Helmuth Rilling

Teaching has always been a central focus of Rilling’s work, and the educational programs at the core of the Oregon Bach Festival mirror his beliefs. Rilling’s conducting master class, Discovery Series, and other programs at the Festival soon led to invitations to work at Indiana, Temple, Iowa, St. Olaf, Baldwin-Wallace, Westminster Choir College and Yale. In 1981 he founded the International Bachakademie Stuttgart, which was modeled largely on his achievements at the Oregon Bach Festival — an institution that further inspired similar Bach academies in Buenos Aires, Cracow, Prague, Moscow, Budapest, and Tokyo. After several successful Bach academies in Santiago de Compostela (Spain), the Real Filharmonia of Galicia was founded there in 1996, with Rilling as its chief conductor. As a guest conductor he has led most of the major orchestras in Eastern and Western Europe, Asia, Canada, and the United States including the Chicago, Cleveland, Minneapolis, Seattle and Toronto Symphonies, the leading orchestras of Vienna, Madrid, Caracas, Krasnojarsk, and Dresden, and the St Luke’s Orchestra for the Weill Music Institute in Carnegie Hall, where he returns in 2009 to conduct Haydn’s Die Schopfung.

A believer in the power of music to cross political and ethnic boundaries, Rilling was the first German conductor to conduct the Israeli Philharmonic in that country after World War II (and has since returned more than 100 times) and he conducted the musical portions of Germany’s official reunification ceremonies. In 1994 the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart was awarded the UNESCO Music Prize, and the following year Rilling received the Theodor Heuss Prize for advancing reconciliation and international understanding. His commitment to new music has led to many commissions, including Penderecki’s Credo, for which the Bach Festival won a Grammy Award in 2001. But the benchmark of Rilling’s career has been his intensely personal interpretations of Bach’s cantatas and choral works. He has recorded more than 100 albums on Vox, Nonesuch, Columbia Nippon, CBS, and Turnabout and in 2000, to commemorate the 250^th anniversary of Bach’s death, Hänssler Verlag released Rilling’s recordings of the complete works of Bach, totaling 172 compact discs — a proud legacy of a life-long devotion to the celebration of Bach’s genius.