GHCD 2328 Secure E-shop Broadcast & Review	GUIDO CANTELLI NEW YORK PHILHARMINIC NBC SYMPHONY   MUSSORGSKY  Pictures at an Exhibition WAGNER A Faust Overture Siegfried's Rhine Journey ROUSELL Sinfonietta for Strings BERLIOZ Hungarian March LIVE RECORDING: 1951-1053 Mussorgsky - Pictures at an Exhibition - Promenade Berlioz - Hungarian March (Damnation of Faust) Vivaldi - Concerto Op. 3 No.8 in A minor, RV522 (L'estro Armonico) - Allegro

Contents:

Guido Cantelli was 36 years old when he was killed in a plane crash near Paris in the early hours of November 25th 1956. His death brought to an end one of the greatest conducting talents to have emerged in Europe since the end of World War II.

He had been born in the northern Italian town of Novara, mid-way between Turin and Milan, on April 27th, 1920.  His exceptional gifts soon manifested themselves, and he was appointed organist of the church in his home town when he was merely ten years old; from the age of 14, Guido conducted the local choral society.  He enrolled at the Milan Conservatory, taking composition and conducting as his principal subjects; after graduation, he was compelled to join the Italian Army, although a thoracic condition delayed his enlistment. His experiences in the Army after the fall of Mussolini led him to Nazi labour camps in Germany and to a hospital in Italy, from whence he escaped to Milan, where he was taken hostage by Fascist troops. 

This was not long before the liberation of Italy, after which, freed by the Allies, Cantelli resumed the conducting career he had barely begun before enlistment. His first orchestral concerts were with the La Scala Orchestra in Milan. He soon gained a reputation in Italy, in part assisted by a friendly British Army Major, Arthur Watson, who had been stationed in Italy after the War to assist in the country's reconstruction with responsibility for organising concerts.  

On May 21st 1948, Arturo Toscanini, during one of his post-war trips to Italy at the end of the previous New York concert season, heard Cantelli conduct for the first time. As Laurence Lewis says in his biography, Guido Cantelli - Portrait of a Maestro (Tantivy Press, 1979), Toscanini suddenly whispered to the La Scala director, Antonio Ghiringhelli, sitting next to him, ‘that is me directing this concert’. On his return to New York, Toscanini’s praise of the young Italian he had heard carried considerable weight, and a little while later, Cantelli received a formal invitation from Toscanini to conduct four concerts with his NBC Symphony Orchestra in New York in January and February, 1949.

Cantelli’s New York debut was little short of sensational, and within a short time he was invited to conduct the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York (the New York Philharmonic, as it eventually became). The collection of performances conducted by Cantelli on this commemorative CD is taken from a selection of those broadcast concerts by both orchestras.

Our programme opens with a thrilling performance of Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. This is by the New York Philharmonic, and comes from a Carnegie Hall concert at the end of March, 1953.  In almost every respect, this performance demonstrates Cantelli’s genius in some detail. The conductor’s ear for internal orchestral balance and especially for intonation was wonderful, often recalled with affection by musicians in Europe and in the United States many years after Cantelli’s death. These qualities, allied to his great grasp of the work in question as a whole, showed that he possessed the ability truly to galvanise an orchestra.  Another example of Cantelli's approach to music-making is his insistence upon scrupulous observance of note-values.  Although the recording quality of this performance is that of good monaural broadcast sound of more than half a century ago, it is still possible to ascertain Cantelli’s gifts in these areas; the very opening is supremely well-balanced, the Philharmonic’s first trumpet holding each note to its full length as well as never losing sight of the overall phrase, and Cantelli keeps an sense of forward-momentum as the visitor slowly (but not too slowly, however) observes the scene before him as he enters the gallery. There is a fascinating comparison to be made with Toscanini’s NBC Symphony RCA recording, made on January 26^th 1953 – Toscanini is a shade more urgent, as if the visitor cannot wait too long to begin his tour; Cantelli – not better, but equally valid an interpretation – is perhaps a shade more understanding of the characteristics of the Promenade, so much so, one hopes, that Toscanini would have said something similar about Cantelli’s account (had he heard it). Despite their more than fifty-year difference in ages, Toscanini’s respect for Cantelli was greater than that of any other conductor he is known to have heard, and yet both were by no means so similar in the results they obtained - equally fine, but different, although the built up to the final Great Gate of Kiev has a similar intensity from both conductors. Perhaps most interestingly of all, comparison may be made with Cantelli’s commercial recording of Pictures at an Exhibition for RCA, taped on January 23^rd 1951 with Toscanini’s own NBC Symphony.

The two Wagner items come from a slightly earlier New York Philharmonic concert, broadcast on March 22^nd 1953 (six days before the performance of Pictures), and here again, without quite duplicating Toscanini in Wagner, there is no doubt that Cantelli’s reading of A Faust Overture owes something to the intensity of the older Italian in this music.  It would, however, be quite wrong to give the impression that the younger man was merely copying the Maestro’s approach; equally, that there is a similarity in their readings of Wagner would be impossible to deny, yet we should never lose sight of the fact that A Faust Overture was already appearing in Cantelli programmes in Italy by the late 1940s, before he had seen Toscanini conduct in the flesh. What is particularly impressive here is the account of Siegfried’s Rhine Journey from Gotterdammerung, the premature death of the young hero casting a profound shadow across the music in terms of Cantelli’s iron control of tempo and of orchestral might.

The Sinfonietta for string orchestra by the French master Albert Roussel, a composer whose music appeared very rarely in Cantelli programmes, but none the less from a composer for whom Cantelli had very high regard. One might remember that in the earlier 1950s, Roussel’s music was more often heard in concert and appeared more frequently on records than seems to be the case today. As with the Hungarian (Rakoczy) March from Berlioz’s Damnation of Faust, these performances come from an earlier NBC Symphony broadcast of fifteen months before that containing the Wagner items – December 1951, a programme which also saw the inclusion of Brahms’s Third Symphony. The March is particularly well-played, with an apt and enlivening basic tempo, almost – but not quite – throwing caution to the winds. 

Finally, we hear two concert-master soloists of the NBC Symphony, Daniel Guilet and Remo Bolognini, in Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Violins in A minor from Opus 8; this performance took place not in the notorious Studio 8H of NBC in New York, but in Carnegie Hall. Cantelli was one of the first major conductors after the Second World War to include Vivaldi’s music at all regularly in what one might term ‘normal’ symphony concert programmes – this was, of course, before the baroque and early music revivals of ten to fifteen or so years later, by which time death had tragically taken Guido Cantelli from us.

Arturo Toscanini, who had retired in 1954, and whose final broadcast concert Cantelli had attended, himself died in his sleep less than eight weeks later, in New York on January 16th, 1957. He was never informed of Cantelli's death.                                                                               Robert Matthew-Walker © 2007

Page revised Tuesday November 27 2007