Guido Cantelli

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

Toscanini elected him his "spiritual heir" since the beginnings of his career.

Cantelli was born on 27 April 1920 in Novara, Italy, to Antonio and Angela (née Riccardone).

He started studying music while still very young.

From 1939 until 1941 he studied with Arrigo Pedrollo, and then, from 1941 until 1942, with Giorgio Federico Ghedini and Antonino Votto.

In 1940 he started his conducting career, graduating from the Milan Conservatory in 1943.

Cantelli studied at the Milan Conservatory and began a promising conducting career.

Cantelli, who had started his career very young in 1940, was already performing in the greatest theatres in Europe and America by 1945.

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.

In 1943, he garnered acclaim for a representation of the Traviata at the Teatro Coccia.

Besides being the conductor, Cantelli was also the artistic director of the representation.

Cantelli's career was interrupted by World War II, during which he was forced to serve in the Italian army, and then placed in a German labour camp because of his outspoken opposition to the Nazis.

He was sent with a team of labourers to Frankfurt am Main.

While in Germany, Cantelli was interned in a concentration camp in Szczecin.

He fell ill and managed to escape the camp.

Cantelli was repatriated to Italy in 1944, establishing himself in Turin.

He resumed his musical career after the Allies liberated Italy.

After resuming his musical career in Turin, Cantelli was invited to conduct some concerts with the Symphony Orchestra of the Radio of Milan (Orchestra sinfonica della Radio di Milano).

Riccardo Pick-Mangiagalli, the director of the Milan Conservatory, decided it was the moment to present the young conductor to the wide public, organizing a concert at the Rocchetta Court of the Castello Sforzesco on 27 July 1945, entrusting to Cantelli the Orchestra of La Scala.

The programme was very proving, and included, among other things, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6, or Pathétique Symphony.

The performance immediately signalled Cantelli's "innate elegance of the gesture, the interpretative strength and stylistic purity, which, animated by the youthful momentum of the young conductor, made a great impression on the public."

After the success of the Castello Sforzesco concert, a successful international career started for Cantelli.

This career would bring him to the major stages of the world, where he would conduct the world's most famous orchestras.

He was acclaimed by the public and the critics alike.

However, in spite of all the compliments and the success, Cantelli's attention was not diverted from his studies.

He kept on studying with "scrupulous commitment and professionalism," encouraged by the great Arturo Toscanini.

Toscanini saw him conduct at La Scala, Milan, and remained impressed.

The results of these stylistic studies by Cantelli maturated on 21 May 1948, with a concert that, in a way, "marked his definitive Scaliger consecration and at the same time his authoritative entry into the small number of great international conductors."

Toscanini invited him to guest conduct the NBC Symphony Orchestra in 1949.

He debuted in America on 15 January 1949, with a "most positive encounter with the New Yorker public".

Besides conducting the NBC Symphony from 1949 to 1954, Cantelli also guest conducted the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the U.S. and the Philharmonia Orchestra in the UK.

While he was conducting in America and Europe and garnering acclaim therein, Cantelli "also continued his triumphal career in his homeland".

After dedicating himself for a long time to symphonic music, Cantelli wanted to return to the "lyric repertoire".

In a note written to Cantelli's wife Iris in 1950 after four of these concerts, Toscanini 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.

Between these two dates, he had been welcomed in Edinburgh (1950), and had completed an acclaimed tournée in London.

On 3 January 1952 he was welcomed again by the American public, conducting the New York Philharmonic.

He was named Musical Director of La Scala, Milan in November 1956, but his promising career was cut short only one week later by his death at the age of 36 in the 1956 Paris DC-6 crash in France on route to the United States.