Possibly the most frustrating thing about the world of classical music is the simple fact that most people never listen to it, unless it’s in the form of a few snatches of a famous work in a coffee commercial on TV, a thin and tinny slice of on-hold music on the telephone, or in the trailer for a movie where the score has yet to be completed. It’s probably safe to say that most people under the age of 40 think of classical music as a dry, reserved and old-fashioned thing that is the province of historians, students and the terminally boring.

Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. But try telling that to a generation whose only perception of classical music comes from the impression they get from the classical section of their local CD retailer – if there’s one there at all. Most of the classical CDs available have imposing, reserved and very conservative cover designs, with the works within often listed on the cover in a very technical format, often in a foreign language; though in recent years many major classical labels have attempted to rectify this, the remedy usually seems to involve signing a young female pianist, vocalist or violinist and hiring a glamour photographer to make her into a pop star. The classical discs in a CD store are filed by composer, but you have to know exactly what you’re looking for if you want to get anywhere, and the disdain the unwitting novice scores from some sales staff when asking a simple question is enough to strike fear into the heart of the most resilient music fan. It’s time for revenge.

Produced in 1997 by the BBC in association with NVC Arts and US public broadcaster WNET, the Great Composers series was a landmark in the not-very-crowded field of Documentaries For People That Like Classical Music But Don’t Know The First Thing About It. Obviously, covering the entire history of classical music in the relatively short span of seven hours wasn’t going to achieve much of worth, so the producers opted for a daring – and potentially controversial – format. Each one-hour episode would cover the life and music of a single composer, each one a crucial contributor to the art – the composers that others followed, imitated or expanded upon. That seven part series has been available on VHS overseas for some time, and now makes its debut on DVD with this first instalment – a disc containing the first two episodes of the seven. Covered here are Bach and Mozart; while no further DVD releases appear to have been scheduled by NVC Arts and Warner Vision at the moment, we eagerly hope the rest of the series (which also features programs on Beethoven, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Puccini and Mahler) will eventually see release on DVD as well.

Each episode is a self-contained documentary, written and directed by different people; each also features a different array of orchestras, soloists and conductors presenting the composer’s key musical works in between sections of biographical information. While not as glossily-produced as some of the BBC’s other documentary series, Great Composers’ trump card is the simple tactic of illustrating the story of a composer’s life not only through their music, but also through vision of the actual places that they lived, worked, composed and played. Giving the viewer a genuine feel for time and place, this is a simple but admirable approach to authenticity that works exceptionally well. The biographical content is exceptionally user-friendly – never getting too technical and always explaining the significance of what’s being said, it’s the ideal primer for anyone who’s ever been vaguely interested in the great classical composers as well as in “fine music� in general.

Some big names are involved here: Kenneth Branagh handles the English-language narration in a wonderfully unpretentious manner, while the list of artists involved is terrific. The Bach episode features the remarkable conductor John Eliot Gardiner (a great exponent of Bach’s music as well as a man who has done more than most to bring classical music to new audiences) with his own Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, as well as pianist András Schiff; meanwhile, the Mozart episode offers the incomparable London Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Sir Colin Davis), the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, pianists Imogen Cooper and Robert Levin (himself a frequent collaborator with John Eliot Gardiner), the hugely popular singer Cecilia Bartoli and even comments from the great conductor Sir Georg Solti.

Obviously not everything from each composer’s life can be included in detail (Mozart’s remarkable Requiem, so familiar to many from the movie Amadeus, barely rates a mention here) but that’s not the point – the producers have set out to provide an overview of each composer’s works, but also of their lives as they may have lived them in their time. In that, they’ve been hugely successful – even for those familiar with the works and facts on offer here, Great Composers is thoroughly entertaining, as well as hugely informative and inspiring. Highly recommended.

The heart sinks somewhat upon first starting up this disc – the Bach episode hardly looks like what we’ve now come to consider the state of the art for television productions, whether shot on film or videotape. This series has most likely been lifted from an analogue video master, which would possibly explain the larger-than-usual amount of video noise visible throughout the first hour. The quality improves dramatically for the Mozart episode, though; both episodes are presented in the full-frame format of their original broadcast.

Subtitle tracks are provided in several languages, but subtitles are switched off completely by default; this is not usual practice for NVC Arts discs, which have always exhibited very intelligent use of subtitles. Here, though, you’ll start to wonder why the people being interviewed on-screen are not being introduced to the viewer in any way, at which point you’ll switch on the English subtitles. They won’t help you much – in fact, they’re mostly non-existent, aside from providing translations of foreign-language texts during musical performances. The booklet provided gives a fairly thorough – if occasionally inaccurate – rundown of who’s on screen in each chapter, though.

Audio is fairly well handled (in basic stereo, it’s Dolby Digital 2.0 encoded and unlike many NVC Arts discs, a Linear PCM track is not provided) but there are some instances of distortion and clipping during the musical sections of the Bach episode, all of them occurring in the right channel. Together with the lessened video quality during this episode, we’d guess it was transferred from a lower-generation master for some reason. Aside from all this, though, audio quality is perfectly acceptable for the purpose, with the music sounding very vibrant (though obviously it’s not at the audiophile quality level of most classical CD recordings).

While all the above may sound worrying, fear not – this is still the best presentation of this series made available to date, and easily surpasses the video and audio quality seen and heard on television when it was broadcast.

Extras are restricted to a single “web-link� HTML page and a pair of Word documents offering a capsule history of each composer.