Marin Alsop: Influences

In this playlist, the American conductor Marin Alsop brings together works and performing artists who have had a special place in her childhood and subsequent career. She kicks off with a work that proved something of an epiphany for her: “I was probably 11 or 12 years old,” she tells Apple Music Classical, “and I was at a summer chamber music festival. I was walking down the hallway of the dorm, and something caught my ear.” Through the door, Alsop could hear a recording of Brahms’ String Sextet in B-flat, the German composer’s first major work for strings only. A violin player herself, Alsop could hear Brahms’ relish of rich string textures, and his characteristic sudden turns from joy to moments of poignancy and even sorrow. “I sat down outside this door, and I remember for the first time being moved to tears by music. This was the moment in my life when I suddenly understood that music has the capacity to move us as human beings. Every time my friends would come over, I insisted we play this piece!” Alsop also recalls occasions when she would join her parents to play music together. She commemorates this with the slow movement of Robert Schumann’s Piano Quartet. “I often played this with my parents,” says Alsop; “my mother on cello, my father would play viola, and our dear friend, Seymour Bernstein, who I had known since birth—he played in a trio with my mom. So this is a very special piece with profound memories for me.” As a violin student at the Juilliard, Alsop played in the New York Philharmonic and the New York City Ballet. Thwarted several times in applying for the Juilliard’s conducting programme, Alsop founded the all-women jazz band String Fever (you can hear their “Fever Pitch” on this playlist), and became a fan of the great violinist Stéphane Grappelli. “I used to go hear him play live all the time,” recalls Alsop, who includes the violinist’s solo to Duke Ellington’s tune “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” “I spent an entire week transcribing note by note this solo,” she recalls, “and I believe if you handed me a violin now, I could actually still play it!” She gained further conducting experience by founding the Concordia Orchestra. Then in 1989, she won the Koussevitzky Prize as outstanding student conductor at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she worked with Leonard Bernstein—“an inspirational, all-consuming figure for me,” recalls Alsop. She naturally includes Bernstein conducting Mahler, whose music he did so much to promote, and also Bernstein’s perhaps most provocative work, Mass, which Alsop describes as “one of the great statements of 20th century music, not only musically, but also politically.” Renowned for her staunch promotion of contemporary music, Alsop has also included tracks by Anna Clyne, Jennifer Higdon, and Christopher Rouse, all of whom became close friends. Yet, as she recalls, she was not initially predisposed to modern music. All that changed thanks to Bartók, as Alsop recalls: “When I was a freshman at Yale, I had a chamber music seminar course. I remember I was assigned this piece, Contrasts, and I thought to myself, ‘Oh my god, I hate contemporary music!’ (I was only 16 at the time.) And I remember telling my mom and dad, ‘I hate new music, I’m never going to play contemporary music.’ And of course, as it turned out, I fell in love with this particular piece, and with Bartók in general. It really opened a whole new door for me.” Marin Alsop has also been a champion of neglected repertoire by such composers as James P. Johnson, whose “Victory Stride” you can hear performed by Alsop’s Concordia Orchestra. “I spent six years researching and searching for his music to be able to restore it then bring it to the public. James P. Johnson aspired to compose for symphony orchestra but was relegated to ‘popular’ music because he was Black. His struggles resonate with me, and I am thrilled that we have been able to make this music available for orchestras worldwide to perform!”