Notes on the Culture
Every Tuesday, Matthew Reed Baker will offer his thoughts on the arts and culture scene. This week: The Peabody Essex Museum makes our landlubber want to go to sea; The BSO offers a downloadable sonic treat. Plus: Achtung baby! Free screenings of classic German film.
Thankfully, winter has yet to clutch us in its witchy embrace, but should ye be keening for Arctic ice and chill, then hie thee hence to the Peabody Essex Museum. Indeed, this North Shore institution’s new exhibit, “To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape,” made this landlubber want to get his Melville on.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my search for the sublime seascape on Newbury Street, but the scope of this show goes way beyond that noble standard.
To be true, the exhibition’s rather prosaic, if descriptive, name doesn’t quite do justice to the soaring images on display, but I’m not sure what would have worked better. After all, these 54 works cover the last 200 years of Arctic and Antarctic exploration. And to think that the artists managed to risk their lives while creating such terrifying beauty should be humbling, to say the least. Seriously, you try painting icebergs and floes from a wooden ship circa 1870. Ernest Shackleton hadn’t even disembarked yet from his mother’s womb.
But hardy New England-born artists like William Bradford and Frederic Edwin Church were there at that time, and their canvases show a ravishingly bleak world, only occasionally punctuated by tiny seamen, polar bears, or kaleidoscopic aurora borealis. Lest this all sound too frigid for your tastes, Bradford in particular was also entranced by the endless summers of the North Pole, and works like Ice Floes in the Midnight Sun (1869) are bathed in golden light…though it would be a stretch to call that glow warm.
And from there, the PEM’s show covers the gamut of painting styles. Richard Brydges Beechey’s HMS Erebus Passing Through the Chain of Bergs (1842) is the classic portrayal of a tall ship braving tempest-tossed seas and horrific obstacles. David Abbey Paige transforms snowstorms and the sun’s halo into impressionistic canvases and pastels.
Artists like A.Y. Jackson, Rockwell Kent, and Lawren S. Harris turn the rocky coasts of Ellesmere Island and Greenland into more abstract planes and sharp shapes of blue and white. The works date all the way up to 2007 with Maine artist John Paul Caponigro’s photograph Antarctica XL, which forebodingly shows the darkened land reflected in icy, black water.
None of the artists took a surrealist approach, but they didn’t have to. After all, the subject matter represented at its most realistic is still more redolent of Middle Earth than, say, Sankaty Head in February. It’s truly an impressively curated show, something quite unique for this area, or any area between the poles, for that matter.
“To the Ends of the Earth: Painting the Polar Landscape” will be on display at the Peabody Essex Museum until March 1, 2009.
iBSOtunes goes live: Okay, so the Boston Symphony probably couldn’t use that name for obvious trademark reasons, but it didn’t stop them from giving us all a big, early holiday present by launching their new music download service yesterday.
Ostensibly the BSO says it’s debuting the service now to prepare people for February’s release of James Levine’s first recordings with the BSO. But really, the idea is so good that you wonder why it didn’t happen sooner.
Here’s the details: MP3s will be available for $8.99 and album, and crucially, they’ll be ripped at the higher 320 kpbs that is currently pretty much nonexistent on that big Apple competitor you may have heard of.
But the clincher for audiophiles is that some albums will be available in HD Surround at $12.99 per lovingly audio-separated pop—the BSO is the first orchestra to make such an offer. Costs of individual tracks depends on the duration.
Even nicer is that the service is starting off with a decent selection of music too, covering each facet of the organization. Fans of the Pops can have their fill of showtunes, patriotic songs and the holiday extravaganza. Tanglewood and Symphony Chamber Players recordings will also be available.
But the motherlode that’s available now has to be the “Symphony Hall Centennial Celebration Box Set,” a collection of 48 works, broadcast live over the years from 1943 to 2000. Serge Koussevitzky, Leonard Bernstein, and Seiji Ozawa are some of the maestros on hand, as are such 20th century composing giants such as Richard Strauss, Stravinsky, and Bartók.
The service is in its beginning stages, so there’s only a limited amount for sale now. In the future, there will be more music as well as a subscription for unlimited access, and better searching capability. But truly, this is the start of something grand–let’s face it, most of these recordings probably wouldn’t be available in stores.
Kino talk at Beacon Street: Readers of this column know that I’m a film nerd, and that I love German arts, even for teens. So I’ve been feeling pretty nifty about our local office of the Goethe-Institut.
The Beacon Street cultural attache has been taking advantage of the current flourishing of German-language film (check out three of the last six foreign film Oscar winners for obvious examples) by hosting a monthly film club of classic films and screenings of new ones at the Coolidge.
Tonight at 7 p.m., they’ll host (in partnership with the Harvard Film Archive) a lecture by the director of Munich Stadtmuseum’s film department, Stefan Drössler, who’ll be teaching you something about Hollywood you might not have known.
In the late ’20s and early ’30s, the only rival to the U.S. film industry was Germany’s, and during that time the Tinseltown studios needed to compete in Deutschland by hiring German stars to overdub dialogue, launching German-speaking L.A.-based stars like Greta Garbo, and even getting total non-Teutons like Laurel & Hardy to phonetically dub a German version of themselves. There will be film clips galore.
I know, sounds nerdy, but anyone with an eye towards film history and history in general should peek in. Besides, it’s free.
Image of Aurora Borealis, 1865, Frederic Edwin Church, Smithsonian American Art Museum, used by permission of Peabody Essex Museum
