Live from Lincoln Center


Live from Lincoln Center was a seventeen-time Emmy Award-winning series that broadcast notable performances from the Lincoln Center in New York City on PBS starting 1976. The program aired between six and nine times per season. Episodes of Live from Lincoln Center featured Lincoln Center's resident artistic organizations, most notably the New York Philharmonic. Funding for the series was made possible by major grants from the Robert Wood Johnson 1962 Charitable Trust, Thomas H. Lee and Ann Tenenbaum, the Robert and Renee Belfer Family Foundation, the MetLife Foundation, Mercedes T. Bass, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Production of new episodes has been suspended indefinitely since 2019.

History

Live from Lincoln Center premiered on PBS on January 30, 1976, as part of the Great Performances family of performing arts programs. Since its premiere, the series has presented performances by the world's greatest performing artists. Some of its most notable regular performers include Audra McDonald, Plácido Domingo, Luciano Pavarotti, Leonard Bernstein, Itzhak Perlman, George Balanchine, Isaac Stern, Nathan Lane, James Galway, Billy Porter, Zubin Mehta, James Naughton, Kurt Masur, Kristin Chenoweth, Jason Isbell, Beverly Sills, Yo-Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Emma Thompson, Joan Sutherland, Josh Groban, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Patina Miller, the New York City Ballet, the Mark Morris Dance Group, the American Ballet Theatre, the Alvin Ailey [American Dance Theater], the New York Philharmonic, and the New York City Opera.
Martin Bookspan served as the program announcer from the premiere of Live from Lincoln Center until his retirement in 2006, at which point Fred Child took over. On-camera hosts throughout the broadcast's history have included Dick Cavett, Hugh Downs, Sam Waterston, Garrick Utley, Patrick Watson, and Beverly Sills. Most recently, the host position has been filled by Alan Alda, Alec Baldwin, Lesley Stahl, and currently, Audra McDonald.
The show was originally developed in the mid-1970s by John Goberman, who served as executive producer from 1976 until 2011. In 2012, current Executive Producer Andrew Carl Wilk took over. Through 2012, the show was, in fact, live.
Through Goberman and Wilk's leadership, Live from Lincoln Center has gone on to win 17 Emmy Awards, 2 George Foster Peabody Awards, and several other accolades over its time on PBS. The current team of directors for the program is made up of Habib Azar, Dana Calderwood, Alex Coletti, Matthew Diamond, Brad Fuss, Annette Jolles, Lonny Price, Alan Skog, Glenn Weiss, and Andrew Carl Wilk. Kirk Browning is credited as the longest-running director of the series, contributing to the production of 185 episodes, and winning two Primetime Emmys as well as two Daytime Emmys. The show's full-time production team, led by Wilk, is composed of Douglas Chang, Kristy Geslain, Danielle Schiffman, Daisy Placeres, Gillian Campbell, and Nick Palm.

Notable broadcasts

Home media

Traditionally, Live from Lincoln Center has never been made available on home video due to rights issues. A notable exception was a series of selected classic episodes licensed to Paramount Home Video and released under the "Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Presents" banner through its Bel Canto Video division in the late '80s. Kultur International Films also released a few episodes on videocassette without any branding.

Reception

Emily Bruno of Broadway World called Falsettos, "Groundbreaking...achingly poignant."