Leading conductor Marin Alsop returns to Bravo! Vail with The Philadelphia Orchestra
Special to the Daily
Nancy Horowitz/Courtesy photo
Born to professional musicians in New York City and mentored by Leonard Bernstein in the late 1980s, Marin Alsop is a lifelong shatterer of the proverbial glass ceiling: She was the first conductor to receive a MacArthur Fellowship (2005), the first woman conductor to lead a major American orchestra — the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (2007-2021) — and, just last February, she became the first U.S.-born woman to conduct the world-famous Berlin Philharmonic. She was also the first woman to serve as the head of major orchestras in South America, Austria, and Great Britain, among other milestones.
When Alsop founded the Concordia Orchestra in New York City in 1984, which she led as music director for 18 years after nearly a decade of freelancing as a violinist — and after graduating from Juilliard in violin (she was rejected from the conducting program) — she declared to the world that, yes, women can be conductors, even if the field has historically been, and still is, dominated by men. Her conducting debut with The Philadelphia Orchestra came in 1990.
“My own path to the podium was not an easy one,” Alsop said in her speech at the 2025 League of American Orchestras national conference, where she received the prestigious Gold Baton award. “When I began, the idea of a woman leading a major orchestra was unthinkable; there were no role models, no pathways, and few open doors.”
To remedy that, Alsop founded the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship in 2002 to mentor and support women conductors. The program has produced 31 women named music directors or principal conductors, and 22 given related titles, such as principal guest, associate, or assistant conductor. “These conductors are transforming communities and changing the face of our profession,” Alsop said. “They prove that talent knows no gender, and they remind us that when we widen the circle, everyone benefits.”
Monday’s program features Wu Man, a virtuoso of the pipa, a Chinese lute-like instrument. She joins Alsop and the orchestra for Zhao Jiping’s Pipa Concerto No. 2, which was composed for Wu Man in 2013 and synthesizes Chinese traditional modalities and Western classical music.
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Alsop’s visit concludes with Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, a classic that was composed against the historical backdrop of political fear and instability — a time when Lenin’s Communist Party had a firm grip on music and the arts, demanding from Soviet composers music of a “socialist realist” nature that the general public could relate to, and decrying progressive or even unorthodox tendencies, such as the young Shostakovich’s. After his fourth symphony was withdrawn from rehearsals, the fifth triumphed — a colossal work that follows classical forms while unleashing torrents of energy and immediately graspable themes, some heroic, some painful, some sardonic. It is his most performed symphony.
The conductor knows the piece intimately; her first encounter with Shostakovich was listening to Bernstein’s famous recording from his tour of the Soviet Union with the New York Philharmonic in 1959. “Before playing it, he gave a talk to the audience about how Shostakovich could bring out the similarities in our cultures much more than the dissimilarities,” Alsop said in an interview about the 50th anniversary of Shostakovich’s death, in 2025. “We are more united than most people think, so we could use some of that insight today.”
Why listen to the symphony, or any of these works, at Bravo! Vail? “Live music is about gathering, experiencing something beautiful and unrepeatable,” she said in her League of American Orchestras speech. “In a fragmented, digital world, this is more vital than ever. We’re not just presenting concerts, we’re building community, sparking empathy, and reminding people of their shared humanity.”
To order tickets and find out more, visit BravoVail.org.
