"Musical Hemispheres"
Artists
Maestro Thomas Sanderling – Conductor
After graduating from the 
Music School of the Leningrad Conservatory and the Music Academy in East-Berlin, Thomas Sanderling started his career at the age of twenty-four as the Music Director of the Halle Opera. He appeared frequently with most of the East German institutions including the Dresden Staatskapelle, Leipzig Gewandhaus and Komische Oper, Berlin, and won the Berlin Critics’ Prize.
He attracted the attention of Shostakovich, who asked him to give the East German premieres of his Thirteenth and Fourteenth symphonies and to make the world premiere recording of The Michelangelo Suite, the composer’s last orchestral work. As a direct result of this he became the assistant of Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan.
A Permanent Guest Conductor of the Deutsche Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin until 1983, he then moved to the West where he appeared at the Vienna Staatsoper, Bayerische Staatsoper, Frankfurt, Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Hamburg State Opera, La Fenice (with Ponnelle), the Royal Danish Opera and the Finnish National Opera.
Parallel to a successful career in opera, Thomas Sanderling has extensively conducted symphonic concerts together with, in North America, the Dallas, Baltimore, Vancouver, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Montreal and the National Symphony Orchestras; in Europe with the Vienna Symphony and Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestras, the Liège, Czech, Dresden, Royal Liverpool, Royal Stockholm, Oslo and Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestras, The Philharmonia, the London Philharmonic and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestras, the Polish Radio National Symphony and the Radio-Symphony Orchestra in Saarbrücken; in Japan, with the Osaka Symphony Orchestra, with which he has been the Principal conductor for ten years and where he is the lifetime Music Director Laureate; and in Russia, where he enjoys particularly strong relationships with the Tchaikovsky Great Radio-Symphony, the St Petersburg Philharmonic and the Russian National Philharmonic, of which he is the Principal Conductor.
Recording credits include a CD of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony with the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra (1998 MIDEM/Cannes Classical Music Award), Brahms’s complete cycle of Symphonies with The Philharmonia, Albéric Magnard’s four symphonies with the Malmö Symphony (2001 MIDEM award) 
and the complete symphonic works by Karl Weigl with Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin, from which the first CD, containing the Symphony No 5. Apocalyptic, received great critical acclaim (CD of the Month in the Répertoire Magazine).
In 2006, for the centenary of Shostakovich’s birth, Thomas Sanderling conducted a series of programmes including rarely performed works by the great Russian composer with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and for the Shostakovich Jubilee Festival in Moscow. The programme in Moscow included the world premiere of the Suite Op.29a from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk which he also recorded for Deutsche Gramophon, together with The Story of the Priest and his Servant Balda. A second CD of ‘Songs and Waltzes’ was also released with the bass Sergei Leiferkus to great critical acclaim.