How much tragedy, drama, joy and fulfilment are concealed behind the dates that summarize a person’s life can only be known – if at all – can only be sensed, can only be imagined, by those that are very close to him. Autobiographical confessions or denials may help outsiders, but there are usually protective filters or defensive walls around the soul that obscure the view.

The fate of the Soviet conductor Kirill Petrovich Kondrashin is just such a case. It is to the memory of this great artist that this Edition is dedicated, documenting recordings from 1937 to 1963 that may not tell the whole tale of his artistic life, but do shed light upon important stages of it.

Kirill Petrovich Kondrashin was born in Moscow on 6 March 1914, just before the fateful start of the First Word War. Little Kirill grew up in a musical family: his Jewish mother was a violinist from Riga, his father played the viola. The boy’s piano lessons began at an early age. We know little of the family’s fortunes in the period after the Bolshevik Revolution, but the teenage Kondrashin was able to study music theory with Nikolay Zhilyoyev (1881-1938).The Russian composer, musicologist and educator had learnt his trade from Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859-1935) and Sergey Taneyev (1856-1915) and was a strong formative influence on his talented pupil.

This is Kondrashin’s laconic summing-up of his “art of conducting”: “Ultimately conducting is simply about making one’s own intentions intelligible to a hundred musicians and letting them play their part in them.” How much tragedy, drama, joy or fulfilment lay behind that aspiration was known only to Kirill Kondrashin himself.