In February and March this year, Marin Alsop, Dalia Stasevska and Joana Mallwitz directed the Berlin Philharmonic in consecutive subscription programmes, uploaded to the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall. The observation would not be noteworthy but for the fact that, a decade ago, Emmanuelle Haïm was the only woman to conduct the BPO in a full concert across its entire season.

Alsop’s programme – astonishingly, her BPO debut – is a long and fascinating one, opening with the premiere of Day Night Day by Outi Tarkiainen (Finnish, b1985). A bewitching piece of post-Sibelian atmospherics (moody stepwise bassoon solos, clarinet and oboe recitatives), it does not outstay its five-minute welcome. The pulse is slow, the direction sure, the heritage of Nightride and Sunrise not oppressive.

Tarkiainen lives in Lapland, ‘where we have day even in the middle of the night, and night in the middle of the day’ as the seasons turn, she says in the accompanying interview. The contrast could hardly be more striking with the climate of central Australia and the raging bushfires of 2009, which inspired Brett Dean to compose Fire Music two years later.

At Rite of Spring length, Fire Music also puts a virtuoso orchestra and conductor through their paces, and indeed it has since become a ballet. The still hum of heat on the ground, the wild and unconfined spread of fire, the empty world left in its wake: all come to life in tightly controlled episodes. The piece is also one of vanishingly few to convincingly integrate an electric guitar within the orchestra (shades of Schnittke’s Ritual).

In the second half, Alsop brings the shortened 1945 version of Appalachian Spring to Berlin – or rather she returns it there, after Copland’s ballet scored an early success during Sergiu Celibidache’s brief tenure as music director. As you might anticipate, Alsop’s direction is a good deal more fluent, not denaturing the Berlin sostenuto string sound but still carefully ensuring that it plays second fiddle to a string of immaculate yet folksy wind solos led by Andreas Ottensamer’s clarinet.

With the addition of the Rundfunkchor Berlin, grooving away to their Brazilian beats, the Chôros No 10 of Villa-Lobos makes a rambunctious finale – an Alsop speciality, too, since her time in charge of the São Paulo SO. Amid the joyful chaos of it all, Alsop herself keeps a surgeon’s cool, with gestures that demand the musicians’ eyes on her and their ears on each other.

Germany’s equivalent of the BBC is ARD, uniting the country’s regional broadcasters. The company’s online player has a page dedicated to ‘Dirigentinnen’ – and why not? Masters courses at conservatoires are now producing conductors of promise with pretty much a 50:50 gender split, but there is still work to be done in persuading some orchestras and audiences that conducting is a job for anyone with the requisite skills, not just the boys.

Born in Germany to Japanese parents in 1986, Erina Yashima will be familiar to Philadelphia audiences as their orchestra’s assistant conductor. Conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra at a concert in March, she takes the full measure of Tchaikovsky’s Winter Daydreams Symphony. Having kept the first movement’s tension high through a keen ear for its counterpoint, she imparts a gentle spring to the Adagio – played cantabile ma non tanto just as Tchaikovsky marks it.

Where Tchaikovsky’s inspiration flags in the latter movements, Yashima’s rhythmic energy does not. Details such as the little viola solo at the end of the Scherzo were new to me, and easily missed on record or from the back of the stalls. I very much like the dramatic outline of the finale’s slow introduction, its gathering momentum and the direct affinity with early Sibelius, which is usually appreciated only in reverse.

Following news of the death of Sofia Gubaidulina in March, ARD also made a timely release of her Third Violin Concerto, as performed in May 2024 by Baiba Skride. The late Ivan Moody admired the ‘cumulative, brooding power’ of this late work (from 2018) in Vadim Repin’s premiere recording (DG, 12/21). Gubaidulina titled it Dialog: Ich und du, referring to a work by the philosopher Martin Buber. Here the ‘du’ is taken by the FRSO under the always impressive Maxime Pascal. Seeing as well as hearing underlines the drama of that dialogue for a listener new to the piece, and clarifies the musical speech, and the degree to which the protagonists question and answer each other.

If that precis resembles, say, the Brahms Concerto, it also reflects Gubaidulina’s thoroughly violinistic writing, encapsulated not just by stretches of cantabile lyricism but a cadenza at the heart of the 23-minute single movement. A second viewing opens out the form as a flowing sequence of seven variations, and points of resemblance and departure from Offertorium, the ’80s concerto so associated with first Gidon Kremer and then Repin. Forty years on, no wonder Gubaidulina distilled the elements of her language, but she sounds more herself than ever.

Over at Stage+ is the real Brahms, the first two symphonies in the hands of another conductor new to me. The 38-year-old Nodoka Okisawa was appointed by the late Seiji Ozawa as his second in command at the Saito Kinen Orchestra, which he founded back in the early ’90s as one of the first of the current crop of super-ensembles drawing their personnel from full-time orchestras, and well beyond the shores of Japan, to gather in an annual festival. Ozawa retains the title of Festival Director, which takes the notion of ‘conductor for life’ to a new level.

Also released on CD – but only by the Japanese arm of Decca – these live performances from the 2024 Festival share a sense of timeliness with Yashima’s Tchaikovsky. Okisawa releases the First from the iron grip of Beethoven’s legacy and into the more spontaneously moulded hands of Schumann. She achieves this not by playing fast and loose with tempos – the relation between introduction and Allegro is measured and old-school, like her omission of the exposition repeat and the orchestral vibrato – but through the cultivation of a sound world, quintessentially mid-Romantic, that draws upon the strengths of the SKO’s burnished horn section and sweetly modulated strings.

On film, Okisawa’s gestures breathe – translating the music with her hands, as Haitink once remarked was his particular accomplishment. Those gestures elicit a surprisingly eventful Andante, which becomes more than usual a precursor to the stormy pastoral landscape of the Second Symphony’s Adagio. By turn, her control over the SKO’s chamber-size forces serves to highlight the trombones and timpani in the Second as agents of disruption. There is a fierce, almost obstreperous strength of purpose to the strings as they dig into the first movement’s development. Okisawa has precise ideas, all of them good ones, about the character of each gesture in the Allegretto, so that the movement becomes an embryonic form of a Mahler scherzo, of the kind to be found in the Fifth and Sixth.

Similar to ARD, the Arte channel hosts a page dedicated to ‘Generation Maestras’, perhaps unwittingly perpetuating a preciously gendered cliché that surely we can do without by now. You have to be very old, or very Italian, or the protagonist of a Jilly Cooper novel, to welcome being unironically addressed as Maestro – let alone Maestra. Anyway … being 29 and Polish, Zofia Kiniorska is none of those things. She has succeeded Ana María Patiño-Osorio (whom we should also be hearing more of soon) as assistant to Jonathan Nott at the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and in December 2024 she conducted an absorbing programme of ‘Classical Women’.

This gets off to an iffy start with The Golden Phoenix and Aurore boréale, short pieces of Hans Zimmer-ish scene-setting by Sandrine Rudaz. Mel Bonis had her models too, writing in belle époque Paris, but better ones – Wagner, and her contemporary as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, Debussy. Mostly through a belated appreciation of her piano and chamber music, Bonis has come into focus as a figure whose fine ear and melodic imagination did not compel her to chase innovation with experimentation.

The Bru Zane label has done what it can for her slender orchestral output, but when do we get to hear these pieces live? And Kiniorska shows why we should, in reviving her triptych of tone poems from c1910: Le songe de Cléopâtre, Ophélie and Salomé, all part of a longer series of ‘Femmes de légende’. Yes, this is music that goes with the flow rather than leading from the front – but I find it irresistible, as I do Kiniorska’s accounts of understated authority, teasing out all the exotica of harmony and orchestration, keeping the stories of these characters on the move.

After further substantial rarities by Augusta Holmès and Cécile Chaminade, saxophonist Valentine Michaud joins Kiniorska and the OSR for Glasslands, a concerto by Anna Clyne premiered in 2023 by Jess Gillam. Clyne evokes the mythological Irish figure of the Banshee with long, looping incantations, carried on the wind by a glistening orchestral texture. Michaud brings more to the piece than ‘wailing, shrieking, or keening in the silence of the night’, promised by the composer, and the piece itself, like the Banshee, never hangs around in one place for too long.

The events

Tarkiainen. Dean, etc Depictions of Nature BPO / Alsop digitalconcerthall.com

Tchaikovsky Sym No 1 Frankfurt RSO / Yashima ardmediathek.de

Gubaidulina Dialog: Ich und du Skride; Frankfurt RSO / Pascal ardmediathek.de

Brahms Syms Nos 1 & 2 Saito Kinen Orch / Okisawa stage-plus.com

Rudaz. Bonis, etc Classique et engagé-e-x! Suisse Romande Orch / Kiniorska arte.tv