The 20th Century on Film

This series aims to show people what the constituent parts of music do: melody, harmony, rhythm – and how the pieces fit together. It’s for anyone who’s ever tried to learn their favourite song at the piano, or who’s tried to pick up the guitar or the trombone, for every kid who’s starting out with music, or the merely curious to know why one piece of music might resemble another.

Universal extends its series of discount-priced "best of" compilations with the unwieldy name "20th Century Masters/The Millennium Collection" to the quasi-classical realm with this Leonard Bernstein entry, which treads a fine line a bit awkwardly as a crossover release. Bernstein was, indeed, a popular composer, with a brace of hit songs (and one or two perennially popular cast albums) derived from his scores for the musicals West Side Story, On the Town, and Candide, and one towering achievement as a soundtrack composer, for Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront, to his credit; and he was also a vastly successful and popular recording artist in the classical field.

The Peggy Lee number in Universal's 20th Century Masters – The Millennium Collection series of discount-priced compilations provides a good, brief selection of the highlights of the singer's career on Decca Records between 1952 and 1956. Two of her biggest chart hits of the period – "Just One of Those Things," and "Mr. Wonderful" – are all included, along with a couple of other chart singles, "Be Anything (But Be Mine)" and "Let Me Go, Lover."