A life surviving Nazis and Soviets robbed Kurt Sanderling of the worldwide fame that many say the conductor deserves.
By JOHN FLEMING
Published September 21, 2003
[EFE (1999)]
Kurt Sanderling, the father of Stefan Sanderling, and a premier conductor of the last 60 years, appeared with the Orquesta Sinfonica of Madrid several years before retiring in May 2002.
Was Kurt Sanderling a great conductor?
"Yes, absolutely, but too few people knew that because he spent so much time in East Germany and Russia. He's a musician's musician, and a great one," said Ernest Fleischmann, former chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra.
Stefan Sanderling's father, now 91 and retired in Berlin, was a relatively unknown quantity in the West. For almost 20 years, he was co-conductor with Yevgeny Mravinsky of the Leningrad Philharmonic, a great orchestra seldom heard outside the Soviet Union during the Cold War. In 1960, Sanderling went back to his native Germany to be music director of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, the Communist rival of the mighty Berlin Philharmonic of West Germany.
Only in the 1970s and '80s did Sanderling have many engagements in the West. A regular stop was Los Angeles, where he used to guest-conduct the Philharmonic for several weeks a season.
"People still speak about his concerts," said Fleischmann, now a consultant in Los Angeles. "It was all the basic repertoire. Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Haydn. They were absolutely revelatory performances. The orchestra just worshiped him. He made one listen to that basic repertoire as though it had been composed yesterday. Very few conductors today are able to do that."
Sanderling was one of a remarkable group of six conductors born in 1912 - the others were Georg Solti, Gunter Wand, Sergiu Celibidache, Erich Leinsdorf and Igor Markevitch - and the only one still alive. His long career on the podium came to a close on May 19, 2002, when he conducted a celebratory final concert in Berlin.
Trombonist Dudley Bright played under Sanderling for about 20 years. Bright was a member of London's Philharmonia Orchestra when Sanderling was a frequent guest conductor. He marvels at his durability.
"Sanderling kept it right up until about three years ago, the last concert I did with him," said Bright, now principal trombone of the London Symphony Orchestra. "I would say it was probably as good as ever if not better. I only started to appreciate him the last five or six years with the Philharmonia. He was getting so old and still so sprightly."
Sanderling was renowned for his approach to Shostakovich, the Russian composer whom he knew well. Symphony No. 15 was a specialty.
"He did Shostakovich 15 with the orchestra about six times over the years," Bright said. "It was like his baby, and he seemed to know all about it. It's a strange piece, very sparingly scored, and it's got quotations from Wagner and Rossini. Sanderling understood what it meant, and he'd tell the story in rehearsal. It all had to do with the Soviet system. For me, that's what made it so special, that he really understood the music. I think he caught a very big piece of Russian soul in his time in Leningrad."
Sanderling's career lacked top-level recordings, and that probably keeps him from being ranked as high as widely recorded contemporaries such as Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Rafael Kubelik, Solti and Mravinsky.
Edel Classics released Kurt Sanderling: Legendary Recordings, a 15-CD set that includes performances of Shostakovich, Sibelius and Mahler by the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. Harmonia Mundi's five-CD Sanderling set has Mozart's C-minor Piano Concerto, with soloist Mitsuko Uchida, and Schumann's Fourth Symphony from the conductor's final concert in Berlin.
