When San Francisco Opera opened its 2021–22 season in August of last year, there was more than one reason to celebrate. The organization’s production of Puccini’s Tosca marked its return to the War Memorial Opera House for in-person live performances after a year-and-a-half hiatus due to the pandemic. Tosca was also S.F. Opera’s debut production under the helm of its new music director, Eun Sun Kim, the first woman to lead a major U.S. opera company.
Kim is a powerful conductor with an ear for detail. During the company’s Tosca run, she accompanied the opera’s ill-fated namesake diva with swells of sumptuous sound from the orchestra and enlivened Puccini’s melodramatic turn-of-the-20th-century score.
On one hand, it doesn’t matter at all that Kim is a woman. She is an astute artist and musician. That’s why she got the S.F. Opera job and why she is in high demand as a conductor around the world.
On the other hand, it matters very much that Kim is a woman. It matters because, quite disappointingly, she is the single exception to a very tired rule. At every other major opera house in the United States, a man holds the position of music director. Following Marin Alsop’s summer 2021 departure from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the same is now also true for every one of the country’s 25 largest symphony orchestras.
Strides have been made, of course. Women are appearing more and more frequently as guest and assistant conductors, and several women lead smaller U.S. orchestras. When French conductor Nathalie Stutzmann joins the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra as music director this fall, there will again be one woman leading a top-tier U.S. symphony. But numbers don’t lie, and top positions at major institutions remain stubbornly homogeneous. In short: Women in classical music are making progress, but not nearly enough. And the women making that progress
