‘Madame Maestro’ to Conduct in Own Backyard

When conductor Kate Tamarkin made her debut with the Dallas Symphony in June, the event made the front page of the Dallas papers.

“They had pictures of ‘Madame Maestro’ on it,” Tamarkin, 33, said wryly in a recent interview. Once the novelty wears off, she said, “I don’t think people will talk about it so much.”

But people do want to talk about it. There are still few women on the nation’s podiums--and none at the helm of the big, prestigious orchestras. Tamarkin, newly appointed associate conductor of the Dallas Symphony, is one of the few.

She will lead the Pacific Symphony on Saturday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre. The next day, as part of her duties as one of two 1989 conducting fellows of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Institute, she will lead the L.A. Phil in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto at Hollywood Bowl.

So inevitably she must deal with the questions about what prospects for advancement there are for women in one of the most male-dominated of all professions.

“I think that conducting and composing are always seen as the last bastions of . . . I hate to say ‘male supremacy’ because I don’t feel like that--male dominance, yes--and my feeling is that conducting fell even later than composing. . . .

“I think it has to do with authority. Conducting is a re-creative thing to do, but it has also to do with giving direction and guidance, and these are things we’re not used to seeing women do, except perhaps to their children or perhaps to their Sunday School choirs. So I think that’s new to people.”

As a result, she said, “women don’t have role models as conductors, so we do figure it out as we go, even down to what we wear, which is what a lot of people are interested in.”

And what about sex bias?

“It has happened more with amateurs than professionals,” she said. “I had a choir in Appleton, Wis., and someone quit because he wasn’t going to sing for a woman. Obviously, that was his problem.”

She added: “The criticism of women is sometimes, well, they don’t know how to be in charge. I think that’s valid--not that all women don’t know how to be in charge. But it’s something that we haven’t had as much practice at, and when women try and be like men when they’re in charge, I think that doesn’t always wear.

“When we are comfortable with ourselves--and I shouldn’t say ourselves as a collective--the more persons are comfortable with themselves and how they are, the better they do their job. So I try--and this is something I’m trying very hard--to be myself. . . . Because, Lord knows, we’re not going to be anybody else better than we’re going to be ourselves.”

Tamarkin’s journey to the podium began indirectly. She grew up in Laguna Beach, taught herself to play the French horn (“My sister played French horn in the Laguna Beach High School band . . . and if she was going to play the French horn, I was going to, too”), got a music scholarship to UC Irvine, then transferred to Chapman College in Orange to study music.

Prompted by her mother--who told her, “If you’re going to go into music, please do something practical with it”--Tamarkin got a degree in music education.

In her third year, she took a conducting class taught by (Chapman Symphony conductor) John Koshak--and the experience proved a turning point.

“I thought to myself, conducting would be so self-conscious,” she said. “You wave your arms and everybody looks at you and this would be a horrible thing. And I got up the first day and conducted, and (Koshak) wrote me a little letter (later) saying, ‘This is what you ought to be doing, you have a flair for conducting. You should work at it. You could really do well.’ ”

But her first thoughts upon graduating were to earn a living, and she began to teach in the Irvine public schools. One year of that proved enough, however.

“I had a 7:30 a.m. string orchestra and then three classes of guitar--junior high--with 90 kids, 30 per class,” she said. “They came in and wanted to play Led Zeppelin. We had a little problem.

“Then I would go teach elementary school instruments across the street at the elementary school. This was all the same day. So after a year of this, I resigned.”

She went to Northwestern University for a master’s degree in conducting, and while there got a guest-conducting appearance with the Fox Valley Symphony in Appleton. Soloist on that concert was cellist Lynn Harrell, who will be playing under her direction again at the Bowl.

“I always make a joke: he got a standing ovation, I got the job,” she said. “But he was wonderful. I didn’t tell him it was my first concert. I didn’t tell anybody that. But I got a job out of it.”

Also on that program: the Overture to Wagner’s “Rienzi” and Hindemith’s “Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Weber.”

“I remember my teacher at the time saying to me, ‘We’ve got to pick big pieces so that they don’t think you can only conduct soft music. If you can do Wagner and Hindemith, they’re not going to think you can’t do whatever else.’ ”

She spent four years as music director of the Fox Valley Symphony and began to work on a doctorate at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. Last year, she was one of three young conductors picked by Leonard Bernstein to lead the Chicago Symphony while he was doing a stint as guest conductor.

“The lucky thing for me is that the Pacific Symphony saw that and so did the Dallas. And that’s where this whole thing started.”

Tamarkin regards herself as one of the “long shots” in the Pacific’s search for a new music director. “Yes, of course I’d be interested,” she said. “But I think my job now is to put on the best possible concert this weekend and let it go from there.”

Is her family coming to the concert?

“They’re all coming--everybody’s coming, everyone I ever knew is,” she said.

“I’ve been gone from the West Coast for 10 years, and having grown up in Laguna, taught in Irvine, it’s very meaningful to me to come back to Irvine and to Southern California. This event is going to have great emotional meaning for me because it’s like a full circle.”

Kate Tamarkin will conduct the Pacific Symphony in music by Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Falla and Stravinsky at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday at Irvine Meadows Amphitheatre, 8800 Irvine Center Drive, in Irvine. Featured soloist will be violinist Elmar Oliveira. (Gates open for picnicking at 6 p.m.) Tickets: $10.50 to $39.50. (Lawn seating for $8.) Information: (714) 973-1300.