In a world of ever-increasing technical standards, recordings by Enrico Mainardi are enjoying all the more musical prestige. Their sincerity and depth of character raise them above any sense of ostentatious self-portrayal.

Mainardi, a great Italian cellist and composer, was born in Milan (May 19, 1897) and died in Munich (April 10, 1976). As a child prodigy he was accompanied on the piano by the great composer Respighi. In 1917 he graduated from the Milan Conservatory with a diploma in composition, however when he took his cello up again after WWI, he found that he had lost the ability to play well. He entered the Academy of St. Cecilia in Rome to study composition and piano, and in 1924 finally decided to seriously study the cello again.

Mainardi would often say later that this experience of forgetting how to play, and then relearning everything, enabled him to be a good teacher. After World War II, Mainardi became well known as a performer, but better known as a cello pedagogue in England and France. Many fine cellists studied with him, including Joan Dickson, Siegfried Palm and Miklos Perenyi. He wrote four concertos for cello and orchestra, and many other works, including cadenzas for some of the major cello concertos.

Together with the pianist Edwin Fischer and the violinist Georg Kulenkampff (whose place was later taken by Wolfgang Schneiderhan), Mainardi formed a famous piano trio. In 1967, he also founded a trio with the pianist Guido Agosti and the flutist Severino Gazzelloni. After Edwin Fischer's death, he gave wonderful recitals in the Mozarteum, either alone or in a duo with his friend Carlo Zecchi.

Sadly, most recordings on the Mainardi-Zecchi Duo have long been unavailable. It is therefore all the more important that this Salzburg Festspiel Edition CD reminds us of that concert in the summer of 1959 that was received so enthusiastically by audience and critics alike.

Mainardi wrote: "My principle and aim is to be at the service of music and not to use it for the sake of showing myself."

“His perfect technique is for him a natural prerequisite for artistic endeavour. But not even for a second does it become a means to an end. All superficial virtuosity, all theatricality is here avoided conciously, and thus he achieves a cerebral level of performance. How differently he then played Schubert’s melodious sonata in A minor, which in its small scale form is far more introspective. And then the soberly passionate pathos of Brahms, caught up in its densely contrapuntal web, was an experience of its own.” - Salzburger Nachrichten, 17/8/1959

Recorded: Mozarteum 13th August 1959