Sian Edwards

On October 1, Sian Edwards assumed her conducting professorship at the Department of Conducting.

Edwards studied with Sir C. Groves, T. Reynish, and N. Del Mar before becoming a pupil of I.A. Musin at the Leningrad Conservatoire. Winning the first Leeds Conductors’ Competition in 1984 led to invitations to work with the CBSO, RSNO, Scottish Opera, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, and Royal Opera, where she made her debut conducting Tippett’s The Knot Garden in 1988.

She has also frequently worked abroad, including with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the St. Petersburg Symphony, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Munich Radio Symphony, and the orchestras of Turku and Tampere in Finland. Always interested in new music, Edwards has conducted many world premières including Mark Anthony Turnage’s operas Greek and Coraline, Through His Teeth by Luke Bedford, and Judith Weir’s Blond Eckbert, which was staged by the English National Opera (ENO) in 1994 while she was its music director. After leaving the ENO, she continued her freelance career, conducting numerous performances particularly in Frankfurt: these included works such as Peter Grimes, Ernest Bloch’s Macbeth, The Queen of Spades, and Adès’s Tempest for Oper Frankfurt as well as projects with the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra and Ensemble Modern.

She has also appeared several times in Vienna at the Theater an der Wien, performing Andre Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Dead Man Walking by Jake Heggie, Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, and the Peter Konwitschny production of La Traviata as well as concert programmes with the RSO and Klangforum Wien. More recently, she has worked with the Scottish Opera on productions of The Rake’s Progress and Bluebeard’s Castle and has conducted Katya Kabanova for Opera North and Opera Holland Park, where she also conducted Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta and Mark Adamo’s Little Women. She returned to the ENO for a new production of Orpheus in the Underworld in October 2019, and 2022 saw her conduct Aida at the Royal Swedish Opera. In 2013, Edwards was appointed Head of Conducting at the Royal Academy of Music, and she became a professor of the University of London in January 2022.

© Katie Vandyck