Kultur Video is a video company that specializes mostly in issuing televised performances of the classics, both musical and dramatic. Along with issuing famous television programs by such artists as Leonard Bernstein and Mikhail Baryshnikov, they are also responsible for videocassettes and/or DVDs of episodes of The Bell Telephone Hour[1], as well as of Laurence Olivier's television performance as King Lear. [2]
Among their releases, in addition to the Olivier Lear, are Baryshnikov's production of The Nutcracker,[3] a Bell Telephone Hour program entitled "First Ladies of the Opera", featuring Joan Sutherland, Birgit Nilsson, Renata Tebaldi and Leontyne Price, twenty-five of Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, and Bernstein's commemoration of the 200th birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven, Bernstein on Beethoven, aka Beethoven's Birthday. [4]
Kultur Video has also been responsible for the Broadway Theatre Archive, a large selection on DVD of telecasts ranging from 1959 to 1990 of classic and modern plays, shown mostly on PBS and NET.[5][6]