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. “I
