Kurt Sanderling would have been 100 years old on September 19, 2012. He very nearly reached that age, for he died just one day before his 99th birthday.

This great conductor’s biography is packed with the events of a turbulent century. He began his career as a rehearsal pianist in Berlin in the early Thirties, before being stripped of his citizenship as a Jew. He emigrated to Moscow in 1936 to join his uncle and after a period in Kharkov was appointed to the Leningrad Philharmonic at the age of only 29, serving as second principal conductor under Yevgeny Mravinsky until 1960.

He then returned to East Berlin and assumed the direction of the Berlin Symphony Orchestra until 1977. From 1964 to 1967 he also conducted the Staatskapelle of Dresden. Apart from Dmitry Shostakovich, a lifelong friend whose works Sanderling championed before and after his death in 1975, Gustav Mahler was the composer closest to his heart. A score of Mahler’s "Song of the Earth” accompanied him into exile, and he gave the Deryck Cooke completion of Mahler's Tenth Symphony its first performance in East Germany in 1978, soon after the conducting score had been published.

When Sanderling took over the BSO in 1960, Mahler was still “off the radar" in East and West alike. Yet he featured his works from the very start. The Fourth was joined in his programming by Mahler's late works, which move on from the sweeping affirmatives of the Eighth to deal with life and farewell in many different ways – with none of the three works ending in triumphant full orchestra.

Only after months or years of concert performance did Kurt Sanderling assemble his BSO before the microphones in the late Seventies and early Eighties, in order to capture this deeply moving music on gramophone records. To mark his centenary, those recordings of Gustav Mahler's last three symphonic works are now brought together in an informative and well-presented special edition.