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It was the early 1980s. At the University of São Paulo's University Campus, Ligia Amadio, a student at the Polytechnic School at the time, gave a ride to a friend, also an engineering student, who was taking an assessment to join the university choir. When they arrived at the audition site, the music director insisted that Amadio also try out for a spot, as Naief Haddad tells Folhapress.
She hesitated, but ended up taking a chance and was accepted. From then on, music regained the space it had had in her childhood - at the age of five, fascinated by the pipe organ of the Santo Antonio do Pari church in downtown São Paulo, she asked her parents if she could study piano.
Amadio completed her degree at the Polytechnic School, but never worked as an engineer. She studied conducting at the State University of Campinas and then improved her skills in dozens of other courses in Brazil and abroad.
Four decades after the warning that her calling was far from numbers, she is facing one of the greatest challenges of her career. Since February of this year, she has been in charge of the Minas Gerais Symphony Orchestra (OSMG), founded in 1976, with the goal of making it one of the country's leading orchestras.
In its almost half-century history, the OSMG has already welcomed a number of guest conductors, but Amadio is the first to assume the position of principal conductor, a pioneering role with which she is well accustomed.
Before her, no woman had held this position at the National Symphony Orchestra in Rio de Janeiro in the 1990s. This was also the case during her time at the philharmonic orchestras of Mendoza, Argentina; Bogotá, Colombia; and Montevideo, Uruguay, among others.
A career like this, in which the name of this São Paulo native always appears associated with the adjective "first", indicates competence, of course. But not only that. It shows how conducting is still an excessively male profession, which is far from being a Brazilian peculiarity. "My European colleagues say that here (in South America) there is more openness than there, that is, this is a worldwide condition," says she, who prefers to be called maestra rather than maestrina.
"The world of classical music has always had difficulty accepting female conductors and, in the rare case that one was tolerated with the baton, it was always as a guest, never as a principal. We had, for example, Joanidia Sodré from Rio Grande do Sul conducting the Berlin Philharmonic as a guest in 1930, but a principal position, here, was always virtually impossible," says Irineu Franco Perpetuo, a classical music critic.
"Before Ligia, I only remember... Ligia herself, at the Campinas Symphony Orchestra, at the Osusp (USP Symphony Orchestra) and at the National Symphony Orchestra," adds Perpetuo.
But he ponders: "There have been examples of women occupying important positions in choral conducting in Brazil: Cleofe Person de Mattos, Mara Campos, Naomi Munakata and, currently, MaÃra Ferreira. But orchestral conducting is still extremely exclusive." According to the critic, the most important thing about Amadio having reached this level "is to show that Brazilian women can be principal conductors (he emphasizes the word 'principal') in Brazil. Without a concrete example to look up to, young female musicians may feel discouraged and give up on the path of conducting." A hypothetical scenario with more female conductors in top orchestras leads to a question for which there is no definitive answer: is there a feminine way to conduct? Karine Oliveira, head of the second violin section of the OSMG, spent a lot of time with Amadio this year. For the violinist, it is the details that differentiate a female conductor from her male counterpart. "The more meticulous a conductor's gaze is, the greater the possibility of the orchestra becoming bigger. And we women see details that sometimes go unnoticed by men."
In the midst of rehearsals for Beethoven's 9th Symphony, which will be performed by the orchestra from Minas Gerais on December 20 and 21, Oliveira comments on the way Amadio conducts the orchestra. "She is very polite, but she never stops demanding things from us, always demanding the music, which is above all else."
In her travels around the world, Amadio inspires admiration, as is the case with the OSMG violinist. But her presence also makes people uncomfortable. "Musicians are sensitive to the artist in front of them, they get emotional, they applaud. There is usually no discrimination. I have suffered more reactions like this from the administration staff of the places I have been, whether they were men or women. The female figure was sometimes shocking," she says.
In 2016, after an episode of sexism - "I can't remember what it was, it was certainly some kind of mistreatment" - she wrote an email to three colleagues: Vânia Pajares, a conductor in successful Brazilian musicals; Claudia Feres, principal conductor of the Jundiaà Symphony Orchestra; and Érika Hindrikson, of the São Paulo Municipal Youth Symphony Orchestra.
"I asked if they had faced situations similar to the one I had experienced, and