I am more of a colleague than a maestro," says Marin Alsop.
That may help to explain her remarkable success since winning the estimable Koussevitzky Conducting Prize in 1989 at the Tanglewood Music Center, where Leonard Bernstein had been her mentor.
Alsop went on to be a guest on the podiums of one major orchestra after another in this country and abroad, and was named music director of the Colorado Symphony in 1993. Next season, she becomes principal conductor of England's oldest orchestra, the Bournemouth Symphony.
Somehow, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra missed out on Alsop's steadily advancing career. But she makes her BSO debut this weekend at the "Symphony With a Twist" series. The program's theme is scandal, which suits Alsop perfectly.
"I think the whole `Twist' idea is great," she says in the conductor's dressing room at Meyerhoff Hall, doing a quick twist of her own on a bottle of diet cola.
"Orchestras sometimes try to find the lowest common denominator with their programs, but this one has some monumental, challenging music in it - Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Barber's Violin Concerto. And I love the idea of doing music that caused a stir or a scandal."
Alsop, 45, knows a thing or two about causing a stir herself. To a certain extent, she can't help doing it.
Although women conductors are hardly unknown - just in Baltimore alone, you'll find the BSO's associate conductor Lara Webber and the Baltimore Chamber Orchestra's founding music director Anne Harrigan - they're still far from plentiful, especially in top posts at leading ensembles. And they still tend to make news on the basis of gender alone.
Alsop, for example, will enter the music history books as the first woman at the artistic helm of a British orchestra when her Bournemouth tenure starts.
She takes all of this in stride.
"I think back to the first time I conducted," Alsop says. "At the end, one of the guys came up to me and said, `I never noticed you were a girl.'
"Maybe it's best to de-gender the issue. If you're devoted and doing your best, that's all [musicians] want."
What orchestra managers and boards of directors want, at least in this country, brings up a different issue.
"They think anyone foreign is better than our own conductors," Alsop says. "So maybe being an American is more a hindrance than being a woman. There is this archetypal image of a figurehead - the older white male with an accent."
