Antonio Janigro

Italian-born conductor and cellist Antonio Janigro reached contemporary listeners most directly through the extensive discography he created with I Solisti di Zagreb, the chamber orchestra he established in 1954. Those recordings long occupied a central place in the Baroque bins of record stores, fueling the broad revival of interest in Vivaldi and his era, and they continue to circulate effectively in reissued form. Janigro nevertheless arrived at Baroque repertoire only after an extended career already shaped by the disruptions of two world wars.

He once recalled his childhood surroundings as both musically immersed and shadowed by loss. Born in Milan in 1918, he was the son of a pianist whose livelihood had been destroyed when a sniper’s bullet cost him an arm during World War I. Janigro began on piano, took up the cello at eight, and entered the Verdi Conservatory the next year. At eleven he played for Pablo Casals, who endorsed his admission to the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris. While studying there in the mid-1930s his mentors were Casals and Nadia Boulanger, his classmates included Dinu Lipatti and Ginette Neveu, and Stravinsky figured among the surrounding luminaries. His programs as a performer eventually stretched from early music to newly written scores. A talent agent overheard him practicing on a train from Paris to Milan, and that encounter set his career in motion.

After an auspicious beginning as a recitalist, Janigro traveled to Zagreb, Yugoslavia, for a holiday that coincided with the outbreak of World War II. Effectively unable to leave, he accepted a post as professor of cello at the Zagreb Conservatory. Following the war he resumed international touring and teaching, serving for a time at the conservatory in Düsseldorf, Germany, from 1965 to 1974. In Yugoslavia, however, he turned more frequently to conducting. At the government’s request he founded the Zagreb Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra and remained its conductor from 1954 to 1964. Yugoslavia’s relative distance from Soviet control also allowed him to lead several leading Western European orchestras, yet his most sustained concert activity took place with I Solisti di Zagreb. Although the ensemble stood apart from the historical-performance movement, its lucid accounts of Baroque orchestral works stood in clear contrast to the thick-textured symphonic readings then prevalent.