Born in 1963 and brought up in Bamberg, Bernhard Heinrichs joined the local boys' choir at the age of seven and took up oboe a little later with Otto Winter. Later on he studied at the Conservatoire in Munich in the master class of Günther Passin and passed his final exam with distinction. As oboist of the Arcis Quintet, Bernhard Heinrichs won numerous prizes such as the German Music Competition in Bonn as well as international competitions in Belgrade and Colmar. In 1987, he was awarded the Bavarian Staatsförderpreis für Kultur, two years later the second prize at the ARD competition in Munich, and in 1990 a first prize at the International Music Competition in Tokyo. As a soloist, he played amongst others with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra, the Munich Bach Soloists, the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. Since 1991, Bernhard Heinrichs has been solo oboist at the Opera in Zurich where he received important musical impulses by Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Other conductors he has been working with include - to name but a few - Franz Welser-Möst, Claudio Abbado, Riccardo Chailly and Christoph von Dohnányi. In 1997, he performed in concerts at the Musikverein with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Bernard Haitink followed by a tour through Japan. At the Mozart Festival in Würzburg, the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, the Chamber Music Festival in Risør (Norwegen), the Carmel Bach Festival (California), and the Salzburg Festival, Bernhard Heinrichs performed as a soloist and chamber music partner of Sabine Meyer, Elizabeth Wallfisch, Iona Brown, Christian Tetzlaff, Alexander Lonquich, Gerhard Oppitz, Christoph Eschenbach and Leif Ove Andsnes. He has been teaching at the Juilliard School in New York, the University of Berkeley, and at the Pacific Music Festival in Sapporo. Bernhard Heinrichs is also an internationally well-known and equally successful painter. His works were exhibited in galleries and art fairs in Zurich, Oslo, Miami, Munich, Vienna, and Stockholm. Bernhard Heinrichs, a former member of the GUSTAV MAHLER JUGENDORCHESTER himself, has been woodwind tutor for the GUSTAV MAHLER JUGENDORCHESTER since 2005.