Alexandra Arrieche
Marin Alsop’ s philosophy is to“ pay it forward.” Three of her many protegees are doing just that.
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mentor
m a g i c
by Martha Thomas
“ The best mentors teach you much more than your craft, and that’ s what I hope to share with my students as well. Yes, it’ s very important to sharpen your skills on the podium, but it’ s just as important to teach young conductors about how vital it is to share the power of music with as many people as possible. Bernstein taught me this when I was a student of his and it was something he lived by. I admired him greatly for that.”— Marin Alsop
Alexandra Arrieche
// From Brazil with Love
A young Alsop with her mentor, Leonard Bernstein.
In the summer of 2010, Alexandra Arrieche went to every rehearsal of the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra( OSESP) that she could. It was her chance to practice the craft of conducting— if only in her head as she studied the musicians at work.
She knew that Marin Alsop would be coming from Baltimore to conduct in October, but Arrieche was scheduled to head up to New York to study with Maestro Harold Farberman at Bard College a month earlier.“ I was so frustrated,” recalls the young conductor.“ She was the person I most wanted to see.”
So Arrieche wrote a letter to Alsop—“ in very bad English,” she recalls— and left it, along with a DVD of her conducting, with the OSESP house manager. A week later, Farberman— who had also been Alsop’ s teacher— told his fledgling student that Alsop had called him.“ She wanted to know if you were real,” Arrieche remembers her teacher saying.
Soon, the two women did meet, and Arrieche says it was“ like a dream.” The OSESP was rehearsing Mahler’ s Fifth Symphony, and under the Maestra’ s baton, Arrieche says,“ it became Mahler’ s orchestra. It was one of those moments where you think to yourself,‘ I want to do that for the rest of my life,’” says Arrieche.
Alsop became a mentor, encouraging the young conductor to apply for the Taki Concordia Conducting Fellowship, a program that Alsop founded to provide opportunities for women. Arrieche won the honor in 2011, and in 2012 became the fourth BSO-Peabody conducting fellow.
Arrieche, now 30, says that in the past five years she has learned more than just technique from Alsop.“ She also opens the experience of everything behind the scenes. For example: outreach, how to engage the community, how to touch people the way the music touches you.”
As a student in Brazil, Arrieche led family concerts for the Festival Villa Lobos and established conducting workshops for young conductors. She also conducted local youth orchestras. She is now artistic director of the Henderson Symphony Orchestra in Nevada, where she is creating opportunities for young musicians, such as the Young Artists Concert scheduled for March 2017.
Chris Ocken( Arrieche, conducting); Paola Prado( Arrieche, top of page); Walter Scott( Bernstein)
10 Overture | bsomusic. org