'i Don't Like My Relationship With Australia To Be Poisoned In Any Way'

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday August 5, 2006

SIMONE YOUNG TALKS TO VALERIE LAWSON

LIVING WELL IS the best revenge. Simone Young is living proof.

Her home in Hamburg is a three-minute walk from Lake Alster. At the Hamburg State Opera, Young presides over a staff of 700, including an orchestra of 125 musicians. She is supported at home and at work by "team Simone" led by her husband, Greg Condon, and her formidable personal assistant, Sabine Rosenberg, who has worked for five bosses of the Hamburg Opera and appears to knows everyone in the arts in Europe.

Did someone mention her sacking from Opera Australia three years ago?

Not Young. On a shimmering day, in her vast office overlooking the waterways and colonnades of Hamburg, she says cheerfully: "I'm always a look-forward kind of girl rather than look-back. I have a nice set-up here. I'm doing the work I should be doing. No recriminations."

Then, after a beat or two and a slightly awkward silence: "An artist's life is made up of great highs, tough lows and you have to be able to bounce back otherwise you're never going to be able to enjoy the highs. You've got to put the lows behind you, learn from them, if you can.

"At the moment I'm working my way through a biography of Alma Mahler [Gustav Mahler's wife] and reading all the struggles Mahler had with the Vienna opera scene and with the public, the press and with the censors. And you think, that was a hundred years ago and then you go back and [Georg] Telemann was having the same problems 300 years ago.

"Artists and culture and public life; it is designed for conflict. The artists who have lengthy careers are the ones who are able to confront the conflict and eventually move on."

Young has buried the drama of 2002, when the board of Opera Australia, chaired by Rowena Danziger, refused to renew her contract as music director because, as Young once explained, "My ambitions for the development of the musical side of the company were deemed unsustainable."

Does she know exactly what happened in the boardroom?

"I have no idea. In some ways it's better not to know. I don't like my relationship with Australia to be poisoned in any way. I get a big kick out of conducting at home."

Young is in Sydney this week to conduct three performances of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, having just conducted a concert performance of Richard Strauss's Salome at the Brisbane Festival.

But a permanent return to Australia is decades away. She is now the presiding cultural spirit of Hamburg, a city steeped in music, where Mendelssohn and Brahms were born, where Telemann and Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach died, where Mahler was chief conductor at the 325-year-old opera company, and where the Beatles began their career 40-odd years ago.

One year into her five-year contract as music director and manager of the opera company, Young, 45, says she has fallen in love with Hamburg, the fourth German city in which she has worked during two decades as a conductor. "We've found a new home here, we don't feel temporary. We've spent 20 years nomadic in Europe."

She's referring to herself and her husband, who is now retired after 33 years teaching French and German in high schools. Condon picks up their younger daughter, Lucie, 9, from school, helps her with homework and ferries her to violin, harp and piano lessons and classes at the Hamburg Ballet School.

"The big bonus of Hamburg is that I have my immediate family with me," Young says. "Just the energy you get from having your people around you. Breathe out and take the boss's hat off for a minute.

"People looking at my career from the outside look at the glamour of the travel: 'Isn't it wonderful!' And yes, it is exciting. But the number of times you walk into a gorgeous hotel suite and go, 'God, another hotel on my own.'

"I was never there when my elder daughter [Yvann, 18] lost all her baby teeth. I never once put her baby teeth under a pillow and played the tooth fairy. I've been able to do that with my little one."

If it all seems too idyllic to be true, there is a downside: a huge workload made heftier by Young's inner drive. On the first Saturday in July, two days before we met in Hamburg, she conducted at the Hamburg opera, slept for three hours, flew to Rome on Sunday, talked all day with the 80-year-old composer Hans Werner Henze about poetry and birdsong [the Hamburg Opera is performing his opera L'Upupa next month], flew back to Hamburg on Monday morning, spoke to the Herald for 90 minutes, then gave in to the aches and coughs of a bad cold, cancelled appointments and went home to bed.

But in her bag, to proof-read that night, were three chapters of Simone Young: Die Dirigentin, Ein Portrait, a biography by German journalist Ralf Pleger, to be published in October.

"Sometimes, for weeks on end, it's seven days a week between 12 and 15 hours a day. But it's of my making, my choice. No use complaining.

"I live on the music. The days I find the toughest are the days when I'm not doing any music, when I'm planning and doing budgets. The days I enjoy the most are where I have rehearsals and meetings until three and a bit of a rest and a performance in the evening.

"After a bite to eat, when I get home, I can't sleep and at the moment I'm working my way through the collection of DVDs of Inspector Morse. I usually pass out on the sofa and Greg will come out and say, 'Aren't you coming to bed?' Or I fall asleep with my laptop on my lap writing emails. I've lost a lot of weight this year [but] I'm taking care of myself physically.

"This career is physically time-consuming, rigorous. It's an obsessive profession that's not suited to many people, certainly not suited to family life. You have to have a very tough skin. It's viewed as a position of power." (Young says only 5 per cent of conducting graduates are women.)

Young's singlemindedness is inherited. Her maternal grandparents migrated to Australia from Croatia. That took determination and tunnel vision, she says. Her father's drive pushed him to abandon teaching in middle age to train as a solicitor. Young's elder daughter, Yvann, studies physics at Oxford University and excels at cricket.

And when Young conducted her first new production at Hamburg, she did not choose a big Verdi or Richard Strauss opera, as expected, but Hindemith's Mathis der Maler (Matthias the Painter): "Not a crowd pleaser, but a piece that talked about the dilemma of being an artist at a time of conflict.

"There's no such thing as just putting on a good show in Europe. It has to have a solid intellectual foundation and rigorous concepts and a clear dramaturgy. The audiences are extremely demanding."

In Germany, she says, the "houses are appropriately staffed" and very well funded. "In Australia, everybody has enough money to survive and not enough to achieve what they really have the capacity to achieve. They barely have enough to survive.

"After you've streamlined your management, which most arts organisations did in Australia years ago, there is nowhere else to make any savings unless you cut into the elements that create the quality," she says.

"But I'm essentially an extremely optimistic and positive person and always like to think that huge potential and optimism and capacity and energy in the Australian cultural scene will ensure its survival and its development. It will just happen at a different rate than we hoped would be the case."

Young misses her parents, both in their 80s and living in Balgowlah, and feels guilty they can't live near their only grandchildren, but "the work here is of such a level and intensity that I couldn't begin to even contemplate [returning to Australia] without travel plans that would make my mind spin. A permanent return in the next 10 years is not likely.

"Just this season I've debuted with Berlin Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic. There's so much happening and the work here is so exciting, we're really building something."

She refuses to criticise Opera Australia, concentrating instead on her achievements with the company.

"I raised awareness of the orchestra as the fundamental element of the company. I was very supportive and very focused on the company as an ensemble organisation and I brought good young singers into the company, but ... it was very intense, the media coverage. What's the old saying? 'There's no such thing as bad publicity.'

"I became extremely well known because of all of that, probably in a way that would never have been the case if I had just been doing my job quietly. Internationally [well known] as well.

"My father-in-law sends us cuttings out of the paper. You know that crossword you get with photos? I've been a photo a number of times. He considers that fame. It's like having your name on a Fantales wrapper."

Beyond Fantales fame, how does she sum up her life so far?

"Music is my life," she says. "It defines who I am."

Simone Young will conduct the Sydney Symphony Orchestra program Night Journeys on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.