Artists of the performances

Conductor
Dorothee Oberlinger

Director
Nils Niemann

Videoartist
Christoph Brech

Orchestra
Ensemble1700

Dorothee Oberlinger I Conductor
Dorothee Oberlinger is one of the influential personalities in the field of early music, honoured with the most important international music prizes, including the Opus Klassik 2020 as Instrumentalist of the Year and the Telemann Prize of the City of Magdeburg, which she was also the first woman to receive in 2020. As a soloist, she works with her Ensemble1700 as well as other renowned baroque ensembles and orchestras. After years of study in Cologne, Amsterdam and Milan, she made her international debut in 1997 with 1st prize in the SRP/Moeck U.K. international competition at London's Wigmore Hall. Numerous invitations from important festivals and concert halls followed. Since 2004 Dorothee Oberlinger has taught as a professor of recorder at the University Mozarteum Salzburg, where she directed the Institute for Early Music from 2008 to 2018. She is festival director of the Bad Arolsen Baroque Festival and the Potsdam Sanssouci Music Festival. Since 2016, she has also realised highly acclaimed opera projects as a conductor.

Nils Niemann I Director
Nils Niemann is one of the few specialists in the scenic performance practice of baroque and classical theatre. As a director, researcher, dramaturge and teacher, he has dedicated himself for many years to researching and testing historical acting and stage techniques. He has worked for the Munich Opera Academy, Musica Bayreuth, the Halle Handel Festival, the Semperoper Dresden, the Potsdam Sanssouci Music Festival and the Boston Early Music Festival, the conservatories in Hamburg, Dresden and Leipzig and the Berlin University of the Arts, among others. From 2007 to 2012 he was instrumental in developing productions for the Sanssouci Baroque Opera Summer as dramaturge and director. In 2021, he staged Georg Philipp Telemann's Pastorelle en musique for the Potsdam Sanssouci Music Festival. Since 2012, he has worked closely with the Liebhabertheater Schloss Kochberg, where he regularly stages productions including the opera Der Apotheker by Joseph Haydn, a co-production of the Liebhabertheater Schloss Kochberg with the Lautten Compagney Berlin and international partners.

Christoph Brech I Videoartist
Christoph Brech was born in Schweinfurt and studied painting and graphic arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In addition to photography and installation art, video art is a particularly important means of expression. Brech has worked with artists such as Christoph Prégardien, Andreas Scholl, Christoph Poppen, Mariss Jansons and Kirill Petrenko. He created the video sequences for Dante's Descent into Hell (Kammerspiele Mainz, Rheinsberger Festspiele and Theater Rudolstadt), for George Frideric Handel's oratorio Israel in Egypt, Nuremberg, and the dome projection for Olivier Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps for the Nicolaus Copernicus Planetarium in Nuremberg (2012). Christoph Brech made his debut as a director with An Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss, which premiered at the Rheingau Music Festival at the Kurhaus Wiesbaden in 2016.
Christoph Brech is the winner of numerous prizes such as the Kunstpreis Berlin 2018 in the category of film and media art, the Artheon Kunstpreis 2020 and he won the Kunst am Bau competition (Marie Elisabeth Lüders Haus) of the German Bundestag in Berlin with Nicola Borgmann.

Ensemble1700 I Orchestra
Ensemble1700 was founded in 2002 by Dorothee Oberlinger in Cologne and is dedicated to European music of the 17th and 18th centuries. On the basis of musicologically sound performance practice, coupled with the highest technical playing ability, the ensemble produces varied concert programmes that are enthusiastically received by critics and audiences alike. Guest performances throughout Europe and the USA have made the ensemble internationally known. For CD recordings, Dorothee Oberlinger regularly invites renowned specialists to complement her regular line-up, whether Reinhard Goebel as conductor or François Lazarevitch (musette, transverse flute), Vittorio Ghielmi (viola da gamba), Andreas Scholl (countertenor) or Dmitry Sinkovsky (countertenor and violin) in solo roles.
Ensemble1700 also performs in opera productions conducted by Dorothee Oberlinger, including Handel's Lucio Cornelio Silla, Bononcini's Polifemo and Telemann's Pastorelle en musique. The ensemble is funded by the federal programme Neustart Kultur and the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of NRW for a period of three years.