Toscanini’s Comeback

Arturo Toscanini was already in his eighties when NBC began a seven-year series of live telecasts of the maestro and his NBC Symphony Orchestra. “This was the first major attempt to bring symphonic music to television; the Leonard Bernstein ‘Young People’s Concerts’ began in the late ’50s. Now virtually all of Toscanini’s television work has been reissued on five DVDs by the enterprising Testament label, and it provides a terrific answer to that perpetual question: ‘What is it that a conductor does, exactly?'”