Marin Alsop shutters up in Brazil

press release:

The São Paulo Symphony Orchestra Foundation – Fundação Osesp is proud to announce that our Music Director Marin Alsop will become Conductor of Honour at the end of her 8-year tenure, in December 2019.

Since she became Chief Conductor, in 2012 (and Music Director one year later), Marin Alsop has been responsible for many remarkable achievements of our Orchestra. Under her baton, Osesp has appeared twice at the BBC Proms, and it has also played for the first time at the Berlin Philharmonie, London’s Royal Festival Hall, Lucerne and Edinburgh Festivals, and Vienna’s Konzerthaus, among other prestigious venues. It has also gone on tour in Brazil, celebrating the Orchestras’s 60th anniversary in 2014.  A complete cycle of Prokofiev’s Symphonies has been released on CD (for the Naxos label), and two new CDs with works by Leonard Bernstein will be released for the composer’s centennial celebrations next year, as part of a boxed set devoted to Ms. Alsop’s long relationship with Bernstein. In the course of the next two seasons, 2018 and 2019, among other projects we plan to release a complete cycle of Brahms’s symphonies on video, conducted and with commentary by Maestra Alsop.

Her expert guidance has helped raise the profile of our Orchestra both nationally and internationally; and her humanistic approach has been an inspiration to many of our educational and outreach activities too. She has been active at our International Winter Festival in Campos do Jordão (now in its 48th season), where she has taught several promising Brazilian conductors; and she was also responsible for the creation of a Conducting Class at our own Osesp Academy.

To celebrate this long-standing partnership, the Foundation is happy to announce the creation of a Marin Alsop Award for Young Conductors. The details of this prize, which will be for young Brazilian conductors only, will be released in due time.