Invited Artist

The conductor Dorian Keilhack, chief conductor of the Vogtland Philharmonie Greiz/Reichenbach from 2020 to 2024, comes from a family of musicians whose roots lie in England, Germany, Austria, Bohemia and Israel. The wide range of his repertoire includes well over 80 operas and the entire symphonic period from the Baroque to the 20th century.

“Thanks to his exceptional musicality and knowledge of repertoire in all stylistic periods and his great conducting skills, Dorian Keilhack is one of the few conductors with whom you know that you are in good hands as a composer,” writes the renowned contemporary composer Aribert Reimann.

For over 20 years, Dorian Keilhack has been at the helm of many orchestras in Europe, South America and Asia. He has conducted at the Bonn Opera, Regensburg Theater, Mönchengladbach-Krefeld Opera, Aachen Theater, Lübeck Theater, Innsbruck State Theater, Bern Theater, Nuremberg State Theater, Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, Coburg Theater, Würzburg Theater, Chemnitz Theater, Mannheim Opera House, Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Collegium Novum Zurich, Archangelsk State Symphony Orchestra, Sinaloa Symphony Orchestra Culiacan Mexico, Gotha-Suhl Philharmonic, Lower Silesian Philharmonic (Poland), Interharmony Festival Orchestra (Italy), Collegium Musicum Pommersfelden and the International Young Orchestra Academy Bayreuth, among others.

After studying piano and conducting at the universities in Nuremberg, Freiburg and at the renowned Juilliard School in New York (with Werner Andreas Albert, Otto Werner Müller, Ulrich Weder, among others), Leon Fleisher, Christoph Eschenbach and Georg Schmöhe provided further artistic inspiration.

In the 1998/1999 season, Keilhack was a solo répétiteur at the Nuremberg Theater. In the autumn of 1999, the artistic director Brigitte Fassbaender and the music director Schmöhe brought him to the Tyrolean State Theater in Innsbruck as a solo répétiteur with conducting duties (from 2003, conductor duties) and assistant to the music director. There he conducted various operas, operettas and musicals. As a specialist in new music, he was often employed as musical director of contemporary opera productions, conducted numerous premieres and supervised guest tours to Salzburg and Vienna. From the 2005 to 2008 season, Dorian Keilhack was conductor and director of studies at the Erfurt Opera.

In 2003, the Tyrolean Ensemble for New Music chose Keilhack as its new artistic director. Invited by the Hall Eye Theatre in 2004, he and this ensemble took over the musical direction of the theatre production of Oedipus Rex by Stravinsky, which was awarded the prize for the best opera production by an independent theatre by the Austrian Ministry of Culture in Vienna.

In July 2008, Dorian Keilhack made his debut with the “Collegium Novum Zürich” at the Zurich Festival. He then took up the position of first conductor at the Bern City Theatre. There, in addition to his own musical rehearsals, he conducted the entire opera repertoire, including Rosenkavalier, La Boheme, Tosca, Onegin, and The Flying Dutchman. The production of “The Divine Tivoli” by Per Norgard under Dorian Keilhack’s musical direction was released on CD in 2010.

Since February 2014, Dorian Keilhack has been accepted by the Innsbruck State Conservatory, where he has taken over the direction of the opera school. In the same year, he took over as chief conductor/artistic director of the 40-member chamber orchestra Camerata Franconia, which has chosen Erlangen as its residence.

A highlight in 2018 was the tour of the Vogtland Philharmonie, which included a concert in the Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein. He was then elected chief conductor of the Vogtland Philharmonie from the 2020/21 season with an overwhelming majority. From autumn 2019, he was already a permanent guest conductor with over 30 concerts.

At the beginning of 2020, Keilhack led his Camerata Franconia on an acclaimed tour of China.

Since 2000, he has been passing on his knowledge to young singers and musicians in master classes and teaching as a guest professor for the summer program at Miami Frost University.

In 2024, Dorian Keilhack will take over as artistic director of the renowned international orchestra academy Collegium Musicum Pommersfelden in Weissenstein Castle, where musicians from all over the world come together for four weeks in the summer to work with orchestras or chamber music.