Marin Alsop recently made history with her appointment as 12th music director of the Baltimore Symphony, beginning with the 2007–2008 season. She is the first woman to head a major American orchestra, which mirrors her ongoing success in the United Kingdom as principal conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony since 2002. In summer 2005, she was named a MacArthur Fellow, the first conductor ever to receive this most prestigious American award. The first artist to win Gramophone’s Artist of the Year award and the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Conductor’s Award in the same season (2003), Ms. Alsop also won the Classical Brit Award for Best Female Artist of 2005. In July 2007, she was honored with a European Women of Achievement Award.
Ms. Alsop is a regular guest conductor with the New York Philharmonic, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Chicago Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. She also appears frequently as a guest conductor with many distinguished orchestras worldwide. After a highly successful 12-year tenure as music director of the Colorado Symphony, Ms. Alsop continues her association as conductor laureate; she also continues as music director of the acclaimed Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in California.
Marin Alsop attended Yale University and received her master’s degree from The Juilliard School. In 1989, her conducting career was launched when she became a prizewinner at the Leopold Stokowski International Conducting Competition in New York. In the same year, she was awarded the Koussevitzky Conducting Prize at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she was a pupil of Leonard Bernstein, Seiji Ozawa, and Gustav Meier.
For more information, go to marinalsop.com and BSOmusic.org.
Percussionist Colin Currie has established a unique reputation for his charismatic and virtuosic performances of works by today’s leading composers, and has already appeared with many of the world’s most famous orchestras. Regularly commissioning and recording new works, he has made an inspirational and innovative contribution to the percussion repertoire. He is currently Visiting Professor of Solo Percussion at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
At the age of 15 Colin Currie won the Shell/LSO prize, and subsequently was the first percussion finalist in the BBC Young Musician competition. He was awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist Award in 2002 and was a Borletti-Buitoni Trust award winner in 2005. Mr. Currie was selected as a BBC New Generation Artist from 2003 to 2005, and as part of the scheme performed a variety of concerto and recital engagements with the BBC orchestras.
An active chamber musician, Mr. Currie has collaborated with artists such as the Labèque sisters, Petersen Quartet, Dawn Upshaw, Viktoria Mullova, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Josh Bell, Steven Isserlis, Barnabás Kelemen, Peter Erskine, Kenny Wheeler, and John Taylor.