Live from Lincoln Center
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Live from Lincoln Center is an ongoing series of musical performances produced by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in conjunction with Thirteen/WNET in New York City.
A series of concerts, ballets, operas, and recitals telecast, as the title says, live from Lincoln Center, it was created and developed by Executive Producer John Goberman and premiered on January 30, 1976 with a concert featuring André Previn and Van Cliburn. It is aired by PBS stations nationwide periodically rather than on a regular schedule. It has presented historic performances by such artists as Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Itzhak Perlman, Isaac Stern, Sir James Galway, Zubin Mehta, Kurt Masur, Beverly Sills, Joan Sutherland, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Audra McDonald, the New York City Ballet, the American Ballet Theatre, the New York Philharmonic, and the New York City Opera to millions of home viewers. It has won ten Emmy Awards and fifty-one Emmy Award nominations, as well as two George Foster Peabody Awards. Two recordings made from concerts presented on the show have won Grammy awards.
Announcer Martin Bookspan was with the program from its premiere in 1976 until his 2006 retirement, when Fred Child, announcer for NPR's Performance Today, took over. Several personalities, among them Dick Cavett, Hugh Downs, Garrick Utley, Canadian broadcaster Patrick Watson, and Beverly Sills, have served as host for the series, with Downs staying the longest. Ms. Sills was the host from 2000 until two months before her death in 2007.
With commercial television networks no longer airing as many classical music programs as they once did, Live from Lincoln Center, along with its companion program Live from the Met (also on PBS), has become the primary source of classical music on American television.
[edit] Notable broadcasts
- 1976: Swan Lake, The Barber of Seville
- 1978: The Saint of Bleecker Street
- 1979: Street Scene
- 1980: A Tribute to John Huston, Isaac Stern's 60th Birthday Celebration
- 1981: Beverly! Her Farewell Performance, An Evening with Danny Kaye
- 1982: A Tribute to Billy Wilder, James Galway Plays Mostly Mozart
- 1983: A Tribute to George Balanchine, Marilyn Horne's Great American Songbook
- 1985: Great Russian Theater Music, Juilliard at 80, Aaron Copland's 85th Birthday
- 1986: Candide
- 1987: A Comedy of Errors by The Flying Karamazov Brothers
- 1989: Ray Charles in Concert, A Classical Jazz Christmas with Wynton Marsalis
- 1990: Yo-Yo Ma in Concert, A Little Night Music
- 1991: Mozart Bicentennial Birthday Serenade
- 1992: New York Philharmonic 150th Anniversary
- 1994: Jessye Norman: Women of Legend, Fantasy, and Lore
- 1997: A Celebration of the American Musical
- 1999: Uptown Blues: Ellington at 100
- 2002: Porgy and Bess, Kurt Masur's 75th Birthday and Farewell
- 2005: American Songbook - Passion, Higher Ground Hurricane Relief Benefit Concert
- 2006: The Light in the Piazza, The Juilliard School: Celebrating 100 Years
- 2006: Audra McDonald Sings the Movies
