(1979) Boston University Symphony Orchestra: BERLIOZ/RACHMANINOFF

“The version (of Rachmaninoff #3), I treasure is not even commercially available: a live recording from 1978 by Anthony di Bonaventura with the Boston University Symphony conducted by Joseph Silverstein. Mr. di Bonaventura is a superb technician and an aristocratic musician. His tempos are spacious, but he elucidates every nuance of the music and reveals all of that note-clogged passage work to be thematic and compositional.” Anthony Tommassini, New York Times (10/29/1995)

“Other pianists may have developed one or another aspect of technique to a higher degree than Anthony di Bonaventura or command a larger range of sonority or a more glamorously individual tone. But I do not believe I have ever heard, in live performance, a technique more fully and completely developed, more flexible, more finished than di Bonaventura’s…In everything di Bonaventura shows his Italian heritage, for the only word to describe the effect of his playing is cantilena, the singing line: he plays the way the great Italian singers of the turn of the century sang, with great expressive freedom, but without the vulgarity. There were listeners who found di Bonaventura’s lingering freedom excessive; it left me hanging on every note. That the Boston University Orchestra was able to follow every expressive inflection of the soloist was a high compliment to their skill and to the sympathy and resourcefulness of their conductor, Joseph Silverstein compliment”, Richard Dyer Boston Globe (10/14/1978)