The top of the classical music world remains a male bastion because of hostile attitudes, according to arts boss Jude Kelly.
The Southbank Centre’s artistic director, 59, said male orchestra directors need to make a conscious effort to promote female talent and not just appoint in their own image. “This is not about women doing it for themselves,” she said, “it’s about chaps who run orchestras and people who run music colleges getting behind women.”
Ms Kelly believed the top of the industry was “a place of too great an absence” for women. She said at the launch of the centre’s new classical music season: “Women still tell me they find orchestras can be hostile and undermine them deliberately, that executive directors can be sceptical.”
She cited all the men who lined up to query the wisdom of female conductors when Marin Alsop became the first woman to conduct the Last Night of the Proms.
Paris Conservatoire head Bruno Mantovani said the job was too “physically testing” for women.
