Kirill Petrovich Kondrashin was born in Moscow on March 6, 1914, just before the fateful start of the First Word War. Little Kirill grew up in a musical family: his Jewish mother was a violinist from Riga, his father played the viola. The boy’s piano lessons began at an early age. We know little of the family’s fortunes in the period after the Bolshevik Revolution, but the teenage Kondrashin was able to study music theory with Nikolay Zhilyoyev (1881-1938).The Russian composer, musicologist and educator had learnt his trade from Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859-1935) and Sergey Taneyev (1856-1915) and was a strong formative influence on his talented pupil. This is Kondrashin’s laconic summing-up of his “art of conducting”: 'Ultimately conducting is simply about making one’s own intentions intelligible to a hundred musicians and letting them play their part in them'. How much tragedy, drama, joy or fulfilment lay behind that aspiration was known only to Kirill Kondrashin himself.