The 2022/23 season marks Alsop’s fourth as Chief Conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, which she leads at Vienna’s Konzerthaus and Musikverein, and on recordings, broadcasts and tours. As Chief Conductor and Curator of Chicago’s Ravinia Festival, she conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s summer residencies, formalizing her long relationship with Ravinia and the orchestra.
Alsop has longstanding relationships with the London Symphony orchestra and the Philarmonia, and regularly guest conducts such major international orchestras as the Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Filarmonica della Scala, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, and the Danish National, Budapest Festival and Royal Concertgebouw orchestras. In 2022/23 she tours Japan with NOSPR Katowice, as well as returns to the Orchestre de Paris, The London Symphony Orchestra, London’s Philharmonia, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, The New York Philharmonic and The Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Since 2021 Alsop has been Music Director Laureate and OrchKids Founder at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. This concluded her outstanding 14-year tenure as Music Director, in which she led the orchestra on its first European tour in 13 years, on multiple award-winning recordings and in more than two dozen world premieres, alongside founding OrchKids, its music education program for thousands of the city’s most disadvantaged young people. In 2019, after seven years as Music Director, Alsop became Conductor of Honour of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, where she continues conducting major projects each season.
Recognized with multiple Gramophone Awards, Alsop’s extensive discography includes recordings for Decca, Harmonia Mundi and Sony Classical, and acclaimed Naxos cycles of Brahms with the London Philharmonic, Dvořák with the Baltimore Symphony, and Prokofiev with the São Paulo Symphony. Committed to new music, she was Music Director of California’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music for 25 years. The first and only conductor to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, Alsop has also been honoured with the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award and made history as the first female conductor of the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms.
The film ‘The Conductor’ (Tribeca Film Festival 2021) maps Alsop’s life and career through intimate interviews, shared moments in her professional and private life, unseen archival footage with her mentor Leonard Bernstein, and of Alsop teaching the next generation of conductors. Amongst many awards and academic positions, she served as 2020 Artist-in-Residence at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts, is Director of Graduate Conducting at the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute and holds Honorary Doctorates from Yale University and the Juilliard School. To promote and nurture the careers of her fellow female conductors, in 2002 she founded the Taki Concordia Conducting Fellowship, which has spawned a number of the outstanding young women conductors of today.
2021-22 season / 433 words. Not to be altered without permission.