G. Ricordi & Co. Ltd.

G. Ricordi & Co. Ltd.

G. Ricordi & Co. (Canada) Ltd. Canadian branch of the Italian firm which was established in Milan in 1808 and became the publisher of Rossini, Donizetti, Bellini, Verdi, and Puccini. Gordon Wry acted as Ricordi's Canadian agent early in the 1950s. Bruno Apollonio, who had been a music publisher in Trieste, took on the agency in 1953 and established G. Ricordi & Co (Canada) Ltd in Toronto in 1954. Apollonio served as managing director until his death in 1983. His wife, Wally, took charge of promotion.

Besides distributing and promoting in Canada the catalogue of the parent firm, Ricordi (Canada) published orchestral works by Adaskin, Aitken, Freedman, Gellman, Joachim, Mercure, Morawetz, Morel, Prévost, and Somers. Printing was done by the W.R. Draper Co of Weston, Ont. Plate numbers were not used. Leeds Music (Canada) took over the sales of Ricordi's printed music (including the Canadian publications) in 1963 and began negotiating the grand rights of Ricordi operas and supplying rental orchestral parts in 1975; Boosey & Hawkes assumed these functions in 1980. Ricordi was a PRO Canada affiliate; a subsidiary company, Summit Music Ltd, taken over by Boosey & Hawkes in 1985, was a CAPAC affiliate.