At least that's what her San Jose Chamber Orchestra concertmaster Cynthia Baehr says. Baehr and Turner have worked together for nearly 15 years.

"She's just amazing that way," Baehr says. "She's really willing to take risks."

While many orchestras embrace a "museum approach" to music, highlighting the work of classical composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johann Sebastian Bach, Turner has premiered more than 40 new pieces. On Oct. 23, she opened the San Jose Chamber Orchestra's 15th season with Willow Glen resident Brent Heisinger's composition, EKTA--a work based on a series of five notes from East Indian music--at Le Petit Trianon.

Hearing his work performed was wonderful and "nerve wracking," Heisinger says.

Turner has become known for her innovative programming, yet she says it was commonplace when the classical composers were alive.

"When Mozart was alive, he finished a piece and they performed it," says Turner, who has lived in Willow Glen for 20 years.

Like composers of the past, Turner is attracted to individual pieces that not only represent something beautiful to the ear, but bring something interesting and unusual to the audience.

This year, the orchestra will present a family concert series, Planet String, which will include a string instrument from a different culture with each performance, such as the erhu--a two-string fiddle from China-- playing with a Western string quartet or quintet.

Turner doesn't have to look far when seeking out these original compositions. Many talented composers live right here in the Bay Area, she says.

"She gives composers a chance, and she gives it her all," Baehr says.

These artists also feel comfortable putting their music under Turner's baton. Heisinger had no doubts that his work was in good hands

She is extraordinary as a conductor, Heisinger says. Heisinger should know. Turner was his student at San José State University.

Medicine to music

Turner began her college career in 1973 as a double major in music and pre-medicine at the USC, but transferred during her freshman year to UC-Santa Barbara.

The workload, Turner says, was overwhelming. Music was the more challenging of the two and she decided to focus on it.

"I thought it would be interesting to see what I could do with it," she says.

Turner promised herself that if she went 90 days without being paid to play music, she'd quit. She was certain she would return to her pre-medicine studies.

But those 90 days never came, and Turner continued to play music, admitting, "I went 89 days once."

Turner discovered music by accident and luck at age 12, when she learned to play the piano. There was always music around her home. Her mother's favorite recordings came from the Boston Pops Orchestra.

"As I learned to play a little better, it become a thing where I could express myself, things that I couldn't express in words," she says.

Turner continued to play through high school and in college.

Her first exposure to the other side of the orchestra also came by chance.

At UC-Santa Barbara, she was playing piano for a musical. The conductor frequently missed rehearsals and Turner began running the rehearsals in his place. Eventually, she was asked to conduct the musical. She was only 19.

"They assumed I could conduct, but I really didn't know how to," Turner says.

Turner learned on her feet but also took conducting lessons with Hajime Teri Murai, then a graduate student at UC-Santa Barbara. Murai is now the music director at Peabody Institute of John Hopkins University.

When she transferred to San José State University in 1976, Turner found other mentors, including harpsichordist Fernando Valenti. Valenti is an internationally recognized harpsichordist who helped reintroduce the harpsichord as a concert instrument in the 20th century, Turner says.

The harpsichord, a predecessor to the piano, has a distinct sound because the strings are plucked rather than hammered.

"I had never even seen a harpsichord," she says. "The minute I played the instrument, I knew this was my instrument. It physically fits me better."

The experience refocused her musical education from piano to harpsichord performance. Heisinger first met Turner as she pursued her bachelor's and master's degree in harpsichord performance at the university.

Heisinger says Turner was exceptionally passionate about music. "She performed and sought out the best. She was like a sponge. She couldn't get enough in terms of music and experience," he says.

After college, Turner's career took off. For 18 years, Turner was the conductor and artistic administrator for Opera San Jose, where she met her husband, opera director Daniel Helfgot.

Yet Turner and some of the musicians she worked with had dreams of something more. Casually they talked about beginning an orchestra in San Jose. It was a dream that became a reality when Turner founded the San Jose Chamber Orchestra in 1991.

The San Jose Chamber Music Society paid for the first concert, which was well attended. Since then, the orchestra has thrived on supporters such as IBM, Hitachi, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and private individuals. The orchestra is now in its 15th season. Nearly half of its pieces each season are new, the remaining pieces pay tribute to classical composers.

Baton in hand

Along with juggling the musical and administrative direction of the orchestra, Turner guest conducts for the American Musical Theatre of San Jose, most recently the production of West Side Story that closed on Nov. 13. She spends several months each year guest conducting in other cities and states, including the Utah Festival Opera each summer. She also works as the festival's music administrator.

Turner gets to share her passion for music and the theater with her husband. Recently the couple worked together on West Bay Opera's La Périchole. Helfgot was the show's stage director and Turner conducted. Turner also performs when she can, including concerts with her sister, Beverly Staples, also a harpsichordist.

After decades of dedication, San José State University's school of music and dance honored Turner as an outstanding alumna earlier this year.

Sitting in her Willow Glen home, sandwiched between her custom-made harpsichord and a piano, Turner says she enjoys both performing and conducting music.

"It's almost like the difference between painting a miniature watercolor and painting a mural on the wall," she says.

With the season off to a busy start, she has numerous performances ahead. She is preparing to conduct the score for the John Adams' opera, Nixon in China, in March in Portland, Ore. On the pages, musical scales are stacked on top of each other and Turner reads the notes like a book.

"Here are the flutes," she says, pointing to a section of the score. "And then three trumpets."

She points to a change in music, the moment where she needs to signal the violins to come in.

In the orchestra pit, Turner brings these scores to life. Musicians who work with her say she conducts with passion and excitement, and makes them feel part of a team.

"It's great working with her as a conductor," Baehr says. "She relates to the orchestra as colleagues, and treats us with respect, which is not always typical of a conductor."

Sometimes the conductor-musician relationship is more of a hierarchy than a level playing field, Baehr says.

Conductors, both in practice and in education, were largely male until the 1960s, when graduate-level conducting programs began accepting female students. Prior to this shift, female musicians were also represented in low numbers during the 1960s, and first chair positions rarely went to women. Turner says. The prevailing belief among management was that "you could tell it was a woman by the way the musician played."

Attitudes slowly began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, when orchestras across America began holding blind auditions, a screen separating the musician and employers.

"It really changed the face of music," Turner says.

In her own career, sexism rarely played a part, Turner says. She's never experienced resistance from audiences and only a handful of male musicians in her 30-year career have objected to working with a female conductor.

"And most of them got over it," she says.

"The truth is, I don't think of Barbara as being a woman or a man," Baehr says. "I just think of her as being a great conductor."

Heisinger agrees. He also prizes Turner for her wit and modesty.

"She's really authentic," he says.

The San Jose Chamber Orchestra performs its inaugural Planet String concert on Dec. 3 from 10:30 a.m. to 11:15 a.m. at Theatre on San Pedro Square, 29 N. San Pedro St., Ste. 200. The family event is free. The orchestra will also join the Choral Project for a joint concert, 'Winter Gifts' on Dec. 9 at 8 p.m., located at Mission Santa Clara, 500 El Camino Real, Santa Clara.