Conductor Strives to Make a Symphony of Note

As an orchestral conductor, Lois Johnson has accomplished at least one feat that maestros such as Leonard Bernstein and Zubin Mehta will never equal.

“I conducted when I was 7 1/2 months pregnant,” Johnson said. “It’s a real trick.”

Johnson is the 30-year-old music director of the San Fernando Valley Symphony Orchestra, a group that in its 42 years has never really been taken too seriously by serious music lovers; a group that used to be a good place for college music majors to get in a little practice and amateurs to have a little fun.

A group that would have disappeared entirely in 1985, but for the intervention of Johnson and her husband, William.

Teetering on the brink of collapse due to community disinterest and nonsupport, the symphony at that time was rescued by the Johnsons, who had moved to California from New York via Sacramento and Tokyo (William Johnson is a lawyer who specializes in representing Japanese businesses.) With help from some Japanese investor friends and Chevron Corporation, the orchestra has returned from the edge of the abyss. Today, Lois Johnson is at the helm musically, William Johnson is president of the group’s board of directors and the ensemble is composed almost entirely of professionals (the concertmaster, Barry Socher, also plays violin in the Los Angeles Philharmonic).

It is, in short, teetering on the brink of, well, being taken seriously.

With a decent (but still temporary) hall to play in, and programs that feature both standard repertoire and “fine” movie music, as Johnson put it, plus carefully thought-out children’s concerts, the orchestra is making its biggest push yet. Its final concert of the season, tomorrow at 8 p.m. at Birmingham High School in Van Nuys, will be one of its most ambitious to date, featuring Brahms’ Second Symphony and the music of Los Angeles composer Bruce Broughton--his “Three Incongruities For Violin and Orchestra,” with soloist Endre Granat, and his score from the film “Silverado.” (See Preview on Page 19.)

“Right now,” Johnson said flatly, “the Valley has a fully professional orchestra--the players are some of the best players in the country.”

Best players in the country? A little hype here? If they’re that good, why aren’t they in the Los Angeles Philharmonic? Simply because, Johnson explained, the market is glutted.

“Look, there’s one position for first flute in the Los Angeles Philharmonic,” she said from the living room of her La Canada home, “but there’s certainly more than one great flutist in Los Angeles. . . . All of our musicians play in different orchestras or in the studio. Some are in the Philharmonic. They are excellent musicians.”

While there might be a glut of good musicians out there, there certainly is no glut of women conductors. Johnson is, in fact, one of the few female maestros around--period. A musician since age 4 (she is a violinist but also plays piano, French horn, trumpet and other instruments), she has yearned for the podium since age 15. Trained at the Manhattan School of Music, where she graduated as the “outstanding musician” of her class, she went on to study conducting privately at the Pierre Monteaux School of Conducting in New York under Monteaux’s understudy, Charles Bruch.

“Everything clicks when I conduct,” Johnson said. “I feel good, and I feel confident. It’s not just something I know I can do, therefore I enjoy it--it’s just such a love of mine, and if I didn’t have that love, I wouldn’t do it.”

Johnson is a no-nonsense conductor, openly disdaining those podium prancers who allow ego and stylistic flair to get in the way of keeping the orchestra together. “People shouldn’t even watch me,” she is apt to say, adding that her interpretive impact is in the music--not in the movements of her arms and hands. It is something she learned from Bruch:

“What he taught me is that when the orchestra is not together, it’s the conductor’s fault. That makes you technically immaculate.” One of the problems with orchestras nowadays is “that the conductors are hard to follow. . . . My attitude about conducting is that I’m the least important figure up there.”

Johnson’s youth, plus the dearth of baton-wielding females, has made it hard for some to take her seriously, she says--at least in Los Angeles. “In New York,” she said, “I never had such a problem, but here, when I tell people I conduct the San Fernando Valley Symphony, they think I should be an old man with freaky hair!”

So that’s another misconception the Valley Symphony must battle: that its conductor cannot be competent without freaky hair. Add to that the group’s never-ending search for a steady venue (they’ve played in everything from a tent in a parking lot to a high school auditorium so sweltering that one concert had to be cut by one-third), and Johnson’s work seems amply cut out for her.

“Also, I think one of the main problems is that the Valley has a million and a half people but does not have a strong identity as one city or community. It should be able to support an orchestra very easily. Many cities much smaller have thriving orchestras. So it’s a big challenge.”

How is the orchestra coping with this challenge? Slowly, she says, but optimistically. Although the Valley Symphony still only puts on about four subscription concerts a year, it has, since 1985, been the regular orchestra playing the Hollywood Bowl Easter Sunrise Service. It is featured regularly in the Christmas Marathon at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. And it has, under Johnson’s guidance, embarked on a drive to present the music of Los Angeles-area composers.

“We’re doing some of their movie music,” Johnson said, making no bones about the fact that it’s an effort to draw audiences. “But we’re not doing anything that is not really good musically.” By “really good,” she refers to the music of such noteworthy movie composers as Broughton, (“Young Sherlock Holmes” and “Silverado”), Bernard Hermann, Miklos Rosza, David Raksin, Elmer Bernstein, Jerry Goldsmith.

And then there are the children’s concerts, held the day of each subscription concert (tomorrow’s concert will be at Birmingham High at 11:30 a.m.). Johnson conducts highlights from the evening’s program, explains them to the children, introduces different instruments and in the upcoming concert will use the orchestra to tell a little story--a la “Peter and the Wolf.”

“We have a really cute script called ‘Andante to the Rescue,’ ” she said, grinning. “It’s about a little space alien who comes to Earth, hears the music of Brahms and Broughton and tries to find Brahms.” Along the way, it is hoped that the children will learn the difference between the two composers, she added.

An even-toned, soft-spoken woman, Johnson divides her non-Valley Symphony time between raising her family (she’s the mother of two--the son she conducted with, pre-birth, arrived in March) and playing violin in the very busy Pacific Symphony Orchestra in Orange County. The fact that she recently just missed becoming assistant conductor of that group raises the inevitable question--does being a woman make it harder for her to earn respect as a conductor? It’s a question the self-described non-feminist doesn’t really like, but she admits that it must be faced.

“Being a woman is a hard barrier to overcome, until people see me conduct,” Johnson said. “You face discrimination to a point, because people think a man should be doing it, but I don’t want to get into that. That’s just how life is. Right now I’m conducting the Valley Symphony, we’re doing a good job of bringing good music to the people of the Valley. And I can’t ask for more than that.”