A 33-year-old Romanian called Sergiu Celibidache, nearly unknown to the public, first conducted the Berlin Philharmonic on August 29, 1945, and scored a great success. Since 1936 he had been a student in Berlin, reading philosophy, religion, mathematics, and finally music (at the Berlin Music Academy, where he conducted choral ensembles and chamber groups in 1944). His accession to the conductorship of the Philharmonic was due to a series of lucky coincidences; Furtwängler was awaiting de-Nazification in Switzerland; the orchestra¹s first post-war conductor, Leo Borchard, had been accidentally shot to death by an American sentry on August 23, 1945; none of the well-known conductors was available or acceptable to the four powers occupying Berlin as a successor; and Celibidache, "politically a virgin," as he later characterized himself, won the mantle by default, having already proven his mettle by conducting the Soviet sector Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. This collection chosen from the original master tapes preserved in Deutches Rundfunkarchiv presents the young Celibidarches best performances with BPO during his first three seasons.