The barrier-breaking Marin Alsop takes a bow, departing as Ravinia chief conductor

What Marin Alsop built at Ravinia started to feel real, she says, in 2022.

Her second summer at the festival, the conductor — the first woman to lead major orchestras in the U.S., Great Britain, Austria and South America — had begun Breaking Barriers, a festival-within-a-festival dedicated to smashing the glass ceiling. The first iteration spotlighted female conductors, like her.

“When I walked into the Ravinia campus, and families were stopping to look at posters of 100 women conductors, many of whom I had never even heard of — that was pretty monumental,” Alsop remembers.

Alsop, who turns 70 this fall, is departing Ravinia after six years as chief conductor and a one-time curator of the festival. During her tenure, she steered the Chicago Symphony through its first regularly convened concerts out of the pandemic and settled it into the renovated Hunter Pavilion.

But Breaking Barriers may have been her crowning achievement, inviting female professionals from male-dominated fields like science, the culinary arts and music composition to convene on the bucolic Highland Park campus.

This year’s Breaking Barriers focuses on film music, co-curated by the composer Laura Karpman, a friend of Alsop’s and former Juilliard classmate. There, Karpman studied with Milton Babbitt, the serialist and unapologetic anti-populist — an unexpected lineage for a composer that would go on to reach millions through the Marvel franchise.

“The thing about Laura is that she’s a chameleon. She can really write any type of music, any style music, and she embraces all genres,” Alsop says.

Every year, Breaking Barriers doubles as a summit for recipients of the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship, Alsop’s coaching and mentoring program for women conductors. Several have gotten podium time at the festival; all have left with a community for life, staying in touch via WhatsApp.

“Conductors never get to see each other — there’s always, like, one in a city at a time,” says Ravinia president and CEO Jeff Haydon. “By the end, it was sort of like a sorority. They were so close they couldn’t say goodbye to each other.”

Though Alsop’s time at Ravinia is ending, the Taki Alsop summit continues elsewhere — as will Breaking Barriers, at a date to be determined. Starting next year, fellows will descend on Prague Summer Nights, a young artists’ program in the Czech metropolis.

A European sojourn is a natural step for the fellowship. Many of the Taki Alsop conductors are Europe-based, and Alsop increasingly is too. Since 2023, she has been the chief conductor of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and the principal guest conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London. She also holds an honorary title from the Vienna Radio Symphony, which she led from 2019 to 2025.

But this homegrown conductor — and champion of American music — is still deeply rooted Stateside. She remains on the faculty of the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, where she led the city’s orchestra from 2007 to 2021. (She is now its music director laureate.) She is also principal guest conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra; for the orchestra’s 2027/28 season, she’s devising a reimagined and semi-staged “Fidelio” with writer and sociologist Reuben Jonathan Miller, until recently a professor at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work.

“We’re adding some characters to bring out the development of the existing characters, and adding dimension to everything. We’re really looking at it through the lens of what’s happening today. So, it’ll be a political statement,” Alsop says.

The thrust of that project — framing the classics with a contemporary twist — could just as easily summarize her Ravinia tenure. In 2023, Alsop interspersed Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with musical interludes by a West African drumming troupe and a jazz combo. A program later this month leads with Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, usually a concert-ender, and concludes with the millennial composer Carlos Simon’s “Good News Mass,” a choral-orchestral blowout and Ravinia co-commission.

That approach is a wide swing from the CSO’s more staid downtown programming. But many of those risks have paid off. Clarinetist John Bruce Yeh, who has known Alsop since both were teenage musicians at the Aspen Music Festival in the 1970s, credits her with “rejuvenating” the festival, starting with her pre-tenure performances of Leonard Bernstein’s “Mass” — staged at the Pavilion in 2018 and 2019, and broadcast for PBS’s “Great Performances.”

“That was a huge achievement,” says Yeh, whose daughter, Food Network star Molly Yeh, also co-curated last year’s gastronomical Breaking Barriers.

Bassoonist Miles Maner, who has worked with Alsop since her subscription debut with the orchestra in 2015, is likewise drawn to her “fearless” programming.

“I can’t think of another conductor with a wider taste in orchestral music than Marin. If it’s written for orchestra, Marin is up for conducting it,” he says. “She’s always keeping an eye on up-and-coming musicians in our field, and ones that have been historically underrepresented. And then, she opens those doors. No one knows better how difficult it is to open new doors in classical music. Marin did that, and she opened some real heavy doors a long time ago.”

Through it all, Alsop very nearly completed a Mahler symphony cycle, conducting all but the Third and Seventh symphonies at Ravinia. (With timing details still to be announced, her future guest appearances will complete the set.) In the meantime, alongside the Philharmonia and Vienna Radio Symphony, she’ll become the first woman in history to record a Mahler cycle, with the first installment due on the Pentatone label next spring.

Between their intricate, demanding writing and philosophical preoccupations, programming Mahler symphonies at Ravinia is, Alsop admits, “always a balancing act.” At the same time, she says, it’s irresistible to pair the nature-loving composer with the verdant park’s setting.

“Because it’s an outdoor venue, you want it to be light and airy and fun and all that. But I think it’s also an opportunity to expose a much broader audience to music that they wouldn’t normally experience, especially in an environment that connects us more directly with nature,” Alsop says.

Happily, the barriers Alsop has made it her life’s mission to break have chipped away somewhat in recent years. For decades, she and JoAnn Falletta of the Buffalo Philharmonic were the only women directing the orchestras of major American cities. Nathalie Stutzmann of the Atlanta Symphony, Xian Zhang of the Seattle Symphony and Elim Chan of the San Francisco Symphony followed suit in recent years, with Chan due to assume the San Francisco mantle in 2027. (Alsop says she has been in touch with Chan. “Let’s support her and enable her to succeed,” she says.)

But the fight continues, Alsop says.

“You also see that the issues that face women sadly remain quite consistent through all the disciplines. The things that have been said to women chefs are things that I’ve heard, that my colleagues have heard,” she says. “United, we have a chance to change the landscape for the future. But alone, we don’t have a chance.”

A new model at Ravinia

With Alsop’s tenure sunsetting, who will succeed her as the CSO’s chief summer conductor — a role that has existed in various guises since 1959 — is now the million-dollar question.

But it might be the wrong one. In an interview with the Tribune, Haydon, the festival’s president and CEO, said succession plans — if they come to pass at all — are on hold through at least 2029, while the festival looks ahead to its 125th anniversary.

“We’re in a few-year transition period,” he says.

Instead, Ravinia will invite annual artists-in-residence to curate festival programming, beginning next year. The first artist-in-residence will be announced as early as the fall.

Haydon admitted that the festival’s first few selections “won’t be surprises.”

“We’ve got a lot of artists that we’ve had long relationships with over the years, and that have interesting connections with Ravinia over time,” he says. “You can bring in an artist and see a lot of different sides of them.”

Ravinia’s new model echoes the Ojai Music Festival’s, in Southern California, where Haydon worked from 2003 to 2012. Because of the festival’s range of programming, he predicted that Ravinia may eventually work with numerous curators across disciplines, as the Los Angeles Philharmonic is exploring. The singer Kurt Elling, for example, already acts as an “advisor” to Ravinia’s jazz programming.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point we have a pop person, whether it’s for one year or a few years,” Haydon says.

• Hannah Edgar is a freelance critic.

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CSO Series

Marin Alsop, conductor

Mahler’s Sixth Symphony at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 23; $17-$111

Breaking Barriers’ “On the Movies” with Laura Karpman at 8 p.m. Friday, July 24; $17-$91

Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony at 7:30 p.m. Friday, July 31; $17-$111

“John Williams and Rachmaninoff” with pianist Emanuel Ax at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 1; $17-$111

Tickets: ravinia.org