Musician and philosopher David Burrows once compared a musical score to a dried cod. After all, the dots, squiggles, and stripes that parade across a page of music manuscript are mere suggestions of the real thing. And though some of us, in the absence of an actual performance, can imagine the sounds that they represent, real music is an entirely different animal: visceral, energetic, and, at its best, succulent – like a properly prepared cod.

The alchemical process that changes musical notation into music relies heavily on a performer’s interpretive skills. But other elements come into play as well: the sound of the hall, the sense of moment, and especially the presentation. Franz Liszt captivated listeners with such dazzling bravado that women admirers would rip jewels from their bodies and fling them onstage. Arthur Rubinstein had the uncanny ability to make every audience member feel that he was playing just to him or her, though this talent never translated well to his recordings.

A performer’s bearing can be a powerful thing. As Frank Sinatra told Pete Hamill, when he first realized he could sing, he felt like he’d “just knocked out Jack Dempsey.”

We largely discount this aspect of the musical experience when listening to recordings, but film or television is another matter. As part of this year’s Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center, audiences will have a chance to judge for themselves how effective these media are at capturing such intangibles. On two consecutive Mondays, tonight and August 23, four sessions will be presented of “Music on Film: Great Pianists Play Mostly Mozart” (one at 6:30 p.m. and another at 8:30 p.m. on each date). The video presentations, at the Walter Reade Theater, have been curated by Christian Labrande. They will be moderated alternately by author, teacher, and radio personality David Dubal, and by pianist Garrick Ohlsson.

Mr. Ohlsson, who will also play Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto with the Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra on August 24 and 25, will be as surprised by the results as the audience. Pianists featured on his program include Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Solomon, Claudio Arrau, and Glenn Gould. But he said he has not seen all the performances that will be shown. “I’m curious about what incredible and perverse things Michelangeli does,” he said. “You can do it differently, but not better.”

For Mr. Ohlsson, it will be a chance to remember live performances he saw by these artists, including one in particular by Michelangeli. “I heard him about a dozen times live, and it would always be perfect and awesome,” he said. “Sometimes that perfectionism took fire and he became a burning bush. Once Evgeny Kissin and Richard Goode and I were in the audience and by the end we were all crying.”

“Gould was the most maddening genius,” he recalled. “Many of us probably feel that in the 20th century two pianists were instantly recognizable: Horowitz and Gould. I can’t be like either of them. And Arrau was a great love of mine. He was my teacher. He felt that physical difficulties were part of the music struggle, and he disdained the easy way.”

The series features Arrau performing Beethoven’s Opus 111 Piano Sonata. “I heard him do this for the BBC around 1970,” Mr. Ohlsson said. “He was at the peak of his physical and emotional powers. The last movement was as beautifully realized as I’ve heard anyone do it.”

How much of this will come across on film to someone who never saw the live performances is an open question. I had a chance to survey several DVDs of performances by these pianists currently available, and can report decidedly mixed results.

“Two Titans of the Keyboard: Sviatoslav Richter and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli” (VAI), for example, provides a rather lackluster experience of Michelangeli performing Beethoven. Richter’s fiery virtuosity, on the other hand, is absolutely riveting: a seemingly irresistible force animates his flailing limbs and bouncing torso, an energy tangible even through the television screen. Pianist Emil Gilels (who per forms alone and with conductor Andre Cluytens on an EMI Classics DVD) combines musical grace with fire. Arrau, in numerous appearances on compilations, is often solemn and somewhat distant. But this is not at all true of his EMI DVD, which includes the stunning performance of Beethoven’s 32nd Piano Sonata, Opus 111.

Not all of the pianists’s personalities come through on film, according to Mr. Dubal. “Michelangeli is an example of one who on film seems to lose the aura and glamour of his recordings,” he said. “It’s interesting, because he was physically almost diabolical.” Among the entries on Mr. Dubal’s programs are performances by Rudolf Serkin, Maurizio Pollini, Friedrich Gulda, Martha Argerich, Leonard Bernstein, and Daniel Barenboim. But there is one he said is truly outstanding: Emil Gilels playing Beethoven’s “Waldstein Sonata.”

“There has never been anything like it,” he told me.

Some commercial producers of such video performances have introduced an extra element of interest by providing historical context. Mr. Dubal wrote and narrated “The Golden Age of the Piano” (Philips). On this disc we witness not only Gould’s balletic fingers, Horowitz’s stunning dynamic shifts, Myra Hess’s muscular assertiveness, and Alexander Brailowsky’s dashing looks and grand showmanship, but also the poignant sight of an aging Ignace Jan Paderewski playing to raise money for his besieged country and a rapt Moscow audience entranced by young Van Cliburn despite the chill of the Cold War.

“I’ve played this DVD for my classes at Juilliard and at other venues,” Mr. Dubal said. “The response has been wonderful. Young people have little knowledge of the past, and these films are illuminating to them. One student told me, ‘this film made me proud to be a pianist.'”

Viewing these legendary performers, despite the drawbacks, can indeed be eye-opening. One collection that offers some fascinating moments is “Great Pianists on the Bell Telephone Hour (1959-67).” Here, Jorge Bolet plays “The Rhapsody in Blue” under the baton of a trim-looking Paul Whiteman (once as well known for his girth as for the appellation “The King of Jazz”). Despite the fact that Whiteman commissioned and performed the premiere of this piece, both his conducting and Bolet’s performance are remarkably un-Gershwinesque.

John Browning, Van Cliburn’s piano rival at the Juilliard School, is shown performing Brahms – as is Cliburn – and the contrast is instructive. Browning’s modern, unsentimental approach is in some ways the polar opposite of Cliburn’s grand, Romantic style. Also included are 15-year-old Lorin Hollander’s awe-inspiring pianistic debut, and Byron Janis performing Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev – and demonstrating why contemporaries regarded his pianism miraculous.

But these video documents also serve to remind us of a sad fact. Today, there is no longer a “Bell Telephone Hour,” and we find little popular adulation for musical greatness. We were once a nation proud of our cultural riches. We should be again.

Mr. Isacoff is the editor of Piano Today magazine. His most recent book is “Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization” (Alfred A. Knopf).