A Christmas solution for historic recordings fans, but any music lover should be pleased: a rare live recording of a complete Philharmonia Orchestra concert at the Royal Albert Hall, conducted by Guido Cantelli, whose brilliant career was cut short by his early death, aged 36, in 1956. Once your ears adjust, these performances of Rossini, Schumann and Brahms have engrossing flair and fizzing energy. It’s one of the first batch of ICA Classics, including discs by Karajan and Klemperer, from the Richard Itter archive, taken from BBC broadcasts between 1952 and 1962 and unreleased until now. Itter recorded them in his Buckinghamshire home on his own state-of-the-art sound equipment. An astonishing story.
