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> Walter Gillessen, 24, of Cologne, displayed a Germanic taste for heavy percussion. Leading Beethoven's Leonore Overture No. 3, he stood with feet together and labored over the orchestra with the short, snappy jabs of a boxer working out on the heavy bag. Son of a conductor, he feels that conducting opera is least satisfying because "you have to follow the singers. And I want to be the leader."
> Juan Pablo Izquierdo, 30, from Santiago, Chile, is assistant conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra of Chile and director of the music department at the Catholic University of Chile. A onetime composer who studied conducting in Europe, he favored lightly accentuated tempos, kept his gestures close to his chest as though he were playing a poker hand. Crouching, swaying from side to side, he was not afraid to let the orchestra forge ahead under its own steam while he shaped the tones of the violin section.
>Sylvia Carduff, 28, a willowy brunette from Chur, Switzerland, is the first woman ever to win the Mitropoulos competition. She was a sorceress on the podium, weaving richly textured tapestries of sound with balletic waves of her arms. In the fast movements, she hunched over the orchestra and urged them on with the furious scrubbing motions of a woman doing the Monday wash. A student of Von Karajan and graduate of the Lucerne Conservatory, she says she entered the contest because of the reluctance of orchestras to hire a woman conductor. "I wanted to show them," she says, "that a woman can beat men if she has to."