Self has diaried before about female conductors, still a rare phenomenon, sad to say, in classical-music land. One high-profile exception just occurred today in London, where as the concert summary obliquely notes:
"The Last Night....includes....the sound of a glass ceiling being broken as Marin Alsop takes charge of her first Last Night."
Yup, for the first time in the 118-year history of the Proms in London, a female conductor took charge of the final concert of the season, casually referred to by all classical music-savvy Brits as The Last Night. More below the flip....
It has to be said that Marin Alsop has a fair list of "firsts" to her credit, as a female conductor, besides being the first female conductor to take on The Last Night, such as:
* First female music director of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra
* First female principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra
* First female music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
* First female principal conductor of the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra
You can imagine that Alsop has done so many interviews and confronted all the questions about being a female conductor in what's still pretty much a man's world that she almost has all the answers down pat. In the run-up to The Last Night, you can read some of the newest examples from the UK as follows:
(a) Fiona Maddocks, The Guardian
(b) Alexandra Coughlan, The Arts Desk blog
(c) Maev Kennedy, The Guardian (more or less a paraphrase of the Maddocks article)
In fact, Coughlan brings up the issue point-blank with Alsop when she asked:
"Do your resent that it’s always you having to break new ground?"
Alsop wisely started her answer:
"There just haven’t been that many women in the position where they can do these kinds of things."
Speaking of articles, Alsop had a column all to herself in
The Evening Standard, on-line version
here, where she points out:
"While we all congratulate ourselves on a woman conducting the Last Night of the Proms, let’s not forget that for many women across the world their situation is getting worse, not better. We must never fall into the trap of getting complacent about things getting better for all women because they simply are not. When a girl can be shot in Pakistan for going to school, when women are arrested after being raped in Saudi Arabia and when the number of rapes in African war zones reaches numbers that are impossible to calculate, we need to keep busy fighting injustice wherever it occurs. And we need to speak openly about inequality, whether in relation to these egregious events or in terms of unequal pay for equal work."
So, what about the concert itself, i.e. how did she do? Well, IMHO, she did fine, just from listening over teh internets. I wouldn't necessarily call it a "great" concert, but one has to realize that The Last Night is only partly about music, as the event takes on the atmosphere of a party, to put it mildly, with dollops of British silliness and hi-jinks in score. You can go to YT and look up videos of past Last Nights to see what I mean. The first half tends to be the more "serious" part, as you can gather from a look at the program(me), comparing before intermission:
Anna Clyne: Masquerade
Richard Wagner: Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg - Prelude to Act I
Leonard Bernstein: Chichester Psalms (with Iestyn Davies, countertenor)
Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending (with Nigel Kennedy, violin)
Benjamin Britten: The Building of the House
Jules Massenet: Chérubin - 'Je suis gris! je suis ivre!' (with Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano)
Handel: Xerxes - 'Frondi tenere e belle ... Ombra mai fù' (with JD)
Rossini: La donna del lago - 'Tanti affetti in tal momento!' (with JD)
....with after intermission:
Leonard Bernstein: Candide, (a) Overture, (b) "Make our Garden Grow"
Verdi: Nabucco - 'Va, pensiero' (Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves)
Harold Arlen: 'Over the Rainbow' (with JD)
Vittorio Monti: Csárdás (with NK)
Traditional: 'Londonderry Air' ('Danny Boy')
Richard Rodgers: Carousel - 'You'll never walk alone'
Granville Bantock: Sea Reivers
George Lloyd: HMS Trinidad March
Thomas Arne: 'Rule, Britannia!' (with JD)
Edward Elgar: Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 in D ('Land of Hope and Glory')
Hubert Parry (orch. Elgar): Jerusalem
Traditional: The National Anthem (arranged by Benjamin Britten)
One of the other traditions of The Last Night is that the conductor makes a speech to the audience. One question was whether she'd touch on the latest controversy about female conductors that recently blew up c/o this male conductor. She did, and pretty much blew off the issue (and the instigator of the recent blow-up) with a few lines, saying that my parents "supported my dream when I was 9 years old", i.e. to become a conductor. She added that "even last week when people said girls can't do that, my parents supported me", which got a nice rise from the audience. She also said "Here's to the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 100th to come", regarding female conductors at The Last Night.
As luck would have it, the Proms featured two female conductors during this final week, the other being the Chinese-born conductor Xian Zhang, profiled in the Telegraph here (curious the choice of a conservative Brit paper to feature her, but never mind). You can listen through next Thursday to the Xian Zhang Proms concert here. The Last Night is available for just about another week at the link given pre-flip.
If anyone is a loser in this diary (besides self, of course), it's the conductor who made the sexist remarks, so a peripheral one level removed loser, in a way. So with that, time for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your own loser stories of the week.....