He was the assistant conductor at the Munich premiere of Alois Hába's quarter-tone opera Mother (1931) and conducted the orchestra of the avant-garde theatre Osvobozené divadlo in Prague (1931–1933).

Conducting work for Czechoslovak radio was interrupted by World War II which resulted in his being imprisoned with his family in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in 1942 and then sent to Auschwitz in 1944.

After the war, Ančerl conducted for Radio Prague until 1950, when he became artistic director of the Czech Philharmonic, a post he held successfully for eighteen years.

He was born into a prosperous Jewish family in the village of Tučapy in southern Bohemia, where his father Leopold was a large-scale producer of liquors and spirits.

[3] His final performance was for the propaganda film Theresienstadt, directed, under coercion of the camp commandant Karl Rahm, by Kurt Gerron to fool the Red Cross.

The film showed Ančerl conducting a work by Pavel Haas on a wooden pavilion, with flowerpots hiding the fact that many of the orchestra were barefoot.

Ancerl's work on the podium brought out the indigenous characteristics of repertoire to which that would apply, and always displayed a flexibly molded and incredibly minute attention to detail.

There was a grace to Ancerl's music-making, and a spiritually-infused lyricism absorbed by a love of life and of nature - sample his discs of Martinu's Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, or Mahler's Ninth on Supraphon - that was a clear stand-out.

His broad range of recordings for the Czech Supraphon label have been carefully remastered for the Karel Ančerl Gold Edition, which was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque by l'Académie Charles Cros.