Pristine Classical Recorded Music

Guido Cantelli

biographical notes from Wikipedia

 

Guido Cantelli (April 27, 1920 – November 24, 1956) was an Italian orchestral conductor.

Born in Novara, Italy, Cantelli was named Musical Director of La Scala, Milan on November 16, 1956, but his promising career was tragically cut short by his death at the age of 36 in an airplane crash in Paris, France only one week later.

In the course of his brief career, he had conducted not only in many of the most famous concert halls of Europe but also in the United States and South Africa. The famous conductor Arturo Toscanini was particularly impressed by him, and, in a note written to Cantelli's wife Iris in 1950 after four concerts where Cantelli had been a guest conductor with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, said:

I am happy and moved to inform you of Guido's great success and that I introduced him to my orchestra, which loves him as I do. This is the first time in my long career that I have met a young man so gifted. He will go far, very far.

Toscanini, who died less than two months after Cantelli's plane crash, was never told of Cantelli's death.

Cantelli left a small but valuable legacy of recordings. Among them are recordings of Beethoven's 7th symphony, Brahms' 1st and 3rd symphonies, Franck's D minor symphony (with the NBC Symphony), Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, Liszt's 2nd piano concerto with Claudio Arrau, and shorter pieces by Ravel, Rossini, and others. His one surviving opera performance is of Così fan tutte, from La Scala in 1956. There is also a live CD recording of him conducting the Verdi Requiem (with Herva Nelli). The Franck, Brahms 3rd, and Beethoven 7th are among his few stereo recordings. Just before he died, he recorded the final three movements of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5 for EMI, but did not record the first movement. In recent years, many performances from broadcasts with the NBC Symphony have been made available.

Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guido_Cantelli

 

 

Bruno Bettinelli

biographical notes from Wikipedia

 

Bruno Bettinelli (June 4, 1913 – November 8, 2004) was an Italian composer and teacher.

 

Biography

Bruno Bettinelli completed his studies at the Conservatorio "G. Verdi" in Milan, under the tutelage of Giulio Cesare Paribeni and Renzo Bossi. He held the title of professor of composition at that same institute, and he trained many notable contemporary Italian musicians, including Claudio Abbado, Emiliano Bucci, Danilo Lorenzini, Bruno Canino, Aldo Ceccato, Riccardo Chailly, Azio Corghi, Armando Gentilucci, Riccardo Muti, Angelo Paccagnini, Mauritius Pollini, Uto Ughi and many others. He also taught the Italian singer-songwriter Gianna Nannini.

He received many international awards for composition, including a prize from Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome in the 1940s. He has also worked in musicology and music criticism.

His compositions are currently performed all over the world. Bettinelli's music is published primarily by Ricordi, Suvini Zerboni, and Sonzogno.

Bruno Bettinelli passed away in New York in 2004 at the age of 91.

As a memoriam to Bruno Bettinelli, Milan's Edizioni Musicali European (EME), in collaborations with the magazines "Cartellina" and "Chorus," established a national competition for choral composition in his name.

 

Music

An author of symphonic, choral, opera, and chamber music, his younger works incorporated a contrapuntal neoclassicism, influenced heavily by Igor Stravinsky, Paul Hindemith, and Béla Bartók, not to mention the Italian composers Alfredo Casella, Goffredo Petrassi and Gian Francesco Malipiero.

His later music evolved constantly, incorporating new elements, such as atonality and 12-tone music, to blend it into a free chromatic language, always expressing formal structures.

Of particular note are his choral works, as he collected and set many traditional Italian folk songs that had heretofore only survived through oral tradition.

Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Bettinelli