He was attractive, charismatic, elegant and bursting with youthful enthusiasm and an extraordinary musical talent, the Italian conductor Guido Cantelli. His death in a plane crash in 1956 at the age of only 36 years left a painful gap in the international music scene.

Maestro Toscanini, who had chosen him as his successor, emphasized that he had never met a more gifted young musician. Cantelli was feted on both sides of the Atlantic as being among the most impressively gifted among the young generation of conductors. His rise to fame was downright meteoric, after benchmark recordings and concerts with Toscanini’s NBC Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra among others in the early 1950s.

Cantelli especially loved German romanticism, as well as Debussy and Ravel, whose compositions were included in almost all of his programmes. This compilation of original albums from the years 1952 to 1960 (plus bonus tracks) shows a musician who indisputably had the “je ne sais quoi” and was determined to produce a maximum of artistic achievement.

The box contains Brahms symphonies (no.1 and no.3), the legendary recording of Mendelssohn’s “Italian”, the much acclaimed Mozart recordings with the Philharmonia Orchestra (A Musical Joke and Symphony no.29), Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” and Debussy’s orchestral La Mer, as well as other French gems. In addition, there are other masterpieces by Beethoven, Schumann, Vivaldi, Wagner, Schubert, Ravel, Dukas, Liszt and others.