As a brand new Douglas DC-6B, frost glazes the ground and fog floats in the air. take off From Orly Airport near Paris at the beginning of November 24, 1956. The plane headed for Shannon, Ireland, and then New York.
It won’t reach either.
Approximately 15 seconds after the plane left the ground, the plane sank just below its path, cutting out an unlit house and jumping into the village of Palaille Vieille Poste.Authorities never found Cause of the crash. All but one of the 35 on board died.
Among them were Guido Cantelli, 36, and a disciple of Arturo Toscanini, the “comet of the conductor” that one critic called him. In just eight years, Cantelli has jumped from an ambiguous state to a career that is still unobtrusive today. He is a guest of the New York Philharmonic, a frequent conductor, and was announced as the music director of La Scala in Milan a week before the crash.
Perhaps Cantelli’s way of death, the waste of it, explains some of the enthusiasm of interest that has come to surround him. It’s hard to think of many conductors who can look up their careers just as accurately-if certainly creepy-to get closer to what’s possible in detail.
After all, not all of Cantelli’s studio recordings, primarily for EMI with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, can be found on 10 discs. Warner Although it’s a box, his weather progress can be tracked weekly as the extraordinary proportion of radio broadcasts with Philharmonic, the NBC Symphony Orchestra and other groups have been restored and released on labels such as: I can do it. will, Music & Arts When Primitive.. Now you have a portrait of Cantelli that is probably more complete than ever.
And what a portrait. Forget what-if smoke from those flames of Paris. If Cantelli, rather than Leonard Bernstein, took over Dimitri Mitropros in Philharmonic, forget the mystery of how American music history was rewritten, as Mitropros wanted. Forget the lament that Cantelli had little time to mature, as if the efforts of young musicians were inevitably low in value.
Appearing as if completely formed by the works of Schumann and Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Debussy, Cantelli was arguably the best conductor, like the New York Times critic Olin Downes. I have written In 1953, a person who “understands notes and wraps his heart in all notes.”
Serious, tense and introverted, Cantelli was not the imitator he was often accused of, as if Toscanini’s Mark was disqualified in the century when his mentor influence was great. Even though he used the tension of the familiar rhythm, the ferociousness of the lines, and the rigor of discipline, those characteristics completely afflicted himself and his musicians with the elegance of expression, the taste of color. It was softened by a maniac to the details. .. He treated all the music as a song and sang it with the care he deserved.
Singing itself played a small role in Cantelli’s training. Born April 27, 1920 in Novara, Italy, he was the second son of a military bandmaster who stood at the table to command the band at the age of five.
As a boy, Cantelli studied piano, trumpet, horn and several percussion instruments, and soon studied under the organist of the Cathedral of San Gaudenzio. He sang in the choir and first directed it at the age of eight. He wrote the Mass at 10. He began substituting the organ at the age of 14, and during the service he played the theme of “Tristan and Iseult”.
He was often seen in Teatro Coccia’s galleries and was reading music on Torchlight. The other night was spent adjusting the radio he saved with his allowance, or in his record, with the most important of them, Toscanini’s. He entered the Milan Conservatory in 1939 and completed a seven-year composition course in three years, but he was not a composer. Shortly after his graduation, Toscanini made his debut with “La Traviata” in Coccia, which opened in 1888 in 1943.
After the German occupation of Novara in September, Cantelli was sent to a camp on the Baltic coast and worked to death, weighing only 80 pounds.How the story was later told to promote him as an anti-fascist as brave as Toscanini had probably He refused to work with the Nazis and eventually became a partisan hero. Probably an hour after being shot when the Allies released Milan.
it’s not, according to He explains to Cantelli’s biographer Lawrence Lewis that he is basically non-political. The Germans probably deported him, a weak draft, to a labor camp because he refused to fight if he was given a choice, and a few months later they drafted him and Mussolini’s Italy. Served the Social Republic. On the way back, he left the hospital and returned to Novara, where he forged a document for the partisans while working at a bank. The day Mussolini was shot, he married his lover, Iris.
After the war, Cantelli realized that he was short of food and lacking opportunities. He made his outdoor debut with the Rascala Orchestra in July 1945, but did not return until May 21, 1948. Coincidentally, Toscanini was in the theater that night and faced his vision of youth. Within a few days, the world’s most famous conductor was in a small Milan apartment in Canteris, playing his latest records and encouraging Cantelli to spend weeks conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra. ..
Cantelli, then 28, arrived in New York at the end of December and was swept away by a world of musical excellence and celebrity. Toscanini declared him an honorary son. Four concerts continued in January and February, each broadcast, each creating a sensation.Alongside the elegant Haydn, there was a very passionate description of Hindemith’s “Matisse der Marel” symphony. one weekVery powerful Tchaikovsky “Romeo and Juliet” with Casella NextBartok Concerto for Orchestra another..
“I feel that Cantelli has a fateful musician in front of him,” Downs wrote about Ravel and Frank’s music after the final program. Toscanini took Cantelli and saw Rockets celebrating before he got home.He goes back every winter and adds a long stint When The Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra made his appearance last longer at the 1954 collapsed NBC.
Throughout Cantelli’s career in the United States, there have been criticisms of his repertoire. Frescobaldi When Monteverdi To barber When Dallapiccola However, it turned out to be repeated seasonally. There was also a fundamental dissatisfaction with him rather than being too precise. “Other men mature to control from uncontrolled passions,” Downs said. I have written After him debut With Philharmonic in January 1952. Cantelli’s approach may be to graduate from control to release. “
The control was hard earned. Cantelli did not read the life of his composer or consciously filter the music through his own aesthetics. He just read the sheet music, and even if he had no memory of Toscanini or Mitropros, he learned them carefully through the melody. During the six hours a day he studied, he said in 1955 that it was not uncommon for him to sing an ambiguous bassoon line and adjust the pace of the room.
He stuck to how to release notes and attack, how to give the line an end and a beginning, and how to balance the parts to sing.But if his grumpy lyricism gave him Mozart And his Rossini With elegance and drive, he also gave him his ability to score. MendelssohnAnd even him DebussyHuge cumulative power.
Cantelli’s perfectionism found its ultimate expression in an enthusiastic session with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London.Ravel’s “Pavan for the Dead Princess” For example, he took 20 tenses to play the 6-minute music correctly. Meanwhile, he struck behind the scenes, harpist Renata Scheffé’s crying, and horn player Dennis Brain afraid of his lips cracking.
But in some explanations, he prefers suppleness to the sweat-sucking volatility he can live and stimulate.his Brahms First It’s fascinating in the studio, but it’s Boston Symphony Orchestra, In Pristine since 1954.His Philharmonia Orchestra Beethoven Sevens Dance happily, but the same symphony faints with music and art release From the 1953 performance written by Surprised Downs call The composer’s “Giant spiritual gloomy in space”.
Enough to raise the question of why Cantelli didn’t take a major post until it was rendered crisply “Così fan tutte” At La Scala in 1956, the house was forced to make an undeniable offer to him. By appearing as a guest in a handful of authoritative, completely different ensembles, he paraphrased him “in more ways in terms of interest, execution, and variety of expression than can be obtained from a single orchestra.” I did.
Philharmonic counterfacts are so far from the truth that you can’t even ask. At the time of his death, Cantelli planned to devote most of his time to La Scala, except for his important Philharmonia Orchestra. His bond with the New York players was already broken.
His only recording with the Philharmonic Orchestra, Vivaldi “Four seasons,” His worst studio effort, and the effort he once had to make to overcome the orchestra’s ruthlessness, gave him Collapse With the wings of Carnegie Hall.apart from Extraordinary Performance — Energetic yet elaborate — In the spring of 1956, Cantelli was furious with the disgust of the players and in November asked Philharmonic management to release him from his contractual obligations. They refused.
And he’s gone.
In New York, where the sick Toscanini was not informed about the death of his heir, Mitropros was Strauss’s. “Todund Verklärung” In his memory with Philharmonic, unlike Cantelli himself, Enthusiastic account — It seems to melt into sadness.
In Milan, the La Scala orchestra played Handel’s “Largo” from the pits, when the hearse paused outside the theater. Former music director Victor de Sabata has offered to conduct. Players preferred Cantelli to do so at the end.
