Marin Alsop life and biography

Marin Alsop is an American conductor and violinist. She is the current music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

American conductor Marin Alsop trained in the U.S., but the success of her international career, particularly in Europe, where she led a number of orchestras in Britain and on the Continent, helped propel her to the post of music director of the Baltimore (Md.) Symphony Orchestra beginning with the 2007–08 season. She became the first woman to lead an American orchestra of this size and prominence.

Alsop was the daughter of musicians and studied piano and violin as a child. By the age of nine, when she heard Leonard Bernstein lead the New York Philharmonic, she knew that she wanted to be a conductor. She entered Yale University in 1972 but in 1975 transferred to the Juilliard School in New York City, where she received bachelor's (1977) and master's (1978) degrees in violin performance. Working as a freelance violinist in New York City, she began to study conducting in 1979. Alsop formed the jazz group String Fever (1981) and the Concordia Orchestra (1984), which performed everything from jazz to contemporary works. In 1988 she began conducting studies with Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa and won her first position with an orchestra, as associate conductor of the Richmond (Va.) Symphony. The following year she became music director of the Eugene (Ore.) Symphony and of the Long Island (N.Y.) Philharmonic. In 1991 she became music director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in Santa Cruz, Calif., and in 1993 she assumed that post at the Colorado Symphony in Denver. She also held various positions with other orchestras. She became principal conductor in 2002 of the Bournemouth (Eng.) Symphony, with which she earned widespread notice, and in 2005 was appointed to the position in Baltimore.

Alsop had a particular interest in American and contemporary music. In 2004 she conducted a revival of John Adams's Nixon in China with the Opera Theater of St. Louis (Mo.) and a semistaged performance of Bernstein's Candide with the New York Philharmonic. She recorded the orchestral works of, among others, the American composers Edward Joseph Collins and Samuel Barber. Alsop also garnered praise for her performances of the traditional, particularly Romantic, repertoire, including recordings of the works of Johannes Brahms with the London Philharmonic. In 2007 Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony, with Joshua Bell as soloist, released John Corigliano's Red Violin Concerto.

Alsop received many honours, among them the Stokowski Conducting Prize in 1988 and, in the same year, a Leonard Bernstein fellowship to the Tanglewood (Mass.) Music Center, where in 1989 she won the Koussevitsky Conducting Prize. Gramophone magazine named her Artist of the Year in 2003; that year she also won the Royal Philharmonic Society's Conductor Award. In 2005 Alsop was named a MacArthur fellow, the first conductor to be accorded the honour, and received the Classical BRIT (British Record Industry Trust) Female Artist of the Year Award.

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