Helmuth Rilling

Photo: Jon Meyers

“Music should never be merely comfortable, never fossilized, never soothing. It should startle people and reach deep down inside them, forcing them to reflect.”

Helmuth Rilling continues to be one of the world’s preeminent interpreters of Bach and conductors of the choral-orchestral repertoire. He has been artistic director of the Oregon Bach Festival—one of the most expansive and critically acclaimed platforms for Bach’s music in America—since its inception in 1970. His tenure will conclude following the 2013 Festival, at which time he will continue, as will Royce Saltzman, as Director Emeritus.

Born in 1933 in Stuttgart, Germany, Rilling studied at the State Music Academy with Hans Grischkat, Johann Nepomuk David, and Karl Gerok and at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome with Fernando Germani. Concentrating on conducting, choral music, and the life and work of Johann Sebastian Bach, he founded the Gächinger Kantorei in 1953 and its permanent orchestral ensemble, the Bach-Collegium Stuttgart, in 1965. After studying with Leonard Bernstein in New York in 1967, Rilling became the professor of choral conducting at the State Music Academy in Frankfurt, a post he held until 1985. He also conducted the Frankfurter Kantorei there until 1981.

Teaching has always been a central focus of Rilling’s. His work at the Oregon Bach Festival has led to invitations to work at such schools as Indiana, Temple, Iowa, St. Olaf, Baldwin-Wallace, Westminster Choir College, Yale, and USC. In 1981 he founded the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart (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, Tokyo, and Taipei. His emphasis on reaching young musicians led to the founding of the OBF’s Youth Choral Academy in 1998 and major youth ensembles in Stuttgart.

Rilling has appeared as guest conductor with virtually all of the world’s important music institutions, including the Chicago, Cleveland, and Toronto symphony orchestras, and the New York, Vienna, and Berlin philharmonics. His 2011–12 season has included concert tours of China and South America with the Bach Collegium Stuttgart and Gachinger Kantorei, a Bach academy in Taipei focusing on the St. Matthew Passion, and Mendelssohn’s Elijah at the Kennedy Center.

A believer in the power of music to cross political boundaries, Rilling has built a special relationship with the Israeli Philharmonic, being the first German conductor to lead an orchestra in that country and having since returned more than one hundred times. He conducted the musical portions of Germany’s official reunification ceremonies. In 1994 his Stuttgart Bach academy was awarded the UNESCO Music Prize, and in 1995 he received the Theodor Heuss Prize for advancing reconciliation and international understanding. His stature in the music world was further acknowledged in November 2011 when he accepted the Herbert von Karajan Prize, joining the company of such luminaries as Anne-Sophie Mutter, the Berlin Philharmonic, Russian pianist Evgeny Kissin, and conductor-pianist Daniel Barenboim.

His commitment to new music has led to many commissions, including Passion settings by Tan Dun and Osvaldo Golijov, the 2009 Messiah by Sven-David Sandström, and Krzysztof Penderecki’s Credo, for which Rilling and the Oregon Bach Festival won a Grammy award in 2001. Among his many volumes of recordings are the complete works of Bach, totaling 172 compact discs, issued in 2000 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death—a proud legacy of Rilling’s lifelong devotion to the celebration of Bach’s genius.