Here are brief reviews from three recent concerts:

Delray String Quartet (Dec. 11, Colony Hotel, Delray Beach): This foursome is on something of a roll as it enters its eighth season of concertizing. Next month it will give the world premiere of the String Quartet No. 5 by Kenneth Fuchs, and will contribute that work to an all-Fuchs disc for Naxos.

It’s just released a second disc (a sampler of live performances from last season), and at the end of next year plans to offer a recording of the Grieg String Quartet and the Piano Quintet of Jean Sibelius, with pianist Tao Lin.

And with a new sponsorship from the Akerman Senterfitt law firm, the quartet is on the verge of a more muscular future. Last Sunday afternoon, it gave the last performance of its first program in a well-attended concert at the Colony Hotel in Delray Beach.

The guest for the afternoon was clarinetist Paul Green, who played the Clarinet Quintet (in B-flat, Op. 34) of Carl Maria von Weber. Clarinetists would be considerably worse off without Weber’s works for clarinet, and this piece is essentially a chamber concerto, with the strings mostly playing accompaniment as the clarinet leaps athletically over the soundscape.

Green played with alacrity and fluid technique, with plenty of impressive, pearly runs throughout the range of the instrument. The very top of the register was sometimes pinched and shrill, but he made up for that with a big, pretty tone in the slow movement.

The second half was devoted to the String Quartet No. 1 (in E minor) of Bedrich Smetana, titled From My Life. This is a repeat work for the Delrays, and this season it got a very well-drilled, solid performance, with good work from violist Richard Fleischman to get the piece off to an impassioned start. Cellist Claudio Jaffe played his yearning intro to the slow movement beautifully, and violinists Mei Mei Luo and Tomas Cotik played with force and vigor.

Although this was an impressive, accurate reading of this fine work of late Romanticism, overall it was perhaps played too aggressively. Each movement was hammered home, and though there were lovely spots of tenderness and contrast in moments such as the rustic Trio of the second movement, in general things were hard-edged and ferocious; it was effective and exciting, but rather too rough.

The concert closed with a very effective arrangement (by a Briton who goes by J. Nurse) of the overture to Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow. It was strong enough to implant Vilja in one’s head for hours afterward, and it was a certified crowd pleaser Sunday.

It may be that this lineup of the quartet, with Cotik in his second season, will be the one to carry it to the next level. The group seems to have gotten past some of its earlier bumpiness and is starting to think of itself as an ensemble that can do bigger things than heretofore. This will be the season to watch for fans of the Delray String Quartet.

Seraphic Fire (Dec. 7, St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church, Boca Raton): There’s almost no end to the great corpus of old and new music for the Christmas season, and last week Seraphic Fire presented its usual eclectic mix of the fresh and familiar for its O Holy Night program of holiday fare.

The Miami concert choir learned earlier this month that it had been nominated for two Grammy Awards, one for its recording of the London version of the Brahms German Requiem, and the other for its first Christmas album (a second one is being done this month). A lot therefore is riding on this current season of concerts to cement that reputation, and so far, so good.

Prominent on the Dec. 7 program at St. Gregory’s, its new Boca Raton home, were new pieces by Steven Sametz and two fresh arrangements by Seraphic Fire founder Patrick Dupré Quigley. The Sametz piece, Nino de Rosas, from Three Mystical Choruses, is getting its Florida premiere in the Seraphic Fire concerts for Christmas, and it features the kind of pungent harmony and stark dramatic setting familiar from this composer’s other choral works. Soloist Lexa Ferrill, a mezzo-soprano, has a characterful quality to her singing, but there was a bit too much vibrato here for my taste, though the piece itself was compelling and well-crafted.

As usual with Seraphic Fire, Quigley made good use of the space, working by candlelight (and LEDs for the music books choristers carried) for the first segment, and bringing in his singers from the back of the church as they sang Preces and Responses by the 17^th-century English composer William Smith. Between those two was Steven Paulus’ Hymn to the Eternal Flame, and after the Responses came Thomas Tallis’ Glory to Thee, My God, This Night, and Quigley’s adaptation of the David Willcocks arrangement of O Come, All Ye Faithful (with the famous descant intact).

All of the concert was like this, with songs done back to back in discrete sections. It had a wonderful way of making the music sound equally persuasive, especially sung this beautifully, with a smooth vocal sheen over everything and contemporary music handled as ably as that of the Renaissance, which was represented here by a lovely reading of Victoria’s O Magnum Mysterium.

Other standouts include a touching Little Child in a Manger, by the contemporary Canadian composer Stephen Chatman, and Seraphic Fire’s now-familiar treatment of Elizabeth Poston’s Jesus Christ the Apple Tree as a 13-part canon sung from throughout the nave by the choir members. Mezzo-soprano Misty Bermudez was the soloist in the closing O Holy Night, arranged by Quigley in a way that at first echoed the bare-bones sound of much of the music on the concert. Bermudez’s voice was rich and full, and Quigley ended his interesting arrangement unusually, in a blaze of fortissimo glory.

Yoonjung Han (Dec. 4, Steinway Gallery Boca Raton): Earlier this month, the South Korean-born pianist Yoonjung Han played the Dame Myra Hess memorial recital series in Chicago, a prestigious series that has introduced rising pianists to a Chicago-area audience in the hall and over WFMT radio.

Three days before, local audiences got to hear Han’s work at the Steinway Gallery in Boca Raton, a return appearance for her this year, after a recital at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Boca last season.

Han, who turns 27 next month, began with Federico Mompou’s Variations on a Theme of Chopin, in which the Catalan composer takes the little Prelude in A (Op. 28, No. 7) through a delicious set of reworkings. She played them beautifully, finding particular warmth in the fourth variation, with its langorous tonal language and sense of bittersweet melancholy.

She brought that same sensibility to more Spanish music, two of the Goyescas (Los requiebros and El amor y la muerte) of Enrique Granados, where even in the more extravagant pages Han had control of the music she was making, infusing it with a fine feeling for Spanish color. She was just as persuasive in the Godowsky reworking of Albéniz’s Tango in D, from his España (Op. 165).

Han also played the Beethoven Sonata No. 28 (in A, Op. 101), which came off a shade carefully. Her Classical textures are very clear and clean, particularly in the fugal passages of the finale. While the short slow movement was darkly pretty, the preceding March needed a bit more abandon, some more force and Beethoven-style coarse wit. That would have made a stronger contrast with the discursiveness of the opening movement and given the music more shape.

Still, this was highly attractive playing, and she returned to the same tradition with pleasing effect in one of her encores, the slow movement of the big E-flat Sonata (No. 52, Hob.XVI: 52) of Haydn. She captured the fantasia element of this music admirably, with a wide range of nuance and shade, and a little rush in the descending thirds that brought the listener’s attention to bear on the music’s drama.

For her second and final encore, Han performed La Campanella, Liszt’s fiery etude on the theme from the finale of Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 2. Han unleashed the fireworks for this piece, demonstrating not just excellent fingerwork but also that she has those virtuoso capabilities in her arsenal.

It was refreshing to get a good piece of bravura after a lot of introspection in Han’s program, and she seems partial to the dreamier, deeply Romantic part of the repertory. She makes a fine champion of Mompou and Spanish composers, but quite a good Classicist, too. When she comes back again, it’d be good to hear her do some earlier Haydn and Beethoven, perhaps even some Mozart, and to see whether she can bring the kind of depth she brought to Mompou to another side of her art.

By Tom Tracy

Walking into the main gallery of the Palm Beach Photographic Centre this month might best be described as a large-scale Rorschach test designed to reveal something about your own Freudian mindscape.

That’s because through the end of the year the Photographic Center on Clemetis Street is hosting Images of Science, an exhibit of 40 photos from scientific research done by Max Planck-affiliated researchers.

The images are presented as large 40x40-inch prints of colorful and exotic shapes and forms created through macro and microscopic photography and other imaging technologies in the worlds of science and industry.

Every year, Germany’s Max Planck Society asks scientists from their 80 institutes and research facilities to provide images of their research that are then juried by a panel of architects, photographers and journalists.

Winning photos are included in the exhibition that has traveled to museums and embassies in Germany, Austria and Thailand. Thus far there have been three rounds of the competition as the show makes it way around the globe.

“There is one photo that looks like Martians to me; I think it was actually a picture of blood cells,” said Fatime NeJame, executive director of the Photographic Centre, which collaborated with the Jupiter-based Max Planck Florida Foundation to present the free exhibit through Dec. 30.

Images of Science represents a first for the Photographic Centre in terms of science and biological research photography and should strike a chord with the Centre’s community supporters and students, many of whom specialize in nature photography and abstract photography based the natural world.

“When you look at these images and realize how important compositions is for photographers — the attention to detail and placement of the subject and lighting is great; you end up with these amazing images that have a lot of impact,” NeJame said.

High-powered microscopic photography reveals a hidden universe when the lens is turned on leaf hairs, nerve cells in mammals, tiny silicon nanowires on a wafer of gold, or a beetle’s feet, And a computer-generated image of a planetary nebula reconstructed from conventional photography.

The spectrum of technologies used is broad. It includes conventional photography, color-added microscopy — light microscopy, electron microscopy, low-temperature scanning tunneling microscopy, confocal laser scanning microscopy — and computer simulations, according to organizers.

The Photographic Centre has invited select groups of local school children and others interested in science and medicine to come tour the exhibition this month, according to NeJame.

“I have four or five favorites. There is one that is multicolored and it looks like buoys in the water, beautifully composed,” she said. “Another looks like a landscape and it reminds me of a mountain range in Turkey. In probably about You look at the different 30 percent of them I can identify them with something else: flowers or things.”

The images not only “make the invisible visible,” but they put a face on scientific processes that have an enormous impact on all our lives, according to Claudia Hillinger, president of the Max Planck Florida Foundation.

As an example, Hillinger points to one of the images in the exhibit, which captures how a particular type of white blood cells, neutrophils, act almost as “linebackers” in our immune system. The cells literally devour harmful bacteria and can also cast out fibrous structures like nets to catch bacteria and kill them outside of the cell.

“This image actually shows a shigella bacteria caught in the net of neutrophils. It’s an amazing thing to be able to see our own bodies working to protect us on a cellular level,” she said.

Hillinger has been honored at a local Women Pioneers in Florida Business event and is based at Max Planck’s first scientific research facility in the United States — the 100,000-square-foot Max Planck Florida Institute on the MacArthur campus of Florida Atlantic University in Jupiter.

The Foundation is the philanthropic arm of the Max Planck research institute, and its mission, including the photo exhibition, is to create awareness of the company’s work, research and its application.

“By doing so, we hope to find a strong network of supporters that will help us continue to carry on this work that might revolutionize our understanding of the brain, how neural networks form, and how we can address neurological and psychiatric disorders and diseases,” Hillinger said.

One of her own favorites is a photograph showing the crystallization processes in liquid films, but the image resembles perhaps a painting by Vincent van Gogh. Another, titled Starry Night, was made with an electron microscope and shows salt droplets embedded in a gelatinous structure.

“They invite us to look at the world with different eyes and in new ways, and in doing so broaden our perception, Hillinger said. “Then the spectator transcends the boundary between science and art. And that is exactly what we hope to achieve.”

Images of Science, through Dec. 30 at the Palm Beach Photographic Centre, 415 S. Clematis St., West Palm Beach. Ehibition hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Thursday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Admission is free. Call 253-2600 or visit www.fotofusion.org for more information.

In the world of Madama Butterfly, it’s all about her, with the occasional supporting character coming in now and again to move the plot along.

But Palm Beach Opera’s current presentation of Giacomo Puccini’s Japanese opera is noteworthy for the strength of its supporting cast overall, and with a fine performance at its center plus a tasteful, intelligent staging, this Butterfly provides a most enjoyable night at the theater, and a memorable way for the company to open its 50th season.

On Friday night at the Kravis Center, the Italian soprano Maria Luigia Borsi showed why she’s been acclaimed for her work as Cio-Cio San in other opera houses. She has a powerful, if not huge, voice, with an admirable technique that allowed her to have plenty of firepower when it came to the final pages. She sang well throughout this hugely demanding part, and aside from a slightly wobbly high D-flat at her first entrance, her work was accurate, smooth and compelling.

Her Un bel dì in Act II was lovely, with a careful, focused performance of the first bars that matched the orchestra almost as though she were in the pit with the musicians, and she unfolded her character’s dream-world conviction slowly, precisely and inexorably, ending with a firm grasp of the two final high B-flats. In the Act I love duet, she sang with warmth and tenderness, and when at times she sang about her happiness, she gave the world felice an endearing sweetness.

She proved to be a fine actress as well, working within the confines of director Ron Daniels’ very clear idea of what kind of story this is. Borsi is distinctly not a modern Butterfly who boldly makes her own choices, and her actions always were circumscribed by the tradition out of which a young girl in a rigid imperial society would act. By that I mean that her movements were boxed-in, but deliberately so, and her reading of the character had a sense of inevitable doom about it that added to its exoticism and made the East-West contrast, and the subsequent misunderstanding, more palpable.

As Pinkerton, the tenor James Valenti was often good, with a clarion voice in his first entrances and in the Dovunque al mondo, as well as the Addio, fiorito asil in the final act. But his singing was spotty otherwise, retreating from its upper notes in the middle of Act I and rather underpowered in the Stolta paura, when it should be all hormonal systems go. He’s a handsome man, and his cowardice in the last act was persuasive, but he would have been more impressive had the voice remained solid (the audience, it should be said, gave him affectionate boos along with the applause, proof that his caddishness had hit the mark).

Two of the supporting voices were exceptionally fine, beginning with baritone Michael Chioldi as Sharpless. Here was a consul who made an impact in every one of the acts, and this is the first time I can remember thinking I wish Puccini had written some more for Sharpless to do. Chioldi has a big, rich voice that stood equal in his exchanges with Borsi and Valenti, and if his acting was a little stiff, his singing gave the character real presence, and that did a lot to help fill out the drama.

Mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts was just as good as Suzuki, blending beautifully with Borsi during the petals scene of Act II, and singing with force and command in all of her appearances. A Japanese-American, Roberts has a large, dark instrument that gave Suzuki poignancy and heft, and her movements across the stage perfectly underlined the nature of her character’s relationship to Cio-Cio San: a servant, but not servile, and in the end, a loving friend. Friday night’s audience gave Chioldi and Roberts warm and well-deserved applause.

The Korean tenor Julius Ahn gave this Butterfly a well-acted, well-sung Goro; here again was a big, impressive voice in a smaller role that widened our appreciation of the whole story. Kenneth Stavert, a returning Young Artist, showed a darker side to his sturdy voice as Yamadori, and the Romanian baritone Valentin Vasiliu was a decent Bonze. Also, the Canadian-Iranian mezzo Shirin Eskandani demonstrated an attractive vocal quality during her few lines as Kate Pinkerton.

This was a very pretty production, with beautiful sets and costumes from the San Francisco Opera. Everything was set amid large sliding screens that were pulled in and out by kurogo, the traditional masked Japanese stagehands, a wonderful touch. The Abraham Lincoln returned to port as a huge backdrop in Act II, and Steven Strawbridge’s canny lighting saw it change color and shape during the Humming Chorus and the transition to Act III.

And something should be said about the excellence of that transition. Too few stage directors in my experience trust Puccini’s original instinct (drawing from David Belasco) to not break the action between what are now Acts II and III, and which originally was just a large Act II. But if you keep it unbroken, like Daniels does here, it works perfectly. Borsi stood absolutely still, staring through a hole in the screen, for the 15 or so minutes from the beginning of the Humming Chorus (here performed pianissimo throughout) to the point at which the action of the act proper begins.

The result was a seamless, moving, almost claustrophobic sense of expectation that was only gently interrupted, an ideal way to suggest an overlong wait that ends in sleep and disappointment. And by keeping the movements of his actors highly controlled and never manic, he suggests at once ancient Japanese drama and a fairy tale, and that makes for a most evocative combination. The only thing that didn’t quite work was Butterfly’s suicide; a slashing of the throat seems anticlimactic, especially after we have seen Goro mime the seppuku that took her father’s life.

The Palm Beach Opera Orchestra under Bruno Aprea was first-rate, with a muscular, vivid approach to this brilliant score that also gave the opera a booster shot of dramatic juice. Aprea, among the most energetic of conductors, perhaps pushed the love duet a little too quickly, and the very ending of the piece could have been stretched just a tad to make it sink in. This is also a demanding score, in particular for the horns, who played beautifully.

The women of the chorus did fine work, and looked wonderful, during the Act I wedding scene, and Daniels’ tableau right before the arrival of the Bonze looked straight out of an Impressionist painting of a garden party.

This is a Madama Butterfly that is culturally aware as well as theatrically savvy, and while Borsi makes an excellent CIo-Cio San, this is a production that is less dependent on the title character as its prime mover, and in that, we have a deeper theatrical experience.

Madama Butterfly will be performed tonight at 7:30 with the Canadian soprano Michele Capalbo as Cio-Cio San and the Puerto Rican tenor Rafael Davila as Pinkerton. Borsi and Valenti return Sunday afternoon at 2 for the third and final performance. All shows are at the Kravis Center. Call 833-7888 or the Kravis at 832-7469 for tickets, or visit www.pbopera.org or www.kravis.org.

Art: The Norton Museum of Art is currently showing a major exhibit of works by one of the most highly regarded British artists of our day, Jenny Saville. She’s best known for her work featuring female nudes, but many of her works are drawn from her studies of plastic surgery, generating pictures whose painterly strokes remind the viewer of Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. The Norton’s show features 28 canvases from 1992 through the present, and is the first exhibit in the museum’s new Recognition of Art by Women (RAW) series. The show runs through March 4. Call 832-5196 or visit www.norton.org.

Opera: The Palm Beach Opera gets its first show of the season off to a popular start tonight with Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, which was the second most frequently staged opera in the States last season (Puccini’s La Boheme was first). Ron Daniels directs this production, which stars the Italian soprano Maria Luigia Borsi as Cio-Cio San tonight and Sunday afternoon, paired with tenor James Valenti as Pinkerton. On Saturday night, Canadian soprano Michele Capalbo sings with Puerto Rican tenor Rafael Davila. Irene Roberts, a former Young Artists member, sings Suzuki. Expect the tears to flow as Butterfly realizes the truth about the cad she married. Curtain is 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday, at the Kravis Center. Call 833-7888 for tickets or more information.

Film: There are many ways to extend the life of beloved characters. While Robert Downey, Jr. continues to stomp on the grave of Arthur Conan Doyle by turning Sherlock Holmes into an action hero, consider instead the more cerebral way Spanish director Mateo Gil gives additional life to the Old West’s Butch Cassidy. In his film Blackthorn, playing at Boca Raton’s Living Room Theaters this week, it seems Butch survived that Bolivian shootout and is now a lion in winter, an old, white bearded man played by craggy Sam Shepard, eager to return to the United States to live out his final days. To do so, he teams up with a local robber (Eduardo Noreiga) for, yes, one last heist. The plot may not bristle with originality, but the characters and performances carry the day.

Theater: What, you still have not been to Palm Beach Dramaworks’ new, gorgeously renovated theater at Clematis and Narcissus in downtown West Palm Beach? This is your final weekend to catch their rightfully acclaimed production of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, a look at the dark side of the American Dream, soon after the end of World War II. For as layers of lies are stripped away from airplane parts plant owner Joe Keller -- played with emotional gusto by Kenneth Tigar -- we learn how his eagerness to provide for his family may have led him to cut corners and ship defective goods overseas. J. Barry Lewis directs with an awareness of the impact of mounting tension. Continuing through Sunday. Call (561) 514-4042.

Music: This weekend at St. Paul’s, the Camerata del Re ensemble celebrates the Christmas season with a look at the music of the American colonies. In addition to pieces from New England and the Carolinas, there will be Christmas music from California, Mexico, Cuba, Guatemala and South America (Paraguay, Brazil, Peru and Bolivia). It’s part of the church’s annual Festival of Lessons and Carols, but it also provides a fresh, inventive way to look at the season, and to remind us of the wealth of arts activity going on centuries ago when so few people outside it were paying any attention. For the procession, the Camerata will perform the Peruvian Juan Perez de Bocanegra’s Hanacpachap Cussicuinin, a hymn from 1631 in the Quecha language of the Incas, and the first piece of harmonized choral music to be published in the New World. The service begins at 3 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free. Call 278-6003 or visit www.stpaulsdelray.org.

Fortunately for all concerned, Stephen Sondheim’s Look, I Made a Hat is not a treatise on the art of millinery.

Instead, it is the sequel to Finishing the Hat, the pre-eminent American theater composer-lyricist’s compilation and consideration of his career, divided into two volumes and filled with nuggets of insight. Or, as he prefers to put it in his subtitle, “Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany.” Indeed.

As Sondheim’s legions of fans -- of which I unabashedly count myself -- could explain to the puzzled, Finishing the Hat is a central musical number in his 1985 Pulitzer Prize winner, Sunday in the Park with George, a statement in song by post-impressionist pointillist painter George Seurat of his obsessive creative process. Painstakingly, he applies dots of paint to canvas until the eye perceives it as a chapeau, Hence, the song’s concluding line and the book sequel’s title, “Look, I made a hat.”

Sondheim divides his career more for ease of lifting the individual volumes instead of inducing hernias with one heavy tome. But there was a distinct tonal shift for him in 1981, caused primarily by the extended suspension of his collaboration with director Harold Prince (Company, Follies, Sweeney Todd and the contentious, quick-folding Merrily We Roll Along) and his embarking on a very different professional partnership with librettist-director James Lapine (Sunday in the Park…, Into the Woods, Passion).

True, Sondheim has more shows to his credit in the first “half” of his career (the briefer 1954-1981), so he pads the second volume -- still fascinating, mind you -- with such miscellany as his movie work (a brothel madam’s solo from The Seven Percent Solution, the score for Dick Tracy, which netted him an Oscar for the languorous Sooner or Later, two barely used numbers for The Birdcage and several intricately conceived songs for the lamentably unproduced Singing Out Loud, which was to be directed by Rob Reiner).

Other included footnotes to his career include Sondheim’s work for television, the most major of which is the hourlong musical Evening Primrose, the tale of a man who escapes from the world to a new life inside a department store. From it comes such cabaret fixtures as I Remember and Take Me to the World. Hailing from 1966, it is out of place chronologically, but since it did not make the cut into the first volume, we will take it -- and Sondheim’s recollections of the program’s genesis -- any way we can get them.

It would be sufficient if Sondheim had merely collected and published his lyrics, the final scores plus the various interim versions and numbers deleted along the precarious road to Broadway. But as he did previously, he pauses, often mid-song, to emphasize a creative impulse, explain a word choice, underline a hair-splitting intention or otherwise muse on recalled anguish as he wrote. The result is again a highly personal tutorial on the history of the musical theater of the past almost 60 years.

But before the reader can get to class, there are the inside covers of the book, which contain Sondheim’s three deceptively simple guiding principles:

Less Is More

Content Dictates Form

God Is in the Details

As we will learn, had he only followed those three tenets more carefully on his most recent narrative musical, Road Show (and its precursors, Wise Guys, Gold! and Bounce), he could have saved himself a lot of grief and certainly some of the 14 years of his life going through three directors, three out-of-town tryouts and six actors in the two leading roles for a show -- about the Mizner brothers of Palm Beach -- that never opened on Broadway. Or at least, hasn’t yet.

One needs to dive headfirst into the text notes amid the lyrics, but here are a choice nuggets (of trivia) to be found there:

* Once per show, Sondheim says he cries at his own work “and Animal Planet, often.”

* Into the Woods, a musical based on scrambling several Grimm fairy tales and considering the consequences of “happily ever after,” began instead with an idea of scrambling television shows.

* The song I Guess This Is Goodbye that Jack sings to his pet cow in Into the Woods is, according to Sondheim, the only song he has written without any rhyme at all.

* In the midst of the discussion of Assassins, he writes, “Audacious is an inch away from smart ass, as Anyone Can Whistle proved.” Doctoral theses have been based on less.

* The show that Sondheim says comes the closest to his expectations for it is … Assassins.

* Sondheim almost wrote a musical of Sunset Boulevard, until the film’s writer-director Billy Wilder casually mentioned that the subject matter required kit to be an opera (an art form Sondheim never warmed to). Then, he adds, “someone eventually wrote it” and Wilder was proven right.

* When Sondheim and John Weidman wrote Road Show/Bounce/Gold!/etc., it saved him from dealing with Weidman’s idea of a musical about the League of Nations. Oy.

Also sprinkled throughout the book are sidebar essays on such topics as reviewers (he is dismissive, but reasonably dispassionately so), awards (he finds them fairly useless unless they come attached to cash) and revivals (most notably a revelatory production of Passion that changed the show’s focus because of one startling performance). And while he promises early on some comments about other lyricists that should “generate enough irritation to go around” -- as certain opinions in the first volume did -- either he is in a much more mellow mood this time or he is withholding his more disdainful views.

As much as I treasure the glimpse into Sondheim’s mind that these two books represent, they also signify to me a large amount of time that might have been better spent writing another musical.

In Look, I Made a Hat, he ruminates over whether he is running out of inventive steam at the age of 80-plus. In his epilogue, he commends to his readers with a creative impulse Phyllis McGinley’s poem, Love Note to a Playwright, calling it “as important a piece of advice as you’ll ever get,” adding “if I’d listened to it the way I think every artist should, I wouldn’t have written these books, I’d have written a couple of musicals instead.”

At least his final words here are the heartening, “Time to start another hat.”

Look, I Made a Hat, by Stephen Sondheim. Knopf, 453 pages, $45.