Nathalie Stutzmann: Conducting Change

By Joule Zelman

In June 2021, when Marin Alsop ended her tenure as the music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the New York Times published a melancholy observation. “Among the 25 largest ensembles,” wrote journalist Javier C. Hernández, “there are now no women serving as music directors.”

This period did not last long. In October, just a few months later, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra announced that it would appoint the French conductor Nathalie Stutzmann in its top creative role. Seattle audiences will have the chance to see Stutzmann at the end of this month, when she will conduct the Seattle Symphony in choral works by Igor Stravinsky and Johannes Brahms.

Stutzmann’s upcoming tenure with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, though a cause for celebration, should be no surprise: she has won international praise as the chief conductor of the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra and a guest conductor for the Philadelphia Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, and many other ensembles in the United States and Europe. Le Monde, one of France’s top newspapers, called her “as rebellious as she is robust,” while the Philadelphia Inquirer has praised her as “formidable” and The Seattle Times has lauded her “clarity of gesture” and “careful cueing and close communication with the players.” A common theme is her obvious rapport with her orchestra: “It’s clear that the musicians love her,” the Atlanta Symphony’s executive director told Hernández. But the appointment of a woman conductor to such an important role, and in such a large and prestigious orchestra, is still an anomaly. Stutzmann will be only the second woman ever appointed to lead one of the top 25 symphony orchestras in the United States.

True, orchestras have progressed substantially toward gender equality in the past decades. According to a report by the League of American Orchestras, women went from representing about 39% of orchestra musicians in 1978 to about 48% in 2014. Blind auditions have been the biggest factor in increasing gender representation (racial diversity is still overall dire; despite people with Asian and Pacific Islander backgrounds making great strides, musicians of color made up only about 15% of orchestra musicians in 2014).

But jobs in conducting, especially the most prestigious ones, still are overwhelmingly given to men. The same report found that women held only about 21% of non-music-director conducting roles in 2016. Their share was far smaller when only the most prominent role of music director was considered—barely one in 10. As many artistic fields, including classical music, confront their lack of gender and racial diversity thanks to recent social justice movements, classical conducting has remained notably white and male. Why, even in the year 2022, has conducting failed to become more diverse?

Whereas orchestra musicians still often audition “blind,” with the selectors having no way of knowing their race or gender, conductors are chosen carefully for their marquee value as well as their skill and experience. They’re typically brought on by selection committees of boards, which often lean strongly male and are almost monolithically white. Many orchestras have seen notable success in diversifying assistant conductor roles, signaling an investment in the next generation of music directors. Even so, today’s top conductors from underrepresented backgrounds still await significant changes to artistic leadership.

So Nathalie Stutzmann’s selection in Atlanta is important news, and a hopeful step toward greater representation in the future of orchestras. But Stutzmann’s path is unique for other reasons, too—she has also had a long and particularly celebrated career as a contralto (a female singer with the deepest vocal range). The daughter of classical singers, she began her musical training at a young age and focused on singing when her music teachers in France dissuaded her from studying conducting. As a student at the Conservatoire de Nancy, she won first prize in singing and opera, was accepted at world-famous Opéra de Paris, and substituted for the famed mezzo-soprano Jessye Norman—all in one year, 1983. Over the decades since, she has performed all over the world and recorded extensively. In her latest album, Contralto (Erato, 2021), she sings Handel and Vivaldi as well as lesser-known Baroque composers like Porpora and Bononcini. She tackles the repertoire with unmistakable passion and ardent expressiveness that renders this stately music dramatic and accessible. In an interview with Radio France, she deplores the tendency to perform the Baroque canon with the “kind of uptightness that they’ve been forcing on us—it’s unbearable, the coldness, the boredom!” The music of J.S. Bach, the epitome of the Baroque era, “can be very lyrical, very sensual, very warm, very rounded.”

Stutzmann’s singing career eventually gave her an opening to a second path as a conductor. In an interview with Radio France, she explained: “It was around 2007, 2008 that I started saying to myself very seriously that maybe times had changed. Maybe there were, in fact, several women appearing on the scene with true careers as conductors […] I was afraid of being ridiculous, because I had already made a name for myself, I didn’t want to destroy everything I had built.” She turned to the renowned conductor Seiji Ozawa, for whom she had often sung in concert, to ask his opinion. “He said, ‘Listen, I’ll invite you to conduct my chamber orchestra in Japan, we’ll see how it goes.’” Thus, Stutzmann had her first chance as a conductor with the Mito Chamber Orchestra, conducting Vivaldi and Mozart. It was a success. With Ozawa’s encouragement, she forged ahead, heading to Finland to study with the conductor and teacher Jorma Panula.

Since then, she has established her reputation for charisma and fire, as well as for her penchant for Baroque and choral works, some of which can be a rarity on the orchestral stage.

When she comes to Seattle to conduct on April 28 and 30, 2022, Seattleites can witness Stutzmann’s keen sense for choral dynamics, with Brahms’s grand and humanistic German Requiem and Stravinsky’s recently rediscovered elegy for Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Funeral Song. A program full of solace, in the hands of an assured and innovative artist: what better way is there to experience the power of music in anxious times?

© 2022