Paul Sacher was a Swiss conductor and patron of contemporary classical music, born in Basel in 1906, who founded the Basler Kammerorchester in the mid-1920s and began his conducting and organisational career that decade. He commissioned and promoted numerous contemporary composers and championed modernist and avant-garde repertoire through ensembles and archival initiatives he established, shaping the performance and preservation of 20th-century classical music in Switzerland and internationally.
