Sarah Urwin Jones Journalist, Writer, Broadcaster

Marin Alsop is poised to take the baton as first woman conductor of a major American orchestra.

Life must be one long series of déjà vus for Marin Alsop. The American conductor can’t seem to get a new job without being the “first woman” in the post. Her latest, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, will make her the first female director of a major American orchestra when she takes up the post in September. It’s a historic appointment, but considering the size of that country and the fact that women started conducting more than a century ago, it’s a rather sobering one too.

Alsop, who will conduct the London Philharmonic in a typical Alsopian mix of contemporary American (Barber) and traditional European (Beethoven) in London this weekend, has been breaking the “glass baton” of the conducting profession ever since she started out 25 years ago in New York, the pro-tégée of Leonard Bernstein.

At 16, she went to Yale, then Juilliard, circumventing hotly contested conducting opportunities by forming her own orchestra, the Concordia. Several scholarships later, and after a decade hopping between American and British orchestras, she was making more history as the “first woman conductor” to head a major UK orchestra — another BSO, the Bournemouth Symphony.

“It’s great, I only need one T-shirt, right?” says Alsop, when we meet in the Henry Wood Hall, where she is rehearsing with the LPO. In a royal blue shirt with her trademark cropped blonde hair, Alsop is an authoritative figure on the podium, though it turns out that this is a hard-won quality. “A woman has to really think about how she gets sound out of the orchestra on the podium,” she insists. “If you want a really big dynamic range, you have to make a different gesture from a man, because otherwise people think that you’re trying to be this huge person and they get scared of that. You’re a woman possessed. Or a bitch. Whereas in a man it’s seen as strong.”

Watching her connect with the orchestra on a dreary January morning, one can’t help but be struck by the fact that when she leaves Bournemouth in 2008 she will be a real loss to the British orchestral scene.

Alsop will also conduct the LPO in a multimedia Rite of Spring during the reopening celebrations of the Royal Festival Hall in June. “They’ve got a very good lightness of being and a great sense of humour, but they’re very committed at the same time,” she says of them.

Britain has been good to her, says Alsop, who as a child dreamt of conducting her “home team”, the New York Philharmonic. “But you have to go with instinct — the kind of chemistry I felt when things started happening for me in the UK in the late 1990s.”

That said, she couldn’t have had a worse start to her move back Stateside. After her appointment, the Baltimore musicians, disenfranchised from the search for a director, baldly announced that they wanted the selection process to continue, claiming that Alsop “didn’t know how to rehearse” and was having a “bad year”.

“It was just totally false,” she says. “I felt a little bit like what I imagine someone who’s just been hit by a car feels — a car which turns out to be filled with your friends. I really thought about pulling out, I mean who needs this in your life? But that was complicated because there was this other pressure of being the historic first woman. How would it have looked if I’d just run away with my tail between my legs? It wouldn’t have been right and it’s certainly not my personality.”

Alsop had other options — she was in the running for several major American appointments at the time, and some felt that she was overdue a shot at one of the London orchestras. “But it would have been doing the same thing to them as they were doing to me.” The situation was resolved when Alsop went to speak to the musicians privately, but she has been left with a “negative little epithet”. “Every time I get newly appointed somewhere now it’ll be, ‘Ah! Ms Controversy!’ But ten years of success should get rid of that. And when you go into an orchestra in this situation, when they say you suck, it can only go up from there, really. The worst that could have happened has already happened.”

If she can repeat her success at Bournemouth, Alsop should silence criticism, and controversy has been good for box office. “I don’t feel the need to be liked. I had to get over it — it’s a very hard lesson for many women, especially in my profession. I’d rather be respected.” She certainly won respect in Bournemouth. She reinvigorated the orchestra after a financial and artistic low. “It was great timing. The orchestra was already very good, but they were ready to bump up a level.”

She’s good at focusing on the bigger picture. “You have to think about why orchestral music and the orchestra as an institution is important. Is it going to survive? Why are audiences not younger? And then you try to impact on that, not just repeating what other people are doing but trying to carve out new paths.”

In Bournemouth that translated into passionate concert talks, extra airtime on Radio 3, some well-received recordings and increased audiences. “I feel like I’ve pushed them as far as they want to go — with me anyway.”

Whether Bournemouth will appoint another woman conductor isn’t clear. But there are more issues at stake. Alsop may be “first woman”, but in many ways she might just as well be “only woman”. After all, how many women conductors can you name? “When I embarked on this profession in my twenties, I thought in ten years this would be a nonissue,” she admits. “But there’s still about the same number of women as when I started.”

Alsop fights her corner with a fellowship for young women conductors, allowing them to conduct sections of her regular concerts, as well as giving one-on-one coaching. “Visibility is key if we’re going to get more women invited into orchestras. In conducting, if you are out of sight you are out of mind.

“The fact that there haven’t been women in the highest levels of American political office makes a huge difference,” she adds. “Once we elect a woman president in 2008, that’ll be good.”

But on the podium itself there’s still some way to go. “Let’s face it,” smiles Alsop, “We’re a long way off from women being able to have the kind of eccentricities some male conductors have. I mean, can you imagine if I turned up late, not having had a bath in a week?” Perhaps it might just smash that glass baton once and for all. Hell, one day it might even get her a London orchestra.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article1354073.ece