Biography

Beginning his career as a cellist, Gueller won the United German Radios Conducting Competition in 1979 and for nearly 20 years ran tandem careers, deputing for the legendary conductor Sergiu Celibidache, who regarded Gueller as his best "pupil". Gueller also attracted the attention of the renowned arts administrator Ernest Fleischman, who "was deeply impressed by his extraordinary musicianship, his marvellous ability to communicate with the musicians, and ... his charismatic impact on the audience."

Bernhard Gueller has been music director or principal conductor of various orchestras, including the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra and the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, a position he relinquished in 2009. When he conducted his final concert in Nuremberg that year, he was lauded for the quality of the orchestra he had built up.

His career has taken him to many top concert halls, from America and Australia to Russia, Japan, China, Korea, South Africa and Brazil, as well as countries in Europe such as Spain, Italy, France, Norway and Sweden and his native Germany. Orchestras he has conducted include the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, the City of Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, Nashville Symphony and Buffalo Symphony in America, the Orchestre-de-Bretagne, Rennes, and the Orchestra of the Loire in France, the Kanagawa Symphony Orchestra in Yokohama, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and the Calagary, Edmonton and Victoria Symphony Orchestras in Canada.

As principal conductor of the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra, Gueller took the orchestra to the 16th International Festival of Music in the Canary Islands in 2000, where the CTPO represented the continent of Africa. He took the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra on a tour of several cities in northern Germany, and also gave a concert in the Berlin Konserthaus.

Gueller has collaborated with many leading soloists such as cellists Daniel Mueller-Schott, Maria Kliegel, Claudio Bohorquez and David Geringas, pianists Ivo Pogorelich, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, Lars Vogt, Janina Fialkowska, Peter Donohoe, Anton Kuerti, John Kimura Parker and Wayne Marshall, violinist James Ehnes, trumpeter Maurice André, singer Measha Bruggegosman, and entertainers Lionel Ritchie and David Foster.

Gueller is acknowledged for the work he does with youth orchestras in South Africa, Germany and Nova Scotia. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Dalhousie University in Halifax in 2009 in recognition of his "outstanding personal achievements".