Month: August 2025

By the way: Molinari’s effusive dedication to Mussolini….

Hi friends, thanks for your kind and encouraging comments under my previous post recounting my adventures at the British Library. By the way, I forgot to notify my few subscribers and fans of Vivaldi that I was finally able to purchase, from a Library in Madrid, a scan of Autumn, the first concerto of the Seasons, in Benardino Molinari’s trail-blazing 1927 edition, and thus could confirm the effusive dedication to Mussolini. I’ve added a caption to my review of Molinari’s recording. It doesn’t add much to the review: just a proof of claims made by some commentators and musicologists…

Paying a visit to the British Library and adding a minuscule confirmation to my dating of Alfredo Campoli’s Four Seasons

When, back in April, I spent many hours researching the true dating of Alfredo Campoli’s live Four Seasons with the Boyd Neel Orchestra – a recording kept on acetates, discovered in the fiddler’s estate after his death and said by his widow to date from Paris in 1939, which would have made it, if not the first recording of the Seasons ever to be published (it came out in 1995), but at least the first extant documentation of a performance -, I found traces online that Campoli and Boyd Neel had performed the piece and the BBC had aired it, at the end of 1949 and again in the first months of 1951, much more likely candidates than the purported “Paris ca. 1939” that many elements made as good as impossible (a mistake that has made it all the way to the Wikipedia article on The Four Seasons). And, in my review, I claimed (or bragged) that “I can know with absolute certainty only by paying a visit to the British Library in London St. Pancras (that must be near the St. Pancras Eurostar train station, how convenient) to consult back issues of London Calling, “The Overseas Journal of the British Broadcasting Corporation”, and the Radio Times… and that’s not in my immediate plans, although I don’t rule it out.”

Well: I finally did pay a visit to the British Library at St Pancras, and found the issues of The Radio Times that confirm that the performance or performances of Campoli and Neel were aired by the BBC in 1949 and 1951. That factual confirmation doesn’t add much to the review (photos of the relevant listings in The Radio Times, and treating those two broacasts as fact rather than hypothesis) – but establishing that minuscule confirmation, however otiose it may be, is still something of a satisfaction to me.

Now I need to pay a visit to Bibliothèque Nationale de France to try and establish if a version of The Four Seasons with narration ever really existed, or was just a baseless indication in old catalogs and record magazines (see my review of Roland Douatte’s Four Seasons for the details).