The Bell Telephone Hour

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Donald Voorhees

The Bell Telephone Hour, aka The Telephone Hour, was a long-run concert series which began April 29, 1940 on NBC radio and was heard on NBC until June 30, 1958. Sponsored by Bell Telephone, it showcased the best in classical and Broadway music, reaching eight to nine million listeners each week. It continued on television from 1959 to 1968. Throughout the program's run on both radio and television, the studio orchestra on the program was conducted by Donald Voorhees.

After early shows featuring James Melton and Francia White as soloists, producer Wallace Magill restructured the format on April 27, 1942 into the "Great Artists Series" of concert and opera performers, beginning with Jascha Heifetz. The list of talents heard over the years included Marian Anderson, Bing Crosby, Benny Goodman, Nelson Eddy, José Iturbi, Oscar Levant, Lily Pons, Gladys Swarthout and Helen Traubel.

Rehearsal: The Bell Telephone Hour was a musical short, filmed in 1947, with Voorhees, Ezio Pinza and Blanche Thebom.

The series returned to radio in 1968-69 as Bell Telephone Hour Encores, aka Encores from the Bell Telephone Hour, featuring highlights and interviews from the original series.

[edit] Television

The TV show, seen on NBC from January 12, 1959 to 1968, was one of the first TV series to be telecast exclusively in color, using the color TV system perfected by RCA in 1954. For much of the early part of its run, the show didn't have a weekly time slot but usually had to share with another program, meaning it aired every other week. By the mid-1960s, however, it had received a weekly time slot, usually on Friday or Saturday evenings. It was noted for its Christmas specials, frequently featuring opera stars as well as stars of musical theater and ballet. In the fall of 1965, the show was switched to an earlier time slot of Sundays at 6:30pm. In 1967, the format changed from a videotaped and mostly musical presentation to filmed documentaries about classical musicians made on location.

One of the most notable documentary programs combined a tour of the Museo del Prado in Madrid, with performances by such noted Spanish musicians as Andrés Segovia, Alicia de Larrocha, and Victoria de los Angeles. Another was a profile of Cleveland Orchestra conductor George Szell. This one was not a biography of Szell, but a documentary showing how he worked with the orchestra.

One of the last, and most notable episodes done in the videotape format, was "First Ladies of Opera", featuring Joan Sutherland, Leontyne Price, Renata Tebaldi and Birgit Nilsson, all on one program. In 1976, footage from the TV series was edited into a 90-minute documentary, The Bell Telephone Jubilee, aka Jubilee.