Karl Ristenpart (26 January 1900 – 24 December 1967) was a German conductor. Career Born in Kiel, Germany, he studied at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin and in Vienna. He was heavily involved in creating three orchestras in his lifetime, most notably the Chamber Orchestra of the Saar. With this group he created one of the earliest recorded collections of Bach's orchestral music. These recordings were made between 1954 and 1967 as Les Discophiles Français, Erato and Club Français du Disque releases in France and appeared then under license with various American labels (notably Nonesuch) on both LP and cassette. Following an out-of-print period, in 2000 the French Accord label, Universal released a six-CD set comprising the entire set of Ristenpart recordings of Bach orchestral works. The conductor and his colleagues from Saarbrücken also recorded performances of works by Mozart and Haydn, among others. The lasting fame he received for these interpretations of Baroque and early Classical music overshadowed the fact that with his Saar orchestra he actually recorded works by approximately 230 composers, at least half of them belonging to the 20th century, for the Saar radio. A possible influence in this direction was Hermann Scherchen, with whom Ristenpart's mother was acquainted before 1914 and to whom she was married between 1919 and 1920. (Hermann Scherchen was a politically active conductor responsible for the premiere performances of what were at the time controversial pieces by composers such as Berg and Xenakis.) In 1932 Ristenpart became the conductor of a little string ensemble in Berlin, whose core was composed of women friends of his wife, the pianist and harpsichordist Ruth Christensen. This ensemble came to be known as the Karl Ristenpart Chamber Orchestra and often played for the Berlin radio and the Deutschlandsender, mostly for exhausting live night broadcasts abroad. But Ristenpart's career as a promising young conductor in Germany was hobbled by his refusal to join the Nazi Party. Following World War II, Ristenpart returned to devastated Berlin and put works by Gustav Mahler, his favorite composer, on the program of his first public concert in the Summer of 1945. With Berlin divided into several foreign sectors, his unblemished political record allowed him to be named conductor for the "Radio in the American Sector" of Berlin (RIAS). In 1946 he thus started to record music, from Monteverdi to Stravinsky, with the forces of his former Karl Ristenpart Chamber Orchestra,