Leading conductor Marin Alsop returns to Bravo! Vail with The Philadelphia Orchestra

Born to professional musicians in New York City and mentored by Leonard Bernstein in the late 1980s, Marin Alsop is a lifelong shatterer of the proverbial glass ceiling: She was the first conductor to receive a MacArthur Fellowship (2005), the first woman conductor to lead a major American orchestra — the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra (2007-2021) — and, just last February, she became the first U.S.-born woman to conduct the world-famous Berlin Philharmonic. She was also the first woman to serve as the head of major orchestras in South America, Austria, and Great Britain, among other milestones.

When Alsop founded the Concordia Orchestra in New York City in 1984, which she led as music director for 18 years after nearly a decade of freelancing as a violinist — and after graduating from Juilliard in violin (she was rejected from the conducting program) — she declared to the world that, yes, women can be conductors, even if the field has historically been, and still is, dominated by men. Her conducting debut with The Philadelphia Orchestra came in 1990.

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