Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra: The Television Concerts, Vol. 2 - 1948-52

"The second DVD volume of Arturo Toscanini's television concerts is a serious treat on a lot of levels. That's especially true of the first of the two broadcasts here, an all-Brahms program from November of 1948. Toscanini lived for so long and had such a lengthy career -- 68 years from his first to his last concert -- that it's easy to overlook today his personal perspective on some of the works and the composers in his repertory. Today the works of Johannes Brahms are established Romantic warhorses, a part of the firmament out of a distant past, but Toscanini's first 11 years as a professional musician, and the first three decades of his life overlapped with Johannes Brahms as a living, active composer. The same may be said for Antonin Dvor?k, who is also represented on this DVD; and Richard Wagner, whose ""Tannhauser Overture"" is present as well, was gone only three years and still a controversial musical figure at the point that Toscanini began his musical ascent. For Toscanini, even in 1948, an all-Brahms program would have been every bit as challenging and involving an artistic endeavor as a work of a contemporary, living composer of the period. The Brahms Double Concerto for Violin and Cello, featuring Mischa Mischakoff and Frank Miller as the two soloists, is an exceptional piece of music-making and worth hearing in any case, not only bracing and exciting but exacting in its details, the conductor and the two soloists -- both first-chair players in their respective sections of the NBC Symphony -- having done the piece in one previous radio broadcast nine years earlier and made several emendations between the two presentations. The audio quality is impeccable, and by the time of this broadcast, from Studio 8-H in Rockefeller Center, the producers had a vast array of camera angles at their disposal. The preservation of the broadcast is marred, unfortunately, by a defect in the kinescope in the second and third movements, which leaves the image slightly out of focus. It's still watchable, and eminently listenable and worthwhile (in fact, the modern voice-over between the first and second movements explaining this is more obtrusive than the flaw itself), but potential purchasers should be aware of the flaw. The concert, strangely enough, closes with two relatively lightweight Brahms works, the Lieberleider Waltzes and the Hungarian Dance No. 1. The second program, from December 1948, is more diverse, encompassing Mozart, Dvor?k, and Wagner. The Mozart Symphony No. 40 gets a treatment that anticipates in some ways the move toward period authenticity that didn't take root until more than a generation after Toscanini's passing, utilizing a reduced string section and almost no vibrato, all of which, when coupled with the conductor's relatively quick tempos, makes this seem very much like a modern Mozart performance in many unexpected ways. By this time, the mikings and camera placements (including moments when we're looking down from over the heads of the musicians) are such that we're getting a very lively visual component as well. Coupled with the unexpectedly rich and detailed sound -- which is highlighted even better on the Tannhauser Overture -- the program is priceless viewing and listening, the digital video format pushing the kinescope source right to the limit of its resolution. As with the first volume in the series, the disc comes programmed with chapter markers for each major work and the individual movements of each work, and there is extensive annotation."