Meet the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra’s First Female Music Director

Rhode Island Philharmonic music director and chief conductor Ruth Reinhardt is the first woman to lead the Philharmonic in its eighty-one-year history. Portrait by Ian Travis Barnard

The two oboe players blow an A note at a distinctive pitch and the winds and the brass instruments take up the call, holding the note for well over ten seconds before fading. The oboes sound a second A, and this time all the stringed instruments on stage take up the hum. As the note fades, the houselights dim, signaling the audience to hush.

The conductor, Ruth Reinhardt, enters from stage right. She strides confidently across the stage, skips onto the elevated podium, and acknowledges her orchestra, then the audience, with a bow. The crowd responds with a fryolator clap, a resounding burst of applause. Like everyone on stage, she is dressed in black slacks, and for her, a flared, black tailcoat. A spotlight highlights her bobbed blonde hair. Reinhardt turns, faces her musicians, and lifts her arms. Immediately, the stage bristles with bows as the violin players prepare to strike the first notes of the concert season.

In her right hand, Reinhardt holds a conductor’s baton hand-turned by a third-generation craftsman in Stockholm. A wooden dowel tapering to a fine point is joined to an absorbent cork handle, so the baton will not slip as she conducts the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra. She likes to hold the baton lightly so as not to transmit a sense of tension to the players.

With the lights low, the hall hushed, the bows poised to strike, Reinhardt lowers her hands for the downbeat. The opening notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner” well from the stage: “GG A G E G?”

It’s tradition for the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra to begin every season with the national anthem, a piece played so often at sporting events, and often not well, that it’s easy to forget what a moving piece it is when played by professionals. It’s also tradition for the musicians to wear concert dress of formal black, and it’s tradition for the orchestra to tune to the oboes. Early oboes were inflexible instruments, difficult to tune, so the rest of the orchestra tuned to them. Modern oboes tune as easily as any other instrument, but tradition rules. The Rhode Island Philharmonic does not casually break with tradition, but this season, for the first time in its eighty-one-year history, the orchestra has as its musical director and chief conductor a woman, Ruth Reinhardt.

Ruth Reinhardt grew up in Saarbrücken, in western Germany, right next to the French border.

She often bicycled along the banks of a river with her parents and an older sister into France, a ride of just a few miles. Their destination was a patisserie, where the girls could choose a pastry as reward for the eight-mile bike ride before turning back. Reinhardt’s pastry of choice was a chocolate eclair.

Both of her parents are doctors: he a pediatrician, she a general practitioner. Her sister is a few years older, and early on, it became apparent that she, too, had the ability and interest to become a doctor, prompting young Ruth to emphatically declare: “I would never become a doctor!” Perhaps she was just displaying her considerable maverick streak, or perhaps she just felt in her bones that her true calling lay elsewhere.

Though they were not professional musicians, her parents loved music, and an eclectic array of it often filled the house. Her sister and a friend began taking violin lessons, which spurred the envy of young Reinhardt, who wanted to do what the older girls were doing.

Reinhardt conducts the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra during a dress rehearsal. Rehearsal/ performance Photography by Rob Davidson

“But I was still too young,” she recalls recently, while sitting in a common area of the Rhode Island Philharmonic’s expansive headquarters on Waterman Avenue in East Providence. At age six, her parents relented, buying her a violin and lessons with one provision: She would practice at least once a day. “It was like brushing your teeth; you had to do it,” Reinhardt says. “But it wasn’t like I had to practice a certain amount each time. And I think that is a good way to do it,” she says, her cadence and grammar spiced with accents of her native Germany. “Don’t take the joy out of it by forcing your children to practice more than they want to. It kept me the joy — that I did it out of my own initiative.”

She joined her sister in the children’s choir of the local Saarland State Theater at age nine, where she saw that music wasn’t just something you did alone in your room — it was a gift to share with others. “For the first time, I got to be onstage in a big production and that just blew my mind — it’s a very different thing if you are at home and you play your little pieces on the violin, or you are on stage with all those amazing singers that sing so loud that it feels your ears are falling off, and the lights and the staging and the orchestra and the full audience is looking at you, and the music — it just felt so powerful to me. And that’s when I knew that I wanted to do music.”

Reinhardt knew she wanted to do music, but in what form? Neither singing or violin seemed enough to contain her enthusiasm. She lobbied her parents to take up the oboe, and when she turned twelve, they yielded. Her oboe teacher introduced her to composing original pieces — she had been reading music since age six; now she had a chance to write it.

“I just loved everything in music,” she says. “I surrounded myself with it. I knew I wanted to be a musician, but I felt that I hadn’t found the thing yet, hadn’t found the one thing that I would just do that, you know?”

In her early teens, Reinhardt and some friends founded a string quartet; she played in a youth orchestra, continued her oboe lessons. “I just did music in many different ways — whenever there was an opportunity to play, I always said yes.”

She always said yes. And that’s how she came to conducting.

This happened in 2004, in Brittany, France, in a music studio there. Reinhardt, then fifteen, was playing in a youth orchestra comprised of talented teens from Germany and France. The conductor, Jean-Yves Altenburger, asked if anyone would like to take a stab at conducting the next day. Reinhardt’s hand shot up. Her response was just part of her habitual way of saying yes to music. She had never even considered conducting.

“I’m not sure why I never thought of conducting as something that would be for me,” she says. “Maybe it is because I never saw — I had never seen a female conductor at this point, or maybe I just didn’t think of the job as being for me.”

Altenburger gave her the score for the next day’s rehearsal, and she spent that evening reading the music, hearing it in her head, marking it up in a way that would help her coax from the orchestra the music as she interpreted it. And the next morning, she stood before her peers and gave them the downbeat.

“I got there in front of the orchestra and it was the most powerful feeling,” Reinhardt says. “That you could just kind of communicate through the music so much between me and the musicians in the orchestra. It almost felt like the music was kind of going through me.”

Altenburger saw that she was talented. He agreed to give her evening lessons in conducting, and when the youth orchestra took a four-city tour, he allowed her to conduct each evening’s encore. “The first concert was on my sixteenth birthday,” Reinhardt says. “So the first official concert I conducted was on my sixteenth birthday and, of course, it was the best birthday present that I could ever have come true.”

Reinhardt conducts the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra at a dress rehearsal. She conducted her first concert at sixteen. Rehearsal/ performance Photography by Rob Davidson

As David Beauchesne perused the itinerary for the annual League of American Orchestras conference, he spied many boring-but-important workshops: fundraising, emerging subscription models, electronic media strategy. Beauchesne was — and is — the executive director of the Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra, a job he assumed because of his passion for music. Music took him from his hometown of Vancouver, British Columbia, to the prestigious Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. He earned degrees in music education and trombone performance, an instrument whose ability to make comical sounds often undermines its importance as a classical instrument highlighted in iconic works such as Ravel’s “Bolero” and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (which the Philharmonic will perform on May 2).

Though he preferred reading musical scores to spreadsheets, while at Eastman, Beauchesne also discovered a passion for administration and helped found the Institute for Musical Leadership. He joined the Rhode Island Philharmonic almost twenty years ago and quickly worked his way up to executive director. Beauchesne has helped improve the organization’s facilities during his tenure, converting the former Nicholson File factory in East Providence into the Philharmonic’s Carter Center for Music Education and Performance, which houses the RI Phil offices and Music School, and worked with the state to renovate the orchestra’s performing home, Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Providence.

As Beauchesne looked over that conference itinerary in Baltimore, he spied one workshop that he truly anticipated: “A Master Class in Conducting” scheduled for the conference’s last day, June 11, 2016. Four relatively young conductors were invited to lead the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra in a rehearsal of a Brahms symphony by Marin Alsop, then head of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, who was the only female music director tapped to lead a “major” American orchestra. Ruth Reinhardt was among the four, and she was by far the youngest, the only one still in graduate school, and the only female.

“Ruth was by far the best,” Beauchesne recalls. “She got the best sound out of the orchestra, and that’s what you want. You want someone who can step up in front of the orchestra and they go on a musical journey together and it looks like they’re all having a good time doing it and the audience is having a good time hearing it.

“There’s not always chemistry” between a conductor and the orchestra, “but when there is chemistry you can see it and you can hear it and you can feel it and it’s rare and wonderful,” he says.

Beauchesne thought: “We’ve got to get her to Rhode Island as fast as we can as a guest conductor before she gets too big!” It took five years (concerts are generally planned years in advance) but he booked her for an appearance in 2023, months after the death of the Philharmonic’s beloved musical director Bramwell Tovey. Beauchesne had lured Tovey, a Grammy Award winner, from the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in 2018, a major coup for the Philharmonic. Shortly after he arrived in Rhode Island, Tovey developed sarcoma. For the last concert of the 2022 season, he conducted a program he titled “A Joyful Future.” Two months later, he died, sparking an expedited search for his successor. After reviewing hundreds of candidates, the search committee chose Reinhardt.

Portrait by Ian Travis Barnard

Yes, Reinhardt acknowledges, a conductor’s arms do get tired. “It is much more physical than it looks,” she says. “When you go to a concert, it just looks like somebody is dancing to music.” But when she heaves her shoulders, or bends her knees, or lifts up off her heels, she is not moving in reaction to the music, like a dancer; she is moving in anticipation of the sound she wants to hear.

“I’m actually shaping the music and that takes much more energy than just going along with something. [Dancing is] much more relaxed than trying to control it or trying to shape it — control is not the right word; you’re shaping it or just nudging it in this direction or that direction,” she says.

In order to “shape” the music, a conductor needs an idea of how she wants it to sound. Reinhardt generally wants it to sound the way the composer intended, which leaves some room

for interpretation. A single bar of music can be “phrased” or emphasized in different ways, much as sentences can be. For example, a father might say to his child, tenderly, “Go to bed now.” Or he might say, peremptorily, “Go to bed — NOW!”

When she looks at a score she tries to break it down into its component parts. “With most music, let’s say with Mozart or Beethoven, you can break down the music into three independent lines. There’s the melody, and it’s usually played by the violins or the flute, or the oboe, or the violins and the flute.

“Then you have bass line, which is independent; it doesn’t just follow the melody — it goes very often in a different direction,” Reinhardt says. “That’s usually played by cello, basses and bassoons, or at least one of the bassoons.

“And then there’s harmony that makes it sound beautiful, but the harmony is not completely independent — it’s connected to the bass line in some ways. Most pieces you can break down into three things that are going on separately. That’s already a lot for a brain to hold, but it’s not impossible, right?”

After she breaks down a score to capture its intended tempo, volume and phrasing, she must convince an orchestra of seventy to a hundred top-notch musicians that her interpretation is solid.

“It’s about all agreeing which direction we go,” Reinhardt says. “It’s like a professional football team. They all know how to play football, but they all have to agree on a strategy for this game. It’s about getting everybody on board and pulling in the same direction and hopefully trying to convince them of your vision for the piece.”

Getting everybody on board begins with rehearsal.

The empty auditorium fills with the sounds of seventy-plus musicians practicing scales and finger exercises, creating a sound that’s cacophonous yet exciting. Every musician in the Rhode Island Philharmonic has earned the right to step onto the stage at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium through a rigorous audition process. Beauchesne, the executive director, estimates that if the orchestra had an opening for a violin player, about 100 people would apply. Only the best musicians win these jobs; but as proficient as they are, they cannot make a living off this one gig. All seventy-three contractual members of the Philharmonic are part-timers. They make ends meet by playing with the Portland Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Ballet, the Boston Pops and the Handel and Haydn Society.

Reinhardt strides to her podium and the instruments fall silent. This is her first rehearsal as the Philharmonic’s musical director, but most of the musicians know her from guest conducting gigs in Providence and Portland. To break the ice, Reinhardt asks her orchestra to play through the opening night’s second piece in its entirety. It is a risky piece of music for a new music director to select as part of her debut: “Diaspora: Concerto for Saxophone” by contemporary composer Billy Childs. It is about the forced diaspora of people from Africa to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, and it features a saxophone player as the soloist — hardly standard fare.

The orchestra members have been practicing the piece on their own for about a month; this is the first time the orchestra will play together to hear how their particular score blends into the whole, and as they play, it sounds really good. At the end of the piece, the orchestra members applaud, not so much as a pat-on-the-back to themselves but in acknowledgement of the virtuoso performance by the saxophonist, Steven Banks, a humble thirty-one-year-old man from North Carolina. (After Reinhardt signed Banks to play the piece in Providence, a major metropolitan orchestra asked him to perform it on their opening night, a career opportunity for a young soloist. Reinhardt offered to release Banks from his Rhode Island commitment; he chose to honor it.)

From the podium, Reinhardt begins breaking down the piece. “First violin and flutes, let’s go to 216,” she says, about ninety minutes into what would be a five-hour rehearsal. “Start right on 216. Just flute and first violins. How can you agree more?”

Twice Reinhardt cues the strings and violins to play that bar, and neither time does she appear satisfied. After the second attempt she turns the page and moves into another section of the piece. Reinhardt could badger Charles Dimmick, first violinist, and the principal flutist Ann Bobo until they got it right, but she lets it slide, a tilt of her head and a frown clearly signaling that she’s not yet satisfied.

In a break, Bobo approaches Dimmick offstage and says, “Charles, have you got a minute?” In a seconds-long conversation, Bobo and Dimmick work out the issue of their timing.

In an interview at his home in a suburb North of Boston, Charles Dimmick says he appreciated the way Reinhardt let the violins and flute section work out the disconnect in bar 216 of “Diaspora.” He has been playing violin for forty-two of his forty-seven years, and Bobo, too, is highly trained, one of the premier flutists in the Northeast.

“There are plenty of conductors that I think really try to lead by telling everybody what to do at any given moment, which is really not terribly effective, especially when you have before you a group of experts,” Dimmick says over a cup of hot ginger tea. “If something is not going well, it’s not because we’re not competent. And I think Bramwell [Tovey] and Ruth recognize that, and recognize that their job is to facilitate.

“Most of what’s important about a conductor,” Dimmick continues, “is not what they are doing in performance; it’s what happens at the rehearsals. It’s where they present a compelling version of their interpretation and try to get eighty other people to buy into that interpretation. … They call it conducting because they’re transmitting an idea to people. And that can be translated through the hands but it’s also translated when you see how she listens and puts this one thing here, and you say, ‘Ah!’ You understand what she’s hearing and what she wants.”

Dimmick, the Philharmonic’s first violinist or “concertmaster,” served on the small search committee that considered hundreds of candidates before choosing Reinhardt as music director. He knew Reinhardt from her guest conductor performances in Portland and Providence and liked the way she interpreted music and handled people.

“People talk about having a players’ coach, somebody who just tries to make life easy for all their players at all times,” Dimmick says. “And that, of course, also can go too far. As a leader, you do need to set a standard, and you do have to have a vision, and I think Ruth really finds that line exceptionally well of listening and collaborating and making it so it’s easy to do our jobs, but also coming in with having a clear of vision of what she’d like and insisting on that when it’s appropriate.”

The Rhode Island Philharmonic Orchestra performs at The Vets in Providence. Rehearsal/ performance Photography by Rob Davidson

Reinhardt maintains a firewall between her personal and professional lives. Her permanent residence is still in Switzerland and she travels to Providence for rehearsals and performances. Ask her about music and she is expansive and insightful. Ask her about hobbies, favorite foods or living arrangements and she deflects. It’s not that she finds domestic life trivial or banal, but “this is not part of my work, it has nothing to do with my work, so I think this is not public. Very simple,” she says in a Zoom interview from a hotel room in Spain. She will allow, for the record, that she lives rurally “in the mountains of Switzerland. I have no pets because I travel too much. And I live with my husband in Switzerland.”

Dimmick has noticed Reinhardt’s reluctance to casually share details of her life. “I think she’s a pretty private person, right? A lot of times I couldn’t really even begin to guess what’s going on in her mind.” And he doesn’t really care. He didn’t vote to hire Reinhardt because he wanted a new best friend — he wanted an excellent conductor.

“The fact that she is a woman is great,” Dimmick says. “But it doesn’t do anybody any favors to have a conductor who is not excellent.”

In separate interviews, Reinhardt and Dimmick eloquently shared their same single-minded pursuit of excellence in music, a passion that borders on messianic. Reinhardt’s life is essentially dedicated to “making the world a better place through music.

“No, my life is not just about work,” she says, “but music takes up a very, very important part of my life, of course. You only become a musician if you love it so much that you cannot live without it. You cannot even imagine your life without it.”

Dimmick concurs. “I believe very firmly that humanity has never created anything more important to humanity than music,” he says. “I think probably it is our greatest thing. … Music is a direct connection from a performer to somebody else’s soul.”

He feels that connection when he plays. “If you had asked me that six years ago, I would have said I don’t really care,” about an audience’s response to his playing. “Obviously, I am playing for the audience to enjoy, but really? I’m playing for my colleagues and I’m playing for the composer. … Then COVID happened,” and there were no live performances.

“Playing in concert dress to a bunch of people on video camera, how awful that felt,” he says. “It really made me recognize that the audience is a living and breathing part of the performance. There’s a real human energy there.”

Beauchesne, himself a musician before transitioning to the business side, says he loves the “compressed period, very intense, very focused, very rapid fire work” of staging each performance. “One hundred musicians that have never played this piece together before come together in three days. It is like being a football coach — most of the preparation is before the game. Then, during the game, is everyone able to translate that preparation into a unified team effort that achieves the desired result? The difference is that in athletics, they need to beat somebody. We don’t need to beat anybody, we just need to inspire everybody.”

And on the opening night of their season, Reinhardt and her team of crack musicians produce the artistic equivalent of a win. The saxophonist, Steven Banks, holds the audience spellbound with a virtuoso performance that quickly makes people forget that saxophone is not traditionally a classical instrument. The risk Reinhardt took in choosing this piece as part of her debut, sandwiched between George Gershwin’s “Cuban Overture” (the same lively, toe-tapping piece that Bramwell Tovey chose for his debut in 2018) and the funereal final movement of Symphony No. 4 by Johannes Brahms, pays off.

The audience, that “living and breathing part of the performance” that Dimmick missed during COVID stands and applauds. Reinhardt faces the audience, which includes her parents, Bernhardt and Anne, in from Germany to see the debut of their daughter who refused to become a doctor.

A girl of middle-school age, a violinist in one of the Rhode Island Philharmonic’s youth orchestras, steps forward with a long-stemmed bouquet. Reinhardt deeply blushes as she bends amid the applause to accept the flowers.

The theme from Bramwell Tovey’s last concert, “A Joyful Future,” comes to its fruition.