Guido Cantelli
(c) Douglas Glass/Warner
To celebrate the 100th birthday of the Italian conductor, Italy’s Teatro Coccia of Novara is organizing – after a forty-year pause – the 11th edition of the competition that launched the careers of conductors like Riccardo Muti, Adam Fischer or Eliahu Inbal. The Competition comes alive in a coproduction with the Teatro Regio di Torino and a recording partnership with Warner Classics.
Registrations for the Competition will open from 1 March to 30 April 2020: conductors of all nationalities, between the age of 18 and 35 will be eligible to participate. Candidates will undergo a preselection based on their CVs and video recordings. From 9 to 12 September the finalists will fulfill the competition’s assignments from the podium of the Orchestra del Teatro Regio in Turin and will be examined by an international jury. The second and last round of the finals will take place in Novara on 13 September.
Guido Cantelli was born in Novara on 27 April 1920 and in his hometown, at the Teatro Coccia, he conducted his last concert on 17 November 1956 where he led the Orchestra of La Scala of which he had been nominated Principal Conductor the previous day. Only a few days later, on 23 November, the airplane that was taking him to New York crashed immediately after taking off at from the Orly airport in Paris. He was only thirty-six at the time but had already become one of the most important conductors of the second part of the Twentieth century and had been acknowledged by Arturo Toscanini as his most authentic heir.
