The film inevitably contains an imba-lance. Toscanini's achievements in early life are largely neglected in favor of his later years for which more footage exists. This, after all, was a man who conducted the first performance of Turandot in 1926. But it's a fine film despite that.
One point Levine makes is that Toscanini, in taking on the NBC job, knew that the acoustics of the hall didn't really suit an orchestra, but accepted it because they favored the recording techniques of the time. What he wanted was to reach the vast new audience that radio offered. Few today will relish the recorded sound of 60 years ago on the accompanying CD, but perhaps will tolerate it in order to understand the approach of a veteran maestro who in his youth knew Verdi.
It's tempting to say that Dame Kiri and Friends is everything that classical music needs to get away from. It shows a concert last year in Auckland performed by Kiri Te Kanawa dressed up to the nines plus some of her fellow New Zealanders, not all of them talented. The formal evening dress does for the exercise from the start -- classical music will never survive if it is made to depend on such divisive pretension. The addition of a number from The Lord of the Rings and a Maori song if anything makes matters even worse.
And finally we have yet another of the dreaded New Year Concerts from Vienna. Year after year they come out, with virtually identical music and an almost certainly identical super-affluent Viennese audience. Only the conductor -- this time Lorin Maazel -- changes. There are, it's true, some optional danced episodes this time (someone at least was conscious of the shortcomings of this dreary annual ritual), but for the rest the Alpine scenes added as a tourist-promoting bonus gave the only pleasure I derived from this mournful DVD.
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