“Is what we’re doing enough?”
Portrait of the conductor Marin Alsop

Under the title “Paradise lost?”, the 2025 Biennale of the Berliner Philharmoniker takes as its starting point the beauty of nature and the threat to which it is exposed. Four depictions of nature from four different continents will be presented by Marin Alsop, a pioneering figure among female conductors, who is making her debut with the orchestra.

“She’s fabulous, she is simply wonderful.” These simple words sum up Leonard Bernstein’s admiration for Marin Alsop, who is herself a huge admirer of the great conductor: “He was first my idol, then the reason I became a conductor. When he finally became my teacher, it was as if I was entering Paradise.” Was the legendary conductor already aware of the prophetic import of his words? Marin Alsop was born in New York in 1956 and attended Yale University and the Juilliard School of Music before being mentored by Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa. What followed was a fairytale career. The first woman to conduct one of the major symphony orchestras in the United States, she was also the first woman to be principal conductor of the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra in Vienna and the first woman to conduct the Last Night of the Proms in 2013, when she earned a place for herself in the Guinness Book of Records.

Clear, precise and without frills

Until now one particular name has been missing from the almost literally endless list of international orchestras that Marin Alsop has conducted: that of the Berliner Philharmoniker. It will not be long, however, before this gap, too, is filled as she will be making her debut with the Berliners in February 2025. In her interview she speaks of the special aura and mystique associated with an orchestra like the Berliner Philharmoniker, qualities that she is particularly keen to imbibe as one of the first women to face down the challenges and prejudices and cause sensation after sensation in a world traditionally dominated by men.

Her style of conducting mirrors the way she speaks: clear, precise and without frills. There is no showmanship here, no theatrical gestures designed to create an illusion of expressivity. Everything she does comes from the inner essence of the music. “You have to be so passionately interested in the music that you almost lose yourself in it,” she says. There is a video clip on YouTube featuring the final movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony in which one can sense the extent to which she is consumed by the music while at the same time never for a moment losing control of the orchestra.

“Glimpses of nature from many different angles”

For her debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker Marin Alsop has put together a programme that reflects her love of a varied repertory while also demonstrating her often astute ability to plan a concert along the most striking dramaturgical lines. In the present case we are dealing with a glimpses of nature from many different angles. By way of a tribute to her North American homeland, she is performing Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, a work which for her is “the very embodiment of American nature and American folklore”. For seven years she was also the principal conductor of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, so she regards Brazil as her second home and recalls this home with a piece by Heitor Villa-Lobos, who likewise had “very close links with nature”.

Fire Music is by Brett Dean, who was himself a member of the Berliner Philharmoniker until 1999. It relates to the devastating bushfires that ravaged Australia in 2009. “But it is also about fire as a source of renewal,” Marin Alsop explains the manifold relationships and associations contained in a programme completed by the world premiere of a piece, Day Night Day, by the Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen, whose music is inspired by her native Lapland.

Music as a way of opening doors

“I have been privileged to see many incredible places in this world, including the Serengeti, the Galapagos Islands and the Brazilian Amazon,” says Marin Alsop in connection with her relationship to nature. At the same time her brow furrows when she turns to the future: “Whenever I look at humankind’s arrogant treatment of this planet, I feel only a sense of fear that we’ve passed the turning point if we are to preserve everything that we can.” She herself now drives an electric car but remains plagued by a guilty conscience “because we conductors spend so much of our lives sitting in airplanes”. She asks herself with increasing urgency: “Is what we’re doing enough? Perhaps concerts and festivals like this one can at least spark a debate on the subject. I’m not so naive as to think that music can solve the world’s problems, but it is a wonderful way of occasionally opening emotional doors and making things possible that are hard to achieve merely through discussion and through language.”