The Philadelphia Orchestra presents Marin Leads Rachmaninoff and Schumann

For me and other women in love with classical music, the war rages on. Dreaming to become a conductor is a bit like planning to win an Oscar or a Nobel Prize. Fifty years ago, a girl couldn’t even dream of standing at the podium and drawing her own interpretations of music, old and new, from the brilliant musicians assembled before her.

That all changed when Marin Alsop became the first female music director of a major American ensemble, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, a position she held for 14 years. (There are other women pioneers in this field, like Philly’s Jeri Lynne Johnson, but we will leave that for another day.) Alsop is the founder of the #PurpleBaton campaign, which brings greater attention to women in conducting.

The orchestra’s full potential

Today, amid many other conducting assignments around the world, she is principal guest conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and source of the interesting, sometimes revelatory program offered during Women’s History Month 2026.

Although the promotional material for this nearly sold-out concert emphasized Rachmaninoff and Schumann, it was the opening work, Go where the wind takes you…, by Ukrainian composer Iryna Aleksiychuk, that explored the full potential of the orchestra and its relevance to today’s war-torn societies. The 14-minute-long work began with a hovering halo of sound, giving an eerie impression similar in feeling to the final movement of Holst’s The Planets. The first part of the work includes Aleksiychuk’s reading of a poem by Olena Stepanenko, who with her young son escaped the Russian bombing of a town destroyed in the Russian war on Ukraine. The poem concludes with words that can apply equally to women creators and to the struggle for freedom:

Sister, go where the wind takes you

There is nothing

that you cannot overcome

The soft folds of the opening section of this work grow more dramatic and dissonant as the work progresses, tumbling into a tender evocation of spring, with bird song and other natural voices. Aleksiychuk was present in Marian Anderson Hall and took a bow and a hug from Alsop at the end of the performance.

Cool perfection

The program continued with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, op. 43, with Van Cliburn gold medalist (2009) pianist Haochen Zhang. The orchestra has had a long and symbiotic relationship with this composition. Rachmaninoff was piano soloist when this work had its world premiere in 1934 with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, who was both praised and vilified for his intensely romantic conducting style, a level of emotional freedom not particularly evident in this contemporary rendering.

Zhang’s playing was perfection itself, if a little cool for my taste, while Alsop’s leadership kept the work moving along at a brisk pace. That voluptuous 18th variation, which we so look forward to, arrived with clean, crisp lines. I couldn’t help thinking, though, that without the 18th variation, this work would not appear on concert programs with such great regularity. At the Friday matinee, Zhang received a standing ovation, to which he responded with a charming performance of Debussy’s The Girl with the Flaxen Hair. Flooded by the golden ambience of the keylight, Zhang concluded a reading of the Impressionist work with an eloquent silence.

Energy and precision

The concert ended with Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 in C major, op. 61. I personally do not care for any of the four Schumann symphonies, all of which sound to me like well-meaning musical exercises. Yet they have a significant place in the repertoire and deserve a fair hearing. Alsop and the orchestra compensated with energy and a pleasing precision, though there wasn’t much they could do with that sleepy third movement. I was delighted, however, to imagine that in the audience, a young girl was mesmerized by Alsop’s wizardry to lead and direct, free to think to herself with a steady smile: “I will do that.”

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