Man to Watch

Guido Cantelli is a young man in no hurry, but he is going places fast. Ever since, at 28, he first led the NBC Symphony as a hand-picked substitute for Arturo Toscanini (TIME, Jan. 24, 1949). Milan's Cantelli has been persuading audience after audience that his may be the richest new conducting talent in a decade or more.

For the past fortnight it has been Boston's turn to watch Cantelli at work leading its famed symphony as guest conductor. Bostonians saw a slim, dark-haired man who seldom used an excessive gesture, but who drew from his orchestra music of clarity and fire. "Hats off, gentlemen, a conductor!" cried the critic of the Boston Post at the top of his review. "There can be no shadow of a doubt," said the Herald critic, "that Guido Cantelli belongs in the very first rank of the orchestral conductors of our time."

Last month Chicago critics did similar cartwheels after Cantelli guest-conducted the Chicago Symphony. Wrote the Tribune's tart-tongued Claudia Cassidy: "Just what it is, the spark that sets some artists blazing, nobody knows. But Guido Cantelli has it." Burbled the Herald-American: "He is sensational without resorting to sensationalism . . . original without being extreme . . . Boards of directors: file this young man for future reference." London critics, when they heard him conduct the brilliant London Philharmonia last year, wrote to the same effect.

Why Settle Down? With such press notices, a roving conductor might be justified in looking for a cosy permanent assignment. Not Cantelli. He has had invitations to settle down. But, says he, "why should I? Only in America is this done. In Europe all conductors travel. Someday, maybe, but I have no plans for the future. I hear many people predicting what I will do. Other people may know, but I do not know."

Meanwhile, for Cantelli, there is the unmistakable satisfaction of working with a variety of fine orchestras. "Each is different," he says. "Each is delicate and complex." Wherever he goes, Cantelli selects his own programs and begins studying scores far ahead--he is working now on a score he will not conduct until 1955. "I think about a score, sing it, hum it. After many months it surrounds me. When I begin to conduct, I feel as if I had conducted this score before."

To Please Old Ladies? Cantelli's wife a painter, always travels with him. They have an apartment in Milan and, when possible, go to the mountains in summer. But he does not expect to have a vacation until 1954. He will take the Boston Symphony into Manhattan's Carnegie Hall this week. Then comes a stint with Toscanini's NBC Symphony, followed by four weeks with Dimitri Mitropoulos' New York Philharmonic-Symphony. On his spring & summer conducting schedule: London and Salzburg.

The U.S. musical custom that unhurried Conductor Cantelli has decided he would like to reform: 2:15 matinees. "That," he says, with an indignant flash, "is an hour selected to please old ladies, but no conductor, no musician, can be ready so early."

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