Conductor Kurt Sanderling has died, two days before his 99th birthday
Kurt Sanderling, once hailed as “the world’s greatest conductor,”
died yesterday, September 17, just two days before he would have celebrated his 99th birthday.
Born in East Prussia to Jewish parents on 19 September 1912, Sanderling began his professional career in 1931 as a répétiteur at the Berlin State Opera (now the Deutsche Opera) but was dismissed two years later as a “non Aryan” when the Nazis swept to power.
In 1936 he moved to Russia to work with the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1936. For the best part of two decades he served as joint principal conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic alongside Yevgeny Mravinsky. In Russia he encountered the music of the then-discredited Dmitri Shostakovich, with which he would become particularly associated, championing it while conducting in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov, and later in the West.
He returned to Germany in 1960 to lead the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, then locked in East Berlin as the Communist-funded competitor to the glamorous Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic partnership in the city’s Western sector. He stayed for 17 years, the last four of which also saw him at the helm of the Staatskapelle Dresden.
He enjoyed productive relationships with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London (who later appointed him as its Conductor Emeritus, his acclaimed 1981 recording of the complete Beethoven symphonies with them now available on Naxos Classics), the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Madrid Symphony Orchestra.
He kept conducting well into later life, announcing his retirement only in 2002 on the eve of his 90th birthday, after more than seven decades on the podium.
Among his other key recordings are the complete Beethoven piano concertos with Mitsuko Uchida, the Royal Concertgebouw and Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestras (Philips); a Brahms symphony cycle (RCA); Shostakovich’s 15th Symphony with the Cleveland Orchestra (Erato); and a vital account of Deryck Cooke’s completion of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony (Berlin Classics).
A 16-disc set, Kurt Sanderling, Legendary Recordings, featuring largely early recordings, is available on Berlin Classics, and includes performances with the Berlin Symphony, Staatskapelle Dresden, Leipzig Gewandhaus.
A five-disc Harmonia Mundi set features Sanderling conducting works by Shostakovich and Prokofiev with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra.
All three of his sons – Michael, Stefan and Thomas – have established careers as conductors.
Posted Sep 18, 2011 at 5:30 pm by Paul Bubendey
I was fortunate to be living in Los Angeles when Kurt Sanderling was a frequent guest conductor. For me, his most memorable performance was Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde”. It was possibly the most perfect performance of this work I have ever experienced. He was a very great and much respected musician.
Posted Sep 20, 2011 at 12:52 am by dieter barkhoff
Sanderling, for me, was one of the very greatest. Once while driving I turned on the radio and the first movement Beethoven’s 2nd Piano Concerto was playing. As it unfolded I marveled at the outstanding orchestral articulation and it suddenly dawned on me this could only be Kurt Sanderling conducting. It was, as it happened, one of his last concerts, finishing with an almost valedictory Bruckner 3. That was what was great about his music-making, that crystalline unfolding of the score, no fancy swooning ‘sound’, but bones, the structure, and the flesh laid out in the notes unlike any other conductor could. His Shostakovich, especially the Berlin Symphony 5 and the Berlin Phil 15, showcase everything great about his conducting: the drama of the opening of the 5th, the veritable hush out of which the main theme springs forth in the 1st movement and the pointed laying out of every note of the 15th, turning it into profound and significant music, rather than the manic scramble jamble a la Mravinsky and Kondrashin. Even his Borodin was great, The Steppes of Central Asia absolutely and searingly desolate, the slow movement of his Second Symphony poignantly articulated unlike any other recording, his Rachmaninov Concerti and Rhapsody with Rosel where every orchestral note is significant, unlike just about every other recording where only the Soloist is in focus.
I also hope the recognition he seemed to only receive from the likes of Uschida, Flor and Rattle becomes a more universal phenomenon.