined audiences. A new Naxos CD featuring the elegant, well-balanced sound of the Elora Singers under Noel Edison includes seven world premi<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">è</span>re recordings of pieces composed as recently as 2016 – plus a non-premi<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">è</span>re recording of a very effective 2014 piece, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quanta Qualia.</i>The words that Hawes chooses for these works are so well-known, at least to those with a conventional religious inclination, that the pieces almost invite a kind of sing-along approach, especially since Hawes is inclined to build substantial works by assembling a collection of very short elements. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Revelation,</i> for example, runs 26 minutes but contains nine sections, while <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beatitudes</i>(using words from the gospel of Matthew) runs 22 minutes and is made up of eight pieces. Hawes’ mixed-choir writing is skillful, and indeed the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a cappella</i> pieces on this disc are more involving than the ones with piano accompaniment, which are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beatitudes, Let Us Love</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Be Still.</i> The piano parts seem more tacked-on than integral to the music. On the other hand, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quanta Qualia</i> includes an alto saxophone with the chorus, and that sound mixture proves both unusual and pleasing. Many of the works lie high in the performers’ vocal ranges – the sopranos occasionally seem to strain to reach the top notes – but the basic musical structure here is as straightforward as the texts, and the disc will please listeners who enjoy contemporary choral music as well as ones seeking religious uplift through traditional means.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Juliana Hall was also born in 1958, but her vocal approaches are quite different from those of Hawes, as a new MSR Classics release makes clear. The piano is more integral to the three song cycles here than it is to anything on the Hawes CD, and the texts that Hall sets are more varied. The most interesting songs are in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O Mistress Mine,</i> which includes a dozen pieces to words by Shakespeare, whose gorgeous language is woven through a piano line that ranges from the piquant to the smooth. The choice of countertenor to voice these songs is an inspired one, and Darryl Taylor delivers the words with sensitivity and emotional involvement, while the composer herself provides first-rate accompaniment. However, Hall’s forays into dissonance do not always fit the words’ meaning and sometimes seem more mannered than necessary to the material, as if it would be unseemly to treat these Elizabethan-era texts in any old-fashioned way when setting them in 2016. Still, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O Mistress Mine</i> is by and large a pleasant, involving and attractively structured cycle. The other two song sets here, for soprano (the very accomplished Susan Narucki) and piano (Donald Berman), are older and somewhat more conventional. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush</i> (1989) is based on the letters of Emily Dickinson rather than her poetry, while <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Propriety</i>(1992) uses poems by Marianne Moore. The Dickinson material is as much historical curiosity as worthwhile fodder for songs, although the chance to hear something beyond the many Dickinson poems that have been set by other composers is a welcome one. The Moore poems are well-chosen: they include <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mercifully, Carnegie Hall: Rescued, Dream, Propriety</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Melchior Vulpius.</i>The settings themselves, however, do not shed any particular light on the words, although they fit the texts well and give Narucki and Berman ample opportunity to emote and express. All these works are world premi<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Arial;">è</span>re recordings, and all will be of interest to fans of modern music for vocal recitals – with the Shakespeare settings most likely to intrigue listeners and occasionally amuse them, as with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This is a very scurvy tune to sing</i>from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tempest.</i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The music of Edie Hill (born 1962) on a new Navona CD includes some of the attention to choral writing found in the Hawes disc and some of the instrumental sensitivity shown in Hall’s works. Hill’s music is eclectic: sometimes straightforward in approach, as in setting a soloist against a larger group, sometimes multi-layered either through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">divisi</i> voices or by setting the vocal elements against instrumental ones that here include percussion (Ted Babcock), cello (Arlen Hlusko), and flute (Mimi Stillman). Like Hall, Hill chooses texts carefully and from varied sources, in Hill’s case both secular and sacred: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fenix</i> comes from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Exeter Book,</i> while <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cancion de el Alma—En una Noche Escura</i>is from San Juan de la Cruz, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Clay Jug</i>is from 15<sup>th</sup>-century Indian mystic Kabir, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We Bloomed in Spring</i> comes from St. Teresa of Avila, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alma Beata et Bella</i> is by Jacopo Sannazaro, and Hill herself – along with Timothy O’Brien – provides the words for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">From the Wingbone of a Swan.</i> The settings are as disparate as the textual variety would suggest, but they all showcase frequent use of dissonance set against sections of lyrical beauty. The music sounds woven as much as composed, the words often unintelligible but functioning as threads within an overall sound picture that uses the voices of The Crossing in a wide variety of ways (only <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">From the Wingbone of a Swan</i> adds instruments to the vocal elements). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We Bloomed in Spring,</i> the shortest work here (under three minutes), is the most immediately affecting and reaches out most attractively; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alma Beata et Bella</i> also has much to recommend it, despite some over-reaching in the higher registers (although Donald Nally always keeps the voices well under control). The remaining pieces are all at least intermittently effective, although they tend to expand rather too far to remain convincing and involving. Hill, like Hall and Hawes, certainly shows skill in handling a vocal ensemble, and these works are pleasant if not especially engaging: Hill’s music will likely reach out with more impact to singers looking for something new to perform than to an audience hoping for a fully engaging listening experience.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Unlike many other contemporary composers of vocal music, Jonathan Santore (born 1963) roots his works firmly in the past, as is abundantly clear on a new Navona CD featuring eight pieces. The largest-scale of these by far is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Requiem: Learning to Fall,</i> for chorus, orchestra and solo mezzo-soprano (Emily Jaworski). In two parts and 12 short movements, this piece is essentially a meditation on the word <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">alleluia</i>and the well-known <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dies irae,</i> both of which elements pervade the music and recur again and again. They essentially represent a simplistic juxtaposition of light against dark, but the words of this <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Requiem,</i> which are not at all the traditional ones of the Requiem Mass, are used to provide a variety of paeans to life despite the work’s overall title. The effect is an intriguing one, and Santore’s striving for clarity of the vocal line makes the intent of this piece and its individual sections clear. The use of an orchestra broadens the texts, and the instrumentation is well handled. The same is true in a short piece called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Forgetting</i> that also uses chorus with orchestra: Santore’s writing for voices, like that of Hawes, emphasizes ease of communication with the audience and is largely tonal. Four of the remaining six pieces here are for chorus plus one or a few instruments: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Walden Recessional</i> includes a cello (Linda Galvan), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Return (Armistice Poems)</i> uses a piano (Dan Perkins), and there is a soprano saxophone (Rik Pfenninger) in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Love Always!</i> In addition, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">O Sweet Spontaneous Earth</i>includes a string trio: Eva Gruesser on violin, Daniel Doña on viola, and Leo Eguchi on cello. The remaining two works are for chorus alone: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kalevala Fragments,</i> its title inviting thoughts of Sibelius, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eight Gypsy Songs after Brahms,</i> whose reference to earlier compositions is obvious. Because Santore goes out of his way to make the clarity of the words central to his vocal writing, listeners’ reaction to these pieces will depend in large part on how they feel about the topics, whether the sylvan setting of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Walden Recessional</i> or the bittersweet World War I environment of the three poems in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Return.</i> Santore has a clear style of his own despite his indebtedness to earlier composers: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kalevala Fragments</i> actually sounds much like layered Gregorian chant, and despite its title, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eight Gypsy Songs after Brahms</i>has very little that is Brahmsian about it either thematically or musically. Much of the music here is intriguing and surprising, taking an audience’s ears in some unexpected directions and even, as in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The bronzed boy</i> (the second in the not-quite-Brahms cycle), in some genuinely unexpected ones. Listeners, even ones not especially enamored of modern vocal writing, will find a great deal of interest in these Santore works.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-66803792504403009862017-02-23T08:50:00.000-05:002017-03-01T10:58:19.611-05:00(++++) SMALL BUNDLES OF CUTENESS<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gossie &amp; Friends Say Good Night.</i> By Olivier Dunrea. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $8.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dot &amp; Jabber and the Big Bug Mystery.</i> By Ellen Stoll Walsh. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $12.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Folk Tale Classics: Cat Goes Fiddle-I-Fee.</i>By Paul Galdone. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $8.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Sometimes the whole point of a kids’ book comes through simply because of how adorable the characters are. Certainly the goslings in Olivier Dunrea’s stories about Gossie and her friends are as cute as can be. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gossie &amp; Friends Say Good Night</i> features them doing exactly what the title says – the aim being to help small humans go quietly and restfully to sleep, just as these small birds do. The book has no particular plot – all that happens is that Ollie walks around Old Farm and finds all the friends getting ready for bed and dropping off to sleep, each in his or her own place and own way. The book does, however, have a special feature that very young readers – or pre-readers, to whom it would be wonderful to read this slightly oversize board book – will especially enjoy: this is a “Touch-and-Feel” book, and most pages have something for small fingers to latch onto or stroke gently. For example, Ollie finds Gossie with her head all the way in her water bowl, getting a pre-bedtime drink – and kids can feel the smooth slipperiness of the bowl. After Gossie goes to sleep, covered by a sweet little green blanket, kids can feel the blanket’s velvety texture. They can also experience the slight roughness of the bark of the tree behind which Gertie snuggles up, and the stickiness of the spaghetti that BooBoo is having for a bedtime snack, and the mildly hay-like feeling of the haystack where Peedie sleeps, and more. After Ollie says good night to everyone, he goes to sleep as well, covered by a bright red blanket that, yes, can be felt (and feels like felt). There is not much story to this book, and there does not have to be: the engaging characters and the bonus of being able to touch and feel the illustrations make it a lovely little bedtime story.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>The lesson of the Dot and Jabber books is that science is interesting, and fun, and all around us. And the fact that Ellen Stoll Walsh’s “mouse detectives” are so adorable helps that lesson go down very smoothly indeed. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dot &amp; Jabber and the Big Bug Mystery</i> was originally published in 2003 and is now available as a “Green Light Reader” at the Level 2 stage, which indicates “reading with help” and is intended for first- and second-graders. The mystery that the detectives are trying to solve this time is one of disappearance: there are bugs all over the meadow until, suddenly, all of them are gone – they have turned invisible! And it is not only the insects that disappear – so does a toad that a rabbit says is right there but that the mice cannot see. Dot and Jabber have a feeling they are being watched, but from where? What clues will help them solve this mystery? Walsh soon has the mice learn about camouflage – and her illustrations are particularly well-done for the purpose, because kids will be able to see the missing creatures only if they look very carefully indeed at the pictures. Green butterflies really are almost completely invisible against the green grass here, and that missing toad looks so much like a rock that the only way the mice can be sure it isn’t one is by seeing it breathe. Lesson learned, the mice quickly apply it – or at least Jabber does, hiding in plain sight by lying down on some fur-matching dirt. A final page gives Walsh’s more-extensive but still age-appropriate explanation of how camouflage works and what purpose it serves, and the book as a whole may well whet kids’ appetite for more knowledge about animal behavior in general and ways of going unseen in particular.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>Sometimes, of course, cuteness is its own reward in kids’ books, and that is the case in the new edition of Paul Galdone’s version of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cat Goes Fiddle-I-Fee,</i> which is in the “Folk Tale Classics” collection but is really not much of a tale at all. It is one of those house-that-Jack-built narratives, with one thing added to another and the whole set of them repeated each time. The pleasantly warm illustrations follow the writing very closely, starting with the black-and-white cat looking up happily while drinking milk: “I had a cat and the cat pleased me,/ I fed my cat under yonder tree./ Cat goes fiddle-i-fee.” There are plenty of animals to be fed under yonder tree: hen (“chimmy-chuck”), duck (“quack”), goose (“swishy, swashy”), and so on until the tree is also the feeding place for a sheep, pig, cow, horse and dog. Eventually the grandmother of the boy who narrates the story feeds <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">him,</i> and the animals all take a nap under the tree – except for the cat, resting in a basket and still going “fiddle-i-fee.” More a nonsense verse or nursery rhyme than a story <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">per se,</i>the book – originally published in 1985 – is still a delightful read-aloud, its repetitions and eventual sleep scene even making it a possible bedtime book if the Gossie story is not quite right for a child. The interactions of the animals are pleasant and downplayed, and Galdone’s trademark insertion of added little visual elements to complement the basic narrative – a bird watching the sheep, a curious turtle looking up at the horse – will give kids plenty to look at while they enjoy the deliberately repetitive text. Parents should, however, be prepared for the inevitable question of what “fiddle-i-fee” actually means. In this case, it means a pleasurable reading experience.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14430080.post-71866872804327158102017-02-23T08:47:00.000-05:002017-02-23T08:47:00.169-05:00(++++) NOT QUITE FITTING IN<br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Duck, Duck, Dinosaur and the Noise at Night.</i> By Kallie George. Illustrated by Oriol Vidal. Harper. $17.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Samson: The Piranha Who Went to Dinner.</i> By Tadgh Bentley. Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins. $17.99.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>One of the most-common themes in children’s books is that it is fine to be yourself, and that even if you don’t seem to fit in, there will be others who will accept you just as you are. You may have to make a little extra effort, but it will be worth it. Spike, for instance, had to make an extra effort to fit in when Kallie George and Oriol Vidal introduced him in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Duck, Duck, Dinosaur.</i> He had to make that fitting-in effort quite literally, because when the ducks’ mother finished hatching her eggs, one of them turned out to be a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dinosaur</i> egg, and while Feather and Flap were normal enough in size for ducks, Spike was – well, he was normal enough for a dinosaur, but scarcely the right size for a duck’s nest! And so we come to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Duck, Duck, Dinosaur and the Noise at Night,</i> which starts as Mama Duck’s family grows too big for her nest – <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">much</i> too big, in Spike’s case. In fact, Spike is so huge that Vidal cannot fit all of him on one page when he first shows him in this book. Well, the three little ones, one of them a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gigantic</i> little one, have to give Mama Duck some room by moving into their own nest, so off they go to a resting place of their own, where they read and snuggle and fall happily asleep – until a giant-size noise startles them all: “GRRORE!” Scared, they all wake up and try to decide what to do – after all, they cannot just hide. Or, well, maybe they can. So they do – and when nothing terrible happens, they resume their bedtime rituals, fall asleep again, and then hear the same horrible noise another time! What can they do? They cannot just run away – or maybe they can. Well, they do, but running around makes them even sleepier, and they fall asleep again, and then…<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>Well, it is obvious where this is going, because sure enough, the noise comes back – but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">this</i> time the intrepid adventurers finally figure out what completely harmless thing is going on, and by now they are so tired that they do not need stories or snuggles or songs or anything except rest. So all ends happily, with the three little ones (including the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">huge</i> little one) sleeping peacefully under the watchful eye of nearby Mama Duck. The story is silly and thoroughly amusing, its “just be yourself and everything will be fine” moral is clear but suitably downplayed, and Spike is so endearing – Vidal draws him with gigantic head and enormous feet and essentially nothing in between – that kids will be eager to reread this adventure while awaiting the next one.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>A piranha named Samson learns to be himself, too, in Tadgh Bentley’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Samson: The Piranha Who Went to Dinner.</i> But it is not easy. Samson is all huge eyes and an extremely toothy smile, and unlike the other piranhas – who are content to sit around and watch TV and eat lots of fish – Samson has a hankering for fine dining. There is no particular reason for this – it is just Bentley’s way of showing how very different Samson is from the rest of his piranha family. Well, it just so happens that not one, not two, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">three</i> fine-dining restaurants are about to open nearby, and Samson knows he just <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">has</i>to get to them to try out some elegant dishes. So off he swims to Café Pierre, where his polite comment to a turtle waiter leads to an exclamation of “Salty Mother of Mackerel!” and an immediate emptying of the establishment. Obviously, Samson figures, he will never get fine food by being himself, so he dons a disguise and heads off to Linguine’s under the name of Samson P. Rana. Everything looks so good there that he breaks into a smile. A big smile. A big, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">toothy</i> smile. One scream of “Scaly Neptune’s Crabcakes!” and this restaurant too is completely empty. Poor Samson! Clearly he was not different <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">enough</i>from his real self – he needs a more-elaborate disguise. And sure enough, this gets him into the last of the fine-dining establishments. But unfortunately the disguise includes a hat, and when the helpful waiter removes it, the hat gets caught in the rest of the disguise, everything comes off, and “For the Love of Smoky Sea Bass!” But not quite <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">everyone</i>flees this time. It turns out that there are some <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">other</i> fearsome fish at the restaurant in disguise, and they too want a chance to enjoy some first-rate food. And that gives Samson an idea. They open their <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">own</i> fancy restaurant, and at the very end of the book, in a laugh-out-loud touch of illustrative silliness, it turns out that their food is so good that all the mild-mannered water dwellers disguise themselves as fierce fish so they can feel comfortable eating at the restaurant – which is suitably called “Big Bites.” So for Samson, as for so many central characters in kids’ books, being himself turns out to be exactly the right thing to do.</div>The Infodad Teamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05488937304837145011noreply@blogger.com0
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