If you don’t recognise the woman in the photograph you aren’t keeping up with the big news from planet classical music. Her name is JoAnn Falletta. In her early life she was a virtuoso classical guitarist with a burning desire to be a conductor, but at music college she was told: “Forget it, you’re a girl.”
Happily, Falletta — a determined Italian-American New Yorker — didn’t forget it. And last week, after an online poll conducted by the classical-music website Bachtrack, she was declared the “world’s favourite conductor”.
Which, of course, produced gales of laughter in some musical circles. In the same poll Simon Rattle occupies a lowly ninth place with just 2 per cent of the vote (Falletta got 17 per cent) while such