Conductors Marin Alsop and JoAnn Falletta

Two women

TOM PURDOM

The last time I heard Marin Alsop conduct, she was leading the Curtis Orchestra and the Philadelphia Orchestra had just started looking for a replacement for Wolfgang Sawallisch. I walked home with some friends and we all agreed we had just seen a strong candidate for the Orchestra post.

The powers that be at the Philadelphia Orchestra tend to concentrate on international stars when they look for a new music director. They seem to feel they must hire someone with a global reputation so the world will know we really do have a major orchestra. But isn’t it possible the Orchestra is so well established after all these decades that such self-consciousness is unnecessary? Isn’t it possible a conductor automatically becomes important when the world-renowned Philadelphia Orchestra honors him or her with the top job on its roster? Why can’t the Philadelphia Orchestra bestow this opportunity on some promising young American conductor with the full understanding that it’s offering a three-year trial contract which will only be renewed if the results prove the candidate deserves such an awesome post?

As it turned out, the Orchestra didn’t receive the telepathic messages my friends and I transmitted as we discussed the young American conductor who had just wowed us with her work with the Curtis students. The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has chosen Alsop instead, and Baltimore— Baltimore!— is now receiving all the attention our society showers on organizations that hire a First Woman.

The assistant conductor’s fate

For her January concerts with the Philadelphia Orchestra— her first Philadelphia appearance since she became a First Woman— Alsop was given an unpromising program. The Philadelphia premier of John Harbison’s new Concerto for Bass Viol and Orchestra looked interesting, but the other two items were Wagner’s Prelude to Act I of Tristan and Isolde and Aaron Copland’s Third Symphony. The Wagner and the Copland are the kind of pieces the Orchestra normally assigns to its second conductor. Until recently, the Orchestra’s assistant conductors were almost never given programs that included the major symphonies. Rossen Milanov is the first exception-- and he’s also the first to sport the title of associate (not assistant) conductor.

Alsop managed to turn this material into a lively, high-voltage evening. The Wagner is essentially an excerpt from a theater piece, and she treated it as the intensely dramatic experience it’s supposed to be. The scherzo in the Copland was a long outburst of American exuberance without a trace of folksiness or Norman Rockwell Americana, and the rest of the symphony sounded just as good. The first movement included some moments of empty bombast, but that wasn’t the conductor’s fault.

When a bass is pitted against an orchestra

The Harbison was composed for 14 prominent bassists who are premiering it around the country. The solo part was a showcase for our renowned principal bass, Harold Robinson, who displayed his skills in movements that captured all the potential of his instrument, from the jazzy to the romantically melodic.

Concertos for the double bass confront an inherent difficulty: the bass sounds weak when it’s pitted against a full orchestra. Harbison dealt with this problem mostly by pairing the bass with bits of the orchestra, one bit at a time. When the orchestra played as a whole, it stayed in the lower half of its dynamic range. The overall effect was a piece that sounded too small for a large concert hall— three movements in a subdued sotto voce. The concerto would probably be much more effective in a smaller hall, with a chamber orchestra backing the soloist.

Meanwhile, at the Chamber Orchestra

By one of those fortuitous coincidences that are appreciated by all writers looking for topical hooks, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia spotlighted another woman conductor the same weekend that Alsop led the Philadelphians. JoAnn Faletta had a program that looked more interesting than the Orchestra’s, and she turned it into one of the Chamber Orchestra’s best evenings.

Falletta’s program fell into two parts. The opening and the closing were devoted to modern approaches to older music— a modern version of the Baroque concerto grosso form that Ellen Taafe Zwilich composed in 1985, Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and a suite from Stravinsky’s Pulcinella ballet, which is based on music by the Baroque composer Giovanni Pergolesi. In the middle, the audience was treated to Dvorak’s Romance in F Minor for Violin and Orchestra and Mozart’s Second Violin Concerto, with guest Cho-Liang Lin in the solo slot.

The weak entry on the menu for me was the Vaughan Williams. I’ve always found it torpid. In Falletta’s hands, it acquired a vibrancy that made me see it in a new light.

One of the great stories of our time

Ideally, there should be no reason to comment on the gender of the conductor. Ideally, women conductors should be as common and unremarkable as women prosecutors. But we haven’t reached that day yet. One of the great stories of our time is the expansion of the roles women play in our society. It is a fundamental change in the history of our species— a development that has an irresistible appeal to the side of my literary personality that writes science fiction. If you could put H. G. Wells inside a real time machine and transport him from 1890 to 2007, he would probably feel that one of the most striking differences between our time and his late Victorian world is the sight of all those women cops and women UPS drivers we see on our streets. And most of us would undoubtedly feel the same way if somebody yanked us into the next century and let us glimpse the tasks women will be performing then.

Is there such a thing as a distinctively female approach to the arts? I could argue either side of that perennial debate, but the contrast between these two conductors tends to support the negative. Maestro Alsop strides onto the stage with a take-charge manner leavened by the grin she flashes at the audience when she makes her opening bow. Maestro Falletta acts more like a gracious host.

Body language matters

For her pre-concert comments— a custom at the Chamber Orchestra’s Monday night programs— Falletta stood next to the conductor’s podium and spoke to the audience in a relaxed, musical voice, with one arm resting casually on the bar that protects the conductor from disastrous backward moves. When Cho-Lang Lin took his bows, she positioned herself deep in the orchestra and gave him a steady stream of applause.

I happen to prefer performers who keep their body language to a minimum, so I was happier watching Falletta, who conducts mostly with graceful movements of her arms. Alsop became positively frantic during the first part of the Wagner. She shifted to a calmer mode when she started conducting less melodramatic music. But Alsop is clearly the kind of conductor who appeals to music lovers who like pianists who throw themselves all over the piano.

Conductors have two fundamental duties. They must develop a solid, well thought out vision of the overall effect the music is supposed to create, and they must impose that vision on the sounds created by a conclave of specialists. These two women use different management styles but elicit the same kind of results: The musicians dig into their instruments and create a coherent work of art.

Now if they’ll just let us see how Marin Alsop conducts Beethoven’s Third…..



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