MARIN ALSOP

ARTIST BIO

Marin Alsop is one of the foremost conductors of our time and a powerful and inspiring voice. She is the first woman to serve as the head of major orchestras in the United States, South America, Austria, and Great Britain. A “formidable musician and a powerful communicator,” and a “conductor with a vision” (New York Times), Alsop is internationally recognized for her innovative approach to programming and audience development, for her deep commitment to education, and for championing the importance of music in the world. She is also the first and only conductor to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.

The 2025-26 season marks Alsop’s third as Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony; her third as Principal Guest Conductor of London’s Philharmonia Orchestra; and her second as Principal Guest Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. She is also Chief Conductor of the Ravinia Festival, where she leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s annual summer residencies, and the first Music Director of the National Orchestral Institute + Festival at the University of Maryland, where she launched a new academy for young conductors and leads the NOI+F Philharmonic each June. Alsop served as Chief Conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra from 2019 to 2025; she was named honorary conductor in appreciation of her commitment to the orchestra, which she led at Vienna’s Musikverein and Konzerthaus, and on recordings, broadcasts, and tours, over six seasons.

The highlight of Alsop’s 2025-26 season is her five-concert Carnegie Hall Perspectives series, celebrating her long association with the storied venue and highlighting the institutions with which she collaborates over the season. The series opens with the Philharmonia Orchestra, of which Alsop has been Principal Guest Conductor since 2023; she leads a program of symphonic staples, featuring piano soloist Alexandre Kantorow, an International Tchaikovsky Competition winner. With Ensemble Connect she curates and conducts a program of new music, part of the group’s Up Close concerts, designed to reimagine the traditional concert experience.

She returns in spring 2026 with two programs as part of Carnegie Hall’s festival United in Sound: America at 250. With the Philadelphia Orchestra, of which she has been Principal Guest Conductor since 2024, after repeated performances since her 1990 debut with the orchestra, she presents the centerpiece of her Perspectives series — a program that includes the New York premiere of John Adams’ The Rock You Stand On, and piano soloist Hayato Sumino. In the next concert, Alsop leads the combined forces of The Juilliard School (her alma mater) Music and Drama Divisions in an exploration of the American spirit, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with the world premiere of a new work by Joan Tower.

A longtime advocate for music education, Alsop leads sessions with the Carnegie Hall Teacher Orchestra Project, a nod to her “Rusty Musicians” initiative with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which invited non-professional musicians to play with the members of the orchestra. She rounds out her Perspectives series with a concert with the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic, which brings together aspiring orchestral musicians from across the country, and the new-music trio Time for Three as soloists.

At the start of the 2025-26 season, Alsop opens the Philadelphia Orchestra’s season in a program that features the world premiere of Adams’ The Rock You Stand On—a new work dedicated to Alsop, of whom Adams said: “She is one of the very few conductors I can trust to do the right thing with what I’ve written. The title, The Rock You Stand On, is non-specific and is not meant to suggest anything other than perhaps hinting at the qualities—loyalty, determination, devotion—that make Marin Alsop so very special to me.” Alsop will be joined by pianist Yunchan Lim, with whom she has cultivated a close relationship since conducting his Cliburn Competition-winning performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto in 2022. She also leads the orchestra on a U.S. tour that includes residencies at Indiana University and Oklahoma State University.

Other season highlights include concerts with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Orchestra Hall (opening its America 250 Festival) and as Chief Conductor of the Ravinia Festival, including the opening night of the orchestra's 89th residency; the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, including the world premiere of a work for soprano and orchestra by Kathryn Bostic; the Houston Symphony with concertmaster Yoonshin Song; and Washington National Opera’s new production of Bernstein’s West Side Story.

In September, Alsop returns to Japan on tour with the Polish National Radio Symphony and pianist Hayato Sumino; leads the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in concerts with pianists Claire Huangci and Bruce Liu, and violinist Maria Ioudenitch; conducts the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin at Berliner Philharmonie and in Brussels; and reunites with the Philharmonia Orchestra in Manchester with cellist Alisa Weilerstein performing Gabriela Ortiz’s newly composed cello concerto Dzonot.

Last season, Alsop became the first U.S.-born woman to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic when she made her long-awaited debut with the orchestra in February 2025, leading the world premiere of Day Night Day, an orchestral work by the Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen. “Alsop opened up the score’s pianissimos into a mesmerising symphonic richness, where minimal interval movements from the strings and the harp evoked the brightness typical of sunlight reflecting off snow,” reported Bachtrack. According to the Berliner Morgenpost, Alsop “skillfully organized the rest of the evening. Tarkiainen’s Day Night Day sounded cool and transparent,” and Copland’s Appalachian Spring suite “unsentimental and structurally conscious.”

Other highlights of Alsop’s 2024-2026 season included an evening devoted to Gustav and Alma Mahler with the Philharmonia Orchestra; the world premiere of Nico Muhly’s Violin Concerto, with soloist Renaud Capuçon and the New York Philharmonic; a New Year’s Eve concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra; a reprise of Julia Wolfe’s Her Story with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C.; and return engagements with the symphonies of Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, and San Francisco.

In 2021, Alsop assumed the title of Music Director Laureate and OrchKids Founder of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, which she continues to conduct each season. During her outstanding 14-year tenure as its Music Director, she led the orchestra on its first European tour in 13 years, released multiple award-winning recordings, and conducted more than two dozen world premieres, as well as founding OrchKids, its groundbreaking music education program for Baltimore’s most disadvantaged youth. In 2019, after seven years as Music Director, Alsop became Conductor of Honour of Brazil’s São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, with which she continues to undertake major projects each season. Deeply committed to new music, she was Music Director of California’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music for 25 years, leading 174 premieres. Alsop has longstanding relationships with the London Philharmonic and London Symphony orchestras, and regularly guest conducts major international ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Budapest Festival Orchestra, and Orchestre de Paris, besides leading the La Scala Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, and others. In collaboration with YouTube and Google Arts & Culture, she developed and spearheaded the “Global Ode to Joy,” a crowd-sourced video project to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th anniversary in 2020. A full decade after making history as the first female conductor of London’s Last Night of the Proms, in 2023 she became the first woman and first American to guest conduct three Last Nights in the festival’s long history. She made her triumphant debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2024, leading a new production of John Adams’ oratorio El Niño that showcased her “deep command of Adams’ music” (Financial Times, UK). Alsop’s discography comprises more than 200 titles, some of which have been recognized by BBC Music and received Emmy nominations, in addition to GRAMMY, Classical BRIT, and Gramophone awards. She has recorded works from the standard repertoire and music by a variety of contemporary composers, championing American music in particular. Her recordings include releases by Decca, Harmonia Mundi, and Sony Classical, as well as acclaimed Naxos cycles of Brahms with the London Philharmonic, Dvořák with the Baltimore Symphony, and Prokofiev with the São Paulo Symphony. Her 2024 album with John Adams’ City Noir, Fearful Symmetries, and Lola Montez Does The Spider Dance, which she performs with the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, was nominated for a Best Orchestral Performance GRAMMY Award.

Other recent releases include a live account of Candide with the London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus; a Kevin Puts collection with the Baltimore Symphony; a Margaret Brouwer collection and a complete Schumann symphonic cycle for Naxos, and world premiere recordings of Malek Jandali concertos for Cedille Records, all with the Vienna RSO. Abstractions, a new album featuring music by the celebrated contemporary British composer Anna Clyne, performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and Alsop, will be released in September 2025 on Naxos. In 2021, Alsop and the Philadelphia Orchestra released a live recording on Pentatone of highlights from Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, with a stellar cast featuring Angel Blue, Lester Lynch, Chauncey Packer and Kevin Short, and the Morgan State University Choir. The 2020 recording of Clyne’s cello concerto DANCE, with soloist Inbal Segev and the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Alsop, has garnered over 12 million plays on Spotify.

In June 2025, Alsop received the Golden Baton Award, the highest accolade conferred by the League of American Orchestras. “Marin Alsop has shattered glass ceilings as an adventurous artist, music director of U.S. and international orchestras, passionate champion of music education for all, and tireless advocate for women conductors,” League President Simon Woods wrote. In 2019 Alsop received the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award. She also served as the 2021-22 Harman/Eisner Artist-in-Residence of the Aspen Institute Arts Program, and 2020 Artist-in-Residence at Vienna’s University of Music and Performing Arts, and is the Director of Graduate Conducting at the Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute. She holds honorary doctorates from Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, and the Juilliard School.

To promote and nurture the careers of her fellow women conductors, Alsop founded the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship in 2002. Over the past 23 years, the fellowship has provided intensive coaching, mentorship, and financial support to women conductors as they progress in their careers. Today, all 36 award winners are working to ensure a more equitable future for classical music through their artistry and advocacy. Among them, they hold 23 music director or chief conductor positions of orchestras around the world.

The Conductor, a feature documentary about Alsop’s life, debuted at New York’s 2021 Tribeca Film Festival and has subsequently been broadcast on PBS television, screened at festivals and in theaters nationwide. It was nominated for the 2023 Emmy for Best Arts and Culture Documentary and recognized with the Naples International Film Festival’s 2021 Focus on the Arts Award. The Conductor is available on demand on Apple TV, Google Play, iTunes, Prime Video, Vudu, and Vimeo.

(August 2025)

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