Saturday, September 29, 2018

JOHN CHUCKMAN REVIEW: THE SET OF COMPLETE HAYDN PIANO TRIOS PERFORMED BY THE BEAUX ARTS TRIO

Haydn, while always enjoyable, in some forms - as in his string quartets, at least for me - does not quite make it into the Mozart-Beethoven-Bach Pantheon.

But he was an immensely gifted and prolific musician, and he sure does reach that level at times, and his set of piano trios is absolutely one of them.

These are delightful - joyful, uplifting, relaxing, lilting, and elegant in turn.

The quality of the playing by the Beaux Arts Trio is flawless to this music-loving but musically-inexpert ear.

The recording quality is fine.

I think I’ve played the entire set ten times since getting it.

It is among my most treasured sets.

Thursday, August 16, 2018

JOHN CHUCKMAN REVIEW: THE ALBUM "RECTO VERSO" BY FRENCH SINGER-SONGWRITER ZAZ

In my earlier review of the album, "Zaz," I somewhat diminished "Recto Verso" by saying that it was good, like "Paris," but wasn't quite up to "Zaz," which is, for anyone who likes this kind of French music, one of the most attractive albums ever made.

Well, I apologize, having listened more to “Recto Verso.” It truly is every bit as good as “Zaz,” a rare thing in popular music to do two albums to such high standards. “Recto Verso” is genuinely excellent throughout and quite moving in parts.

Of course, for all really fine music – classical or popular – being able to listen to it a number of times, still getting something from it, is almost a defining characteristic.

This is an extraordinarily talented woman. She writes fine songs, and she sings any song with great feeling, which, to my mind, is what this kind of French music is all about. I have a small collection of the great chanteuses, and Zaz ranks with the very best.

Again, just as with the album, “Zaz,” she moves me to tears in a couple of numbers. And that’s on top of all the purely pleasant music here. The arrangements always are agreeable and never intrusive. There is simply not one track on this album that does not please in one way or another.

That’s high praise, and she deserves it.

Monday, May 14, 2018

JOHN CHUCKMAN REVIEW OF STEPHEN KOTKIN'S STALIN: WAITING FOR HITLER

How can a major biography be both a real disappointment and perhaps of some significance to read?

If you want to understand that, you should read Stephen Kotkin’s Stalin. I found I could manage only getting through Volume Two: Waiting for Hitler, as I will explain.

Or I should say, try to read it, because Kotkin is part of that special class of writers with the academic style one finds in social studies journals filled with articles from academics trying to notch up one more publication. It is almost as dry and lumbering as some of the stuff one can read from the Soviets.

Imagine using awkward neologisms like “dekulakization” over and over? There’s several of them repeated here often, like unwelcome old friends. I also object to the author’s invariable use of “regime” for Stalin’s government. Yes, it was what many of us do indeed think as a “regime,” but that word selection in a biography is unnecessarily loaded.

It was, no matter what, a “government,” and its actions, if skillfully related, should speak for themselves. Show, don’t tell, is the master story-teller’s motto. But Kotkin is pretty much incapable of doing so, and that is a weakness of the book.

Stalin was an interesting figure (I’ve read several biographies) and his era was filled with huge and tumultuous events, so you couldn’t ask for better material. But Kotkin manages never to bring any of it to life. His recitation is rather lumbering. Bringing an important historical figure and his or her era to life, always providing the author is also accurate with facts and displays a good sense of perspective and relative importance, is my idea of the ultimate achievement in biography.

I can think of any number of fine biographies that achieve this, but Kotkin simply fails to do so. We never for a minute forget we are reading a rather dry academic’s summarizing of a huge volume of old documents.

I am not exaggerating when I say that only in some of the many letters and notes quoted from Stalin do we get a sense of life. Stalin was a pretty good writer, and it comes through, even in translation. Of course, it is also a bugbear of mine when an author quotes too much, my view being who needs the author then. We could just as well be given a series of selected documents. I wouldn’t say Kotkin goes too far in this, but the thought does cross your mind while reading, and it shouldn’t.
Kotkin is associated with an extremely right-wing institution, the Hoover Institution, so I attribute things like using the word “regime” to that bias.

Sure, Stalin was terrifying creature, but I avoid authors who in any way preach or sermonize, as so many at the Hoover Institution indeed do.

Its very name, like so many privately endowed American think-tanks, is often a guarantee of nothing that an open mind wants to be exposed to.

But I had read in a Russian source that there was balance in this new biography. So, I decided it must have value.

After all, no matter what you think of communism or Russia, Stalin was one of the giants of the 20th century, a man who greatly shaped the world into which we were born.
It is important to understand how that came to be and what are the factors which made such a role for a single human being possible.

But the way that the biography disappoints comes as a surprise.

It is packed with facts, it reflects scholarship, but it is not well-written, and it just doesn’t quite “gel” in creating a vivid, living portrait.

It has too much of the academic thesis in its writing, which is a very limited type of writing, interesting to a very limited number of people.

So, I cannot say the book is not worth reading, but it is nevertheless quite disappointing and not a little boring. If you want one that is not, read Montefiore. He may not have enjoyed quite the same access to archives, but he paints a lively and interesting portrait.

Sunday, January 21, 2018

JOHN CHUCKMAN REVIEW OF DENIS VILLENEUVE'S BLADE RUNNER 2049

Have you ever seen Ed Wood’s “Plan 9 from Outer Space"?

It is undoubtedly one of the worst movies ever made, but you know that before seeing so much as a single frame because it is known for having been cheap beyond description, almost a kid’s effort at making a movie.

It has a bit of a cult following because it is so laughably bad. We all have a bit of a soft spot for something like that, with no redeeming qualities beyond its absurdity. But you cannot achieve such status if you have big pretensions, something “Blade Runner 2949” has in greater abundance than anything else. It literally drags truckloads of pretensions through scene after tedious scene.

Well, my best first go at a description for “Blade Runner 2049” is as a remake of “Plan 9 from Outer Space,” a remake with an obscenely large budget and vast pretensions. It is undoubtedly one of the worst films I have ever seen. It has literally no redeeming quality, not even its absurdity.

It has no real story to tell, terrible writing, and virtually all of the actors offer abysmal performances. The star, Ryan Gosling, walks through his role with two expressions, grim and grimmer. Even the cameo near the end with Harrison Ford is a performance you will only want to forget.

Ryan Gosling reminds me a bit of comedian Chevy Chase in his general appearance with eyes uncomfortably close together, something that the constant beard stubble on his face in this role serves to distract us from. This is not my idea of good casting, and that judgment holds for pretty much the entire company. This guy isn’t funny or even pleasantly light, ever, as Harrison Ford, the star of the original “Blade Runner” could very much be. He is relentlessly dull.

He’s grim and boring and you couldn’t care less what happens to him. The impression is not helped by some truly dumb lines not worth opening his mouth for. But the lines he delivers are no worse than those given other major characters. The language is so dumb, sometimes it reminds me of one of those old, early Toho monster movies that were dubbed in with English lines like, “Don’t be a wet noodle!”

He lives in a world that has the same dark look of the original Blade Runner, but the effort to create an ugly environment here has been put into hyperdrive, and you can only ask yourself why anyone would want to live there for even a day. Mass suicide – whether by humans or replicants - I should think would be this world’s greatest risk, not the activities of various malefactors or no-longer desired models of replicants.

Gosling drives around in a flying car that reminds me of a concept from a cheap 1940s movie serial. It flies, but it still has doors, it still has a windshield (and, yes, complete with windshield wipers for the rain), it still has seat belts, and, amazingly enough now at the dawn of the self-drive era, it still has a driver driving. This is a perfect example, typical of many in the film, of imagined gizmos or special effects without any imagination. Glitz without content, and really without interest for the viewer.

And they spent plenty on some of these gizmos trying to amaze us – the film’s budget having been the best part of 200 million dollars - but none of it does, it is all so completely lacking in imagination. There are many scenes with gimmicky special effects that have no meaning, none whatsoever, nor is there even a hint of trying to explain them – as with the golden ripply-looking walls of a company or a tall cement tree complete with guy wires.

It’s all tedious. There isn’t even a worthy villain in the whole long effort, as the original “Blade Runner” had in the fine Rutger Hauer, one of that film’s real high points. We understood his motives, and he played his almost-tragic role wonderfully. Here we have intense, shrieky women in weird, ugly clothes and make-up, trying to kill people for reasons we can’t be quite clear about.

This is a truly terrible film, and I cannot understand some critics’ references I read as to its quality, references which aroused my interest. Some said it needed editing, but editing wouldn’t help this, except through the sheer fact of there being less of it to sit through. The film did not do well at the box office, but I have never considered that a standard of measurement, some of the better films in history having achieved that same distinction.

But this is not another “It's a Wonderful Life,” which did not do well at the box office despite the huge affection in which it is held today, it is more like Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate.” Just appallingly bad