Dorothee Oberlinger – recorder player, ensemble director, conductor, festival curator and university professor – is today recognised as one of the most influential international figures in the field of Early Music. She has received numerous national and international awards, among them the Opus Klassik (2020, Instrumentalist of the Year), the Echo Klassik, the Diapason d’Or, the ICMA Award and the Telemann Prize of the City of Magdeburg.
Since 2002 she has performed as a soloist with Ensemble 1700, which she founded, and with leading baroque ensembles and orchestras including 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 Español, Il Suonar Parlante, Zefiro and Concerto Köln.
After studies in Cologne, Amsterdam and Milan (recorder, school music and German studies), she made her international debut in 1997, winning first prize at the SRP/Moeck International Recorder Competition in London’s Wigmore Hall. She has since been invited to many of the world’s leading festivals and concert halls, among them the Grand Théâtre de Bordeaux, Teatro Colón Buenos Aires, Grand Théâtre de Genève, Laeiszhalle Hamburg, KKL Lucerne, Tonhalle Zürich, Auditorio Nacional de Música in Madrid, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées Paris and DeSingel Antwerp. Alongside her deep engagement with baroque repertoire, Dorothee Oberlinger frequently turns to contemporary and avant-garde music; notably, she contributed to "Touch", the 2009 album by the Swiss pop duo Yello.
In 2004 she was appointed professor at the Mozarteum University Salzburg, where from 2008 to 2018 she directed the Institute for Early Music, transforming it into an internationally respected centre for the study of historical performance practice. She is Artistic Director of two of Germany’s most important early music festivals: the Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci and the Barock-Festspiele Bad Arolsen.
Her international debut as an opera conductor came in 2017 at the Göttinger Händel-Festspielen with Händel’s "Lucio Cornelio Silla", praised for its "ingenious" (Berliner Zeitung), "energetically buoyant, furiously crisp" (Süddeutsche Zeitung) direction and "compelling sense of the music’s movement" (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). Further opera productions have included Bononcini’s "Polifemo" (2019), Telemann’s "Pastorelle en musique" (2021), Giuseppe Scarlatti’s "I portentosi effetti de la madre natura" and Alessandro Scarlatti’s serenata "Il giardino d’amore" (2022, supported by NEUSTART KULTUR), Andrea Bernasconi and Wilhelmine von Bayreuth’s "L’huomo" and Giovanni Alberto Ristori’s "I lamenti d’Orfeo" (2023). After Graun’s "Adriano in Siria" and Händel’s oratorio "Il trionfo del tempo" in 2024, she presented in 2025 Agostino Steffani’s "Orlando generoso" as a staged production at the Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci, alongside the rediscovery of Francesco Bartolomeo Conti’s "La colpa originale" – all with her Ensemble 1700.
As a guest conductor, Dorothee Oberlinger has worked with the Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra, the Duisburg Philharmonic, the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, the Dresden Philharmonic and La Scintilla Zürich. Her other opera engagements include Reinhard Keiser’s "Nebucadnezar" at Winter in Schwetzingen, and Händel’s "Alcina" at Bonn Opera and Staatstheater Nürnberg in a staging by Jens Daniel Herzog. These productions have been acclaimed as "the most impressive performances of recent years" (Mundo Clasico), "compelling" (Concerto), "brillian" ("Nürnberger Nachrichten"), "ravishing" and "unusually multi-faceted in its musical realisation" (Oper!). As the WDR 3 Opera Blog wrote: "Oberlinger succeeded in shaping the orchestra into a rhetorically and finely articulated body of sound, one that could easily have been mistaken for an original-instrument ensemble."
Dorothee Oberlinger is an honorary citizen of her hometown, Simmern. In 2021 the Federal President awarded her the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, First Class, for her services to culture. In 2025 she received the Grand Cultural Prize of the Rhineland Savings Banks Cultural Foundation – one of Germany’s most prestigious cultural awards.