Female conductors are stepping up to the nation’s podiums in greater numbers than ever before.
By Sally Howard
The arts world is renowned for its tendency to hype “the next big thing:” an iconoclastic new sub-genre of electronic music, perhaps, or a rags-to-riches rising star of stage. Yet, even in this ravenous media climate, last fall was a particularly news-rich season for U.S. classical music.
In September 2007 Marin Alsop, the new music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (baltimoresymphony.org)— and the nation’s first female conductor of a major orchestra—garnered breathless coverage of her inaugural concerts as BSO conductor in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. “Join the maestra as she makes history,” touted the BSO’s marketing board; “A landmark appointment,” agreed the New York Times. A few months later, the Lyric Opera of Chicago (lyricopera.org) saw excitement over the appointment of its first female guest conductor: raven-haired Parisian Emmanuelle Haïm, who debuted at the Lyric with her forceful, shapely and exuberant performance.
Cue arts columnists, chewing their Mont Blancs and jotting down a trend: Women, after centuries of waiting in the wings, are storming the recalcitrant male bastion of the conducting podium—and impressing audiences around the world.
Of course, today’s clutch of rising female conductors—Haïm and Alsop, and other baton-wielding women such as Cuban-American Tania León and Uruguayan Giselle Ben-Dor—weren’t, in point-of-fact, the true pioneers. In the late ’30s, French composer-conductor Nadia Boulanger became the first woman to lead the top symphony orchestras in New York and Boston; and conductor/opera director Sarah Caldwell founded an opera company in Boston as early as the ’50s, going on to become the first female conductor to lead New York’s Metropolitan
Opera in 1976.
In spite of these early breakthroughs, women conductors have been but bit players to classical music’s leading men in recent decades—well represented in the corridors of colleges, but stopping short of attaining the power, prestige (and astronomical pay scale) of the conducting superstars at the
Big Five orchestra cities (New York, Boston,
Philadelphia, Cleveland and Chicago). What’s new—and indeed newsworthy—is the gallop at which women are now gaining ground on this gender imbalance, both in world-league conducting and the twin male-dominated domain of composition. According to Nicholas
Liebman, a composition student at Butler
University in Indianapolis, roughly half of the undergraduates in his class are women. “I think it’s great,” he says.
This trend is no doubt thanks—at least in part—to current female composers such as Kaija Saariaho, Judith Weir, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, Joan Tower and Chen Yi.
Naturally, in their efforts to snap the glass baton, today’s female conductors are also inspiring a new generation. College music departments, too, report soaring numbers of women applying for M.A.s in conducting. Marin Alsop is particularly hands-on in what she sees as her responsibility to foster this young female talent. In 2002, she founded the Taki Concordia Conducting Fellowship (takiconcordia.org), a mentoring organization that works to create opportunities for female conductors. Tania León is also credited with leading new audiences to classic music; she regularly schedules concerts in settings as offbeat as hospitals, prisons and impromptu open-air events in Brooklyn, N.Y.
In the lightening hands of these maestras, the days of female conductors being a newsworthy novelty are numbered. Catch musical history in the making with our who’s who of the women coming soon to a podium near you.
Marin Alsop
In a sentence: As an unstoppable U.S. maestra, she is the first woman to head a major American orchestra.
Résumé: Homegrown star Marin Alsop’s route to the top also straddled the continents. Born in Manhattan to jazz musician parents, Alsop attended Yale University at 16, followed by The Julliard School, where she achieved bachelor’s and master’s degrees in violin. In 1981, she founded the New York-based String Fever, a 10-piece chamber ensemble devoted to the literature of Big Band Swing. In 1984, she followed this successful precedent in founding a larger group, Concordia Orchestra. In 1989, she won the Koussevitzky Conducting prize at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she was a protégée of her childhood hero Leonard Bernstein. After a decade pinballing between American and British orchestras, Alsop became The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s (a major U.K. ensemble) principal conductor. In 2005, she returned home to take up the musical directorship post at Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, quipping: “Another BSO, another first as a woman. It’s great: I only have to buy one T-shirt!”
Alsop on Alsop: “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 seem a woman possessed.”
Emmanuelle Haïm
In a sentence: This French legend is breathing light and life into Handel and other composers.
Résumé: Haïm’s ascension to the classical music superleague was as smooth as her Marlboro-laced Gallic drawl. A Parisian by birth, in 1990 she was plucked from the city’s esteemed Conservatoire to play harpsichord continuo for American William Christie’s Paris-based baroque group Les Arts Florissants. Ten years later, she decided “it was time to become an adult” and became a conductor, establishing her own period instrument band, Le Concert d’Astrée, which fast became the hottest property in the music world when it was introduced. In 2001, Haïm assumed her place on the world stage with similar aplomb, when the U.K.’s high-profile Glyndebourne touring opera took a chance on the then-unknown young Frenchwoman, giving her the opportunity to conduct Handel’s Rodelinda. Haïm’s success at Glyndebourne brought fame and a shower of invitations to conduct Handel operas across the globe, including, on this continent, Agrippina at the Chicago Opera Theatre and, recently, Julius Caesar at the Lyric.
Haïm on Haïm: “I am stubborn; I know what I want, but I am not interested in conducting for the power. To conduct is to make the players love the music as much as you do. Sometimes you guide; sometimes you just give. Perfection is when it’s like chamber music, in which everyone listens to everyone else—it transports me.”
Giselle BenDor
In a sentence: Polish-Uruguayan Giselle Ben-Dor (pictured on pg. 51) possesses formidable podium presence and is a champion of Latin American music.
Résumé: Born in Uruguay to Polish parents, Ben-Dor’s rare musical ability became evident at a tender age. She won an America-Israel Cultural Foundation scholarship to study at Tel Aviv’s Rubin Academy of Music and went on to the Yale School of Music, before winning conducting fellowships at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute and the Israel Philharmonic. Her American conducting debut was with the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra in a 1986 Summerfest concert. From 1988 to 1991, Ben-Dor was resident conductor of the Houston Symphony and conducted at the 1989 inauguration of President George H. W. Bush. After stints at Annapolis Symphony Orchestra and the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, she became music director of the Santa Barbara Symphony orchestra in 1994 and Conductor Laureate in 2006. In 2004, she created the Tango and Malambo Festival, celebrating tango and its rustic cousin.
Ben-Dor on Ben-Dor: “Conducting is a uniquely powerful thing. Think about it: You have a group of people who are all raging ahead under the will of one person’s vision. It’s all about authority, and it’s no surprise that there have always been more male conductors, as they’re more comfortable leading. But times change and conducting is now about the relationship with the orchestra as much as authority. It’s an opportunity for female conductors to shine.”
Tania León
In a sentence: This Cuban-born composer/ conductor is known for her spirited turns with the baton, and works as the musical director and a leading light in the Brooklyn Philharmonic.
Résumé: León’s music potential was spotted by her grandmother, who saw her bouncing along to classical music on the radio as a toddler and swiftly spirited her off to a musical conservatory in Havana, where she excelled as a pianist. She went on to study at New York University before becoming a founding member and the first music director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, set up to seek a “classically American” voice in dance and music. León established the music school and orchestra (dancetheatreofharlem.org). In 1978, she instituted the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert Series, and in 1994 co-founded the American Composers Orchestra Sonidos de las Americas Festivals. As reputed for her composition as her conducting, León’s orchestral work Desde… was premiered by the American Composers Orchestra in Carnegie Hall in 2001, and in 2005 she joined forces with Nobel Prize-winner Wole Soyinka, collaborating on the award-winning opera Scourge of Hyacinths. These days, León guest-conducts across the globe for the likes of The New York Philharmonic. In March, she will visit Madrid, and in April, China, as a cultural ambassador for the U.S. On March 28, a new piece of León’s work premiers at New York’s Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.
León on León: “People place me in many different categories and give me many labels: as a female musician, as a Latin musician, as a ‘woman of color.’ But I don’t mind breaking down barriers. If I can take music into a gym, onto the streets of Harlem or into a prison, and I can open one mind to the power of music, I am proud to accept that responsibility.”
Catch Them In Action
MARIN ALSOP
She will play with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and with Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra on XM radio (www.xmradio.com).
EMMANUELLE HAÏM
Check out her awesome talent in the November 2007 Virgin Classics release, Bach: Magnificat/Handel: Dixit Dominus. An EMI release, tentatively entitled Lamenti, is expected in Fall 2008.
GISELLE BEN-DOR
She will appear at the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston (www.proarte.org) and Santa Barbara Symphony Orchestra (www.thesymphony.org).
TANIA LEÓN
She will be guest conducting Chicago Sinfonietta during March (www.tanialeon.com).
