Classical musicians generally shy away from making political statements. Leonard Bernstein and radical chic notwithstanding, they tend to cling to the illusion of an art that floats above politics, formally pure and spiritually aloof. The Kansas-born mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, whom I profile in this week’s issue of the magazine, bucks the trend. Two years ago, she denounced Sam Brownback, the governor of Kansas, after he eliminated arts funding in the state. (Perhaps not least because of her efforts, arts funding was later partially reinstated.) And this past summer, DiDonato began speaking out against Russia's new law against gay “propaganda,” dedicating her performance of “Over the Rainbow” at the Last Night of the Proms, in London, to those affected by the law and the violence surrounding it. She also told me that she had turned down an invitation from the Novaya Opera, in Moscow, as a result of the legislation, which Vladimir Putin signed in June. She hesitated to do so, well aware that her own country has been anything but a moral beacon in all manner of ways, but in the end she couldn’t bring herself to go. “I’m not a fan of silence,” she wrote in a post on her blog.

The Russian law has roiled the classical world as few other political issues have in recent years. As I note in a column this week, loud protests greeted the opening night of “Eugene Onegin” at the Met, on account of Valery Gergiev and Anna Netrebko’s ties to Putin. (On my blog, you can see a campaign video that Gergiev made for Putin last year: “One needs to be able to hold oneself … Presidentially … so that people reckon with the country. I don’t know if it’s fear? Respect? Reckoning.”) With Gergiev presenting three all-Russian concerts at Carnegie Hall in coming weeks, there will be occasion to reflect further on this conductor’s political entanglements.

The gay issue was not the only one hovering at the Last Night of the Proms—a hugely popular annual event that involves much flag-waving and collective singing. The fact that Marin Alsop presided over the affair highlighted the severe underrepresentation of women in the ranks of leading conductors. This was the first time in the hundred-and-nineteen-year history of the Proms that a woman had been chosen to conduct at the Last Night. The problem is not that there is any lack of female conductors—the journalist and blogger Jessica Duchen has drawn up a list of nearly a hundred of them—but that there is “one heck of a glass ceiling regarding where they work,” as Duchen says. Alsop, as the music director of the Baltimore Symphony, and of the São Paulo Symphony, is one of very few women to have cracked the ceiling and reached the top of the profession. “I’m still quite shocked that it can be 2013 and there can still be firsts for women,” Alsop told the crowd.

In 2008, in a column about Alsop, I wrote, “The problem isn’t that misogyny runs rampant in the music world; it’s that the classical business is temperamentally resistant to novelty, whether in the form of female conductors, American conductors, younger conductors, new music, post-1900 concert dress, or concert-hall color schemes that aren’t corporate beige.” I was naïve about the degree to which male-chauvinist attitudes persist. Shortly before Alsop’s Last Night appearance, the young Russian-born conductor Vasily Petrenko, who leads the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic and the Oslo Philharmonic, declared that orchestras “react better” to male conductors and that “a sweet girl on the podium can make one’s thoughts drift towards something else.” Petrenko—who, ironically, has been marketed on the basis of his handsome looks—later apologized, and claimed, “What I said was meant to be a description of the situation in Russia, my homeland.”

There is more where that came from. Recently, I came across an interview that the conductor Yuri Temirkanov—the longtime music director of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, and, as it happens, Alsop’s predecessor at the Baltimore Symphony—gave last year to the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta. A formidable figure in Russian music, Temirkanov served as a mentor both to Gergiev and later to Petrenko. The interviewer, the Paris-based pianist and composer Elena Gantchikova, deserves credit for grilling him. A Russian-speaking friend provided this translation:

Q.: In your opinion, could a woman conduct?

A.: In my view, no.

Q.: Why not?!

A.: I don’t know if it’s God’s will, or nature’s, that women give birth and men do not. That’s something that no one takes offense at. But if you say that a women can’t conduct, then everyone’s offended. As Marx said, in response to the question “What’s your favorite virtue in a woman?”—“Weakness.” And this is correct. The important thing is, a woman should be beautiful, likable, attractive. Musicians will look at her and be distracted from the music!

Q.: Why? There are women in the orchestra; people indifferent to a women’s charms. Besides, how many times would you be enraptured by appearances? After all, it’s something you tire of, and switch to the heart of the question. Statistically, of course, there are women conductors.

A.: Yes, they do exist.

Q.: Nevertheless, you maintain that these are less than women, or less than conductors.

A.: No, simply that in my opinion, it’s counter to nature.

Q.: And what is it in the conductor’s profession that runs counter to a woman’s nature? That’s counter to the essence of the conductor’s profession?

A.: The essence of the conductor’s profession is strength. The essence of a woman is weakness.

The principle of male power is so deeply ingrained in the mythology of the conductor that sentiments such as these are still not uncommon, although they are seldom expressed so bluntly in public. The bias against female musicians is hardly confined to Russia—and it should be remembered that composers such as Galina Ustvolskaya, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Elena Firsova achieved prominence in the Soviet Union at a time when their female counterparts in the West were struggling for recognition. The Vienna Philharmonic appears at Carnegie Hall season after season, despite the small number of women in its ranks. (It began admitting women only in 1997.) When Jane Glover leads “The Magic Flute” at the Met in December—in an abridged holiday version—she will become only the third female conductor in the company’s history. The stiflingly male atmosphere in the upper echelons of classical music reinforces the image of a dim, hidebound art, out of tune with modern reality. If people in the classical world are uncomfortable with taking a political stance, they might at least worry about appearing to be stupid.

The conductor Marin Alsop at the Last Night of the Proms. Photograph by Carl Court/AFP/Getty.