If you are a musician who doesn’t want to be categorised too rigidly, like some butterfly pinned to a board, then flitting between Bournemouth and Denver, Colorado, makes the point neatly that a life can work happily on different levels. Too much water in one place and none at all in the other, says Marin Alsop, conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. An unusual balance.
Tomorrow Gramophone magazine will name Alsop as its artist of the year — as voted by the magazine’s readers. It’s a tribute to a conductor who seems more than usually peripatetic, zipping across the Atlantic to the Rockies — where she directs the Colorado Symphony — from Poole, Dorchester and Weymouth, and stopping off in New York on the way to play jazz violin with friends in her own band. She has been something of a will-o’-the-wisp for years, a welcome guest rather than a fixture in Europe, but her recordings, particularly of the American composer Samuel Barber, have now given her a sharp profile and, to judge by the Gramophone vote, a solid following.
Bournemouth has the oldest professional orchestra in the country and a dedicated audience who give it a feeling of immersion in its community. It is an enviable institution despite the customary financial worries. Sitting not far from the dockside at Poole, Alsop notes matter of factly that these days she is recognised when she arrives in town, a courtesy not extended to more celebrated figures in many bigger cities. It is not an indication of an over-the-top style, however, since Alsop is not at all pushy off the podium. How is it, then, that she is attracting more attention than ever?
We talked — with the Labour Party conference banging away just along the coast — about her enthusiasms: her passion for contemporary composers such as John Adams and Christopher Rouse, her love of Brahms, her delight in hearing Handel loosened up a little (she does an annual Messiah in Denver that would have the Huddersfield Choral reaching for smelling salts), how her time as principal conductor at the Royal Scottish National Orchestra gave her the chance to absorb herself in James MacMillan’s music, and above all her debt to Leonard Bernstein.
When she was growing up in New York in the early Sixties, Bernstein was at the peak of his celebrity. Alsop was at the Juilliard School, the daughter of two professional orchestral players steeped in music, and it was natural that, as well as her classical training, she would develop her passion for jazz. Her breakthrough came, appropriately, at the Tanglewood Festival, where Bernstein was Godfather. There she won the conducting prize and another in the same year in New York. She was off.
Her recordings of Barber for Naxos, now in four CD collections, manage to have both sparkle and weight, and are much more affecting than, say, her recording of Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony with the Colorado Symphony, which is distinctly spongy. The American idiom is her own, and these recordings lack the fuzziness that sometimes seems to attend Barber. She understands him. Clarity is her trademark. It’s the only way, she says, to persuade and convince audiences.
“Orchestral music can’t be trite,” she says. “It has to be engaging.” Alsop’s style involves talking to audiences about the pieces she is about to conduct. A device that can be somewhat arch in other hands appears a straightforward extension of her personality: music is discovery. Her programming in Bournemouth depends on her own passions. Late 20th-century music appears not because she believes it is “good” for audiences to broaden themselves but because it is the stuff that she feels passionate about. That evangelism has become part of the style, the engagement which persuaded Bournemouth that Alsop would continue the orchestra’s upward march. She is steely and cool, but somehow she smoulders, too.
So it is inevitable that I ask her why there are not more women conductors. An old chestnut produces, for once, an interesting answer. “A woman has to make different physical gestures from a man’s to elicit the same response. When I make the same gesture as a man on the podium, I get a different reaction.” She thinks that because we are so stuck in our recognition of genders by gesture in conversation, it is hopeless for a woman conductor to ape what men do when they have a baton in their hand. They would only appear like pretend men.
“So I find myself practising gestures to make sure that they are different. That’s how I get my reaction.” For the New York generation that grew up with Bernstein, it is, of course, a style that involves every part of the body and the mind. It speaks of her absorption in baroque, romantic and 20th-century music, and the wish to enjoy the life of a guest conductor who dives week by week into Europe and the US, and is committed to spending 12 weeks every season with her players in Bournemouth.
As in Denver, she is trying to prove that the symphony orchestra can span the generations, refreshing the great works for audiences who know them well and introducing them to the young. She grew up with Bernstein’s televised children’s concerts in New York in the late Fifties and still recalls that the performances had a quality that every conductor, even in our own time, does well to remember: “They never patronised the audience.”
Alsop may lack the broad public recognition that last year’s winner, the Russian violinist Maxim Vengerov, has built up. But it will be surprising if her directness and touch don’t bring her a huge and enthusiastic following.
Bernstein-Chichester Psalms, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marin Alsop (Naxos, £6)
And the winner is. . .
The Gramophone awards are often thought of as classical music’s Oscars. The disc of the year, announced tomorrow, is chosen by the magazine’s formidable cadre of critics. But this year there has been a minor tornado, with the resignation from the panel of Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times writer.
He objected to the involvement of a wider panel of listeners, including readers, to help whittle down the number of discs before the final choice. But in trying to hold the difficult balance between expert assessment and popular reaction by involving non-professionals, the magazine is hardly turning the world upside down.
