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Great Performances

''Great Performances'' is a television series devoted to the performing arts and has been aired on the U.S. television network PBS since 1972. The show is produced by WNET in New York City.

It is one of the longest-running performing arts anthologies on television, second only to Hallmark Hall of Fame. "Great Performances" presents concerts, ballet, opera, an occasional documentary such as ''Toscanini: The Maestro'', and plays. The series has also won many television awards, including an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, an Image Award, and nods from the Directors Guild of America and the Cinema Audio Society.

The program's spin-off, called ''Great Performances: Dance In America'', began airing on PBS in 1976, and concentrates solely on dance, featuring such performers as Mikhail Baryshnikov. Although it is not seen as often as it once was, there have recently been new ''Dance in America'' programs, such as the Emmy-winning 2005 production of Tchaikovsky's ''Swan Lake'', starring Angel Corella, Gillian Murphy, and the American Ballet Theatre.

In 2007, Great Performances began rebroadcasting Metropolitan Opera's "Live in HD" series. [http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/genre/opera.html Great Performances . Genre . Opera on Film | PBS]

Repeat guest hosts include Walter Cronkite, Julie Andrews and Whoopi Goldberg.

Major underwriters throughout the show's run included: The National Endowment for the Arts, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
PBS viewers, Exxon, Martin Marietta, Texaco, Deluxe Corporation, Duracell, Ernst & Young, Chase Manhattan Bank, and UBS.

Source: Wikipedia