Marin Alsop
Principal Guest Conductor
From September 2023
Marin Alsop was chosen by the players of the Philharmonia as Principal Guest Conductor in 2023, in recognition of her exceptional musicianship, her commitment to diversity and education, and the breadth of her repertoire.
In the 2023/24 season, Alsop began her tenure with an all-American programme featuring the Marcus Roberts Trio, to open the Philharmonia’s series Let Freedom Ring. In the 2024/25 season she conducted music by Gustav and Alma Mahler, a programme from the Americas, complete with accordion and tango dancers, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 with William Kentridge’s striking animated film Oh To Believe In Another World, and the Chichester Psalms by her erstwhile mentor Leonard Bernstein. In 2025/26, she conducts Laura Karpman’s ‘tennis opera’ Balls, a Sunday afternoon concert pairing music from Star Wars with Holst’s The Planets, and a programme contrasting music by Mexican composers Arturo Márquez and Gabriela Ortiz with Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade.
Alsop is also Chief Conductor of the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Artistic Director & Chief Conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony, Principal Guest Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Chief Conductor of the Ravinia Festival, where she leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s annual residencies. She is Music Director Laureate and OrchKids Founder at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, after an outstanding 14-year tenure as its Music Director. Having made history as the first female conductor of the BBC’s Last Night of the Proms, and the first female and first American to guest conduct it three times, in 2025 she became the first US-born woman to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic.
To promote and nurture female conductors’ careers, in 2002 she founded the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship. The only conductor to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, she has also been honoured with the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award. The Conductor, a documentary about her life, was nominated for an Emmy and recognized with a Naples International Film Festival award.
