The Conductor

When Marin Alsop attended one of Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" in the mid-1960s at the age of nine, she realized that she had to become a conductor. However, her teachers, colleagues and representatives of the classical music business told her that this plan was impossible to realize. The reason: she is a woman...

Today, Marin Alsop is the first (and only) female winner of a MacArthur Award, the first woman to conduct the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, and the first woman to conduct the BBC's "Last Night of the Proms". In 2019, she became the first woman to become General Music Director of the Vienna RSO.

Director Bernadette Wegenstein tells Alsop's story in a mixture of interviews and insights into her work and private life. It features previously unreleased footage of her collaboration with her mentor Leonard Bernstein, exclusive recordings of her work with some of the world's most important orchestras and a new generation of conductors and musicians who, like herself, were not necessarily welcomed with open arms into the world of classical music.