Desert Island Discs: Archive 2011-2015 - Marin Alsop

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the conductor, Marin Alsop.

Music Director of both The Baltimore Symphony and The Sao Paulo State Symphony Orchestra, she is a maestro with a mission: music, she believes, is a powerful vehicle for social change.

She had the good fortune to be brought up in "a household that exuded possibility" and was filled with music - both her parents played professionally. She took up the piano aged two, swapped to the violin at 6 and then aged 9, saw Leonard Bernstein at work and made the decision that conducting would be her career. Much later she would go on to be mentored by the man who inspired her.

It bores her when interviewers ask why there aren't more women conductors - nonetheless her capacity to maximise the few opportunities she was given as a young woman making her way in an exclusively mans' world gives one a flavour of her indomitability. Her day-to-day job after all is working out how to convince 100 experts to do what she wants.

She says, "maybe it's being an only child: you want to bring people together and create this big family feeling, I don't know what it is but I always gravitated towards organising."

Producer: Cathy Drysdale

Published on Sunday, 28th September 2014.

Available Podcasts from Desert Island Discs: Archive 2011-2015

Subscribe to Desert Island Discs: Archive 2011-2015

We are not the BBC, we only list available podcasts. To find out more about the programme including episodes available on BBC iPlayer, go to the Desert Island Discs: Archive 2011-2015 webpage.