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Simone Young has many fascinating opinions on music and the
business of conducting it. And she's been given many an opportunity
to discuss them in recent years: her departure from Opera
Australia and her subsequent appointment as General Manager
and Music Director of the State Opera and Orchestra of Hamburg
both brought a flurry of interview requests.
'Take me out of performance mode and I'm a completely different
person', Young commented to Juanita Phillips in an interview
for Newsweek's 'Lunch with' column, an article seasoned with
observations as to the conductor's shoeless poise atop a leather
sofa. Yes, her musical interpretations are a different (but
no less effective) means of communication, but you do get
a pretty good idea of Young the person and the musician from
her talkative manner. 'I know I have a sound; I don't know
where it comes from', explained Young to Phillips on the maelstrom
subject of orchestral sound, 'people have tried to analyse
it, and you can't'.
As the curtain was about to come down on her remarkable career
with Opera Australia, Young shared her thoughts on Richard
Strauss with Andrew Ford on ABC's The Music Show: 'Strauss
is sometimes criticised for being non-intellectual, rather
in the same way that Puccini was, yet the structural clarity
and the beauty of the instrumentation is highly intellectual,
which all comes from a very profound, dramatic impetus. And
then of course there's the marriage of the music and the text...
it's wonderful stuff.'
Born in Sydney, Young was a repetiteur at the city's opera
house in her early twenties, becoming Chief Conductor some
twenty years later in 2001 following a steady rise through
Europe and America. To Newsweek, Young explained her early
policy of 'setting myself ridiculous tasks', and waxes lyrical
on the musical and intellectual influence of Daniel Barenboim
- 'a genius' - that proved so significant. In Hamburg we perhaps
see the sort of organisation that Young's Opera Australia
was heading towards (or, at least, aspiring to): a huge company
with over 200 salaried musicians and no need for compromise.
From extraordinary work in Australia, via successes with the
Vienna and Berlin Philharmonic Orchestras and opera houses
in New York and Paris, Simone Young makes her London Philharmonic
Orchestra debut on 17 October 2007.
2007/08: dates with Simone Young
Wednesday 17 October 2007
Friday 19 October 2007
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