In this video, the American conductor Marin Alsop examines some band and orchestra scenes from popular films and television shows and determines how accurate they really are. Does the conductor from the movie ‘Whiplash’ have an effective teaching style? How historically accurate is ‘Amadeus’? Was Richard Dreyfuss convincing as a high school orchestra conductor? Marin answers all these questions and much more.
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Marin Alsop is an American conductor. She is music director laureate of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Ravinia Festival, and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Born in New York City, to two string players, she was educated at the Masters School and studied violin at the Juilliard School’s Pre-College Division, graduating in 1972. She attended Yale University as a mathematics major, but transferred to Juilliard, to study the violin.
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After failing three times to win admission to Juilliard’s conducting program, Alsop founded the New York String Ensemble in 1981, the female jazz ensemble String Fever, and in 1984 Concordia, a 50-piece orchestra specializing in twentieth-century American music. She went on to become music director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, then principal conductor and, consequently, music director of the Colorado Symphony.In 2007 Alsop became the first woman conductor to be made the music director of a major American orchestra. She led the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra for 14 years – 11 years longer than the length of her original contract.