Christoph Rehli
Guest Conductor
Christoph Rehli was born in Switzerland and studied piano, organ, theory, and conducting at the Zurich University of the Arts. Further studies in conducting took him to the Pierre Monteux School in Maine, where he studied with Maestro Charles Bruck.
From 1994 to 2023, he was a professor of conducting at the Lucerne University of Music, training numerous conductors who have gone on to have successful careers.
From 1994 to 2012, he led the Youth Symphony Orchestra of the Winterthur Conservatory (Switzerland), transforming the ensemble into an excellent musical group.
From 2016 to 2023, he served as conductor and artistic director of the Neumünster Orchestra Zurich, one of the oldest orchestras in Switzerland.
Christoph regularly collaborates with symphonic orchestras in Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Romania, Lithuania, and Russia. As a guest conductor, he maintained long-term relationships with the Symphony Orchestra of the City of Pilsen (Czech Republic), the National Philharmonic George Enescu Bucharest, the Transilvania Philharmonic Orchestra Cluj-Napoca (Romania), the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra Vilnius, and the Tchaikovsky Orchestra of Moscow Radio.
Rehli was invited to teach conducting courses and give concerts at the University of Memphis Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music and at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota. He also conducted concerts in India (The Bombay Chamber Orchestra) and China (Shanghai Conservatory of Music).
Christoph Rehli is deeply engaged with the orchestral literature of the Viennese Classical period. A particular focus of his work is on the lesser-known repertoire of the Pre-Classical era and the still-underappreciated works of Italian opera composer Ruggero Leoncavallo.
Christoph lives with his family in the Bernese Oberland and spends much of his time in his second home, Tuscany.
Richard Masters
Piano
Richard Masters is a soloist, opera coach, chamber musician and orchestral pianist based in Blacksburg, VA, where he is an associate professor of piano and collaborative piano on the music faculty at Virginia Tech's School of Performing Arts.
Significant collaborations include concerts with Grammy-winning baritone Donnie Ray Albert, flutist and composer Valerie Coleman, Colombian mezzo-soprano Marta Senn, and the late Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Barbara Conrad. He has also appeared with former Boston Symphony principal trombonist Norman Bolter, former Juilliard String Quartet violinist Earl Carlyss, saxophonist Harvey Pittel, and under the baton of the late Lorin Maazel. Masters has performed solo, chamber and vocal recitals throughout the U.S. and in Europe. Other recent appearances include performances at the English Music Festival in Oxfordshire, England, the American Cathedral in Paris, and the Richard M. Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California.
Masters is the music director of Druid City Opera in Tuscaloosa, where he recently conducted Il Barbiere di Siviglia in 2025. Past performances with Druid City include Rigoletto, Lucia di Lammermoor, and Tosca. He has also served as associate conductor and head coach for Opera Roanoke, where in the 2024 season, he conducted Amahl and the Night Visitors, played continuo for Le nozze di Figaro, and rehearsed and performed Britten’s The Turn of the Screw. Of his recitatives for Figaro, Gordon Marsh wrote in Opera magazine, “…Masters's harpsichord continuo served brilliantly as a 'responding character' during the recitatives…” (June, 2024)
The Chicago Tribune critic Howard Reich selected Masters’s recording of American art songs on the Albany label with sopranos Ariana Wyatt and Emily Martin as one of “the best classical recordings of 2020,” writing “Richard Masters summon[s] practically orchestral color at the piano." Other recordings included song cycles, instrumental sonatas, and solo piano works on the Heritage and E-M Records labels. A disc of chamber music for trumpet and piano with trumpeter Jason Crafton was released on the Blue Griffin label in Fall of 2025.
Masters has published articles and reviews on a wide variety of topics in a number of periodicals including American Music Teacher, Piano Magazine, Opera Journal, Association of Recorded Sound Collectors (ARSC) Journal, and Leitmotive, the Journal of the Wagner Society of Northern California. The ARSC Journal awarded him its 2024 Best Review Award for his review “From Hollywood to the World: The Rediscovered Recordings by Pianist and Conductor José Iturbi.” In 2023, he published a book with Rowman & Littlefield, An Encyclopedia of American Pianists from the 1800s to the Present.
Masters is a Yamaha Artist. He holds degrees from the Eastman School of Music (DMA), the Juilliard School (MM), and the University of Colorado at Boulder (BM).
Mathias Elmer
Mathias Elmer, a native of Switzerland, is the Director of Orchestral Activities and Assistant Professor of Music at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Prior to this position, he served as Director of Orchestral Activities at Connecticut College in New London and at the University of Memphis Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music. In 2017, he completed his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in orchestral conducting at the University of Memphis under Maestro Pu-Qi Jiang. Further studies in conducting led Dr. Elmer to Michael Stern (USA), Karl Anton Rickenbacher and Johannes Schlaefli (Switzerland), and Mark Ensley (USA), among others.
Elmer received his master’s degree in orchestral and operatic conducting at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts School of Music in Switzerland under Maestro Ralf Weikert. Elmer was Music Director of the Orchestra con brio in Glarus, Switzerland, a post he held for eight years. Between 2002 and 2014, he served as founding member and trumpet player of the professional brass quintet Philharmonic Brass Zurich–Generell5. Throughout Switzerland, Elmer is sought after as a wind band festival adjudicator, and from 2009 to 2014, he taught for the Zurich Music Association as a member of the conducting faculty.
Together with his colleague Kevin Sütterlin, Elmer is Co-Music Director and founder of Sinfonietta Memphis, a Tennessee-based chamber orchestra focusing on historically informed performances of music by Viennese Classical composers. Another focus of his work as a conductor is his passion for works by underrepresented composers, and he has led seminars and given lectures on how to incorporate this repertoire into a University orchestra concert program. Elmer has performed music by Florence Price, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Fanny Hensel-Mendelssohn, Louise Farrenc, as well as pieces by living American composers, including Scott Hines from Memphis, Tennessee. Dr. Elmer is the winner of The American Prize in Conducting in the College/University Orchestra division for 2017/2018.