ABSTRACT
Women conductors are very rare in music, but recently one of them appeared at London’s superb Festival Hall. Nothing like it had ever been known before [as she conducted] a professional orchestra and a crack London choir in Beethoven’s Choral Symphony … one of the Everests of music. It makes exceptional demands on the conductor’s nerve, stamina, intellect, imagination, emotions. A woman is no more expected to conduct it than build a Great Boulder Dam, pilot a space rocket, buy ten million surplus Army razor blades, put up a new deep-sea diving record or win a cheese-eating contest. 1
