With her appointment as Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop becomes the first woman to head a major American orchestra.
In September, her debut concerts in this position were a success.
"Conducting her first subscription-series program at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall as the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra here on Friday night, Marin Alsop received two prolonged standing ovations.
The one that mattered most came at the end of this season-opening concert, an ambitious program that intriguingly paired two volatile works: John Adams's Fearful Symmetries, followed by Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Ms. Alsop, who turns 51 in October, looked as dapper and dynamic as ever in her customary black slacks and stylish jacket. She drew incisive, vibrant and richly colored accounts of both works from the Baltimore players.
But the ovation that must have been especially gratifying came at the start of the evening, when she arrived onstage, and so became the first woman to hold a music director's post at a major American orchestra. She placed a hand to her heart and seemed a little overcome, understandable given the obstacles she faced when her appointment was announced in July 2005. ...
What a difference two years has made. As director-designate Ms. Alsop reinvigorated the orchestra, institutionally and artistically. A born communicator and effective proselytizer for music, she has led a major community-outreach effort and taken the orchestra back into the recording business for the first time in a decade. ...
None of this could have happened, though, had Ms. Alsop not won over the musicians. To judge by Friday's concert, the second performance of this program (the first was on Thursday at the orchestra's subsidiary home at the Music Center at Strathmore in North Bethesda), the players are enthused and confident."
The New York Times, 29 September 2007
"... her triumphant inaugural Baltimore concert last week in the Music Center at Strathmore, near Washington DC, attested to those qualities of insight and creative energy that have made her such an asset on the rostrum, not only at Bournemouth but also in London and elsewhere in the UK. ...
Characteristically, Alsop was strong on textural detail, be it the cunning manipulation of instrumental timbres and rhythm in Adams's Fearful Symmetries or in the spectral dance of plucked strings in the third movement of Mahler's Fifth Symphony.
The symphony also affirmed Alsop's sense of style, structure and emotional temperature, to which the Baltimore orchestra responded with playing that had breadth, technical excellence and a malleable feel for fluctuations of mood from the frantic to the sublime. This was an interpretation crafted with care ...
Baltimore had pulled out all the stops to ensure that Alsop's arrival was memorable, and it can have no doubt that its choice of music director is a wise one."
The Telegraph, 3 October 2007
"Two years after anticipation of her appointment caused a near-mutiny among its players, Marin Alsop made her official Charm City debut as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra last night, receiving a standing ovation as the took the stage.
The ovation was repeated, even more emphatically, at the conclusion of the concert. The audience seemed reluctant to leave."
The Baltimore Sun, 29 September 2007