Richard Itter Collection

  • Jacqueline du Pré & Mstislav Rostropovich: Schumann & Dvořák Cello Concertos (Richard Itter Collection)

    MP3 Album:
    This previously unreleased live recording of Jacqueline du Pré playing the Schumann Cello Concerto is her first public performance of the work, given in the Royal Festival Hall on 12 December 1962 with Jean Martinon conducting the BBCSO. She had worked intensively on the concerto with Paul Tortelier in Paris prior to this concert. When Du Pré studied the Schumann with Mstislav Rostropovich at the Moscow Conservatoire in 1966, he exclaimed, ‘This is the most perfect Schumann I have ever heard’. The 1962 live performance of the Dvořák Cello Concerto by Rostropovich has also not been released before. He is partnered by Carlo Maria Giulini, who went on to to make a studio recording of the same concerto with him in 1977. The Times critic described this Edinburgh Festival performance as an ‘exciting’ and ‘emotionally supercharged interpretation’ with Giulini’s reading ‘full of finely wrought points of detail’. The attractive bonus features Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya in the Ária from Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras.
  • Guido Cantelli (Richard Itter Collection)

    MP3 Album:
    Guido Cantellis live recordings with the Philharmonia Orchestra are exceptionally rare because the BBC seldom broadcast any of his concerts. ICA Classics released Cantellis live concert from the Edinburgh Festival in September 1954 on ICAC 5081 but there has been nothing else. Toscanini was Cantellis mentor and there is no doubt that he would have continued in the great conductors footsteps had he not been tragically killed in an air accident in Paris on the 24th November 1956. He was 36 years old. The Royal Albert Hall recording made by Richard Itter in May 1953 is very well recorded for the period and preserves the palpable excitement of the whole concert.