Obituary
Kirk Browning, for 60 years a top arts director in television
Kirk Browning, 86, the director who began putting performances on TV almost 60 years ago at NBC and continued with PBS broadcasts as recently as a month ago, died of cardiac arrest Feb. 10 in New York.
His last gig, a month earlier, was directing “I Can’t Believe It’s Schoenberg” for Live from Lincoln Center.
His first was in 1948, directing the TV debut of Arturo Toscanini with the NBC Symphony Orchestra.
Working with the famed conductor was an easy job, Browning once told David Horn, WNET’s director, music programming. “As long as every camera had Toscanini in the shot, it was okay.”
In the decades between the two concerts, Browning broadcast musicals, operas and ballets, as well as symphonies. He did Frank Sinatra’s first big TV special and the first made-for-TV opera, Amahl and the Night Visitors, on NBC.
“Kirk basically created the craft,” developing styles of “scripting and camera use that many directors have learned from,” Horn said. Browning’s frequent use of close-ups and a moving camera made sense for the small-screen TV.
When the camera is moving, viewers will pay attention—they want to see what it’s exploring, Browning explained in an Archive of American Television interview in 2000.
Browning usually started a scene in a carefully chosen close-up rather than long shot, he said, because a screen showing more than a few things would invite viewers to lose interest. “The key is to find some specifics that I know the audience is going to care about.”
He was a pianist and Connecticut chicken farmer when he chanced into a job as a music librarian at NBC and rose to stage manager and then Toscanini’s director.
After NBC Opera Theater folded in the 1960s, Browning moved to WNET Opera Theater and other arts series since combined in Great Performances. He taped NET Playhouse dramas in huge TV studios and American Playhouse adaptations on Broadway stages.
Since 1986, he had directed 185 unobtrusive broadcasts from concert halls for Live from Lincoln Center. When producer John Goberman proposed shooting the series live, Browning thought the in-house audiences would rebel, he recalled in the 2000 interview. But he and Goberman quietly tried shooting in each theater and found it could work.
For each broadcast, Browning had already spent a week with an audio tape and sheet music, planning and noting every camera shot—the foundation for his unflappability.
“When it came to this kind of programming, he was the one,” said John Adams, director, music services at WNET. “He had a great mind, a great ear for music and a great eye for what looked good to the camera,” Adams said.
Also: “He was the nicest man you’ll ever meet.”
Horn agrees. “He was a wonderful man, and he influenced a lot of people,” Horn said. “He put a lot of artists at ease when he worked with them.”
Browning said he refused offers from Hollywood. Though there were auteurs in movie-making, he said, there was no such thing in TV. His “greatest reward,” he said, was bringing the crew and performers into the close collaboration that TV requires.
Survivors include his wife, Barbara, and two sons.
Web page posted May 2, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
