When we reviewed the first DVD in the Great Composers series, we hoped it wouldn’t be too long before the remaining episodes in this wonderfully user-friendly and informative 1997 BBC co-production would make their way onto disc as well, having been available on VHS tape for a good long time. It’s taken more than six months for them to appear, but the second and third discs released have finally made it possible to “collect the set� on DVD, providing a handy instant primer on the history of classical music via the lives of some of its great composers and, of course, their music.

The key here is the title. The seven part series covered (not surprisingly) seven composers from the last 300 or so years of classical music, all of them undeniably great and all of them massively influential in their own way upon the composers that followed them. But the title doesn’t limit the amount of great composers to seven (there are substantially more), nor does it make any claim that this is a definitive list. Your favourite composer might not be represented here, but the musical path that led to them is.

This second disc includes episodes 3 and 4, covering the lives of Ludwig van Beethoven and Richard Wagner respectively. As with the entire series, each composer’s life is recounted in a compact hour using the actual locations where they lived and worked, along with fascinating and insightful comments by renowned conductors, musicians, historians and others. Tying it all together is a refreshingly non-patronising narration read by Kenneth Branagh.

It seems a somewhat bizarre combination in some ways, Beethoven with Wagner on the one disc. But it does make an odd kind of sense as a double feature, and not just because Wagner was initially influenced by Beethoven. Both men were eccentric, often difficult and ferociously committed to their art, and Beethoven often neglected his own personal hygiene to focus on his music in the face of the terror of impending deafness.

Wagner, of course, upped the stakes on his predecessor by being downright arrogant, rude and self-obsessed, as well as an unashamed racist whose words were later seized upon by the Nazis. The man wanted to build the world’s biggest opera house exclusively for his own compositions, with a nice big boulevard connecting the opera house to his home’s front door - a road which would have been built by demolishing half of the poorer residential part of Munich! The fact that Wagner was an utter bastard is confronted head-on in Great Composers, the consensus being that while the man might have been more than a little unpleasant, he was an utter genius when it came to music. Amongst those speaking in his defence here are a survivor of the Nazi holocaust and famed professor Stephen Hawking. That’s the great thing about Great Composers - far from being a dry, analytical look at the lives of some famous dead guys that wrote music, these documentaries are enormously good fun and incredibly informative, whether you’re new to classical music (or even completely unfamiliar with it) or not.

Once again we see the two 59-minute episodes crammed onto a single-layered DVD, something which in theory should be possible to do without problem. However, Warner Europe’s MPEG encoding is considerably less than state of the art, and has caused problems before on NVC Arts discs. This one’s no exception, with considerable MPEG encoding problems cropping up, most noticeably in the form of a “grid� of vertical lines faintly (but often visibly) overlaid on the picture; this is something we’ve seen happen first-hand with software MPEG encoders as a result of digital processing (like cropping or scaling) during encoding, though exactly what causes it is hard to say. But it’s definitely visible here, along with some rather obvious aliasing of diagonal edges and some big chunky macro-blocking during almost any scene involving our old enemy-of-compression buddy water.

A lot of these problems may have been exacerbated by the extremely low data rate in use here; incredibly, there’s still nearly a gigabyte of free space left on the disc that could so easily have been used to lighten the compression load a little bit. The average bitrate here is so low it’s amazing there aren’t more problems; very few compressionists are capable of getting away with such a low data rate, and here it looks like the video master was just fed through an encoder in one pass and sent off for mastering. The third disc in the series (which we’ll review shortly) puts three episodes on a dual layered disc with a greatly increased bitrate, so it’ll be interesting to see if these problems go away there.

All that said, this doesn’t look unwatchably bad - like the first disc, in fact, it’s still of far higher quality than either the TV broadcasts or the VHS tape edition. A co-production with US public television, the video here is 4:3 full-frame and probably from a composite source; the content here is so compelling, though, that it seems almost churlish that we’ve spent two paragraphs above complaining about MPEG artefacts. Most people watching this disc will be perfectly happy with the picture quality, however on larger screens the compromises made start to become quite visible.

Only one other video complaint: like last time, there are no on-screen titles to indicate who is speaking at any given moment, and the subtitles don’t help with this either. Instead, to find out who it is who’s currently on screen, you have to consult the accompanying booklet.

Audio is Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo, and is completely problem-free. It’s clear, crisp and suitably hi-fi; tape hiss is so non-existent you can actually hear where the narration is punched in and out of the mix at times.

Unlike the first disc in the series, this one has no DVD-ROM material included (the first disc offered a web link and some MS Word format biographies). There are no extras included at all, actually, though ironically there is room; regardless, the programs themselves are reason enough to want this disc.