Conductor's Orders [Conductor Simone Young]

This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Gislason, Kari (2019) Conductor’s orders. [Composition] This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/132121/ c The Saturday Paper This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the document is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https:// www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/ culture/ music/ 2019/ 08/ 03/ conductor-simone-young/ 15647544008549 Conductor's Orders [Conductor Simone Young] by Kári Gíslason “Do you mind if I finish this row?” Simone Young has her feet up on her dressing room couch, knitting laid across her lap. “It’s for my mother,” she says of the work in progress – a jumper with a lovely, slightly old‐fashioned cable pattern on the front. For a moment, I sit and watch. It’s an unusual way to start an interview with one of the world’s leading conductors but knitting has a certain magic – the way different lines form a whole, much like a composition. As Young puts the jumper away, families are walking past outside the window, in the low afternoon light of a winter’s day. “It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been overseas,” she says, “part of you just always wants to come home. I mean, look at the weather out there, and the way people are relaxed.” Young herself looks relaxed, comfortable in her skin, although there’s a workmanlike seriousness there, too. She speaks in phrases that sweep and change in volume, apologising every now and then for a yawn – having just finished a series of performances with the Zurich Opera, she’s rehearsing today for a concert in Brisbane and feeling jetlagged. Born in Australia, she now lives in England but conducting at the highest levels means she frequently travels. “I live close to Gatwick,” she says, laughing. It’s been four years since Young left Hamburg, where she directed both the state opera and the city’s philharmonic orchestra for a decade. She had a budget of $97 million and a staff of 700 people. Now she is freelance, self‐determined, and one of the world’s most in‐demand conductors, famous for her interpretations of German music, and for a style of conducting that is expressive, embodied and direct. Young’s musical life began in Sydney, where she attended Monte Sant’Angelo Mercy College, an independent girls’ school that insisted there were no jobs women couldn’t do. She has proved that many times over. Early in her career, she broke into a field that long resisted accepting women as conductors when, in 2001, she was the first woman and youngest person to direct Opera Australia. Other breakthrough achievements followed. But Young says she can tire of discussing “all these firsts”. “The first woman to conduct the Vienna State Opera, and Paris, and Dresden, and, and, and… Great. Now there are a few others, and they’re ticking off some other firsts, and I’m delighted for them … I’ve been conducting professionally in Europe for almost 30 years, so all those firsts are in the far past, as far as I’m concerned. And they’re far less interesting, I think, than actually if you want to assess what somebody’s achieved and look at the career as a whole and put gender and nationality outside of that.” Young acknowledges it was “a very big deal” to be the first woman to conduct the Vienna State Opera. “There were at the time no women in the orchestra, and getting over that hurdle meant that nobody else had a leg to stand on if they were to say, ‘Well, you know, can a woman really do that?’, which people were still saying in the ’90s,” she says. “They can’t say that anymore.” Later this year, Young will be leading orchestras in Vienna, San Francisco, Tokyo and beyond. But for now, her itinerary brings her back to the cities of her youth. In August, State Opera South Australia will host Young and four friends, all sopranos, in a concert of highlights from Richard Strauss’s operas and lieder. It will be familiar ground for Young, who’s worked for long spells in Germany, often conducting the operas of Strauss. 1 She’s also worked with all four singers before – Emma Matthews, Miriam Gordon‐Stewart, Catherine Carby and Lisa Gasteen – thus the title for the event: Girls’ Night Out, a reunion. “Strauss wrote for the female voice in a way that’s kind of unparalleled for this period of music,” says Young. The young German composer first fell in love with the female voice in the early decades of the 20th century. It was a time of great change and musical innovation, but few artists were putting women at the centre of their endeavours. Strauss was captivated by the task. “If we think of all his operas,” says Young, “if we think of the central female roles, attractive or unattractive as some of them are dramatically, you are never left in doubt for a moment that he doesn’t absolutely adore the women that he’s writing for.” Strauss’s muse, it was said, was his wife – the soprano Pauline de Ahna. Over the course of their marriage, she was a constant source of inspiration. Strauss once wrote that she was “very complex, very feminine, a little perverse, a little coquettish, never like herself, at every minute different from how she had been a moment before”. It’s not an entirely flattering portrait. But it does read as loving, with a mix of frankness and teasing humour, comfortable in enjoying a partner’s complexity, their contradictions. Many feel this openness also comes through in Strauss’s female characters, and in how they face their troubles. He wrote that he “thanked the Almighty Creator for the gift and inspiration of the female voice” – acknowledging both his wife’s influence and that the female voice could be a muse in its own right. Young mentions she’s been reading the work of Karl Kraus, a satirical writer who lived in Vienna in the first part of the 20th century. “Kraus wrote some very interesting and some not very attractive but very thought‐provoking aphorisms about women. One of my favourites is: ‘A woman is only truly beautiful who can acknowledge being ugly.’ I think that’s amazing.” The Marschallin, a leading female character in Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier, could be a case in point. The work, written with the Austrian librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, is one of Strauss’s most famous and most performed operas; the concert in Adelaide will feature its brilliant closing trio of soprano voices. “I think the Marschallin is one of the great all‐time female characters. She is, in her life, very indulged, she’s the head of this court, but she’s living in the loveless environment of an arranged political marriage. She indulges herself with young lovers, and along comes Octavian, who really touches something in her. In the final scene of act one, she’s honest with the audience about the fear a woman has about ageing in a way that, up to that point, was unparalleled in operatic repertoire.” The Marschallin’s affair with the younger Octavian ends in heartbreak when she realises that she must release Octavian to be with Sophie, the woman he really loves. “We already know there can’t be a happy ending for the Marschallin, but that she’s okay with that, because that’s how the way of the world is supposed to be, in her picture of the world. Her extraordinary musical and emotional generosity in the trio becomes completely understandable for an audience because we’ve had an incredibly intimate conversation with her at the end of act one.” 2 Although Strauss’s affection for the female voice was ahead of its time, the musical language he used to express it most often looked to the past. “Strauss was not a musical innovator, as such,” explains Young. “He took what was happening at the end of the 19th century and ran with it and developed it. He didn’t actually change paths anywhere, like a Schoenberg or Berg.” By World War II, many composers had moved away from the heritage of Wagner, Brahms and Mahler and were searching for new tonalities. But there was still room for someone like Strauss, who wanted instead to perfect what had come before him. “With Strauss,” explains Young, “it was as though he was such a lover of the late‐Romantic textures and colours and the brilliance of the orchestration that he took this and refined it and refined it and refined it, until it became this perfect jewel of music.” That jewel is often described as decadent, even decaying and ironic, but also as deeply sensual.

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