Bell Ringer

For 26 years on radio and TV, the Bell Telephone Hour played duenna to the world's best music and most of its best contemporary performers, from Pons and Pinza to Toscanini and Tebaldi. The show had all the virtues of the duenna -care, good taste, restraint and fondness for her charges -but also the one vice: it was often pretty dull. Producer Henry Jaffe recalls: "We'd put a performer on a bleak stage in front of a dirty curtain and say, 'Perform!' " Perform they did, often superbly, but Bell began to feel its image had become ossified. This season, the program has shucked its shawl and gone off in search of adventure -and in the process become one of the best series on TV. Using hand-held cameras and available light, spotting sound technicians in the middle of a performing orchestra, spending time and money horrendously, the Telephone Hour has put together a unique format of musical documentary that does honor both to the music and to the documentary.

Peeks & Pathos. The biweekly series got off winging in September with a charming lope through Spoleto, Italy, where Composer Gian Carlo Menotti was preparing his home-grown annual music festival. Bell's camera crews spent seven weeks with Menotti. They peeked in as he attended rehearsals, chatted with visitors in three languages, and finally paraded ecstatically through congratulatory mobs in Spoleto's town square on the night of his birthday. Musically, the program equaled anything that Bell was ever able to do in the studio, with Sviatoslav Richter as the pianist in the Shostakovich Quintet and Zubin Mehta conducting the Verdi Requiem and a stunning new production of Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande.

In the four programs aired since then, the Telephone Hour has never stopped ringing:

>> For the opening of New York's new Metropolitan Opera House, Producer

Robert Drew culled one hour from the staggering total of 55 he had shot, managed to catch the frantic, discombobulated rehearsals of Samuel Barber's opera Antony and Cleopatra; the suave calm of Met General Manager Rudolf Bing; the comic pathos of Soprano Leontyne Price as she got trapped in a prop pyramid before 3,800 people at dress rehearsal; the triumph of opening night, and the quietly joyous reunion of Price with her parents backstage afterward, in which she told her father that there was champagne in the icebox and please to leave her some. The camera even caught more than it meant to. During one rehearsal, Director Franco Zeffirelli unexpectedly waved onstage 226 extras, a gesture that cost Bell $15 a head in fees.

>> Pianist Van Cliburn played at Michigan's Interlochen National Music Camp, recorded two Chopin sonatas in a New York studio, packed the Hollywood Bowl for Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, and ate a folksy dinner with his parents and friends at their home in Shreveport, La. In between times, he mused about himself, his fame and his music: "The role of a concert artist in a concert hall will never be eclipsed."

>> At the Tanglewood Music Festival, in Massachusetts, the cameras cut away from performances of Debussy, Hindemith and Stravinsky for an interview with Composer Aaron Copland and a long glimpse of Soprano Phyllis Curtin in a replica of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "little red house," teaching young hopefuls.

>> Last week viewers got a stunning candid portrait of Cleveland Symphony Conductor Georg Szell (TIME cover, Feb. 22, 1963), as he coaxed and drove his orchestra into shape for its opening concert of the season. Szell declined to submit to an interview, but he gave Director Nathan Kroll free run of the rehearsal and concert hall. That was plenty. The camera painted penetrating portraits of Szell the perfectionist, the coach, the music scholar, the witty teacher of young conductors ("If your cheeks start to tremble on the downbeat, then it was incisive enough"). In an expertly wrought final sequence, the film shifted, without losing a note of music, from the maestro in grey pullover at the final rehearsal of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony to the formal performance itself. In closeup, the camera showed everything from his shaking cheeks to a pixyish grin and hidden O.K. sign when a difficult passage went well, while the orchestra roared on toward the magnificent finale.

This week's show, a history of Christmas music from the 4th century to the present, is a small concession to the Telephone Hour's previous image, but from there on, it will be the new Bell again, with home movies of Toscanini obtained from his family, and Handel's Messiah against a Rocky Mountain background.

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