Marin Alsop

Marin Alsop (2017)

Marin Alsop (/ˈmærɪn ˈɔːlsəp/; born October 16, 1956) is an American-born Austrian conductor, the first woman to win the Koussevitzky Prize for conducting and the first conductor to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She is music director laureate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Ravinia Festival. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2020. On June 5, 2023, she was named as the artistic director and conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Quotes

• So many superficial aspects of Tár seemed to align with my own personal life. But once I saw it I was no longer concerned, I was offended: I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian.
• To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser — for me that was heartbreaking. I think all women and all feminists should be bothered by that kind of depiction because it's not really about women conductors, is it?
• There are so many men — actual, documented men — this film could have been based on but, instead, it puts a woman in the role but gives her all the attributes of those men. That feels antiwoman. To assume that women will either behave identically to men or become hysterical, crazy, insane is to perpetuate something we’ve already seen on film so many times before.
  • "‘I’m offended by Tár as a woman, as a conductor, as a lesbian’", The Sunday Times (London, January 8, 2023)
  • The Sunday Times article reports only one woman (Nathalie Stutzmann in Atlanta) is a music director of an orchestra in the United States.

• [On the slow growth of the number of female conductors] With women, historically, it's been, you know, "You should be happy for what you have. Don’t push people — they’ve done a lot already!" There’s always this sort of patronising approach.
• We could have been programming work by under-represented people for the last 50 years, but the choice was not to. We could have had women on the podium, but the choice was not to.
• [On a perceived orchestra's retreat to conservative stances after the pandemic] I thought classical music institutions would come back with a new approach, new ways of connecting with audiences. Have we seen that? In some ways I see these organisations trying to go back to the way they used to do it.
  I'm not saying that what we do — the actual music-making — needs to drastically change, but everything around it does. And it can’t just be, ‘Oh we’re going to include a piece by a woman composer, or a person of colour’. It becomes perfunctory rather than celebratory.
• But, fundamentally, I think goodness is very underrated.
  • Quotes from an interview, as cited in "Bernstein would be cancelled, says Proms conductor Marin Alsop", The Times (London, September 8, 2023)
  • Alsop was due to conduct the Last Night of the Proms in London on 9 September. She was the first woman to do so in 2013.