Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra: The Television Concerts, Vol. 5 - 1948-52

"This last volume in the Testament Records DVD reissue series of Arturo Toscanini's televised NBC concerts shows no slackening of either the conductor -- who celebrated his 85th birthday between the two concerts presented here -- or the orchestra, or the ambitious nature of these broadcasts. Indeed, the range of composers represented on these two telecasts, encompassing Franck, Sibelius, Debussy, Rossini, Beethoven, and Respighi, is uncommonly varied and bold for this era of broadcasting, even if the material itself -- with one notable exception -- is generally among the most accessible and well-known of these composers' respective outputs. That exception, the Franck piece Redemption--Symphonic Interlude, was a work that had all but disappeared from concert halls at the time that he began programming it in his NBC concerts. The audio quality of this disc is exceptionally good, and the visuals are worthwhile despite some problematic elements -- Toscanini and the NBC Symphony had moved their broadcasts to Carnegie Hall a couple of years earlier, after years of broadcasting and telecasting out of NBC's Studio 8-H; there, the director and crew had mastered the art of presenting an orchestral concert on television and knew every angle that worked; at Carnegie Hall, they basically started over on page one, and never really had the chance to get it 100% right. In the prior set of telecasts from Carnegie Hall, the cameras had roamed freely all over the stage and throughout the orchestra, while for these two performances, most of the shots and angles were confined to Toscanini, which was fine except that this was sometimes in tight close-up, which sometimes made it difficult to observe his level of communication with the orchestra. We get enough that is worth seeing, however, to make this disc worth owning, and the performances themselves are beyond reproach. The full-screen (1.33-to-1) black-and-white image -- preserved on kinescope (literally a film of a broadcast, shot off of a television screen -- has its occasional flaws, mostly derived from anomalies in the original broadcasts, but is generally stable and clear and well detailed. The chaptering is keyed to the structure of the works being performed, and the disc opens automatically on an easy-to-use menu. The annotation is extremely detailed and informative."