From a start like that – starting your marriage with a divorce – the only way on is up. It was stressful, but it made me realise that in this work being liked is not important. My job is to make top-quality music, and to make an orchestra successful. Now my concerts are sold out in Baltimore – maybe because people think they’ll see another fight.”She’s been a fighter since she went to a Leonard Bernstein concert at nine.

“What I registered was his joy, his bottomless enthusiasm, his energy, the sense that he was hugging the audience – I instantly knew what I wanted to do.” She’d been playing the violin in an orchestra since she was seven, and had persuaded her father – who now makes her batons – to buy her miniature scores, so that she could get the whole picture. “I was curious about how everything fitted together and who did what when.”As a teenager, she routinely got friends to join her in quintet versions of Mozart symphonies, and when she went to study at the Juilliard she made three attempts to join the conducting programme. After her third failure, she decided to set up her own orchestra, which, by specialising in reviving forgotten American gems, became a runaway success. She owes her conducting skills to persuading everyone who conducted her to give her a lesson, or at least a few tips.Now she teaches it. The commonest error musicians make when they move from playing to conducting is to assume there’s no real technique involved, she says. “And compared with playing the violin – the athleticism involved in becoming an international instrumentalist is supreme – there isn’t much. But tremendous physical skill is required to be a conductor too – you can’t just get up on the podium and assume you’ve got it.

It’s all about body language, and it’s not a matter of just keeping time.”The spate of articles about Alsop “poking her baton through the glass ceiling” has now died down, but the gender issue remains her prime concern. She observes with pained surprise that there are no more women conductors now than there were when she started 20 years ago. She’s inaugurated a scheme whereby young female conductors can shadow her as she goes about her work, and she’s donating most of a large cash prize she recently won to help finance their studies.She admits that sexist prejudice may always run deep “If I’m aggressive, people sometimes say it’s over the top. If a male conductor is aggressive, he’s often praised for his strength. What I aim for, and try to inculcate in my students, is strength without any adjective associated with it We must de-genderise conducting. This applies to male conductors too, if they want to be truly great.”‘Independent readers’ can buy two tickets for the price of one to see Marin Alsop conduct the ‘Requiem’ by Gabriel Faur?n 13 July, 8pm, at St Paul’s Cathedral, London EC4 Ticket prices start at £10 Call 08451 207 502 and quote “Independent offer” Subject to availability..