Marin Alsop: A woman of substance

Next week, the American conductor Marin Alsop will become the first woman to take charge of a British symphony orchestra. But, as Keith Potter hears, it's consistency, not gender, that matters

When the American conductor Marin Alsop raises her baton to conduct Leonard Bernstein's ever-popular Chichester Psalms, the first item in next Wednesday's opening concert of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra's current season at its home base in Poole, she will be the first female principal conductor of a British symphony orchestra. But when asked, doubtless for the umpteenth time, whether she feels that it's different being a woman on the conductor's podium, this firm but friendly 46-year-old responds that she has no idea; after all, as she says, she's never been a man.

There are, besides, more important matters for Alsop – who this season is also completing a 10-year engagement as music director of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra in Denver – to attend to as she signs on for her four-year stint here. When Michael Henson, the managing director of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (BSO), arrived three and a half years ago, the financial situation he encountered caused him to close the BSO's sister orchestra, the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, and to renegotiate his remaining band's participation in the Arts Council's lottery-funded Stabilisation Programmme.

Both Henson and Hilary Boulding, music director at the Arts Council, are actually now pretty gung-ho about the turnaround they consider has already been achieved, one year into a present three-year plan. And they seem to have a point. BSO audiences have increased by 10 per cent across the 2001-02 season. The orchestra, which receives just over £2m from the Arts Council, ended last year with a financial surplus. And subscription sales are evidently on target for the season just beginning.

The BBC will be broadcasting nine BSO concerts this year, too. And even the BSO's Wessex Hall home (from henceforth to be cumbersomely known as the Concert Hall, Lighthouse, Poole's Centre for the Arts) has benefited from a further stage in its refit. Completion of this has prevented Alsop's first BSO programme in her new role – which includes a work by the American composer Christopher Rouse – from being played in Poole. Exeter and Portsmouth will, though, hear it this week.

Challenges, of course, remain. Without the Sinfonietta, for example, the BSO and its spin-off ensembles – a chamber orchestra, a string orchestra, smaller wind and brass groups and the contemporary-music ensemble Kokoro – are required to play in smaller venues across five counties, from Devon to Hampshire. And all this on top of the symphony orchestra's own fairly punishing British touring programme, not to speak of foreign visits: in 2003, they will play in Belgium and Germany.

In Poole, also, the "greying" of the BSO's core audience is notable to the occasional visitor such as myself. As well as the many retired people living in the Bournemouth-Poole conurbation, the orchestra should surely be doing more to attract the large number of students now also to be found there. On her visits last season, Alsop started giving friendly but musically substantial introductions to pieces of music during concerts. The roles of Andrew Burn, head of education and ensembles, and of the double-bass player Andy Baker, the BSO's roving music animateur, will be important as well.

Apparently sought after by other British orchestras – her guest-conducting relationships with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the City of London Sinfonia still have a year to run – Alsop is, not surprisingly, particularly interested in American music. This includes not only Samuel Barber (she's been doing a well-received Barber series with the RSNO for Naxos) and the already-mentioned Rouse, but also Bernstein, John Adams and Philip Glass. Six BSO recordings, also for Naxos, are planned, of music by Richard Strauss, Bartok and Korngold, as well as more American repertoire. Alsop wants to perform all the Mahler symphonies in concert, interestingly in tandem with works by Bernstein, her own mentor. New music is not neglected: there are plans to have several short residency periods for different composers.

And what about the relationship of the orchestral players themselves to a conductor who is certainly a much less formal person than Yakov Kreizberg, the BSO's previous principal conductor? "With my own orchestra," she says, "I have to always be consistent; this is what we're striving toward. As a guest conductor, you can strive toward something, but you don't have to live up to it the next week." Different conductors inevitably bring out different qualities in the same orchestra. But Jennifer Curiel, who plays first violin with the BSO, is scarcely alone in being perplexed as to exactly how this is achieved. "Some conductors drive at things and it doesn't quite click," she states. "But then somebody like Marin comes along, and everything seems to work."

"When in a masterclass," Alsop says, "I watch five young conductors conduct the exact same piece with the exact same musicians, yet it sounds completely different. How is that possible? It's the same people playing. But it's all about the relationship and about how the orchestra reacts. The only simple analogy I can think of is when I shake hands with people: do you know how you immediately feel a want or a fear, or a lack of power? Not that you judge someone necessarily by that, but you just react almost unconsciously to their body language. And that's what conducting's all about: the orchestra reacts to the motions and, of course, to your way of presenting things and your sense of humour, or lack thereof. But I think the beauty is that often musicians are completely unaware of it. I like that part." And as a violinist who has subbed with the New York Philharmonic, she should know. With , Duncan Riddell, their new leader of one year now also on hand, the BSO strings, perhaps particularly, seem in excellent hands.

Daniel Jemison, the principal bassoonist, says that "Marin is very good at judging when she needs to put her foot down and get something sorted out, and when it's better to take a softly-softly approach. There are things that go wrong in rehearsals that would never go wrong in a concert, just because the concentration is bound to be different. And there are some conductors who would pick up on that, and rehearse it and rehearse it, when actually they could have left it alone and worked on something that really needed the work. And you can still get conductors who are more ego than talent. I think that Marin has got a good feeling for people. It's not all ego." It's no surprise to hear that Alsop got the players' own vote when the decision was being made about whom to appoint.

The BSO's audiences might, indeed, like to watch for something that is, so far as I'm aware, unique. Hang around (if the ushers will let you) after a concert ends, and you might see Alsop pop back surreptitiously on stage to have a word with those players still packing up their instruments. There's tender loving care for you. But as for all that gender business, Jemison probably sums it up best: "I simply don't notice," he says, "what sex someone is when they're up there conducting me."

The BSO's first Poole programme this season is on Wednesday (01202 685222), also broadcast on Friday on BBC Radio 3