For Your Consideration: 'Antarctica: A Year on Ice'

Antarctica: A Year on Ice, directed by Anthony Powell

Scientific studies continue to show that the world's warming seas are contributing to an accelerated melting of the Antarctic glaciers. Although Anthony Powell's new documentary, Antarctica: A Year on Ice, is not mainly about this phenomenon, it is a visually beautiful study of human habitation on the southern ice cap. Powell and his wife live in Antarctica -- not just in the summer when most researchers are there, but throughout the year. This small film, funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, was made over the course of ten years there, a glimpse into what people who spend the harsh winter in Antarctica have to go through -- "a wild and lonely winter few will ever experience," as Powell puts it in his narration.

The innovative part of the film is the time-lapse video of this most cruel landscape, captured at the cost of wearing out "thousands of dollars of camera gear." The effect it produces is often stunning, like the 360-degree continuous shot that follows the never-setting summer sun as it seems to revolve around McMurdo Station; ice freezing or unfreezing in the bay; the aurora australis flickering in the sky; or the supply ship unloading a year's worth of supplies before the winter residents are marooned on the ice for a period of near-total darkness for the Antarctic winter. The people who choose to remain there in such conditions are a special breed, and Powell focuses mainly on the ins and outs of their life in isolation from the rest of the world.

Other Reviews: New York Times | Washington Post | Los Angeles Times NPR | Village Voice | Hollywood Reporter

What they undergo is extraordinary in one sense. Antarctica is larger than the United States, and the number of people remaining year-long is less than a thousand. It is desolate: as Powell puts it, "there are still places there where no human has ever set foot." The most harrowing passages are taken during the terrifying hurricane-like storms that sweep across the ice in the winter, with winds so strong that snow is forced through tiny cracks in structures and vehicles, completely filling them with snow. At one point, someone throws a cup of boiling water out the window, to show how it is instantly transformed into icy vapor in the extreme cold. Interviews with people during the winter and footage of what they do for most of the time reveal a drab, confining life, as well as the kooky things they do to keep things interesting. One of these folks muses about the international cooperation on Antarctica, one of the few places in the world where countries actually work together, in accordance with the Antarctic Treaty, to preserve this unusual place for scientific research. If only we could do the same in other parts of the world.

This film opens today at Landmark's E Street Cinema.

Rilling with NSO

Bach, Advent and Christmas Cantatas, Gächinger Cantorei, Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, H. Rilling (Haenssler Classics, 2009)

Charles T. Downey, Helmuth Rilling returns to NSO with sweet gifts of Bach
Washington Post, November 25, 2014

Over the past decade, Helmuth Rilling has taken the podium of the National Symphony Orchestra every two or three years, generally for a grand choral work around Easter: Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” in 2012, Haydn’s “Creation” in 2009 and Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” in 2006. And if the esteemed German conductor, now in his early 80s, has become associated with one composer, it is Bach, to whose music he returned in his latest program with the NSO, heard Thursday night at the Kennedy Center.

Rilling is often cast as a modern-instrument traditionalist on the levee that holds back the flood of historically informed performance ensembles. But his take on the opening work of this concert, Bach’s third orchestral suite, suggested that Rilling has been listening to his early-music colleagues and has even adopted their best ideas... [Continue reading]

National Symphony Orchestra
With Helmuth Rilling, conductor
Music of Bach
Kennedy Center Concert Hall

À mon chevet: 'Une fille d'Ève'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

On the gloom of this life one sole figure of a man, that of a music-master, stood vigorously forth. The confessors had decided that music was a Christian art, born of the Catholic Church and developed within her. The two Maries were therefore permitted to study music. A spinster in spectacles, who taught singing and the piano in a neighboring convent, wearied them with exercises; but when the eldest girl was ten years old, the Comte de Granville insisted on the importance of giving her a master. Madame de Granville gave all the value of conjugal obedience to this needed concession,--it is part of a dévote's character to make a merit of doing her duty.

The master was a Catholic German; one of those men born old, who seem all their lives fifty years of age, even at eighty. And yet, his brown, sunken, wrinkled face still kept something infantile and artless in its dark creases. The blue of innocence was in his eyes, and a gay smile of springtide abode upon his lips. His iron-gray hair, falling naturally like that of the Christ in art, added to his ecstatic air a certain solemnity which was absolutely deceptive as to his real nature; for he was capable of committing any silliness with the most exemplary gravity. His clothes were a necessary envelope, to which he paid not the slightest attention, for his eyes looked too high among the clouds to concern themselves with such materialities. This great unknown artist belonged to the kindly class of the self-forgetting, who give their time and their soul to others, just as they leave their gloves on every table and their umbrella at all doors. His hands were of the kind that are dirty as soon as washed. In short, his old body, badly poised on its knotted old legs, proving to what degree a man can make it the mere accessory of his soul, belonged to those strange creations which have been properly depicted only by a German,--by Hoffman, the poet of that which seems not to exist but yet has life.

Such was Schmucke, formerly chapel-master to the Margrave of Anspach; a musical genius, who was now examined by a council of dévotes, and asked if he kept the fasts. The master was much inclined to answer, "Look at me!" but how could he venture to joke with pious dowagers and Jansenist confessors? This apocryphal old fellow held such a place in the lives of the two Maries, they felt such friendship for the grand and simple-minded artist, who was happy and contented in the mere comprehension of his art, that after their marriage, they each gave him an annuity of three hundred francs a year,--a sum which sufficed to pay for his lodging, beer, pipes, and clothes. Six hundred francs a year and his lessons put him in Eden. Schmucke had never found courage to confide his poverty and his aspirations to any but these two adorable young girls, whose hearts were blooming beneath the snow of maternal rigor and the ice of devotion. This fact explains Schmucke and the girlhood of the two Maries.

No one knew then, or later, what abbé or pious spinster had discovered the old German then vaguely wandering about Paris, but as soon as mothers of families learned that the Comtesse de Granville had found a music-master for her daughters, they all inquired for his name and address. Before long, Schmucke had thirty pupils in the Marais. This tardy success was manifested by steel buckles to his shoes, which were lined with horse-hair soles, and by a more frequent change of linen. His artless gaiety, long suppressed by noble and decent poverty, reappeared. He gave vent to witty little remarks and flowery speeches in his German-Gallic patois, very observing and very quaint and said with an air which disarmed ridicule. But he was so pleased to bring a laugh to the lips of his two pupils, whose dismal life his sympathy had penetrated, that he would gladly have made himself willfully ridiculous had he failed in being so by nature.

According to one of the nobler ideas of religious education, the young girls always accompanied their master respectfully to the door. There they would make him a few kind speeches, glad to do anything to give him pleasure. Poor things! all they could do was to show him their womanhood. Until their marriage, music was to them another life within their lives, just as, they say, a Russian peasant takes his dreams for reality and his actual life for a troubled sleep. With the instinct of protecting their souls against the pettiness that threatened to overwhelm them, against the all-pervading asceticism of their home, they flung themselves into the difficulties of the musical art, and spent themselves upon it. Melody, harmony, and composition, three daughters of heaven, whose choir was led by an old Catholic faun drunk with music, were to these poor girls the compensation of their trials; they made them, as it were, a rampart against their daily lives. Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Paisiello, Cimarosa, Haydn, and certain secondary geniuses, developed in their souls a passionate emotion which never passed beyond the chaste enclosure of their breasts, though it permeated that other creation through which, in spirit, they winged their flight. When they had executed some great work in a manner that their master declared was almost faultless, they embraced each other in ecstasy and the old man called them his Saint Cecilias.

-- Honoré de Balzac, A Daughter of Eve (translation by Katharine Prescott Wormeley)

Balzac filled La Comédie Humaine with so many endearing small characters. The childhood of "the two Maries," the two daughters of the Comte de Granville, Marie-Angélique and Marie-Eugénie, is kept dreary and devoid of all worldly influence by their religiously zealous mother. Only the less than imposing figure of their music teacher, Wilhelm Schmucke, allows one ray of light, listening to and performing music, into their lives. Although the girls remain devoted to Schmucke, his greatest concern in life is his friend and roommate, Sylvain Pons, who loves music, fine food, and art collecting, the last of those passions being the focus of another Balzac book, Le Cousin Pons. Balzac makes quite clear the nature of the two men's relationship, referring to them as living like a married couple. Pons even manages to leave his wealth and extensive art collection to Schmucke, and eventually the two friends are buried next to each other in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise, where Balzac himself is buried.

On Forbes: The Met's Klinghoffer Brouhaha

“The verdict was in, right after the premiere: The Death of Klinghoffer, John Adams’ opera that was performed at the MET to vociferous and heated, if small, protests (amply supplemented by local politicians) on October 20, is not an anti-semitic work.

Not a particularly surprising verdict, actually—that much was known already and we needn’t feign surprise now. This alleged anti-semitism had been a non-issue when it was first performed in Brussels (in 1991). Nor had it been an issue on the subsequent performances in New York (Brooklyn Academy of Music, also 1991), or Philadelphia (Curtis, 2005), or this very production’s earlier performance in London (English National Opera, early 2012). The only story in the Klinghoffer-controversy is that it became a story at all...

Continue reading here, at Forbes.com

Classical Music Agenda (February 2015)

Concert tickets make an excellent Christmas gift. Here are the ten performances we most want to hear in the month of February.

Schubert, Winterreise, I. Bostridge, L. O. Andsnes (EMI, 2004)

VOICES:
Tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Julius Drake take a walk in the snow with a performance of Schubert's Winterreise, in a free concert at the Library of Congress (February 7). For a lot more money and perhaps not better results, super-diva Renée Fleming performs a recital, presented by Washington Performing Arts in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall (February 23). Her program will include works by Handel, Richard Strauss, Debussy, and others.

Dolora Zajick, Elizabeth Bishop, and Alan Held star in the production of Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites at Washington National Opera (February 21 to March 10). The opera will be sung in English, which is a little weird, and Francesca Zambello will direct, hopefully not with the onstage executions she has turned to before.

CHAMBER MUSIC:
Do not miss the recital by violinist Isabelle Faust and pianist Alexander Melnikov (February 8) at the Phillips Collection, with music by Franck, Dvořák, Enescu, and Tchaikovsky. One of our favorite string quartets, the Jerusalem Quartet, performs music by Haydn, Schulhoff, and Schubert at Shriver Hall in Baltimore (February 15).

Schubert, Death and the Maiden, Jerusalem Quartet (Harmonia Mundi, 2008)

If you missed the local debut of the Quatuor Hermès, you have two more chances to hear them play: on the Candlelight Concert Society series in Columbia (February 21) and at the Embassy of France (February 26).

SYMPHONY:
Matthias Pintscher conducts his own music, plus that of Fauré and Ravel, with the National Symphony Orchestra (February 19 to 21). Music for the theater -- the Pelléas et Mélisande Suite and Daphnis et Chloé -- is paired with the U.S. premiere of Mar'eh, Pintscher's new violin concerto, with Karen Gomyo as soloist.

Charles Dutoit makes a welcome return to Washington, this time in a concert with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, presented by Washington Performing Arts in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall (February 21). The program includes Debussy's Iberia, Ravel's La Valse, and Stravinsky's Le chant du rossignol, plus Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini with Nikolai Lugansky as soloist.

OTHER:
Actors Derek Jacobi and Richard Clifford are back for another Shakespeare affair with the Folger Consort. After The Tempest in 2010 and A Midsummer Night's Dream in 2007, this time it will be The Merchant of Venice (February 27), with the Gabrieli Consort joining the Folger Consort in the Music Center at Strathmore.

We would never miss a local performance by the Mark Morris Dance Group, and the next one will feature the choreography set to music by Lou Harrison and Mendelssohn, at the GMU Center for the Arts (February 28 and March 1). Morris insists on his dancers performing to live music, which is one of the reasons why we can always recommend the group's performances.

See the complete calendar after the jump.

Read more »

On Forbes: 11 Recordings To Remember Lorin Maazel By

“Aren’t you afraid I will kick the bucket?” When he was appointed as music director of the Munich Philharmonic starting in 2012/13—a mildly contentious appointment in the wake of Christian Thielemann being bungled out of town—Lorin Maazel told the audience at the press conference (to much laughter) that he had posed this pointed question to the musicians and officials who lured him to town. They weren’t, and he didn’t seem particularly worried, either. Fit, energetic, and with good genes—his father, as he often pointed out, lived to 106 and in fact passed on just in 2009—Lorin Maazel struck anyone who met him as having another decade or more in him. It turned out to be only...

Continue reading here, at Forbes.com

Beethoven Sonatas - A Survey of Complete Cycles Part 9, 2014 - 2016

Incl: J-E.Bavouzet • T.Ehlen • T.Honma • M.Houstoun II • Y.Kosuge • C.Leotta • S.Masi • D-B.Pienaar • M.Rasch • M.Pollini • M.Zhao

	Maurizio Pollini 1977 - 2014 - DG After almost 40 years in the making, Maurizio Pollini has completed his Beethoven cycle when Sonatas Nos. 16 through 20 (opp.31 & 49) were released in November of 2014. The following is from DGs website on the project, but since it's to the point, there's no point in fancifully re-phrasing into my own words what would amount to much the same thing: Pollini’s recordings of Beethoven’s last five piano sonatas, issued on three LPs, attracted critical praise and were chosen as “Instrumental Album of the Year” at the inaugural Gramophone Awards in 1977. Gramophone’s reviewer wrote of the “noble purity” of Pollini’s interpretations, an observation inspired by the intellectual rigour and spiritual intensity of his music-making. The pianist’s account of the Late Piano Sonatas proved both a commercial and critical success. Today it remains among the best-selling titles in the Yellow Label’s Originals series. It was also the subject of one of the earliest "Dip Your Ears" reviews written here on ionarts. His 2014 releases made our "Best of 2004" list, a decade ago: "...the literally brilliant interpretations go some way in shining light on the less popular, shorter opp. 54 and 90..." Availability: Country / Label USA UK France Germany DG Yes Yes Yes Yes
	Christian Leotta 2008 - 2014 - ATMA Classique Five volumes of nine discs. A native of Catania, Italy, when Leotta "appear[ed] in Montreal in 2002, at the age of only 22, Christian Leotta was the youngest pianist since the youthful Daniel Barenboim ever to undertake a recital series encompassing the entire corpus of Beethoven's 32 Piano Sonatas." I think that his name and origin easily qualifies his to be a Beethoven-loving mobster's cycle of choice. Availability: Country / Label USA UK France Germany ATMA Classique Individually Yes Yes Yes
	Timothy Ehlen 2009 - 2014 - Azica Timothy Ehlen is Associate Professor of Piano and Chair of the Piano Division at the University of Illinois School of Music. Availability: Country / Label USA UK France Germany Azica Individually Spotily Spotily / mp3s Yes
	Daniel-Ben Pienaar 2012 - 2014 - Avie Recorded at the Duke’s Hall of the Royal Academy of Music, London. Availability: Country / Label USA UK France Germany Avie Yes Yes Yes Yes
	Michael Houstoun II before/up to 2014 (?) - Rattle Throughout 2013, Chamber Music New Zealand's ReCycle Series featured acclaimed New Zealand pianist Michael Houstoun performing all thirty-two of the Beethoven piano sonatas. As he says of this, his second, cycle: This time it’s a different experience, because I’m older, and music is a whole different world for me than it was 20 years ago. I think I’m a more natural musician than I was before. I’m much more relaxed, and more in tune with the sonorities of the instrument. I still love clarity, people have always said to me that my playing is clear, and I think that’s important – clarity allows the audience to choose for themselves what they want out of the music. For me, I’ll be even less inclined to impose myself on the music, and to impose my own ideas. What is important is sincerity, and not getting in the way, and being true to the instrument. Here's him in an extended interview where he talks, explains, and plays. Availability: Country / Label USA UK France Germany Rattle MP3 only MP3 only MP3 only MP3 only
	Mélodie Zhao 2014 - Claves Records are made to be broken, even in classical music. When then 24-year-old Korean HJ Lim recorded the complete Beethoven Sontatas for EMI, released for a tenner on iTunes, it made a splash mostly for audacity. Two years later she is bested in every way: Swiss-Chinese Mélodie Zhao has done it at 19… and much more gratifyingly. This cycle is tastefully individual instead of idiosyncratic, thought-through instead of overwrought, and to the point instead of proving one. Take the confident rhythms of the Largo of op.7, muscular Finale of op.10/1, the unsuspected sweetness of op.14/1, the staggered Andante of the Appassionata, the terrifically lilting op.27, or the wistful op.30: the fresh, vivid, never overwrought playing Mlle. Zhao's delivers much and promises even more. Availability: Country / Label USA UK France Germany Claves Yes Yes Yes Yes
	Yu Kosuge 2011 - 2015 - Sony Japan (SACD) Yo Kosuge, a Germany-based Japanese pianist, recorded these Beethoven Sonatas for Sony Japan between August 2011 and August of 2015 on a Steinway at the Art Tower Mito Concert Hall in in Mito (Ibaraki Prefecture), Japan. The set comes in five 2-disc digi-packs stowed in an oversized paper box, each with a title in German: "Aufbruch", "Liebe", "Leben", "Transzendenz", und "Botschaft"... (("Departure", "Love", "Life", "Transcendence", "Message") which seems to be an Asian thing to do with Beethoven sonatas. (Ed. The SACDs are hybrid-SACDs.) Availability: Country / Label USA UK Japan Germany Sony Japan Import Import Yes Import
	Tamami Honma 2015? - Divine Arts From the label's website: "While core repertoire is not our main priority, sometimes an interpreter comes along with fresh perspectives as well as technical skill, and we hear ‘the divine art of music’ in reality." Availability: Country / Label USA UK France Germany Divine Arts TBR TBR TBR TBR
	Jean-Efflam Bavouzet 2011 - 2016 - Chandos The cycle (and pianist) whom Chandos have invested their fine efforts into, over the last years. We may have only reviewed him once on ionarts, when he gave his Washington debut at the Terrace Theater. (Jean-Efflam Bavouzet Floats Ravel but Sinks Beethoven) That recital, granted, was not indicative of a Beethoven cycle being in the near future (even though he had won first prize in the Beethoven International Piano Competition in Cologne in 1986), but it showed his talent in sublime Ravel (which he has also recorded). His work on 'the full Ludwig' did not, in any case, start until five years later. First issued in three releases of three CDs each; now out as a 9-disc set. Recorded on a Steinway Model D (587 462) concert grand at Potton Hall. I quite like Andrew Clement's moderately positive review of the third installment (to which I am listening as I write this) in The Guardian. Gramophone magazine is more enthusiastic: "Here is the concluding instalment – Volume 3 – of Jean-Efflam Bavouzet’s chronological journey through the 32 Beethoven sonatas, a cycle which may have been matched by one or two but has not been surpassed, I would judge, in the last 30 years. Yes, it’s that good. I greatly enjoyed Volume 2 (3/14) and this is an even higher achievement." (as per Stephen Plaistow; who one volume earlier still engaged in pedantery to show how erudite his criticism is, jamming this gem of a statement into the review: "...in the first of the Sonatas quasi una fantasia, Op 27 No 1, there is a finger slip at bar 9".) Also, there's a review of the whole set by Dominy Clements on MusicWeb International to be found here. Availability: Country / Label USA UK France Germany Chandos Yes Yes Yes Yes
>	Steven Masi 2011 - 2016 - Troy Albany 10 CDs. Recorded at Patrych Sound Studios, NYC; performed on a Hamburg Steinway CD 147. A MusicWeb review of Brian Reinhart's of volume 1 can be read here. Availability: Country / Label USA UK France Germany Troy/Albany Yes Yes Yes Yes
	Martin Rasch 2014 - 2016 - Audite FORUM A Munich-based project from Audite; a bit of a surprise of a release that smells of "Executive-producer-knows-pianist-in-question-very-well". Perhaps he uncovered a gem; I have not found any reviews yet. The pianist uses a Steinway D. He teaches at Munich's University of Music and Performing Arts and his bio professes a love for complete cycles of music. It was published on Audite's new sublable "Forum", which is Audite's way of publishing interesting projects that may not quite meet the quality-criterion for a 'proper' Audite release but are still deemed worth seeing the light of day. Availability: Country / Label USA UK France Germany Audite Forum Yes Yes Yes Yes

This listing of all Beethoven Sonata Cycles will continue as more sets reach completion or as I find more information about sets already completed.* There are certainly plenty sets under way that should or may reach completion soon: Among them Angela Hewitt (Hyperion), Igor Tchetuev (Caro Mitis), Jonathan Biss (Onyx), Akihiro Sakiya (DPIC Entertainment), Martin Roscoe (Deux-Elles), James Brawn (MSR), Paavali Jumppanen (Ondine) [Completed & Added], Yusuke Kikuchi (Triton) [Completed & Added] et al. I will also add a selection of historically important attempted cycles that were never finished but include >20 >9 sonatas. That would add Rudolf Serkin (CBS, 10 sonatas missing), Bruce Hungerford (Vanguard / Piano Classics, also 10 sonatas missing), Emil Gilels (DG, opp.2/1, 14/1, 54, 78, 111), and Glenn Gould (CBS/Sony, opp.7, 22, 49, 53, 79, 81a, 90 missing, op.106 separate, opp.7 [partly], 49/1, 101 available on CBC recordings). There are seemingly abandoned cycles that will not be included, such as those of  Giovanni Belluci,  Bruno Leonardo Gelber,  Yoshihiro Kondo, or  Per Tengstrand. There are cycles that are unworthy of discussion or outright fraudulent, i.e. not actual piano playing and/or of excrutiating quality and/or cobbled together from other performances. Most famously Joyce Hatto, but apparently also Vladimir Morrone, Giancarlo Andretti, Alicja Kot, and Claudio Colombo.**

* If you count, as I did, Backhaus II and Arrau II as complete, despite one and two (respectively) missing sonatas. I do not count Walter Gieseking (tapes of 4, 5, 7, 20, 22 for a radio cycle are lost, a studio cycle for EMI was missing seven sonatas when he died), Wilhelm Kempff "0" (Polydor, opp.2/3, 22, 27/1, 28, 31/2, 101 missing).

** Invaluable research on this end done by Todd, resident Beethoven-Sonata expert (and addict) at the Good Music Guide Forum.


Part 1: 1935 - 1966
Part 2: 1967 - 1975
Part 3: 1977 - 1989
Part 4: 1990 - 1996
Part 5: 1996 - 1999
Part 6: 2000 - 2005
Part 7: 2006 - 2009
Ronald Brautigam Special
Part 8: 2010 - 2013



If you have additional information about recording dates, availability, cover art -- or corrections and additions -- your input is much appreciated.

This survey is meant to list all complete sets of Beethoven's Piano Sonatas and their availability in different markets, not to review them. If you are looking for recent releases, like the Ponelle-filmed cycle of Barenboim's Beethoven Sonatas, or his "Beethoven for All" set, they are included with the sets of which they are actually re-releases.

Discographies on ionarts: Bach Organ Cycles | Beethoven Piano Sonata Cycles I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX | Beethoven Symphony Cycles Index | Beethoven String Quartet Cycles | Bruckner Symphony Cycles | Dvořák Symphony Cycles | Shostakovich Symphony Cycles | Sibelius Symphony Cycles | Mozart Keyboard Sonata Cycles

Follow @ClassicalCritic

On Forbes: The 13 Best Recordings of Claudio Abbado: A Remembrance

“When a fine artist dies, we hear that it is a major loss to art. This is usually gross exaggeration: when Mozart died short of 36 years age, just as his career was really taking off, that was a great loss to art. Ditto for Schubert’s demise at 31 or when Juan Crisóstomo Arriaga died days short of his 20^th birthday, with so much promise of future greatness.

But when an accomplished and celebrated artist dies in the autumn of their years, with great accomplishments behind them, not that much ahead of them, and often after they have retired or passed their artistic peak, it isn’t in any meaningful way a loss to the greater community. (Though it certainly is one to friends and family). Instead, one should react with gratitude and joy for having been given so much by the artist, and amazement at how much these women and men were allowed to touch our lives—living on in the memories and legacies, recollections of ours and influences on us...

Continue reading here, at Forbes.com