Most people picture a symphony conductor in the image of Leonard Bernstein. A wild, white-haired gesticulator in a tux and tails. A maestro, not a maestra.
Kate Tamarkin has lived with those sexist stereotypes since she found her forte nearly 20 years ago. Now in her fifth season with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra, the 39-year-old conductor is living proof that a woman’s place is at the podium. Last year she had her way with the epic Verdi Requiem. Next week she’ll try Beethoven’s Ninth on for size.
“Meaty works” are one reason Tamarkin finally gave up her old gig at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. “I would never have been able to do this in Dallas,” she says. “There I could do ‘Peter and the Wolf.'” Hers was a calculated risk in a limited market, where a few slots at the top are occupied by old white men reluctant to pass the baton. Until she heads up a “major” orchestra, Tamarkin is conducting her life on a freelance basis. When she is not commanding concerts in Vermont, she moonlights as music director of the East Texas Symphony.
“It tends to be the rule rather than the exception,” Tamarkin says of her double-barreled life of meetings, rehearsals and red-eye flights. Being single helps a bit — Tamarkin shares her Texas townhouse with a beloved 17-year-old cat. But national notoriety can be lonely, and occasional big-budget job opportunities do little for aching shoulders after a long night with Beethoven. Nursing a bad cold in her Church Street office in Burlington, Tamarkin puts her position in perspective: “My joke is if you feel like a truck ran over you, you have done a good job.”
California-born Tamarkin has come a long way from Laguna Beach — a symphony-free surf town where music meant joining the school marching band. Without the benefit of real lessons, the 14-year-old Joan Baez fan picked up the French horn. Her first encounter with a real orchestra was forgettable. “I got to sit on the bleachers and watch Zubin Mehta conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic,” she says. Nothing clicked. “It never occurred to me that I would be doing what he did.”
A few years later, she discovered her own directorial talent in a conducting class historically dreaded by music majors at nearby Chapman College. “It was just this horrible thing and you had to do it,” Tamarkin recalls. But she surprised herself — and everyone else in the class — with her natural kinesthetic response to music. “A conductor has to have the same sense of music as motion that a dancer does,” she explains. “I got up the first day, had a great time and the teacher wrote me a little note that said, ‘This is what you ought to do.'”
No doubt even as a young woman, the tall, dark-haired Tamarkin was a striking presence on stage. Critics have described her conducting style as “athletic” and “vigorous.” Her only reservation was gender. That she didn’t know any women conductors “really brought me up short,” Tamarkin acknowledges. Thankfully, her teacher became the first of many male mentors, including Leonard Bernstein, who assisted in confidence-building. Women have been less helpful, Tamarkin says diplomatically. Her one encounter with a female conductor from the Netherlands was one of the “least supportive” of her career.
Tamarkin graduated from Chapman with a degree in music education — “for my mother,” she jokes. But her first job — teaching music in three public schools a day — was an unmitigated disaster. She fled for grad school, and after a year at Northwestern, took a similar job in the Chicago area. She was teaching 32 classes a week when a call came from the Fox Valley Symphony in Wisconsin. The community orchestra was looking for a new conductor, and wanted to make its search “more interesting.” Her interview took the form of a concert — as it did 10 years later in Vermont. “The soloist got a standing ovation,” Tamarkin says, “and I got the job.”
It was the first of a slew of lucky breaks for Tamarkin, a career crescendo that started after she took a leave to earn her doctorate at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. First she got into Tanglewood Music Festival on a fellowship. Then she was one of three young conductors chosen in a nationwide competition to direct the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the tutelage of Leonard Bernstein. Without prompting, she produces the autographed score of West Side Story inscribed, “For my Kate, not the shrew, but kiss me anyway, and brava.”
Talent scouts from the Dallas Symphony also caught the concert in Chicago, which coincided with a very large convention of the American Symphony Orchestra League. Dallas offered Tamarkin a job as associate music director — and she became its first female conductor in history. “I ended up going from this little bitty orchestra in Wisconsin to the Dallas Symphony,” Tamarkin says. In budgetary terms, which is how symphonies size each other up, it was a $ 16 million leap.
Dallas was a good move, at least initially. New facilities. Television coverage. “It was a good place for a fledgling conductor to get a lot of experience — in a hurry,” Tamarkin explains. But her opportunities amounted to whatever the higher-ups turned down: holiday pops concerts, early-morning kids’ shows, private parties. Tamarkin knew what she was getting into — aspiring associate conductors are expected to move on. The goal is to find your own orchestra, and give it your own sound, according to LeAnn Binford of the Dallas Symphony. “A lot of the young conductors have had to go to Europe to find that,” she says. “Kate has been able to succeed in the United States.” She was the number-two candidate in a recent conductor search at The New Mexico Symphony.
Signature sound does not come easy. By the time you see arms flailing, the bulk of the musical work is done. The conductor has studied the piece, and made her own decisions about the original intentions of the composer. “Beethoven writes that he wants this loud, but how loud?” Tamarkin says by way of demonstrating the kinds of interpretive choices she has to make. And there is the small problem of conveying that information through gesture to members of the orchestra — certain beat patterns are universal but each conductor expresses them differently.
In performance a conductor is as much dancer as musician — with all the exhaustion that comes after contorting for two hours with her arms in the air. Tamarkin wakes up with sore muscles after every concert and takes all day to prepare for the next performance. She also has a hard time finding dresses that provide her room to move in all the right places. On at least two occasions she has blown through seams on stage: Once it was a sleeve on live television. Another time, a big wide Velcro belt. “I remember there was this big downbeat, and the thing went rrrrrip. I heard this awful sound and suddenly felt very free.”
Tamarkin uses elements of Tai Chi in her not-always-daily workout. She is also a fervent vegetarian and animal lover — funky details not immediately apparent from her straight, mainstream demeanor. For Tamarkin, a relaxing day would involve petting dogs on Church Street. Lots of them. A not so relaxing day — like this one — would probably involve a morning interview, fundraising lunch and afternoon board meeting — what Tamarkin chalks up to “ambassadorial duties.”
She takes them seriously, though, ever since a brief encounter in the powder room of the Chicago Conrad Hilton clued her in to the fact that others have a stake in her conducting career. After her Bernstein debut, three women ambushed her in the bathroom to thank her for making history. “I realized in one sense this has nothing to do with Kate Tamarkin at all,” she says, “but what a female figure represented to other women up there.” Her baton, in other words, doubles as a torch.
This article appears in October 11 • 1995.
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