Missing From Podiums: Women; New York Times, 12/20/13

Zachary Woolfe, New York Times; Missing From Podiums: Women: "“Dinosaur, go back to your cave!” the British conductor Sian Edwards said over the phone with a laugh, her eyes audibly rolling. I had asked for her response to the bizarrely retrograde comments a few respected male musicians had made recently about female conductors. In August, the young Russian maestro Vasily Petrenko told an interviewer that players, presumably men, “react better when they have a man in front of them.” He added, “A sweet girl on the podium can make one’s thoughts drift toward something else.” Not long after, controversy erupted over comments that Bruno Mantovani, a composer and the director of the Paris Conservatory of Music and Dance made on French radio. “Sometimes women are discouraged by the very physical aspect,” he said. “Conducting, taking a plane, taking another plane, conducting again.” Then the New Yorker critic Alex Ross provided a translation of an interview that the venerable Russian conductor Yuri Temirkanov, one of Mr. Petrenko’s mentors, gave last year. “The essence of the conductor’s profession is strength,” he said. “The essence of a woman is weakness.” The pace is agonizing, but things are improving. Recent conversations I’ve had with conductors at various stages of their careers, as well as administrators, artist managers and teachers, suggest that what’s preventing equity is now less overt sexism, though those comments by the Russian maestros and Mr. Mantovani have made clear it still exists, than simply time — the trickle of a younger, more heterogeneous generation as it permeates the field — and incremental societal shifts in attitudes about the face of leadership."