Guido Cantelli - Icon - Fiery Angel of the Podium [9CD Remastered Box Set] (2012)

Guido Cantelli’s relatively small yet significant legacy of commercial recordings for EMI have been kept alive on CD, chiefly through the label’s Great Recordings of the Twentieth Century series and Testament reissues. EMI Icon’s Cantelli box brings most of these recordings together for the first time in one collection. The only item missing is a rejected 1951 Mendelssohn Italian Symphony that Testament eventually published.

However, the unfinished 1956 Beethoven Fifth is included (Cantelli completed the last three movements before his untimely death in a November 1956 plane crash), as well as the 1954 NBC Symphony Franck D minor, an RCA recording for which EMI owns the rights to the stereo master tape. Disc 9 is given over to an audio documentary portrait by Jon Tolansky featuring brief interview excerpts with musicians who worked under Cantelli’s direction, long stretches of musical examples, and previously unpublished rehearsal snippets that hint at the conductor’s exacting standards and high- strung temperament.

The main question for collectors will concern sound quality. While many of the recordings are represented by their most recent and best-sounding EMI or Testament transfers, certain items, regrettably, are not. Why, for example, opt for the Tchaikovsky “Pathetique” Symphony/Romeo and Juliet coupling in its 1989 EMI Great Recordings transfer rather than the more open and robust-sounding 2004 Testament edition? Why use EMI’s 1989 Brahms Third transfer, so less vivid in comparison with Testament’s 1999 edition?

Similarly, the 1994 EMI Artist Profile Franck Symphony remastering yields to the version Testament brought out in a collection of Cantelli’s complete NBC Symphony commercial releases. Not that these earlier transfers sound bad—in fact, they’re perfectly acceptable, yet their upgrades ought to have been used.

That said, all of these recordings testify to Cantelli’s superb orchestral control, ear for color and textural clarity, and impeccable taste. This applies as much to the 1950 La Scala Tchaikovsky Fifth as to the 1951-56 Philharmonia Orchestra collaborations. As I wrote in an earlier review, Cantelli may have rode the Philharmonia musicians hard, yet they played like angels for him, notably first-desk soloists such as horn legend Dennis Brain, who shines in the Brahms Third symphony’s third movement, in Mozart’s Musical Joke, and in Ravel’s Pavane for a Dead Princess.

Cantelli admirers already know about the meticulous textural contours and pinpointed nuance of his Debussy and Ravel, or the lilting string work and ideal tempos throughout Beethoven’s Seventh symphony and the approved 1955 Mendelssohn Italian. Some may find the Schumann Fourth a bit severe and driven, but the well-considered details still command attention, such as the busy string figurations that are perfectly balanced in relation to the sustained brass chords.