KTLA to Broadcast Warsaw Benefit Concert

KTLA Channel 5 will be the only TV station in the nation to broadcast--although delayed--Friday’s benefit concert in Warsaw commemorating the 50th anniversary of the invasion of Poland, according to general manager Steve Bell.

KTLA will air the 90-minute special “Warsaw, September 1, 1939” featuring Leonard Bernstein, on Sept. 16 at 11 p.m. Anchor Hal Fishman will introduce the commercial-free program (which will be carried live in Europe) and set the concert in its historical perspective, Bell said.

“Poland is the center of the news world right now,” Bell said. “That alone makes it so important to carry. Then there’s the fact that it’s a UNICEF benefit.”

Bell was refering to the recent historic vote in the lower house of Poland’s National Assembly, in which the Solidarity-backed Tadeusz Mazowiecki was elected the Eastern Bloc’s first non-Communist prime minister.

Besides Bernstein, who will open the concert in the Warsaw Grand Opera House by reading from W. H. Auden’s poem, “September 1, 1939,” performers include Krystof Penderecki conducting his “Polish Requiem,” Liv Ullmann narrating Arnold Schoenberg’s “A Survivor From Warsaw,” pianist Marek Drewnowski playing Chopin’s A-flat Polonaise Opus 53, and baritone Hermann Prey singing “Revelge” from Mahler’s “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” with Lukas Foss conducting.

Interspersed among the musical performances will be personal reminiscences written and read by Polish-born international lawyer and author Samuel Pisar, who survived the Auschwitz and Dachau Nazi death camps.

Addressing the subject of delayed coverage on KTLA, Bell said: “We probably would have run the event the next day if we hadn’t found out about it so suddenly and so late. But we decided to delay in order to publicize it in TV Guide and the newspapers. We wanted people to know about it.”

Delayed broadcasts will also be seen in Japan, Australia, much of Central and South America and perhaps on Central TV of China, Bell said.

The Warsaw concert is being televised live in Poland, Great Britain, Austria, and West Germany, and probably live in Italy, the Soviet Union, Hungary, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, Bell said.

“It’s a terrible indictment of the networks and stations across the country,” Bell says of the possibility that the Warsaw concert will not be picked up by other U.S. stations.

KCET Channel 28 was unaware of the Warsaw concert.

“(KCET’s) station manager, Stephen Kulczycki, and manager of broadcasting, Steve Lama, never saw any paper work from PBS,” said Barbara Goen of KCET’s publicity department. “Stephen Kulczycki is very connected with the major programming decisions in the (public broadcasting) system. If he hasn’t heard about it, I can’t imagine that anyone else has.”

“Whenever a worthy program can’t find an outlet elsewhere we always represent it,” Bell said. “It’s a challenge, and if it’s as worthy as this endeavor seems to be we always rise to that challenge. We always have and we always will.”