Elsa Maria Schiller

But the Iron Curtain was sometimes strangely permeable.

In the late 1950s, the West German record company Deutsche Grammophon, under the extraordinary direction of Elsa Schiller, came to arrangements with the government of Poland.

Now, at the time, Poland had been granted some limited autonomy by Moscow, and Deutsche Grammophon was able to make recordings in Warsaw as long as they covered the expenses and the technology, and the rights to distribution were shared with a local Polish label.

And that is the origin of the first, perhaps, mainstream recordings by Sviatoslav Richter that reached Western Europe and the US, and I guess the British Commonwealth.