Stefan Dohr

Horn player Stefan Dohr, who was born in 1965, hails from Münster in ­Westphalia. He completed his instrumental studies in Essen and Cologne and was appointed Principal Horn by the Frankfurt Opera and Museum Orchestra when he was just 19. Following engagements with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Nice and the Deutsches Symphonie-­Orchester Berlin, he was named Principal Horn of the Berliner ­Philharmoniker in 1993 — a position he still holds today. As a soloist, Stefan Dohr has worked with such conductors as Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Bernard Haitink, Daniel ­Harding, Gustavo Gimeno, Paavo Järvi, Sir Simon Rattle, Dima Slobodeniouk, and Christian Thielemann. He has performed solo works with the Berliner Philharmoniker as well as with the Los Angeles and Oslo Philharmonic Orchestras, the NHK and Tokyo ­Metropolitan Symphony Orchestras, the Netherlands ­Radio Philharmonic, the Sydney Symphony and Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestras, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, and the Dresden Philharmonic. Dohr’s repertoire spans every era of horn music, and several leading contemporary composers have written new works for him, including Hans Abrahamsen, Dai Bo, Toshio Hosokawa, Jorge E. López, Wolfgang Rihm, Steingrímur Rohloff, Johannes Wallmann, and Herbert Willi. He premiered Jörg Widmann’s Horn Concerto in 2024; tonight he will give the world premiere of a new concerto by Esa-Pekka Salonen. A passionate chamber musician, Stefan Dohr has performed with violinists Kolja ­Blacher, Guy Braunstein, and Carolin Widmann; tenors Ian Bostridge and Mark Padmore; and pianist Kirill Gerstein. He is also a member of Ensemble Wien-Berlin and the Philharmonic Octet Berlin. Stefan Dohr teaches at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin and at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and gives masterclasses around the world. He has served since 2015 as a visiting professor at the Royal College of Music in London.

August 2025