In September 2016, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra of the SWR (RSO) merged with the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden- Baden and Freiburg and formed the new SWR Symphonieorchester which is headquartered in Stuttgart.

The Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1945 and in the following seven decades developed as one of the most important musical ambassadors of Germany. It performed around 80 concerts per season in the SWR broadcasting area, in addition to national and international guest performances and performances at world-wide music festivals. The Stuttgart RSO focused on one hand towards the large classical and romantic repertoire that is represented by exemplary performances, and, on the other hand, towards contemporary music and rare musical works, including little-known composers. The sponsorship of young artists also belonged to the Stuttgart RSO undertakings, as well as the development of sophisticated music for a younger audience.

World-renowned conductors, as well as some of the world’s greatest soloists, have been guests of the Stuttgart RSO, including: Carlos Kleiber, Ferenc Fricsay, Karl Böhm, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Hans Knappertsbusch, Sir Georg Solti, Giuseppe Sinopoli, Kurt Sanderling, Gary Bertini and Herbert Blomstedt, as well as Maria Callas, Mstisław Rostropowitsch, Maurizio Pollini, Yehudi Menuhin, Alfred Brendel, Hélène Grimaud, Anne Sophie Mutter, Elina Garanča, Rolando Villazon, Hilary Hahn, Sol Gabetta and Lang Lang.

Sir Roger Norrington has been the principal conductor of the Stuttgart RSO from 1998 to 2011 and its Conductor Laureate after 2011. Norrington has succeeded in giving the orchestra its unmistakable image through the use of historically informed performances coupled with the implementation of the resources of a modern symphony orchestra. His work emphasises the symphonic cycles of works by Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, Mahler, and Elgar. Hans Müller-Kray and Carl Schuricht made their marks as the first conductors of the Stuttgart RSO. From 1972 to 1982, Sergiu Celibidache was the creative director. Through his intensive and evocative rehearsals, he developed a new sound that would characterise and capture the ambiance of the moment, a way of performing that would set standards for many years and that led the Stuttgart RSO to become one of the world’s finest orchestras. Sir Neville Marriner und Gianluigi Gelmetti were principal conductors of the Stuttgart RSO in the 1980s and ’90s. Georges Prêtre took over creative direction in 1996. From 2011 until 2016 Stéphane Denève was as principal conductor leading the Stuttgart RSO.

Having studied initially in Königsberg, the capital city of East Prussia (now called Kaliningrad, and located in Russia) and in Berlin, Kurt Sanderling was engaged as a répétiteur in 1931 by the Berlin Städtische Opera, where he assisted Fritz Stiedry and Paul Breisach. However, with the assumption of power by the National Socialist regime in 1933 he was compelled to give up this position, and worked subsequently with the Berlin Jewish Cultural Federation leaving Germany as a refugee in 1936. Unusually for a musician, instead of heading west, Sanderling travelled to the east, where he had relatives. He secured a post as assistant to Georges Sébastian with the Moscow Radio Orchestra and made his conducting début with the orchestra in 1937. He left Moscow in 1939 to become chief conductor with the Kharkov Philharmonic Orchestra, a position which he retained for three years.

Having made a guest appearance with Evgeny Mravinsky’s Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra in 1941, Sanderling was invited to become this orchestra’s second conductor at a time when it had been evacuated to Novosibirsk, Siberia, a situation conducive to his forming a close relationship with his musical colleagues. The orchestra returned to Leningrad in 1944 and Sanderling and Mravinsky shared the principal conducting duties (with Mravinsky in charge) until 1960; during this period Sanderling also taught conducting at the Leningrad Conservatory. In 1960 the Communist authorities invited him to return to East Berlin to become chief conductor of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, with the intention of making this orchestra a rival to the Berlin Philharmonic, then under the direction of Herbert von Karajan. This objective Sanderling to a large extent achieved, making numerous recordings for the East German record company VEB with both the Berlin Symphony Orchestra and with the Dresden Staatskapelle, of which he was chief conductor from 1964 to 1967.

During the 1960s Sanderling appeared abroad, making successful appearances at the festivals of Prague, Salzburg, Vienna and Warsaw. He made his début in the United Kingdom with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1970 and in 1972 substituted for Otto Klemperer with the New Philharmonia Orchestra, with whom he developed a close relationship. He recorded a complete cycle of the Beethoven symphonies with this orchestra in 1981 and was made an honorary member in 1996, the only previous recipient of this award being Klemperer. He conducted the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra for the first time in 1976 in a sequence of outstanding performances which led to subsequent appearances with the orchestra in 1978, 1980 and 1990. Following the collapse of the Communist regime, during the 1990s Sanderling enjoyed a distinguished international career, and gave notable performances with many leading orchestras, including the Royal Amsterdam Concertgebouw and Los Angeles Philharmonic. In 2002, the year of his ninetieth birthday, he decided to cease conducting.

Sanderling was a true representative of the Austro-German style of conducting, and at the same time, because of his extensive experience in Soviet Russia, an authoritative interpreter of twentieth-century composers such as Shostakovich. His podium manner was undemonstrative, with an expansive but always clear baton technique. In rehearsal however he was highly dynamic, as the writer Norman Lebrecht graphically illustrated in connection with the preparation for a performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 8 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1991: ‘Restrained and energy-efficient on the concert podium, he becomes a different man in rehearsal, loquacious to the point of garrulousness, acting up like a Hollywood ham in a surging current of communication. When a flute and harp fail to grasp his intentions, he detains them at the end of the session, pacing wordlessly back and forth until the players comprehend the weariness and boredom he is trying to make them convey.’

Sanderling’s recorded repertoire is very wide indeed, and includes complete cycles of the symphonies of Brahms and Sibelius, both of which are outstanding. His recordings of the music of Bruckner and Mahler are equally notable. His recordings of Shostakovich, especially of Symphonies Nos 5, 6, 8, 10 and 15, and of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2, with the Leningrad Philharmonic, may be considered authoritative; while his accounts of the final three Tchaikovsky symphonies are extremely powerful, in a more Teutonic sense. By contrast his interpretations of Haydn’s six ‘Paris’ symphonies are full of wit and elegance. Sanderling was also a most distinguished accompanist, recording with such leading instrumentalists of the Soviet Union as Emil Gilels and David Oistrakh. His account of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter is deeply poetic.

Kurt Sanderling died on 17 September 2011, two days before his 99th birthday.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).

Anton Bruckner, born near Linz in 1824, is known chiefly as a symphonist. He trained as a schoolteacher and organist, serving in the second capacity in Linz until moving in 1868 to Vienna to teach harmony, counterpoint and organ at the Vienna Conservatory. His success as a composer was varied in his lifetime, his acceptance hampered by his own diffidence and his scores posing editorial problems because of his readiness to revise what he had written. He was nine years the senior of Brahms, who outlived him by six months. Bruckner continued Austro-German symphonic traditions on a massive scale, his techniques of composition influenced to some extent by his skill as an organist and consequently in formal improvisation.

Orchestral Music

Bruckner completed nine numbered symphonies (10 if the so-called Symphony No 0, ‘Die Nullte’, is included). The best known is probably Symphony No 7, first performed in Leipzig in 1884; the work includes in its scoring four Wagner tubas, instruments that were a newly developed cross between the French horn and tuba. Symphony No 4, ‘Romantic’, has an added programme—a diffident afterthought. All the symphonies, however, form an important element in late-19th-century symphonic repertoire.

Choral Music

Bruckner wrote a number of works for church use, both large and small scale. Among the former are Te Deum, completed in 1884, and various settings of the Mass, including the well-known Mass No 2 in E minor.

Feature interview: At 200, Bruckner Is More Popular Than Ever With Conductors. Why? (The New York Times)