It’s all about being powerful without apologising for it, she tells Jessica Duchen in Independent, Wednesday 3 February 2016.

When Marin Alsop stepped on to the podium to conduct the Last Night of the Proms in 2013, surrounded by pink balloons, the heady applause that greeted her masked the gentle cracking of a glass ceiling. She was the first woman ever to wield the baton over the highest-profile event in the UK’s musical calendar. Last summer she did it again.

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She is director of the graduate conducting programme at Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Institute in the US, and of course teaches both men and women. But whenever she takes an all-female class, she declares, she thinks it likely that the main issue will be power. “When I have a class of all men, it’s very rarely about power, but more usually about problems with connection. That’s a gross generalisation, of course. But I’d bet, from my experience, that the biggest challenge for women would be about how to deliver a gesture that elicits a powerful sound without any kind of apology, and without any kind of associated negative reaction from the musicians.”

This is the link to the full article.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/how-marin-alsops-classes-for-young-women-conductors-are-changing-the-face-of-the-profession-a6848966.html