Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt

After studying at several music academies, he worked in German opera houses between 1923 and 1945, first as a répétiteur and then in increasingly senior conducting posts, ending as Generalmusikdirektor of the Deutsche Oper Berlin.

After the Second World War, Schmidt-Isserstedt was invited by the occupying British forces to form the Northwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra, of which he was musical director and chief conductor from 1945 to 1971.

His extensive recorded legacy features the Austro-German classics with which he was widely associated, but also includes works by Czech, English, French, Italian and Russian composers.

[2] He managed to hold these senior posts – and to be put on the Gottbegnadeten list of the Third Reich's élite artists – despite avoiding joining the Nazi Party,[4] and having a Jewish wife, whom he sent to England for safety, with their two sons, in 1936.

The director-general, Hugh Greene, appointed Schmidt-Isserstedt as director of music, and tasked him with assembling and training a symphony orchestra for the station.

[7] It took him six months to bring the new Northwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra (NWDR SO) to the standard he required, and in November 1945 he conducted its first public concert.

In a survey of radio orchestras in 1955, The Musical Times commented that the NWDR SO had quickly been recognised as "fit to challenge even the Berlin Philharmonic".

[8] For Glyndebourne Festival Opera, both at its base in Sussex and at the Edinburgh Festival, he conducted Così fan tutte, Le Comte Ory, Ariadne auf Naxos and The Soldier's Tale,[9] and a celebrated series of performances of The Marriage of Figaro (1958), with a cast he considered near ideal, including Geraint Evans, Pilar Lorengar, Graziella Sciutti and Teresa Berganza.

[7] At the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, he conducted Tristan und Isolde with Wolfgang Windgassen and Birgit Nilsson in the title roles (1962) and Der fliegende Holländer with Donald McIntyre as the Dutchman (1972).