Performers
Dorothee Oberlinger – recorder
Peter Kofler – keyboard
About the artists
Dorothee Oberlinger
The recorder player, ensemble leader, conductor, festival director and university professor Dorothee Oberlinger is one of today’s leading international figures in the field of early music. She has been honoured with national and international music prizes such as the Opus Klassik, Echo Klassik, the Diapason d’Or, the ICMA Award and the Telemann Prize of the City of Magdeburg.
Since 2002, she has worked as a soloist with Ensemble 1700, which she founded, as well as with renowned baroque ensembles and orchestras such as the Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca, Musica Antiqua Köln, Arte del Mondo, B’Rock, the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, the Academy of Ancient Music, Al Ayre Espagnol, Il Suonar Parlante, Zefiro and Concerto Köln. After studying in Cologne, Amsterdam and Milan, she made her international debut in 1997, winning first prize in the international SRP/Moeck competition in London’s Wigmore Hall. Since then, she has received numerous invitations to perform at most major festivals and concert halls such as the Grand Théatre Bordeaux, Teatro Colón Buenos Aires, Grand Théâtre de Genève, Laeszhalle Hamburg, KKL Luzern, Tonhalle Zürich, Auditorio Nacional Madrid, Théatre Champs-Elysees Paris and DeSingel Antwerp, etc.
In addition to her intensive involvement with Baroque music, Dorothee Oberlinger has also repeatedly devoted herself to contemporary music and the avant-garde, for example, she was involved in the 2009 album Touch by the Swiss pop duo Yello. She has been a professor at the Mozarteum University Salzburg since 2004, where she headed up the Institute for Early Music from 2008 to 2018 and developed it into an internationally-recognised institution for the study of historical performance practice. She is the festival director of two important early music festivals in Germany, the Potsdam Sanssouci Music Festival and the Bad Arolsen Baroque Festival.
Dorothee Oberlinger is a guest conductor of international ensembles and orchestras. She made her international debut as an opera conductor at the Göttingen Handel Festival in 2017 with the production of Handel Lucio Cornelio Silla, followed by, among others the opera productions Polifemo by Bononcini (2019), the Telemann opera Pastorelle en musique (2021), I portentosi effetti de la madre natura by Giuseppe Scarlatti (2022), Nebucadnezar by Reinhard Keiser (2022/23), Adriano in Siria by Carl Heinrich Graun (2024), G. F. Handel’s Alcina (2023/24), and Orlando Generoso by Agostino Steffani (2025).
Dorothee Oberlinger is an honorary citizen of her home town of Simmern. In 2021, she was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit First Class of the Federal Republic of Germany by the Federal President for her cultural services.
Peter Kofler
Born in 1979 in Bolzano, Peter Kofler began his musical training at the ‘Claudio Monteverdi’ conservatory there. He continued his studies in Munich, where he studied organ and church music with Harald Feller and harpsichord with Christine Schornsheim. Kofler regularly performs under renowned conductors such as Sir Simon Rattle, Franz Welser-Möst, Bernhard Haitink, Riccardo Muti, Daniel Harding, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Giovanni Antonini and Thomas Hengelbrock. He is a founding member and harpsichordist of the baroque orchestra ‘L’Accademia Giocosa’.
Peter is a regular guest at international music festivals and has already worked with Anne-Sophie Mutter, Lisa Batiashvili, Anna Prohaska, Michael Volle, Dmitry Sinkovsky and Gabór Tarkövi. As a soloist or chamber music partner, he has performed with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the brass section of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. He works closely with the recorder player and conductor Dorothee Oberlinger and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.
As an organ soloist, he has already played at important venues such as Notre-Dame de Paris, the Lucerne Culture and Congress Center, Berlin Cathedral, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna, the Frauenkirche Dresden and St. Michaelis in Hamburg. Since August 2008, Kofler has been organist at the Jesuit Church of St. Michael in Munich. He was awarded the Bücher-Dieckmeyer Foundation’s prize for the promotion of church music in Bavaria. He is also the initiator and artistic director of the international organ festival ‘Münchner Orgelherbst’ at St. Michael’s and teaches organ and choir conducting at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Munich.
From 2003 to 2014, Kofler was répétiteur and assistant to Hansjörg Albrecht at the Munich Bach Choir and directed the Munich Classical Choir from 2007 to 2010.
His artistic work is complemented by CD and radio productions (ZDF, BR, RAI, Deutsche Grammophon, Sony Classical, Querstand, Raumklang, Tudor, OehmsClassics, Solo Musica, All of Bach). The organ CD Transkriptionen received much praise in the press and was nominated for the ‘Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik’.
In February 2024, Peter Kofler completed the complete recording of all of Bach’s organ works with a total of 16 CDs. The complete cycle was recorded on the 4-manual Rieger organ in Munich’s Jesuit Church of St. Michael. The first volume was awarded the ‘Editor’s Choice’ by the British music magazine Gramophone.
