This interview was published previously (in Dutch) in Preludium, the magazine of the Concertgebouw Orchestra and The Concertgebouw.
By Frederike Berntsen
We’re speaking with Simone Young while she’s rehearsing the Vienna State Opera production of György Kurtág’s opera Fin de partie. ‘Fantastic music. I’ve gone through the score with Kurtág himself, and it was extremely interesting. A rehearsal period like this is exhausting but exhilarating.’
For Young, opera and the symphonic repertoire go together. She conducted her first opera forty years ago, and she added the symphonic repertoire a bit later. And the opera experience is necessary, she says. ‘How can you do Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony if you’ve never conducted his opera Fidelio? As a musician, you pile up one building block after another, you’re constantly working with experiences. When I walk on stage now, I might be calmer than I used to be; you build that up too with knowledge and experience.’
Order tickets for the concerts with Simone Young on 16 and 19 January
Order tickets for the concert on 17 January, featuring only Bruckner
Young is making her debut with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. The programme: Anton Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony and Olivier Messiaen’s L’Ascension. Was this her choice? ‘Absolutely! These two composers are an incredibly good match. Both were mad about the organ. Religion and spirituality were extremely important to them. With both Bruckner and Messiaen, you hear this unbelievable sense of tone colour, and the similarities in how they think from the brass and woodwind perspective is fascinating too. Religion is also an important key to understanding both of them, it’s the essence of their ideas. But you can appreciate the music completely without being religiously inclined yourself.’
‘Bruckner is all about depth, but it’s not heavy. The material is enormously colourful, and you can’t ever let that drag.’
‘Bruckner’s one of my favourite composers,’ Young continues. ‘He must have been an unpretentious person who led a quiet life, and he apparently wasn’t ambitious. But you feel a huge amount of passion and drama in his music. I love his Sixth Symphony the best, and it was also the first Bruckner symphony I conducted. It’s a highly romantic piece. Do you know what I think? Our image of Bruckner, that you have to play his music heavy-handed and slow, is wrong. That idea arose in the 1970s and it’s spread since then. For me, Bruckner actually links up neatly with the classical tradition of Beethoven and Schumann. It’s the conductor’s job to lift his music up, to make sure it doesn’t become leaden. Bruckner is all about depth, but it’s not heavy. The material is enormously colourful, and you can’t ever let that drag.’
Simone Young studied piano and composition. She was chief conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra and director of Hamburg’s opera house for many years. Wagner and Strauss operas are among her specialities. Since 2022, Young has been a chief conductor on her native soil, with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. ‘We’ve just got a new hall! The public is curious and interested, so that makes it a great working environment.’
One of Young’s great inspirations is Daniel Barenboim, for whom she worked as an assistant after her arrival in Europe from Australia. She describes him as ‘a musical giant, and magnificent with Bruckner. His way of thinking and acting had a huge influence on me.’ She mentions in passing that she’s also met Messiaen. When she was in her twenties, she was in Paris soaking up French music. She played Messiaen’s piano music and worked with composer/conductor Pierre Boulez.
Australia is her home, but so is Europe. ‘I feel comfortable on both continents, and I can’t imagine living on only one or the other. There’s an overall optimism in Australia, as well as a certain innocence. In Europe we think the classical music scene is normal; we take good concert halls and a rich musical culture for granted. Australia is big, but the classical-music world there is small. This mild naiveté makes the public really eager to know about the arts and what’s on the programmes. They don’t take anything for granted, and that’s very attractive.’
Young continues animatedly, talking about her upcoming programme with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. The first time she heard Bruckner’s music was while she was in secondary school, in Sydney. ‘The Sixth is a symphony of shades of colour, with a different hue dominating every page of the score. Bruckner’s music feels natural to me.’ Young had played piano for years, and Bruckner composed from the perspective of the organ, so she can relate to his musical language as a matter of course. ‘I can look at any Bruckner symphony and just see the structure; they were logical to me from the beginning. Mahler, on the other hand, I find very difficult. Bruckner is crystal clear to me.’
‘When I conduct Bruckner, I try not to overload the symphony with heaviness, religion, significance. You can make music out of it once you understand the structure. Music is abstract, so you have to bring out the beauty and the warmth in it. And always be honest – don’t ever try to say something that you don’t feel yourself. Some of the symphonies exist in different versions, and I always choose to conduct the first one. Why? Because they contain Bruckner’s very first ideas, with no filters. These versions aren’t perfect, some things in them aren’t clear, they’re like puzzles. I love the intellectual challenge of this raw material. Bruckner rewrote symphonies not because he thought they needed it, but because people around him thought they did.’
Young’s scores are a study in themselves, as they have all the markings she’s made over the years. She also likes to get her hands on manuscripts, since they provide a lot of information about a composition’s history. ‘Before you start a rehearsal, you have eighty percent set in your head’, says Young. ‘You know what you want to do with a piece. But then there’s the sound. That comes from the orchestra, and it depends on the acoustics of the hall. That’s a living element that you have to respond to. Even after doing Bruckner’s Sixth with all the different orchestras I’ve conducted, each orchestra’s sound always makes it something different.’
This will be the first time Young has conducted the Concertgebouw Orchestra. However, she has performed previously in the Main Hall, long ago with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. She calls the hall and all its history spectacular. For her, it feels like stepping into a bit of tradition: ‘So many recordings of the Concertgebouw Orchestra made in this hall have inspired me. And definitely the ones with Bernard Haitink: they sound gorgeous and natural. With him, it’s always about the music and not the conductor, never ‘look at me!’ but ‘listen to the music!’
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