Willem van Otterloo was born in 1907. He studied medicine briefly in Utrecht and played saxophone in the student dance orchestra Tower Town Band.
 He subsequently studied cello and composition at the Amsterdam Conservatory. One of his first large-scale compositions, the Third Orchestral Suite (1932), won first prize in a competition held by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. When conductor Willem Mengelberg withdrew due to illness, the young composer was invited to conduct the work himself.
In 1932 Van Otterloo joined the cello section of the Utrechts Stedelijk Orkest (Utrecht Municipal Orchestra); in 1933 he became the orchestra’s assistant conductor and in 1937 was promoted to principal conductor. From 1946-1948 he also conducted at De Nederlandse Opera, and from 1947-1949 was conductor of the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra.
In 1949 he took up the post of chief conductor of the The Hague Philharmonic (Residentie Orkest), at that time a lacklustre ensemble. He is credited with boosting the quality of the orchestra in a remarkably short period of time. Let us not forget what it meant in those days to be a chief conductor: eight months a year with the orchestra, active participation in the orchestra’s organization and structure, and the responsibility for a huge number of concerts – nearly a hundred per year. By January 1961 he had already conducted his 1000th concert with The Hague Philharmonic.
Before long, the RO had become an outstanding ensemble that, in those years, even vied with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The Hague Philharmonic also attracted the world’s top guest conductors: Pierre Monteux, Charles Munch, Eugen Jochum, Carlo Maria Giulini, Hans Rosbaud, Karl Böhm, Rafaël Kubelik, John Barbirolli, Antal Dorati, Günter Wand, Jean Martinon and Leopold Stokowski.
Van Otterloo’s composers of choice in those days were Haydn, Schubert, 
Berlioz, Brahms, Franck, Bruckner, Reger, Ravel, Bartók and Stravinsky. But he also conducted works such as Alban Berg’s Lulu Symphony, excerpts from Wozzeck, the Drei Orchesterstücke and the Kammerkonzert; the Fünf Orchesterstücke, Variationen für Orchester, Begleitungsmusik z.e. Lichtspielszene by Schoenberg; Anton Webern’s Fünf and Sechs Orchesterstücke and Variations für Orchester; the Fifth and Sixth Symphony by Karl Amadeus Hartmann; works by Varèse (Arcana), Ives (Three Places in New England) and more than three hundred works by contemporary Dutch composers.
In 1962 he returned to lead the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, in a co-directorship with Jean Fournet. In 1972 he left The Hague Philharmonic, taking up posts with orchestras in Düsseldorf, Tokyo and Melbourne. His last position was as chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
Willem van Otterloo was by no means a glamour-seeker or showman. The music itself had the highest priority. His consummate knowledge of each and every score was legendary, and he conducted nearly all the larger works from memory. But above all he was a true orchestral trainer. He worked tirelessly on intonation (he could sing entire chords flawlessly), rhythmic precision and consistency in sound and timbre. He preferred taut, brisk tempos; he demanded orchestral discipline and total control; he had the uncanny ability to maintain a coherent musical line and never lost sight of the structure and form. In these respects Van Otterloo was perfectly suited to the recording studio.

Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer. Schubert already died before his 32nd birthday, but was extremely prolific during his lifetime. His output consists of over six hundred secular vocal works (mainly Lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of chamber and piano music. Appreciation of his music while he was alive was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works. Today, Schubert is ranked among the greatest composers of the late Classical and early Romantic eras and is one of the most frequently performed composers of the early nineteenth century.
It was in the genre of the Lied that Schubert made his most indelible mark. Prior to Schubert's influence, Lieder tended toward a strophic, syllabic treatment of text, evoking the folksong qualities engendered by the stirrings of Romantic nationalism. Schubert expanded the potentialities of the genre like no other composer before.