German conductor Ruth Reinhardt is building a reputation for a keen musical intelligence, programmatic imagination, and elegant performances.
In the 2023-24 season, Reinhardt’s plans include leading her first staged opera, a production of La Traviata for the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm, directed by Ellen Lamm and featuring the young rising voices of Ida Falk Winland and Joel Annmo. She continues to build her already burgeoning reputation among symphony orchestras, making debut appearances with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic, and WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne. In North America, she begins the season with a debut appearance at the Nashville Symphony and also makes debuts with the Minnesota Orchestra, New Jersey Symphony, and a postponed debut with the Grand Rapids Symphony, which was where Reinhardt found herself when the Covid pandemic shut down the performing arts world over the course of two days in March 2020.
Programmatically, Reinhardt’s interests have led her toward an in-depth exploration of contemporary repertoire, leading the symphonic and orchestral world into the 21st century. Strongly centered on European composers, with significant emphasis on women composers of the second half of the 20th century and early 21st century, she brings new names and fresh faces to many orchestras for the first time. Among those whose works appear often in her progams are Grażyna Bacewicz, Kaija Saariaho, Lotta Wennäkoski, Daniel Bjarnason, Dai Fujikura, and Thomas Adès. Parallel programming can be complementary or contrasting, from the classic moderns such as Lutosławski, Bartók, Stravinsky, and Hindemith, or core composers of the symphonic canon–e.g. Brahms, Rachmaninoff, and Dvořák.
In recent seasons, Reinhardt has made an important series of symphonic debuts in North America with the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, and symphony orchestras of San Francisco, Detroit, Houston, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Seattle. In Europe, her appearances have been no less impressive—the Orchestre National de France, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, Tonkünstler Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, and Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (RSB), to name several.
Reinhardt attended The Juilliard School of Music in New York as a student in the conducting class of Alan Gilbert and James Ross, where she received her master’s degree. Prior education and training was at the Zurich University of the Arts (Zürcher Hochschule der Künste), studying violin with Rudolf Koelman and conducting with Constantin Trinks and Johannes Schlaefli. She attended master classes with Bernard Haitink, Michael Tilson Thomas, David Zinman, Paavo Järvi, Neeme Järvi, and Marin Alsop, among others. Reinhardt was a Dudamel Fellow of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (2017-2018), conducting fellow at the Seattle Symphony (2015-2016) and Tanglewood Music Center (2015), and Taki Concordia associate conducting fellow (2015-2017). Reinhardt was born in Saarbrücken, Germany into a family of medical doctors and studied violin and singing from an early age. She currently resides in Switzerland.