Marin Alsop

Marin Alsop has a worldwide reputation as an inspiring and influential conductor, passionate and full of creative drive. She is known internationally for her innovative programming and for her engagement with audiences of all ages. Contemporary music is a particular interest for her, and she was the music director of the California Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music for 25 years.

She maintains strong long-term relationships with the great London orchestras, and also appears regularly with the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Filarmonica della Scala. As chief conductor and curator of the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, she directs the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s summer residencies there.

Since the 2019/20 season Marin Alsop has been chief conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra (RSO). Plans for the 2022/23 season include concerts at the Vienna Konzerthaus and Musikverein, as well as CD recordings, radio broadcasts and international tours.

In 2019 Marin Alsop became conductor of honour of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, following seven years as its music director. Since 2020 she has been music director of the National Orchestral Institute + Festival, where she heads a newly founded conductors’ academy. In 2021 she was appointed music director laureate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (which, in her former position as music director, she led on its first European tour in 13 years and with which she premiered numerous works), and founder of ‘Orchkids’: a music education programme for deprived children in Baltimore.

Marin Alsop’s extensive recording catalogue has received several awards from the magazine Gramophone. Her career and her commitment to the next generation of conductors are documented in the film The Conductor (Tribeca Film Festival 2021). In addition to numerous teaching commitments, she is artist in residence at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University. She holds honorary doctorates from Yale University and the Juilliard School. In 2002 she founded the Taki Concordia Conducting Fellowship in order to promote and support the careers of female conductors; in 2020 this was renamed the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship.

In 2019, Marin Alsop became the first and only female conductor to receive the prestigious Crystal Award from the World Economic Forum. She was the first female conductor of the BBC Last Night of the Proms.

Marin Alsop studied at the Juilliard School and Yale University. Her international career began when she won the Leopold Stokowski International Conducting Competition in 1989, and became the first woman to receive the Koussevitzky Conducting Prize in Tanglewood, where she studied in masterclasses with Leonard Bernstein.