Handy Makes Her Mark Conducting : Music: She is coming from New York to lead CSUN’s symphony orchestra Sunday. She was the only woman in her training class, but says more are entering the field.

Guest conductor Patricia Handy’s appearance Sunday with the Cal State Northridge Symphony Orchestra will offer an unspoken, if substantial, message along with its classical music.

At 38, the New York-based conductor is far from the traditional fatherly figure often found leading orchestral concerts. And music professor David Aks said he hoped that the program would demonstrate to female music students at CSUN that becoming a conductor “is an option.”

“It’s starting to open up,” he said. “Women are rising in this business. . . . If we can start changing musicians’ attitudes, I think that will do much to break down the barriers.”

Aks was quick to add: “We are really bringing her here because she’s very good at what she does.”

The New York Times, for one, has described Handy’s work as “first-rate.” The concert, as part of the CSUN School of the Arts’ “Guests Artist Series,” marks the conductor’s first trip to Los Angeles.

The 8 p.m. performance will include excerpts from Bernstein’s “Candide,” Mahler’s “Kindertotenlieder” (or “Songs on the Death of Children”) and Shostakovich’s “Symphony No. 9.” Soloist will be Michelle DeYoung, winner in the Western region of this year’s Metropolitan Opera competition.

Handy said she plans to discuss the growing number of female conductors in a talk with students. When she began studying music at the Juilliard School in 1972, she said, she was the only woman in her conductor training class.

“So it was very, very difficult for me,” said Handy, now associate conductor of the Greenwich Symphony Orchestra. “Now . . . it isn’t at all unusual. People don’t even notice now when there are women in training programs.”

She added: “I think women bring something particular or specific to their interpretation. I’ve noticed that in listening to tapes of my own work.”

The Sunday concert, presented in the school’s 400-seat Campus Theater, will include much of the same program that the CSUN Symphony Orchestra intends to perform on its upcoming European tour, Aks said.

Handy said she has never before performed any of these pieces, which Aks chose. “So I’m looking forward to that, too, as an element of excitement.”

The conductor added that she enjoys working with college-age musicians, as she did when she was a teacher at Juilliard for five years at the beginning of the 1980s, and more recently with the Summer Youth Ensemble at the Kennedy Center. Handy now teaches privately.

“It’s fun,” she said. “There’s a vitality that sometimes wears off when people get older.” As college students, “they’re still very fresh, they’re learning things for the first time.”

Guest conductor Patricia Handy will lead the CSUN Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. Sunday at the CSUN Campus Theater, 18111 Nordhoff St. , Northridge. Performed will be works by Bernstein, Mahler and Shostakovich. Tickets are $10 general admission, $6 students and senior citizen s. Call (818) 885-3093.