The announcement that Marin Alsop has been made music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra may not seem immediately momentous. Alsop is a big name internationally, responsible for a successful stint at the head of the Bournemouth Symphony, is well into a blistering series of Brahms recordings for Naxos and was voted by Gramophone, the UK's best-known classical music magazine, 2003 artist of the year. A top job with a top orchestra seems the obvious next step.
But there's one arrestingly unusual thing about this story. Alsop is female – and in the arena of top-flight, world-class classical conductors that makes her an extraordinarily rare creature. She will be the first woman to head a major American symphony orchestra, arguably the first woman ever to achieve so high-profile a position. The biggest shock, many think, is that this should be a shock at all.
Yet controversy has been frothing ever since the decision was made public. Players in Baltimore have gone on the record to express their frustration at being overruled by their directors, muttering darkly of their "artistic views" being steamrolled and urging that the selection process should have continued far longer.
James Jolly, Gramophone's editor and a long-time champion of Alsop's talents, sharply dismisses these criticisms as "profoundly unprofessional" – the result, he thinks, of murky internal disputes that have seeped their way into the public domain. "It's very unfortunate," he says, "that she's been caught up in what is essentially a game of political manoeuvring."
Whether these tussles have anything to do with Alsop's gender is a moot point (some have made the obvious assumption that they do), but it's hardly possible to deny that, as yet, few women have made it to the top of the orchestral tree. A comprehensive list of female conductors drawn up by the Kapralova Society (named after the Czech composer Vitezslava Kapralova and "dedicated to promoting women in music") is striking not simply for its energetic pursuit of names both known and obscure, but because it needs to exist at all.
So what's the reason? Endemic sexism? Limited opportunities? Frustrated ambition? A combination of all three? Jolly takes an optimistic view: it's only a matter of time, he reckons, before the balance stabilises. "Statistically it's crazy that there aren't more women conductors."
And Alsop, he continues, might just be the person to make a difference. "She's the kind of person that audiences respond to very well," he says, "a great communicator. She can sweep everybody into the music."
For her part, Alsop has expressed impatience with fielding questions about the fact that she's, well, not male. Speaking in an interview with this paper, she admitted: "When people ask me, 'What's it like to be a woman conductor?' I have no perspective. I've always been a woman conductor. I have never been, say, a lizard conductor."
