Dorothee Oberlinger is already there. She waits calmly at the conductor’s desk while the audience streams into the Schwetzingen Rococo Theater to Reinhard Keiser’s “Nebucadnezzar”. She will conduct the performance at the Baroque Festival “Winter in Schwetzingen”, the first of this opera in three hundred years, without a baton; Apparently she doesn’t need the big entrance at the beginning either. Oberlinger was often called the “Queen of the Recorder” after the instrument with which she became known and which finally freed her from the reputation of being a torture tool for musical beginners. With her playing that is as virtuosic as it is musical, but also with her natural glamor factor. After all, the “flauto dolce”, the “sweet flute” had a great time in the Baroque era as a solo and orchestral instrument before it was rediscovered in the 20th century as a mass instrument for school classes. Oberlinger is of course a child of the early music movement, whose boundaries she has always liked to push. “Dance For Two” is the name of one of her albums that she released last April together with violist Nils Mönkemeyer. There is no original literature for the unusual duo, which is why the two have adapted pieces from several centuries of music history. Simply because they were curious to play with each other, an approach that is more common in jazz than in classical music.
Flutist Dorothee Oberlinger: The Queen – Culture
