MUSIC REVIEW : Edwards Rewards in Philharmonic Debut

There was a time when Sian Edwards was slated to become the first woman to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic in a winter subscription concert. The exigencies of interregnum scheduling being what they are, her conductor-of-the-week appearance found her instead the second woman to lead the band in November.

However diminished as a local sociological marker, Edwards’ debut with the orchestra Friday, in the first of three weekend performances at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, still proved a major musical event.

The 31-year-old conductor has led most of the major orchestras in Great Britain. Trained at the Royal Northern College of Music and the Leningrad Conservatory, she has generated considerable buzz through her meteoric operatic career, conducting for Scottish Opera, Glyndebourne, the Edinburgh Festival and Covent Garden.

Edwards lived up to her credentials. In a comprehensively demanding program, she displayed a real flair for both color and architecture and exerted a vigorous yet poised podium presence.

In the process she reminded some observers of Andre Previn, our last and not entirely unlamented music director, at his most energetic. Edwards too favors upward jabs of the baton from a fencer’s pose, and conveys cues and conviction without choreographic excess.

Her program also suggested Previn. He was hardly the Philharmonic’s only champion of Shostakovich, but few others combined it with a mastery of Ravel.

Edwards kept the surface of Ravel’s “Rapsodie Espagnole” shimmering seductively while maintaining the essential rhythmic underpinning. She elicited a gorgeous, warm sound under full dynamic control--almost nothing above a mezzo-forte until the finale.

A sensitivity to layered, interactive textures also served Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony well. Edwards’ probing but by no means dawdling account of the Largo exploited rather thansuccumbed to the often clotted motivic web. She used the clarity of the enervated central section to allow individual voices free expression, as though a crowd scene had suddenly dissolved into close-ups.

The contrasting galvanic kick of the other two movements was firmly focused, creating a feeling of exuberance rather than hysteria.

Countervailing classicism came in the form of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Peter Serkin asserted a characteristically idiosyncratic yet highly logical interpretation with virtually flawless technique. Clear, brisk, sharply accented and kaleidoscopic in touch in the outer movements, he turned to sublime introspection in the Largo.

He also offered his own virtuosic, thematic stream-of-consciousness cadenza for the final movement, and transformed Beethoven’s expansive first movement cadenza into something similar.

Edwards led the down-sized orchestra in a rather soft-grained accompaniment and one not always tightly connected to Serkin. Style in this case seemed more reflective of the soloist than the composer.

For its fifth conductor in as many weeks, the Philharmonic delivered lively and responsive performances, marked by elastic phrasing and rich sound. The agenda provided ample challenges to all the resident soloists, with particular glory due Miles Zentner for the mini-piccolo concerto in the Shostakovich Scherzo and Carolyn Hove’s plangent, pertinent English horn solos in Ravel’s Malaguena and “Feria.”