E1 Entertainment and the Archive of American Television released Leonard Bernstein: Omnibus – The Historic TV Broadcasts a few weeks ago on January 26th and I completely missed it. The four-disc collection runs 449 minutes and includes seven episodes of Omnibus featuring the conductor Leonard Bernstein, broadcast between 1954 and 1958
- Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
- The World of Jazz
- The Art of Conducting
- American Musical Comedy
- Introduction to Modern Music
- The Music of Johann Sebastian Bach
- What Makes Opera Grand?
Some were lectures, others were performances. Here’s a preview:
How do the episodes look? Here’s what Casey Burchby’s review for DVD Talk, had to say:
The full-screen black-and-white images were first broadcast live, and look pretty good considering their age. Although the images flicker and there are lots of shadows, these are source defects that mostly would have been visible to viewers in the 1950s, too. It would appear that significant restoration work has been done, since many programs from the same time – including The Honeymooners – look a lot worse than this set.
The DVD Verdict review is less impressed with the video, calling it “pretty bad: blotchy, soft, inconsistent.” One additional review can be found at Monsters & Critics.
I have such fond memories of the ‘NBC Television Opera Theatre’ series, one of lasting cultural legacies of the programming genius of Mr. Sylvester L. Weaver, Jr., who went on to attempt to create a fourth network with his late fifties Program Service Network attempt.
Has anybody uncovered findings of these classic operas for DVD or even potential airing by PBS?