At the heart of that enchanting musical Come from Away, the American Airlines captain Beverley Bass sings a number called ‘Me and the Sky’, reflecting on her career: how she’d dreamed of flying planes since girlhood, then learnt to fly small aircraft working for a mortician, then joined American Airlines and then, as the Second World War pilots retired, moved up the chain to become AA’s first female captain, regularly flying the Paris to Dallas route and even teaching the men how to fly. It’s an inspiring and empowering song about the challenges that so many women faced, and still face, in a man’s world. That song came into my mind as my plane headed towards Atlanta for a few days this spring to witness Nathalie Stutzmann at work with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, whose Music Director she has been since 2022.

Stutzmann has long been on my radar, though for the majority of that time as a singer – the possessor of a rich, and very distinctive, true contralto voice. I particularly love her Brahms, the songs with viola but also the Alto Rhapsody, which she recorded magnificently with Sir John Eliot Gardiner. And she was also a regular in Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage: to hear her sing ‘Wer Sünde tut’ from Cantata No 54, Widerstehe doch der Sünde, with her ‘purple-clad’ (Jonathan Freeman-Attwood in Gramophone, 5/06) voice is to encounter one of the musical joys of that magnificent series.

I first heard her conduct the day after the Westminster terror attack back in 2017. She was on the podium in front of the London Philharmonic Orchestra in a programme that, though planned months, if not years, before, might have been made especially for that poignant occasion: Strauss’s Tod und Verklärung and Mozart’s Requiem (‘May their souls find solace and appeasement in this offering,’ Stutzmann said of the victims – to whom she and the LPO dedicated the concert – as she addressed the audience at the start of the concert). She conducted with real authority and great attention to detail, and clearly had something to say about each piece, showing a particularly instinctive command of the choral music. I knew she was someone to watch, so I tried to hear her whenever I could – in Paris and in London, most recently in Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony and Te Deum with the LSO, with whom she delivered performances that compared very favourably with some rather more high-profile conductors who have been entrusted with recordings of the cycle. (When I mentioned to a friend, the tenor Ed Lyon, that I was off to Atlanta, he told me that he’d jumped in at the eleventh hour for a Bach St Matthew Passion Stutzmann conducted in Liverpool in 2016, adding, of a clearly enjoyable experience: ‘Well, orchestras really like her, and that’s half the battle, isn’t it?’)

Stutzmann, with a gesture of grand théâtre, has chosen the stage of the Atlanta SO’s hall as the setting for our interview, sitting on the chairs of the first desks of violins. As I set up my recorder, she sits at the Steinway and rattles off some rather impressive Bach. Last night, she conducted a pretty traditional programme of Mendelssohn’s The Hebrides, Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto (with Maria João Pires) and Schumann’s Fourth Symphony. It went very well, Pires throwing a few curveballs along the way to add some spice to the proceedings, the orchestra on good form, giving us a punchy, athletic Schumann symphony that had the audience leaping to its feet.

Although her Beverley Bass-like career path is not that high up on my list of topics to discuss, I can’t resist saying that she seems like someone who has found themselves in a very happy place. She laughs in agreement, and points out that the previous week saw her 50th concert with the Atlanta orchestra (a rather glamorous affair with Renée Fleming singing Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs), before offering, unprompted: ‘As a teenager, I always wanted to be a conductor. It was a constant dream of mine. I played in an orchestra as the first bassoon, I played the cello, I was a pianist … I grew up as a pianist. But I was always fascinated by singers because my parents were opera singers; I was always going backstage to watch them. But my mum told me that when I was seven I was in the pit all the time just watching the conductor. So it was very disappointing when I became a teenager because I didn’t know if I could do something really important like that. I certainly knew I couldn’t be anything other than a musician, but I didn’t know what kind. It was very disappointing at that time to realise that, “No, you will not be able to conduct as a woman – society is not ready for it.” But I kept the dream alive. Then it was tricky to find the right moment. When would be a good time for me to do it? And then I think there came a slight change in society, a little bit of a change of mentality. It was also the moment when I felt I was at the peak of my voice, and it was very important for me to do it when my voice was still in good condition so that no one could say, “Oh, she’s started conducting because she has no more voice.” You know how people can be!’

As a singer she appeared with some of the great conductors of our time. She tells me that she auditioned for Herbert von Karajan for Bach’s B minor Mass (there’s a famous video of the conductor working with two other members of what would have been a spectacular cast, Sumi Jo and Cecilia Bartoli). Someone had described her as ‘the new Kathleen Ferrier, bla bla bla’, she tells me, rolling her eyes self-deprecatingly as she says it, ‘so he wanted to hear me. I went to sing for him in Salzburg’s huge Grosses Festspielhaus. I was so nervous. My knees were shaking like hell and I couldn’t see him. And then he said, “I want this girl working with me in my room.” And I said, “Oh my God, he hates it.” And the pianist said, “No, no, that means he really liked it.” And then for two hours I was with Karajan – stopping me at every note and talking about music. It was the most extraordinary moment of my life!’ Sadly, Karajan didn’t live to see the project through, and she never sang with him.

Although she appeared with many leading conductors, she cites two as decisive in her move to taking up the baton: the late Seiji Ozawa and Sir Simon Rattle. ‘They were the two people I relied on because we knew each other well enough that I could say to them, “Please, if I’m just terrible as a conductor, you must let me know. I need the truth. Tell me if I have no talent.” I asked them to be honest as I didn’t want to be ridiculous. And they both said, “You should do it.” That gave me the courage to go on, and I will never be grateful enough for their support. Seiji gave me my first concerts as a conductor, in Japan – with the Saito Kinen Orchestra and Mito Chamber Orchestra, both fabulous ensembles. I remember rehearsing the Mito Chamber Orchestra in The Hebrides – I loved the way the timpanist played, and I said I would like to meet him. The promoter said, “You don’t recognise him?” I said, “No, who is he?” He told me he was the principal of the Vienna Philharmonic. Of course, there are those videos with all the great conductors, and that guy had a beard. But he’d shaved it off, and I didn’t recognise him. So for my first ever truly important concert as a conductor, I had the Vienna Philharmonic’s timpanist!’

With Rattle, Stutzmann shared her concerns about needing to get a good, practical technical grounding in conducting. His response was to suggest she went off to audition for the legendary Finnish conducting teacher Jorma Panula (whose stable of alumni reads like a who’s who of major podium talent of the past 40 years – from Mikko Franck, Sakari Oramo, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Osmo Vänskä, to Klaus Mäkelä and Tarmo Peltokoski). ‘And that’s how I went to the Sibelius Academy. Panula didn’t know who I was, and that was very important to me. He was the ideal teacher. He says two words a day, but those words count for everything. And his classes are the complete opposite of what people imagine a conducting class to be, because he never, ever shows you how to conduct. This was exactly what I needed. If he picks you, it’s because he thinks you have a talent for conducting. He also has this dark humour. I remember one time he said, “You have 12 minutes to rehearse Brahms No 3.” And I said, “Which passage?” His response: “You have 12 minutes – and it has already started.” It had already started! I’ve never forgotten that! As far as technique is concerned, he leaves you to develop your own language and your own personality. He just gives you a few tricks that you will really need with an orchestra, like how to listen, and how to save a situation, and things like that. And he’s filming you all the time! When it’s really, really good, he says so.’

Back in May 1962, the Atlanta Art Association sponsored a fact-finding trip to Paris with a view to creating an ‘arts campus’, a centre for music, theatre and the visual arts. Many of the city’s cultural and civic leaders travelled to the French capital to find out how such an artistically rich city operated. The trip over, the chartered Air France flight left Orly Airport on June 3 to return to the US, but the Boeing 707 crashed on take-off, killing all 106 Atlantan passengers onboard. It was a devastating blow to the city, wiping out an entire stratum of arts administrators and patrons. The trauma was considerable but it also acted as a catalyst, and the Memorial Arts Center (one of the largest in the US and now named the Woodruff Arts Center) was built, opening in 1968.

At that time, the arts centre was home to an art college, an art gallery and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, then in its third decade of existence (it was founded in 1945). The centre’s creation coincided with the arrival of Robert Shaw as the orchestra’s second Music Director – the man whose prowess at training choirs brought him to the attention of Arturo Toscanini. (It’s the Robert Shaw Chorale that contributes so thrillingly to the Italian conductor’s RCA recordings of Aida, Un ballo in maschera and Falstaff, as well as his classic 1948 Beethoven Ninth Symphony.) Not surprisingly, the Atlanta Symphony Chorus became legendary, and its quality has remained one of the city’s glories. (When Donald Runnicles performed Britten’s War Requiem with the Berlin Philharmonic in 2003, he took the Atlanta chorus with him. At the first rehearsal, when the chorus started to sing, the orchestra apparently simply stopped playing, so awestruck were they by the American choir’s sound. Chorus and conductor have returned to Berlin twice more.)

Thanks to his work both with Toscanini and with George Szell, neither exactly a pushover, Shaw came to the attention of Telarc, the Cleveland-based record label created by Jack Renner and Robert Woods, celebrated for the fidelity of its recorded sound. For Telarc in 1978, the Atlanta SO made the first orchestral recording in the US using digital technology (Shaw conducting Stravinsky’s The Firebird Suite of 1919 and excerpts from Borodin’s Prince Igor). Shaw’s 1987 Atlanta recording of the Verdi Requiem for Telarc won a Gramophone Award: Alan Blyth commented in his March 1988 review that ‘I don’t think any of the other sets on CD [including those by Sir Georg Solti, Carlo Maria Giulini and Riccardo Muti] has choral singing to equal that here,’ and of the Atlanta SO he commented, ‘Since 1967 [Shaw] has been Music Director in Atlanta where, as earlier records have shown, he has done sterling work but nothing quite to equal this new set.’ (During my three-day visit, so many people on the Atlanta SO staff lamented the fact that I wouldn’t be hearing the chorus, clearly a source of great pride.)

Shaw was succeeded in 1988 by Yoel Levi, and the relationship with Telarc continued, ushering in a series of fine recordings that invariably showcased the relatively new medium of CD. Robert Spano, now the orchestra’s Music Director Laureate, greatly expanded the Atlanta SO’s diet of new music during his 20-season tenure, quite a lot of it recorded for Telarc, and he also focused on the music of Osvaldo Golijov for DG. He bequeathed an orchestra in good shape to Stutzmann, his successor, but in selecting her, the ensemble clearly wanted to refocus on the core repertoire and benefit from her keen musicianship and appetite for hard work.

David Coucheron – Norwegian by birth, and Curtis-, Juilliard- and Guildhall-trained – has been the Atlanta’s concertmaster since 2010 (when he was the youngest concertmaster of any major US orchestra). He has a ringside seat, and is warm in his admiration for Stutzmann on the podium. ‘When you’re on stage with her,’ he tells me, ‘you feel that every fibre, every bone in her body is just music. Everything she does is for a musical reason. There are no external factors that she’s putting into the mix. She believes really strongly in what she is doing, and it’s for a very good musical reason. And that’s very inspiring. And I think the audience pick up on that – whether subliminally, or not, I don’t know, but we’ve certainly had responses showing that something is clearly working. What I get from her as an orchestral musician is the sense that she comes from a performance background, and she understands things like the differing energies of a rehearsal and a performance, and when you should save things for the evening. She’ll also do things spontaneously in the performance to heighten tension, so it’s not just like a railroad track – she’s a big fan of doing things in concerts that we didn’t really rehearse, to make things more exciting. I think that’s what comes through from her experience as a world-class performer. It’s very exciting!’ Stutzmann evidently works her orchestra hard, often having sectional rehearsals where she can work on tone, colour and, perhaps most strikingly (perhaps because of her singing background), the cultivation of a long lyrical line (very much in evidence in The Hebrides).

The orchestra’s Vice President of Artistic Planning is Stutzmann’s fellow countryman Gaetan Le Divelec, formerly her manager at Askonas Holt, where he spent 21 years. Like few others, he knows what makes her tick and was instrumental in securing some of her earliest conducting engagements and positions: Principal Guest Conductor of Ireland’s RTÉ National SO, Chief Conductor of Norway’s Kristiansand SO and, from 2021 to 2024, Principal Guest Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, with whom she recorded a very fine cycle of the Beethoven piano concertos for BIS with the young Chinese pianist Haochen Zhang (a Gramophone Editor’s Choice in January 2023). ‘I managed her from 2016,’ Le Divelec tells me over lunch. ‘She had already been guest conducting for about two years, largely under the radar. I took over at the point when things were shifting up a gear and she wanted someone who was more focused on managing conductors as opposed to vocalists. I was getting consistently good feedback about her work as a guest conductor, and it always revolved around how deeply she goes into the music. I think here in Atlanta that’s what the orchestra responded to. It was a big change for them. Nathalie could not be more of a polar opposite of her predecessor in the way she works, and when I was approached about her taking this position, one of the things that made it interesting for me was that the orchestra had been bold enough to make that kind of decision.’

Part of that boldness must be the fact that most conductors her age would have about 30 years’ experience under their belt: she has half that. As Le Divelec points out, ‘Obviously she’s having to learn a huge amount of repertoire as she’s only had a relatively short career as a conductor. It’s something I have to factor in during the planning process. It’s a big deal. She has this mountain of repertoire to climb! But she’s meticulous in her preparation. She will never learn something in a hurry. She’ll always drill down to the granular level. While it takes her time to prepare new repertoire, she does bring a wealth of musical experience which goes back to her singing career, and that’s probably the easy part for her. The time she invests in learning new repertoire is, in my experience, more than the average for a conductor. I think the orchestra responded then, and still responds, to her passion and her deep musicianship – things she has in levels that are way above average. When she started guest conducting here, I was still her manager, and the feedback I was getting was that they loved her musicianship.’

The key to Stutzmann’s musical ‘centre of gravity’ lies, perhaps, in her name. ‘My great-great-grandfather was from the Thunersee in Switzerland,’ she explains. ‘He was there at about the time [1886-88] that Brahms was writing his symphonies there. Then the family moved to Münster in Germany, and my great-grandfather fell in love with a French girl. So they moved to Alsace, and that’s how the family – the Stutzmann side – moved to France. So yes, I have these German genes, for sure. I don’t know if it has to do with my romantic soul, but it’s just a repertoire which is the closest to my heart.’

I’m not alone in thinking she has a wealth of experience in Baroque music under her belt, but before she joined Gardiner for his Bach Cantata Pilgrimage she hadn’t actually performed much music from that period. Her diet was mostly of the late 19th century – the great Austro-German song repertoire from Schubert, Schumann and Brahms to Mahler. When she created her chamber orchestra Orfeo 55 (in 2009), it was largely as a response to discovering the wealth of music that perfectly suited her voice. And it was then, she tells me, that she got this false reputation of being a Baroque specialist – ‘which I’ve never been!’ In any case, she hates being pigeonholed. But she’s too good a musician not to have benefited from the numerous lessons that an immersion in Bach and Handel gives – after all, Brahms, one of her idols, acquired each volume of the Bach-Gesellschaft edition as it was published, clearly to great effect!

‘Nothing educates your ears better as a conductor than when you have had the chance to approach every kind of repertoire. It informs the way you will be as a conductor later on. And I am absolutely convinced I wouldn’t be the conductor I am today without everything I’ve absorbed from those around me. Often I’d just say, “Can I come to a rehearsal?” Also working with amazing pianists – I learnt so much from Inger Södergren, my pianist for 20 years. It was just a permanent school. I’m very lucky I’ve had this, although a part of me would have wished to have started conducting earlier.’

One of her passions is for the music of Wagner and Bruckner. Last summer (and repeated again this summer), Stutzmann conducted Tannhäuser at Bayreuth, clambering through the glass ceiling broached by Oksana Lyniv in 2021. (Her work there in 2023 earned her the title Best Conductor at the 2024 Oper! Awards – quite an honour from a German magazine that must know a thing or two about Wagner conducting.) Earlier this year she conducted Der fliegende Holländer in Turin, and she reintroduced her Atlanta audiences to Bruckner’s Seventh and Ninth Symphonies as well as his Te Deum. ‘They said we’d have no one in the hall, so I had to fight hard – and it was sold out for every concert. They were just open-mouthed. I mean, it’s not that difficult to listen to Bruckner, but it was such a great surprise to see how well it went down.’

The ‘hook’ for featuring Stutzmann on our front cover is the release by Erato of her first recording with the Atlanta SO: Dvořák’s New World Symphony and the American Suite. It was made live, as a kind of tribute to her arrival in the US. Most orchestras could play the symphony in their sleep, so I ask her how she approached it? Did she strip it right back and start again from the ground up, saying, ‘How does this thing work?’ Her reply: ‘It’s exactly that. If you look at my programming, you will see that it’s my favourite thing to do – to take works that everyone knows, or thinks they know well, and just do them from scratch. You realise very quickly in rehearsal that there are so many details in the score that no one plays. So, for this recording, first of all we used the new edition by Bärenreiter. I should say publicly that I’m a Bärenreiter ambassador – but it’s not about that, it’s about the fact that the score just contains so many indications in terms of articulation, accents, the sforzati. There are so many legendary recordings of the work which are beautiful, but most of those details you can’t hear. So it’s always a joy for me to point them out and just try to get them from the orchestra. But most of all, I try to understand the meaning of it. Why does he write this? Why does he write that? How does this work? The first time I experienced this was when I rather crazily programmed the New World with the New York Philharmonic – forgetting that they created the piece! I did wonder whether I’d been too bold, and I was a little bit nervous at the first rehearsal, but I was so glad when some very old players in the orchestra who’d played it so many times responded to this “refreshed” approach. I also went to the New York Philharmonic library, which has the manuscript complete with its markings – it’s just extraordinary. Then I came here and did the recording. We had to do it live, which makes it very challenging. And, as always, there’s very little time. But the scores were prepared, with all my markings, to save time. And it seems that the way I asked them to play was extremely different from what they had done in the past. It was hard, hard work because it’s much more difficult to change habits than to be set on automatic pilot, or what’s supposed to be tradition.’ I tell her that Semyon Bychkov has forbidden his orchestra, the Czech Philharmonic, from playing the New World – usually barely rehearsed – on its tours to China without him. ‘Routine music-making is one of the most catastrophic things for any conductor,’ was her response.

Signing to Warner Classics’ Erato label has reunited Stutzmann with the company’s President, and one of the classical recording industry’s titans, Alain Lanceron, with whom she first worked back in the 1980s when it was EMI. ‘He asked me to sing a small role in a recording of Albéric Magnard’s opera Guercoeur – a very Wagnerian piece. Funnily enough, it was the first time I’d ever travelled on a plane! The sessions were in Toulouse, with Michael Plasson conducting. But the most exciting part was that the cast included Hildegard Behrens – she was something of a hero of mine. (I’d heard her at Bayreuth when I was at the Sibelius Academy as a student.) So Alain and I have grown up together. When I founded Orfeo 55, he recorded us and now he’s followed me to Atlanta! What I love about him is that he’s kept that same freshness and passion that he must have had as a teenager. And he completely understands and respects your artistic wishes and repertoire. If you don’t like to work with this or that artist, he won’t force it – he understands the importance of the human relationship in music-making. And this is very rare.’

When I ask her when she and Lanceron first encountered each other, she gives a rather disconcerting reply: ‘The first time I met Alain, I was in the body of my mum!’ She must have seen my alarm … ‘It’s an extraordinary story! He’s from Nice, and he would often go to the opera with his dad, who loved opera. My mother [Christiane Stutzmann – Nathalie took her mother’s name] was singing Desdemona opposite the Otello of Mario Del Monaco [in 1965]. My mum was seven months pregnant with me, but it didn’t show – she didn’t put on a lot of weight, and she had a very beautiful dress which also hid it! Alain was something like 16 and he took a photograph of my mother, which he has showed me. So I’ve known him a very long time!’

As I return to Europe, inspired as so often by the chemistry that can happen between a conductor and a hundred orchestral musicians, I reflect that not once during my trip has anyone mention Stutzmann’s gender. She’s earned everything she’s achieved thanks to her fine musicianship, her ambition for her orchestra and her infectious charm.

This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Gramophone. Whether you want to enjoy Gramophone online, explore our unique Reviews Database or our huge archive of issues stretching back to April 1923, or simply receive the magazine through your door every month, we've got the perfect subscription for you. Find out more at magsubscriptions.com