Riccardo Chailly, was chief conductor of Amsterdam’s prestigious Concertgebouw Orchestra from 1988 to 2004, and in 2017 he was appointed music director of the world’s most famous opera house, La Scala, in his native Milan. What few people know is that Chailly has had a love affair with jazz since playing the drums as a teenager, and he has unlimited praise for the genius of the American composer George Gershwin, whose music Chailly chose to conduct for a special Italian radio and television (RAI) recording in 1991.
Broadcast: November 1991