Marin Alsop is looking a little tired. So am I. I’ve been pursuing her since May when she was in London to give a masterclass (sic) for female conductors at the Royal Festival Hall (it was riveting), to make her debut with the Philharmonia (their Shostakovich Fifth Symphony brought the house down), and to spend a weekend recording Australian composer Amanda Lee Falkenberg’s The Moons Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) at St Luke’s – a wildly ambitious, highly cinematic, 45-minute, seven-movement piece that portrays different moons in the solar system, ending with our own. Signum Records will release the fruits of that intense weekend of recording in October – the month of Alsop’s 66th birthday.
OTHER THAN A FEW brief snatches of conversation over lunchtime sandwiches, there was no time to talk to Alsop at the recording session, and a proposed trip to Austria to watch her rehearsing ahead of an August BBC Prom with her own ensemble, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, had to be cancelled as I had Covid. So reluctantly we have to talk online, in an hour between rehearsals. Alsop, back in Vienna after three weeks spent curating the Ravinia Festival in Chicago, is about to head to London for the Prom, to be followed by a tour of Japan with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, then back to the UK in September for more concerts with the Philharmonia. The life of the maestro – she apparently dislikes the term ‘maestra’ – is a demanding one.
is an offbeat project. ‘Amanda emailed me and told me about this piece she was working on,’ Alsop recalls. ‘She sounded kind of nutty, but I like nutty ideas. She sent me some samples
