Ruth Reinhardt

German conductor Ruth Reinhardt is building a reputation for her keen musical intelligence, programmatic imagination, and elegant performances.

The 2025/26 season marks the beginning of Reinhardt’s term as Music Director of the Rhode Island Philharmonic, leading seven programmes across the season. In the summer of 2025, she made debuts with the Seoul Philharmonic and the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra. Other significant debuts in the 2025/26 season include the Staatskapelle Dresden, Philharmonia Orchestra in London, Hong Kong Philharmonic, Bruckner Orchester Linz, SWR Symphonieorchester, the Folkwang Kammerorchester in Essen, and the Sinfonieorchester St Gallen in Switzerland. She also has return engagements with the Warsaw Philharmonic, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Naples Philharmonic (FL), and the Orlando Philharmonic. 

Programmatically, Reinhardt’s interests have led her toward contemporary repertoire, with significant emphasis on women composers of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. Her programmes often introduce new names and fresh faces to many orchestras, including Grażyna Bacewicz, Kaija Saariaho, and Dai Fujikura, to name some of the more familiar ones, and pairs them with stylistically contrasting or complementary pieces, whether core masterworks by Brahms, Rachmaninoff, or Dvorak, or with “classic moderns” such as works by Bartók, Stravinsky, Lutosławski, Martinů, and Hindemith. Ruth is a frequent collaborator of many of today’s foremost instrumentalists spanning several generations. Among them are pianists Emanuel Ax, Daniil Trifonov, and Eva Gevorgyan; violinists Augustin Hadelich and Vadim Gluzman; cellists Andrei Ioniță and Jean-Guihen Queyras; horn player Stefan Dohr; and saxophonist Steven Banks.

In past seasons, Reinhardt has appeared with many of the major North American Orchestras and as recently as last season has made debuts with the St. Louis and Charlotte Symphony Orchestras. Previously, she has appeared with the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra (on four occasions), National Symphony Orchestra, and the symphony orchestras of San Francisco, Detroit, Houston, Seattle, and Baltimore. In Europe, she has appeared with Hague Residentie Orkestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic in Amsterdam, Orchestre National de France, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, RSO Berlin, Stockholm Philharmonic, and Tonkünstler Orchestra Wien, among many others.

Ruth Reinhardt served as Assistant Conductor of the Dallas Symphony for the final two seasons of Jaap van Zweden’s tenure as Music Director (2018-2020). She received her master’s degree in Conducting from the Juilliard School of Music in New York in 2017. She was a Dudamel Fellow of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (2017-2018), conducting fellow at both the Seattle Symphony (2015-2016) and Tanglewood Music Center (2015), and Taki Concordia associate conducting fellow (2015-2017). She currently makes her home in Switzerland.