The Maestro is a Woman


Marin Alsop, who conducts the Pittsburgh Symphony this weekend,
is thriving in a role usually played by men Friday, September 24, 2004

By Andrew Druckenbrod, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Marin Alsop -- "Why don't I just make an orchestra and figure out how to be a conductor? So that is what I did. It seemed like a much more direct and autonomous route."


Pittsburgh Symphony
Featuring: Marin Alsop, conductor; Lang Lang, piano.


Program: Christopher Rouse's "Phaethon"; Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1; Camille Saint-Saens' Symphony No. 3, "Organ Symphony."
Where: Heinz Hall, Downtown.
When: 8 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 p.m. Sunday.
Tickets: $17-$69; 412-392-4900.


Christopher Rouse's orchestral 'Phaethon' gallops toward the sun

When Marin Alsop found old prejudices were limiting her lifelong desire to be a conductor, she could've stuck to playing the violin. She could've given up on the chauvinistic podium. Instead, she took things into her own capable hands. She founded her own orchestra.

Talk about gumption. But in a traditionalist field such as classical music, which in the United States boasts not a single female conductor at a major-budget orchestra, gumption is as necessary as good technique.

The situation came to a head appropriately enough in 1984. After all, it wasn't Big Sister that Orwell predicted would be pervasive. Faced with limited opportunity to conduct and failing several times in auditions for the conducting program at Juilliard -- even though she had flourished in a master's in violin performance there -- Alsop founded Concordia Orchestra in New York City.

"I thought to myself, why am I killing myself to get in here?" Alsop says from her home in Denver. "Why don't I just make an orchestra and figure out how to be a conductor? So that is what I did. It seemed like a much more direct and autonomous route."

That route would lead to the prestigious Gramophone Artist of the Year award in 2003, much lauded recordings and praise for her conducting around the world.

"[Alsop] has everything a conductor at the beginning of the 21st century needs," Gramophone editor James Jolly recently raved. "She's profoundly musical, she has a great conducting technique ... and I think the fact that she's got broad musical tastes is very important. She's in contact with culture today."

Alsop balances conducting the core classics with championing new music, cultivates chemistry with an orchestra while connecting to the audience, and programs adventurously while watching the finances.

Alsop just doesn't have the time to dwell on the "woman thing."
"I don't feel this huge responsibility on my shoulders," she says. "There is part of me that would just like to ignore the whole issue and move on, but there is part of me that has to be realistic. This is the reality. When you look around, there aren't women leading major orchestras."

What's amazing is that, although many major orchestras have seen significant increases in the number of female members in the past few decades, there has been no like movement in the conducting field.

"In the last 20 years that I have been in this industry, I had naturally assumed that there would be an influx of women, and there really hasn't been," says Alsop. "There's still about the same number of us as when I started." Others include JoAnn Falletta of the Buffalo Philharmonic and Eve Queler of the Opera Orchestra of New York.

That number didn't increase this week when the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra hired three conductors to succeed Mariss Jansons.

Although she has yet to run a major orchestra in the United States, at 47, Alsop has wowed critics, orchestras and audiences, enhanced the status of the Colorado Symphony so well she has been named music director laureate, and successfully run the important Cabrillo Music Festival of contemporary music in Santa Cruz.

She has guest conducted many major orchestras, including being principal guest conductor of both the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the City of London Sinfonia. This is a breakout year for her. She guest conducts the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. She debuts with the PSO this weekend.

Yet it's only in Europe that she has been given the chance to run a major orchestra. In 2002, she took the helm of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. She is the first woman to run a major British orchestra. What did she do with the opportunity? She garnered the Gramophone award in her first season.

"I feel that all I can do is be who I am and try to be proactive in my own way, which you can tell from my history doesn't have too much to do with ladder climbing," says Alsop, whose name continues to surface for the positions open in the orchestras of Chicago, Dallas and Detroit.


FROM PRODIGY TO PROTEGE
It'll never be known if Alsop's life in music was predetermined -- her parents never allowed any deviance early on. Professional musicians both, they started her on the piano at the age of 2, and when she rejected that, they persuaded her to take up the violin at 5. "I had lots of other interests that were completely ignored," she says, laughing. But the truth is, her immense talent made it easy and fun for her.

Marin Alsop: "My father took me to hear Bernstein do a Young People's concert when I was 9 or 10 years old and that was it for me!"

Already a serious musician, she was 7 when she enrolled in Juilliard's preschool and played in its prep orchestra. Then she made the Lorin Maazel-like decision to be a conductor at the age of 9. The inspiration was none other than Leonard Bernstein.

"My father took me to hear Bernstein do a Young People's concert when I was 9 or 10 years old and that was it for me!" she states in a testimonial on her Web site, www.marinalsop.com. "I absolutely knew that I wanted to become a conductor and never changed my mind!"

The charismatic Bernstein has influenced countless musicians to join the profession, but not many pre-teens. "It sounds ridiculous that when I was 9 this made such a huge impression [on me], but I think my musical growth was so forcibly advanced by my parents that I did have some powers of assessment that most kids at the age of 9 [wouldn't]," Alsop says. "I already had a vibe about the orchestra. I loved the sound of it and being in the middle of the texture."

Plus, she was 9, with the conflicting desires to follow and deviate from her parents. "I think unconsciously there was that part of me that wanted to be in music but wanted to do something distinct and separate from my parents," Alsop says. Her parents, to whom she remains close, were thrilled at the decision and supported her enrolling at Yale University in 1972 -- at 16.

It was at Yale that she first became acquainted with contemporary music, which would later be a major part of her career.
Her initial response? "I remember going home from school and telling my parents that I hated contemporary music."
Time, experience and a composer named Steve Reich changed that. Only 17, she played in a performance of Reich's "Violin Phase" in New York.

"I would go down to New York from Connecticut to rehearse, and it was so cool," she says. "That got me a little jazzed about contemporary music. I transferred to Juilliard and got involved in playing a lot in the new music scene in the '70s and the '80s in New York, including with the Phillip Glass Ensemble."

It wasn't long before being jazzed (and performing jazz, too, as a improvisational violinist) would lead her to start Concordia Orchestra. With it, she learned first-hand the difficulties of running an ensemble while studying scores ferociously on her free time. Subbing at violin in the New York Philharmonic, she marshalled enough courage to ask visiting conductors such as Eduardo Mata and Karl Richter to give her conducting lessons.

Her conducting career was moving but at a steady largo. Then her paths crossed again with Bernstein, when the 32-year-old Alsop accepted a conducting fellowship at Tanglewood in 1988.

"He was my idol from when I saw him at 9," she recalls. "I think he had the ability to change people's lives in an hour. He could give you the key to unlock the door to complete access, whether it was to music, the concept behind a great idea or to your own person. I can almost replay every moment I spent with him."

The momentum, confidence and prestige Alsop gained from Bernstein's mentoring for those two years before he died in 1990 propelled her to take the next step. Soon afterward she made her conducting debuts at the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic and became director of the Cabrillo Festival.

In 1993, Denver's Colorado Symphony hired her to lead it in its early days of existence. She did so admirably, enhancing the orchestra's reputation and quality and twice garnering ASCAP's first prize for programming of new music. That she participated in making the nascent self-governance of that orchestra work smoothly means she is already interested in working with, not in spite of, musicians, something that should endear her to many U.S. orchestras.


NO PRETENSES
In spite of the accolades she has received for programing new music and her strong relationship with composers such as Christopher Rouse, Alsop doesn't want to be known as a new music conductor, but a complete one. "Here in Denver for over a decade I have done everything."

Part of her American reputation as a new music advocate, however, is due to her recording output. "In recording one has to [mostly] do the niche repertoire in order to fill the catalog void," she says. She's addressing this recently with acclaimed CDs of Barber, Bernstein and Tchaikovsky for Naxos and is recording a Brahms cycle with the London Philharmonic.

Even as she continues to change preconceptions about herself, Alsop sees her role as de-mystifying classical music.

"One of the big criticisms about classical music is that it is an ivory tower experience, an elitist experience," she says. "I am not one for a lot of pretense. If people clap between movements, fine."

With music education not a high priority in schools, she echoes the thoughts of many (including the PSO) that orchestras must work hard to make up for it.

"You have to reach out to the community, you have to be the ambassador to the community for classical music." The twist with Alsop is, she likes doing this, a far cry from the Jansons and Barenboims of the musical world.

"I enjoy doing all those things. I am more than willing. Maybe it's from building my own orchestra that I understand the logistics that go into it. [Plus] I consider my audience beyond the people who buy tickets. I consider everyone in the community my audience. My goal would be to reach everyone regardless of whether they ever come to the concert halls."


First published on September 24, 2004 at 12:00 am
Post-Gazette classical music critic Andrew Druckenbrod can be reached at adruckenbrod@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1750.