Guido Cantelli conducts American Masters = PISTON: Toccata; COPLAND: El Salon Mexico; CRESTON: Dance Overture; Two Choric Dances; BARBER: Adagio for Strings; School for Scandal Ov. – NBC Sym. /NY Philharmonic/Cantelli – Urania

by | Nov 29, 2010 | Classical Reissue Reviews | 0 comments

Guido Cantelli conducts American Masters = PISTON: Toccata; COPLAND: El Salon Mexico; CRESTON: Dance Overture; Two Choric Dances, Op. 17b; BARBER: Adagio for Strings; Overture to the School for Scandal, Op. 5 – NBC Symphony (School for Scandal; Choric Dances)/New York Philharmonic Orchestra/Guido Cantelli – Urania URN 22419, 60:20 [Distr. by Albany] ****:
Guido Cantelli (1920-1956)–gifted Italian conductor and protégé of Arturo Toscanini–to his credit exerted his own powerful personality, deferring to none when it came to his taste in modern music, although Cantelli favored neo-Classical models generally. At the time of his untimely death in 1956 at Orly Airport, the New York Philharmonic had been well considering Cantelli  for the post as a successor to Dimitri Mitropoulos, likewise an active exponent of American classical composition. Urania (after the AS label in Italy) assembles broadcast performances of 1952-1955 that characterize the energy and persuasive élan Cantelli brought to the podium.
Piston’s Toccata (13 March 1955) opens the concert, a work rife with virtuosic parts in the strings, winds, and brass, highly punctuated by always within a tonal framework. The rapid-fire staccati seem descended from passages in Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, and the kettledrum part alone deserves separate applause. Like Serge Koussevitzky, Cantelli enjoyed a deep reverence for Copland’s sarcastic musical picture, El Salon Mexico (13 March 1955), whose early pages seem to dip and weave with post-intoxicated languor. The string tone, however, wrings our hearts with that special yearning of place that we receive when we read Steinbeck or watch Tim Holt and Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. When the festivities open up, the ancient Aztec gods themselves may well slap at the piñata. If the music occasionally sounds like the mambo from West Side Story, recall that Copland came first.
Paul Creston’s Dance Overture (18 March 1956) remains among my favorite selections from Cantelli, and I never cease to program it for my radio broadcasts in tribute to Cantelli. The piece contains innumerable rhythmic nuances and shifts, a throbbing melody, all kinds of trapeze acts for winds and brass, and the orchestra even has to clap in syncopation.  The explosive finale brings down the house on 57th Street. The Two Choric Dances (29 November 1952) invoke something of Debussy’s Syrinx and Sacred and Profane Dances for Harp. The first, set in dark hues, utilizes strings, winds, and piano obbligato. Its lachrymose character could be taken for Medea’s Dance of Vengeance by Barber. The second Choric Dance opts for more brash, pungent means in the strings and horns. The piano part establishes running ostinati while strings and battery indulge in frenzied Bacchic rites that occasionally reveal a sultry Eastern temperament.
Samuel Barber’s orchestral scores seem to have appealed to young talented conductors, witness Cantelli and the equally-gifted Thomas Schippers. The Overture to the School for Scandal (29 November 1952) from the same concert as the Creston Choric Dances, moves at a frenzied pace, until the lovely oboe melody that marks Barber as a major lyricist in music. Its variant lead to contrapuntally colorful procedures, beautifully balanced under Cantelli’s firm hand, playing the slow sections with careful deliberation, until the searing recapitulation. Barber’s most popular work, the Adagio for Strings (27 March 1955), rarely acknowledges its predecessor in Torelli’s E Minor Concerto Grosso.
Nevertheless, Cantelli exacts a measured, spacious reading from its tragic figures, the strings of the New York Philharmonic well accustomed to the agonized yearnings demanded by permanent conductor Mitropoulos. My copy suffered a persistent clicking in the last cut, the Barber Op. 5.
–Gary Lemco

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