The recorder player, ensemble director, conductor, festival director and university professor Dorothee Oberlinger is one of the most formative international figures in the field of early music today. She has been awarded numerous national and international music prizes, including the Opus Klassik (2020, Instrumentalist of the Year), Echo Klassik, Diapason d'or, ICMA Award, and the Telemann Prize of the City of Magdeburg.
As a soloist, she has been working since 2002 with the Ensemble 1700, which she founded, as well as with renowned baroque ensembles and orchestras such as Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca, Musica Antiqua Cologne, 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 her studies in Cologne, Amsterdam and Milan (recorder, school music and German philology), she made her international debut in 1997 with the 1st prize in the international competition SRP/Moeck U.K. at the Wigmore Hall London. Since then, she has received numerous invitations to 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 or DeSingel Antwerp, etc.
In addition to her intensive engagement with Baroque music, Dorothee Oberlinger also regularly performs contemporary and avant-garde music, and was involved, for example, in the 2009 album "Touch" by the Swiss pop duo Yello. Since 2004 she has been teaching as a professor at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg, where she headed the Institute for Early Music from 2008 to 2018 and developed it into an internationally recognized 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 Arolsen Baroque Festival.
She made her international debut as an opera conductor at the Göttingen Handel Festival in 2017 with the Handel production "Lucio Cornelio Silla", followed by the operas "Polifemo" by Bononcini (2019), the Telemann opera "Pastorelle en musique" (2021) and the production "I portentosi effetti de la madre natura" by Giuseppe Scarlatti (2022). In 2022, the German federal program NEUSTART KULTUR funded the staged production of the serenata "Il giardino d'amore" by Alessandro Scarlatti, conducted by Dorothee Oberlinger and her Ensemble 1700. Further baroque opera projects were funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia from 2022 to 2024.
As a conductor, Dorothee Oberlinger has worked with the Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra, the Duisburg Symphony Orchestra and the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, among others. She has also directed opera projects at the Schwetzingen Winter Festival and at the Bonn Opera. In 2025, she will conduct the Dresden Philharmonic and La Scintilla Zurich, among others.
Dorothee Oberlinger is an honorary citizen of her hometown of Simmern, a small town in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. 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 achievements.