Pioneering female conductor Marin Alsop brings a musical statement to Cleveland Orchestra debut (December, 2011)
By Michael Norman, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

Late isn't even the word. No, a better term for Marin Alsop's upcoming debut with the Cleveland Orchestra is "delinquent," as in seriously overdue.

But don't blame the Cleveland Orchestra too much for being so slow to feature a female conductor. It's just one member of a global musical culture in which men still occupy most of the top spots.

"Our industry is very conservative," said Alsop by phone from her office at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where she's served as music director since 2007 and holds a contract through 2015. "It's slow to change. But I think it's really important not to get stuck in what we do."

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"It's a topic that I wish didn't have to be addressed, but it does," said Alsop, the first female head of a major American orchestra. "Twenty or thirty years ago, I thought it would be different by this point.

"But I try to stay positive. I think we're in the sort of mindset of at least being able to look outside the box."

Yet Alsop isn't coming to Cleveland to rectify gender inequality. Not principally, in any event. If her appearance upsets the social status quo a little, that would be great, but her primary mission is to make a musical statement, same as any other guest.

And she's no novelty on the artistic front. With her current position in Baltimore, her upcoming tenure as music director of Brazil's Sao Paulo State Symphony Orchestra and her distinguished work with the Colorado Symphony and England's Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Alsop qualifies as a major figure, the peer of just about any great maestro to appear on the roster in Cleveland this or any other season in recent history.

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But the second half of Alsop's performance is dedicated to American music, of which she's long been a staunch defender and genuine admirer. Ever since her school days, in fact, and more recently as a teacher herself, she's felt impelled to draw attention to the art of her homeland.

"I had to try to find a repertoire niche that was personal and would distinguish me," Alsop said, recalling her early career and studies at the Juilliard School of Music.

"Maybe it's because I feel sort of quintessentially American, but it seemed to me to be a natural marriage of many needs. For a young conductor, American music can be a real calling card."

It can also make for an attractive musical evening, as her program here illustrates. Along with the Saint-Saens, Alsop will conduct Bernstein's "Serenade," with first associate concertmaster Peter Otto as soloist, and Barber's Symphony No. 1, a work premiered in the United States by the Cleveland Orchestra under associate conductor Rudolf Ringwall in 1937.

Little could anyone in the audience at the time have suspected that nearly 75 years later, an artist named Marin Alsop would be standing in the same place, conducting the same music with the same ensemble.

In that respect, times have changed dramatically. In others, though, it might as well still be 1937. Which is why Alsop said she hopes for competition, for more female conductors to rise to her level and more conductors of both genders to take up the banner of American music as she has.

"I don't aspire to be the only one," Alsop said. "I hope there's a race on."

The BSO Tackles Jeanne D’Arc au Bûcher (November, 2011)
By Lee Gardner, Baltimore City Paper

Reached by phone in Sweden, Alsop says her initial exposure to Honegger’s piece came piecemeal: “I don’t know if it was a bootleg recording or what, but I only heard snippets of it, and I was very intrigued.” She got hold of a score and “fell in love with the piece, but of course it’s rarely, rarely done.”

Doing some reading on Joan of Arc, Alsop learned that the historic Joan was believed to have been born in 1412. As she planned the BSO’s 2011-2012 season, it struck her that serendipity on the level of Joan’s 600th birthday “wouldn’t come along too frequently,” she jokes dryly. “The season just grew out of it like wildfire.”

All hail Joan of Arc, in music -- but in London? (November, 2011)
By Michael Roddy, Reuters

(Reuters) - This weekend concert and filmgoers in London can celebrate the upcoming 600th birthday of Joan of Arc, girl soldier and Maid of Orleans who donned male clothing, put on armour, rallied the demoralised French army and defeated the...English.

"It's important that we pay homage to history, so we don't repeat it again," American conductor Marin Alsop said, with a chuckle at the incongruity of praising St. Joan, who had visions from God and heard voices saying she should fight the English occupiers, on the home ground of her sworn enemies.

Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the only woman to head a major American orchestra, will lead the London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican in Swiss composer Arthur Honegger's rarely performed oratorio "Joan of Arc at the Stake."

The orchestra also will perform live a modern soundtrack for the 1928 Carl Dreyer silent film "The Passion of Joan of Arc" while Alsop and others will participate in discussions about the woman who elevated the child king Charles VII to the French throne and was burnt at the stake as a heretic for her efforts.

"She's been embraced as an icon and a symbol by the far right and the far left and the feminists and the non-feminists," Alsop told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"She's a really fascinating historical figure because she's able to be adopted and molded to whatever interest a particular cause has. It also opens up a great discourse, and one that I often have to participate in, regarding women in unusual leadership roles."

Here's what else Alsop had to say about the lessons to be learned from the life of the virginal woman warrior, whom many scholars say was born in January 1412, why she has inspired painters, composers, writers and playwrights over the centuries, and what audiences will be missing if they don't hear the oratorio by Honegger, who also wrote music for film, flute and one of whose best known pieces is a "symphonic movement" for a steam engine.

Read more...

Baltimore Symphony's OrchKids program expands to third school (October, 2011)
By Tim Smith, The Baltimore Sun

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's nationally recognized educational outreach project, OrchKids, is expanding to a third location, Mary Winterling Elementary School.

The pre-K through 5th-grade public school is in the Lexington neighborhood, close to the largest OrchKids operation at Lockerman Bundy Elementary School.

"We're trying to create a linked neighborhood and create an OrchKids campus in West Baltimore," said Dan Trahey, OrchKids director of artistic program development.

"Mary Winterling and Lockerman Bundy are very near to each other. There are some things that Mary Winterling has that are going to be great for the program, like a 500-seat theater and a place where it would be easier to hold outdoor concerts.

"My dream is ...
to create a musical yellow brick road, maybe painted with musical notes, that connects the two schools," Trahey added. "For people in the neighborhood to see kids with their instruments walking between the schools would be so great."

With Winterling joining Lockerman Bundy and New Song Academy (about a half mile from the other two), there will be more than 350 children taking part in OrchKids programs during the 2011-2012 school year. OrchKids is scheduled to expand to an East Baltimore school in the Highlandtown neighborhood in January.

OrchKids, launched three years ago with seed money by BSO music director Marin Alsop, provides music education programs during and after the regular school day at no charge to the participants. Instruction on a variety of instruments is included, along with group lessons and tutoring. Meals are served during the after-school sessions.

Based on a much-heralded national education program in Venezuela called El sistema, OrchKids aims to provide enhanced opportunities, musical and otherwise, for disadvantaged children.

In a statement released Monday, Winterling Elementary School principal Nikia Carter said: "I anticipate the positive impact that OrchKids will have on the students and families ... Music is an invaluable tool for teaching skills that extend beyond the classroom, such as discipline, confidence and cooperation with peers. I eagerly look forward to watching my students grow both as musicians and as thriving individuals." "

Trahey said that 100 pre-K and kindergarten students at the Winterling school will be taking part in OrchKids this first year. "We like to start with younger kids and build up," he said. "Starting next year, the kids will be moving back and forth between Mary Winterling and Lockerman Bundy for classes."

The Frederick-based company Music & Arts, which sells, rents an repairs musical instruments, has committed $90,000 in instruments and other supplies for OrchKids over the next three years. Music & Arts is also providing an instrument repair credit of $5,000.

Hearts on Sleeves: Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at the Music Center at Strathmore, September 24, 2011 (September, 2011)
By Andrew Malone, DMV Classical

Most post-concert Q&As are kind of terrible, with people asking irrelevant questions or attempting to show off their massive erudition for all present, but I always stay for Alsop’s. Why is she so consistently entertaining?

* She’s funny. First and foremost. She never passes up an opportunity for a chuckle, and it makes the audience feel at ease.
* She knows how to take a bad question and turn it into something worth answering: by repeating the question and talking until she lands on a better topic.
* She knows how to draw whatever guests she has onstage (James Lee, in this case) into the discussion without being obvious or ostentatious about it.
* She seems to actually enjoy it.

Four simple ingredients, but they go a long way.

By Zachary Lewis, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

That gust of fresh air you just felt didn't come off Lake Erie. No, it's the figurative effect of Marin Alsop leading the Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall.

A departure from the norm on two significant accounts, Alsop's performance Thursday marked both a rare appearance by a female conductor and an all-too-infrequent exploration of American music. What's more, it was excellent, as Alsop in her Cleveland debut made obvious why she's held in such high regard.

Of all the traits that distinguished Alsop's performance, the strongest was her commitment. Conducting Barber and Bernstein, Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, radiated degrees of enthusiasm and seriousness few display for American music. Where many make only token gestures, she made it her centerpiece.

Start with Barber's Symphony No. 1, premiered in the U.S. by the Cleveland Orchestra in 1937 and last heard here in 2000. Alsop made of the youthful work a brute, dramatic thing, hooking listeners not just on its tight-knit structure but also on its bold, almost violent feeling.

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Alsop and the orchestra, too, played a slate of memorable characters, lending explosive energy to one figure's point about sexual compatibility and plunging headlong with Otto into the festive final moments. No less engaging was Otto's lofty Socratic dialogue with first assistant principal cellist Richard Weiss.

But American music doesn't mark the limit of Alsop's talent. On Thursday, she also revealed her powers over core European repertoire, leading an authoritative performance of Saint-Saens' "Organ" Symphony No. 3 with principal keyboardist Joela Jones in the featured role.

By Steve Cohen, Broad Street Review

Marin Alsop apparently didn’t get the memo.

Female musicians these days are supposed to wear glamorous dresses to look beguiling on their CD covers and concert posters. Alsop, in contrast, wears simple black pant suits and cuts her hair short. As a result, we concentrate more on the music she programs.

She conducts the classics much the way she dresses: unfussy, simple and elegant.

I’ve never heard Alsop conduct a mediocre concert, and the last few that I’ve seen have been considerably better than that. The last two featured works associated with her mentor, Leonard Bernstein, but she led performances that were radically different from the way Bernstein interpreted those same pieces. In the Verdi Requiem with the Baltimore Symphony last spring and the Dvo?ák New World Symphony with the Philadelphia Orchestra last weekend, she led readings that were less portentous, less bombastic, less throbbing yet thoroughly convincing.

Her style was also equally far removed from what I grew up with in Philadelphia during the Ormandy era. Alsop cares a great deal about eliciting a beautiful sound from the orchestra, and what she gets is sonorous but less lush and plush than what her predecessors produced.

Her tempo for the New World was faster too, with no sentimental lingering, albeit with a few luftpausen (momentary suspensions). Dvo?ák was inspired by America, but he remained a composer from central Europe who maintained its traditions.

By David Patrick Stearns, The Philadelphia Inquirer"

Classical warhorse repertoire needs to be programmed with the utmost care so as not to wind up in the glue factory - Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 ("New World") being a case in point... Will we ever hear it with fresh ears?

The Philadelphia Orchestra's guest conductor, Marin Alsop, gave the piece an optimum platform Thursday at the Kimmel Center by placing it alongside its grandchildren. Dvorak's initial influence over American composers is somewhat invisible because his imitators had little staying power. But the subsequent generation - represented by Copland's Clarinet Concerto and Barber's Toccata Festiva - refracted Dvorak into truly American voices.
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Even the smartest programming lacks impact without worthy performances, and worth wasn't lacking. With his liquid legato and seamless phrasing, principal clarinetist Ricardo Morales was born to play the Copland concerto, which unfolded so naturally that even the jazz hints near the end never felt out of place, despite some smudgy playing in the orchestra. Barber triumphed: Because organist Ken Cowan was happy not to dominate the ensemble in the Toccata, listeners better appreciated the endlessly inventive frame Barber put around it.

And Dvorak? With Christoph Eschenbach, the piece was about experiencing loss and finding home. Alsop's more muscular view was about new discovery. Each movement built masterfully, with transitions managed so organically and with such elegance that the music progressed effortlessly from one plateau to another. At maximum volume, Alsop then accelerated the tempo - a calculated but excellent effect.
These days, conductors make a splash and then spend the next 20 years trying to live up to it. Alsop, 55, was long a good conductor without great interpretive distinction until recent years, when she has emerged with highly charged performances of repertoire well outside her American specialty. I would never have predicted, for example, that she would develop into a knockout Elgar conductor. But she has - and so much else. Some conductors are born into greatness. Alsop is willing herself into it.