Antonia Brico

Antonia Brico (born June 26, 1902, Rotterdam, Netherlands—died August 3, 1989, Denver, Colorado, U.S.) was a Dutch-born American conductor and pianist, the first woman to gain wide recognition and acceptance as a leader of world-class symphony orchestras.

Brico moved from her native Netherlands to the United States with her parents in 1908 and settled in California. She graduated from high school in Oakland in 1919, by which time she had become an accomplished pianist and had made a small beginning toward her conducting career. In 1923 she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, having been an assistant to the director of the San Francisco Opera during her college years, and she then studied piano under various teachers, including Sigismund Stojowski. In 1927 she entered the Berlin State Academy of Music, and in 1929 she became the first American to graduate from its master class in conducting. During that period and for three years afterward, she was also a pupil of Karl Muck, conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic.

Brico’s debut as a professional conductor came in February 1930 with the Berlin Philharmonic. That appearance, as well as subsequent ones with the Los Angeles Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, and the Hamburg Philharmonic, was highly praised by critics. In January 1933 she made her New York debut as guest conductor of the Musicians’ Symphony Orchestra. Guest appearances in Detroit, Michigan, in Buffalo, New York, in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere followed. In 1934 she agreed to become conductor of the new Women’s Symphony Orchestra, which presented two concerts in New York in early 1935 and then performed full concert seasons annually until 1942. In January 1939, when men were admitted, it became the Brico Symphony Orchestra. At Lewisohn Stadium in July 1938 she was the first woman to conduct the New York Philharmonic, and in 1939 she conducted the Federal Orchestra in concerts at the New York World’s Fair. In 1946 she made an extensive European tour in which she appeared as both a pianist and a conductor. During the tour she was invited by composer Jean Sibelius to conduct the Helsinki Symphony Orchestra in a program of his music.

After the mid-1940s, perhaps as her novelty disappeared, she found it increasingly difficult to gain serious attention in the traditionally male field she had chosen, her manifest ability notwithstanding. In 1942 she settled in Denver, Colorado, where she founded a Bach Society and the Women’s String Ensemble. She also founded (1948) the Denver Businessmen’s Orchestra—renamed the Brico Symphony Orchestra from 1968 to the mid-1980s; now the Denver Philharmonic Orchestra—which she conducted until her retirement in 1985. In 1956–58 she was guest conductor of the Boise (Idaho) Civic Symphony, and she continued to appear as guest conductor with orchestras around the world, including the Japan Women’s Symphony. In 1974 a documentary film about her life titled Antonia: A Portrait of a Woman, made by Jill Godmilow and Brico’s former student, folksinger Judy Collins, led to invitations to conduct at Lincoln Center in New York City, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.