Conducting Herself Accordingly

When Sian Edwards started out, there were so few female conductors, she had to find musical role models elsewhere. “I was tremendously inspired by women who pushed themselves,” she says, ticking off a few unexpected heroines. “Bette Midler’s ‘Stay With Me, Baby’ is a great example of somebody giving 100%, and Tina Turner is an incredibly generous, high-energy artist.”

Edwards, at 37, is today something of a role model herself. In 1988, she was the first woman to conduct at Covent Garden and, a few years later, the first woman hired as music director at the English National Opera (ENO). She would have been the first woman to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Music Center in 1991 had a scheduling change not sent Marin Alsop to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion stage two weeks earlier.

According to Edwards, who will be back at the Los Angeles Philharmonic Friday through next Sunday, female conductors are “still rare enough to be commented upon.”

They also still face gender-related hurdles.

“How do you manifest authority?” she asks. “When you have a problem is when you suggest a way you’d like something to be played, and musicians disagree. When there’s a man on the box, it’s taken more easily.”

Then again, Edwards says, youth can be more of a problem than gender. “Orchestras are hierarchal institutions,” she points out, “and especially being young, I have to be aware of that formality. There is an artificial barrier between the orchestra and conductor. You have to respect the distance each needs and hope you don’t lose your own spontaneity and character.”

Not Edwards. Dressed in jeans, hiking boots and pullover sweater, the red-haired musician looks like someone who would be as comfortable at Wembley Stadium, where she saw Turner last summer, as in an opera pit.

Edwards shares a London flat with her husband, music historian Ian Kemp, and their 5-year-old son, Finn, though the family plans a move to rural Sussex where the conductor was born. In her study, shelves of books include titles on yoga and feminism as well as musical scores and biographies of composers.

Edwards began her musical career playing French horn. Then, after putting together a band in high school that played the music of Glenn Miller, the Electric Light Orchestra and more, she began writing arrangements and conducting. At the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, she concentrated on the French horn but did postgraduate work in conducting.

Impressed with the skills of Estonian conductor Neeme Jarvi, with whom she studied briefly in Holland, she followed his example and headed to the Leningrad Conservatory. “In Britain they felt conductors were born, not made,” Edwards says. “Training was anathema to the state, which felt talent was a divine gift. Any talent is a gift, but it has to be nurtured.”

In Leningrad, where her teacher was A.I. Musin, it was very different. “Professional orchestras were available daily to play for the conducting students. In this country, you were expected to know before you were taught, but there you weren’t expected to learn until you were taught. It takes a long time to find the way to do things and, in Russia, I was given that time.”

She was also given a specialty of sorts. Edwards says she had only “a vague interest” in Russian composers prior to her studies at the Leningrad Conservatory, but her musical selections and assignments would come to reflect her training. The Sunday Telegraph, for instance, praised Edwards’ conducting of Prokofiev’s “The Gambler” at her ENO debut in the 1989-90 season, noting both her pacing and “how much at home she is in 20th century Russian music.”

Edwards won the prestigious Leeds Conductors’ Competition in 1984. She made her operatic debut in 1986 (subbing for Simon Rattle on “Mahagonny” at the Scottish Opera), and spent the late ‘80s and early ‘90s in opera houses and on podiums around the world.

She conducted at the Royal Opera two or three times a year; she appeared at Glyndebourne Festival Opera, with the London Philharmonic, the Berlin Symphony Orchestra and the Ensemble Modern, among others. Her Haydn was praised in Pittsburgh, her Shostakovich in England, and her L.A. debut was credited as “a major musical event.”

That same year, the English National Opera twice approached her about taking on the job of music director. Once her son was born, she decided that she liked the idea of being rooted in London. And, she says, “I was immensely flattered to be asked.”

Edwards assumed the ENO job in August 1993, joining ENO’s new general director, Dennis Marks. The two were novices at running an opera company and, for Edwards, who earned mixed reviews during her tenure, it only lasted until 1995.

“When I was invited to take it on, the organization seemed watertight, with good audiences,” Edwards recalls. “But audiences started to fall away and its ground-breaking productions of the ‘80s were no longer in favor or revivable. They had a 3-million-pound [about $5-million] debt, and enormous administrative problems, which were mine as well as [Marks’]. It kind of overwhelmed me. I decided to move on rather than learn on the job.”

As she withdrew, Guardian writer Tom Sutcliffe emphasized that “there is no doubt about Edwards’ quality as a conductor and musician.” Now Edwards is philosophical. Freed up to do more guest conducting, she seeks an ensemble with which she “could have some long-term plans . . . that won’t preclude my freelance work, which I’m really enjoying. I have a varied diet of music making, and I’d like to keep that going.”

Her agenda at the Music Center will reflect some of that variety: Berlioz, Ravel and another mini-specialty, Czech composer Leos Janacek.

L.A. Philharmonic Managing Director Ernest Fleischmann calls her Janacek “exciting and dramatic” and asked her to include both the composer’s “Taras Bulba” and his Violin Concerto in her program. Edwards has conducted the concerto, which was only published in 1988, but it is new to the Philharmonic. (“A little jewel of a piece,” says Philharmonic violinist Elizabeth Baker, who will perform it.)

Assignments after Los Angeles include work in Germany, France and Holland. One upcoming date, in July, is a program of works by contemporary female composers for the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra.

That invitation, Edwards acknowledges, gave her a little pause. Might participating in such a program only serve to reinforce a women’s musical ghetto?

Her manager, Jonathan Groves, thinks not. “She has been the first woman conductor whose gender has become quite irrelevant,” Groves says. “People recognize she knows her job. She’s not a giraffe. It’s ceased to become an issue.”

*

LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC WITH SIAN EDWARDS CONDUCTING, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. Dates: Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m.; next Sunday, 2:30 p.m. Prices: $8-$60. Phone: (213) 365-3500. Edwards will also lead a youth symphony program and open house at the Pavilion on Saturday at 10:15 a.m. $6-$10.