Low-Budget Highbrow
KOSTELANETZ, RICHARD
Low-Budget Highbrow Classic Arts Showcase has a little bit of everything. BY RICHARD KOSTELANETZ To my culturally critical mind, the richest show on television these past few years has been an...
...Josephine Baker in Zouzou (1934), wearing only pasties above her waist, looking as classically beautiful as any woman who ever lived...
...This review, of course, has turned into a catalog of masterpieces identified only by name...
...Footage of live performances by the legendary diva Maria Callas, who must be seen for her reputation to be believed...
...John Eliot Gardner conducting Claudio Monteverdi's Vespers in Venice's San Marco, and Colin Davis conducting Mozart's Requiem at the Herkulesaal in Munich...
...But in that respect, it resembles the potpourri of the Classic Arts Showcase: There's no other way to suggest the richness and variety of the Classic Arts Showcase...
...Classic silent shorts by George Melies, among others, often with more recent soundtracks, and the Pathe comedy The Policeman's Little Run (1907...
...A Dave Fleischer cartoon, Greedy Humpty Dumpty (1936), where the protagonist speaks in couplets and two composers get credits...
...great singers I'd never known before and haven't heard anywhere else (beginning with the countertenor Jochen Kowalski...
...Billie Holiday performing with Roy Eldridge, Gerry Mulligan, and Ben Webster in a 1957 telecast...
...You also get the impression that within their generally high levels the producers can't distinguish what is merely good from that which is great: When I watch the six hours I've recorded on a VHS tape, I usually lament the inclusion of excerpts I've already seen, zipping through what only ruthless fast-forwarding can correct...
...Scenes from Bruno Bozzetto's marvelous Allegro Non Troppo (1976), the feature-length European competitor to Fantasia...
...Here are some of the gems I have seen: Richard Kostelanetz is a widely published poet and critic whose latest collection of essays, More on Innovative Music(ian)s, will appear later this year...
...Glenn Gould playing Bach's Partita, no...
...Actually, it's more correct to say that I videotape it...
...A succession of jazz pianists, including Fats Waller and Art Tatum...
...A great live performance at night in Verona of Giacomo Puccini's "Invocation to the Moon" from Turandot...
...Be warned: This is low-budget highbrow programming, which keeps costs down by making almost no gestures of explanation about the things it shows...
...Scenes from Buster Keaton's The General (1927), Cecil B. DeMille's King of Kings (1927), Marcel Carne's Children of Paradise (1945), Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930), and Walter Ruttmann's Symphony of a Great City (1927...
...Lily Pons in 1946 singing "The Bell Song" from Leo Delibes's Lakme as no one has done that virtuoso vehicle since...
...Indeed, since the City University channel broadcasts the program for several hours through the weekend nights, I customarily record an entire VHS tape every weekend for playback on my own time during the week...
...Consisting of excerpts from decades-old films, videos accompanying classical music, concert performances, and related highbrow stuff, Classic Arts Showcase is produced by a Los Angeles foundation for free distribution to public stations...
...Lord knows where the producers find this stuff...
...I watch it whenever possible...
...Of course, one's appetite comes away from the Classic Arts Showcase's excerpts more often whetted than satisfied...
...In New York City, hour-long modules appear on Long Island public television, the Board of Education's station, and the City University station...
...If many of the artists and works I've mentioned aren't already familiar, perhaps the program is best avoided...
...The classical-music abstractions by Oskar Fischinger (1900-1967), who taught Walt Disney how to do Fantasia before he quit the project...
...The Russian ballerina Maya Pli-setskaya performing a dying swan to Camille Saint-Saens's music...
...6, Ralph Kirkpatrick playing Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue on a harpsichord in 1978, and Andres Segovia's thick hands at eighty-three playing a Bach gavotte...
...But when I finish, I find that at least one excerpt (out of several dozen) persuades me to keep the tape, rather than put it on the pile for rerecording...
...BY RICHARD KOSTELANETZ To my culturally critical mind, the richest show on television these past few years has been an austere program known as Classic Arts Showcase...
...Bing Crosby in 1933, before he became slick, singing Auf Wiedersehn, My Dear...
...The program is hard to watch as broadcast, containing as it does a lot of classical warhorses accompanied by bucolic scenes from one or another obvious landscape—the Czech Republic for Dvorak, Penshurst Place for Elgar, American prairies for Copland, and so on—and then too many slick clips from a 1950s Firestone television program on the arts...
...Marian Anderson singing the spiritual "Crucifixion" to the accompaniment of a quiet piano...
...Margot Fonteyn's duets with Rudolph Nureyev in the 1960s...
...Otherwise, remote control securely in hand, I've seen performances filmed in the late 1940s in the shell of the Berlin Philharmonic...
...Videotaped, however, Classic Arts Showcase is far more acceptable: The viewer can use the fast-forward button on the remote control to zip through the junk...
...Giovanni Pastrone's Cabiria (1914), with original titles by Gabriele D'Annunzio...
...passages from Hans-Jurgen Syberberg films of Richard Wagner operas that I would never otherwise have seen...
...Van Cliburn's legendary, prize-winning performances in Moscow in 1958...
...Scenes from a 1939 film of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado performed by the D'Oyle Carte company...
...Scenes from the Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger film The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), which I'd never seen before, which I now identify as the first and perhaps the greatest opera movie (as distinct from the filming of an opera) ever made...
...But if you want to move beyond the middlebrow and are willing to do a little fingerwork with the remote control, the Classic Arts Showcase is the only television to watch...
...Arturo Toscanini conducting Beethoven's setting of "Ode to Joy...
Vol. 6 • September 2000 • No. 2
