Marin Alsop

Alsop trained as a violinist, studied violin at Juilliard and conducting with Gustav Meier and Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood in 1989, and in 2005 became the first conductor of any kind to be given a MacArthur Fellowship. Two years later she took over the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the first woman appointed music director of a major American orchestra, and stayed fourteen years, leaving in 2021 as music director laureate. Chief conductorships of the São Paulo State Symphony and of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony followed, the latter concluding in 2025 with the title of honorary conductor; since 2023 she has been artistic director and chief conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, and she became principal guest conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra from the 2024–25 season. She conducted the Last Night of the Proms in 2013, the first woman to do so, and the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, which she founded in 2002, has since supported a long line of women conductors. She took her bachelor's and master's degrees in violin at Juilliard, having begun at Yale, played with the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet orchestra, and won the Koussevitzky prize for student conductors at Tanglewood in 1989. She led the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in California as music director for twenty-five years, has been chief conductor and curator at Ravinia, where she first appeared in 2002, and directs the graduate conducting programme at the Peabody Conservatory, with honorary doctorates from Yale and Juilliard. Her recorded cycles include Brahms with the London Philharmonic, Dvořák in Baltimore and Prokofiev in São Paulo for Naxos.