The Symphony

The Teaching Company is a well-established source of educational lectures on many topics, including music history, as evidenced in this six-disc introduction to The Symphony, which outlines the development of the symphonic form from its Italian origins in the eighteenth century through the 1950s. Professor Robert Greenberg, who has contributed many earlier installments to the series (including a 32-lecture series on the symphonies of Beethoven), is an erudite fellow and an enthusiastic speaker, and he dispenses much detailed information, making the subject fairly accessible to the uninitiated (even if he does periodically overdo the folksiness for rhetorical effect). Of course, his coverage is selective and somewhat idiosyncratic (a mere single lecture covers the Beethoven nine, but another is devoted entirely to the Shostakovich Tenth, for instance), but that's to be expected. To be honest, there seems little reason to prefer the visual set of the lectures to the purely audio version also available as there are few visual aids to break up the lecture format--portraits of the composers, or the titles of the brief musical excerpts played as examples. Since learning styles vary, however, this is recommended, especially for those who don't already own the audio version. Aud: H, C, P. (F. Swietek)