There’s a ventilator humming in the maestro’s interview room – and it’s like a ticking time bomb.
“It’s in E flat – and after a certain amount of time, it will drive me nuts,” says Simone Young, who says she’s a theatre tech’s worst nightmare. There will always be a fixture on a lighting grid somewhere that is gnawing at her ear. In F sharp. Fix it. Please.
The Sydney Symphony’s trailblazing chief conductor is speaking with the Guardian ahead of a new documentary about her life, Knowing the Score, which charts her rise to the top of one of the world’s most male-dominated industries.
Released next week, it draws an easy comparison to another film about a female conductor which will be sharing the same cinemas: psychological drama Tár, tipped to sweep the Oscars later this year. The two films have Cate Blanchett in common, who stars in Tár and served as executive producer on both. And while one protagonist is fictional and the other real, both share a prodigious musical ability that can be a blessing and a curse: perfect pitch.
For Blanchett’s Lydia Tár, that condition manifests in being plagued by intrusive, unsettling and repetitive sounds. For Young, it’s a hypersensitivity that can make her appear a little neurotic too: headphones in the street to cancel out traffic noise, complaints about background music in restaurants and at hairdressers. Triple-glazed windows in hotel rooms across the world are a rider in her contracts.
“I know I’ve become that person. I’m picky.”
Young compares experiencing perfect pitch to how others might read books: “You don’t need to read the words out loud to hear them … a friend I was trying to explain this to said it was like seeing colours in the dark.”
“Look, it’s an incredibly useful talent in as far as you can sit on a plane and open a score and hear it all in your head,” she says. “But it can be a nightmare ... If I’m in a modern theatre there are low dynamic, constant pitches. I have had to teach myself to block out the noise, eliminate sounds. For me the idea of being in a completely silent environment is rare. And wonderful.”
‘I found Tár fascinating. But it’s a work of fiction’
Young and Blanchett met when both films were nearing completion, after the actor invited the conductor to a private screening of Tár in London in June 2022, to “get some feedback”.
Two weeks later Young returned the invitation, with Blanchett viewing an early cut of Knowing the Score, and agreeing to come on board.
“Her performance in Tár is impeccably researched and rehearsed and trained and there’s a huge amount of emotional and intellectual capital invested in it,” says Young, of Blanchett. “I found Tár fascinating … but it’s a work of fiction.” (Note to filmgoers: Conductors do not commonly travel in private jets. “Those days are long gone,” Young says.)
The fictional film is less about conducting than it is about the abuse of power wielded from the podium, says Young – and that power is very real. It was mercilessly dissected in the 1992 book The Maestro Myth by British music journalist Norman Lebrecht: a work populated with autocratic, despotic, megalomaniacal, brilliant conductors, with Berlin Philharmonic’s longtime conductor Herbert von Karajan the poster boy.
“When I wrote that book, there were no women conductors to write about,” Lebrecht says in the film. And Young represents everything the now cliched maestro is not. (“And it is maestro, not ‘maestra’,” she asserts, dismissing the artificial word invented only recently. “But try just ‘Simone’, it’s easier.”)
Young doesn’t particularly want to discuss gender, either in the documentary or the interview. As she says in the film, “What does being a women have to do with conducting? My tits don’t get in the way.”
The comment encapsulates Young’s exasperation with the state of play in her chosen field, where a woman standing on a podium in front of a major symphony orchestra is still out of the ordinary. The quip also gives us a glimpse into the Young persona: a woman who cuts to the chase and enjoys a joke; a woman who, despite having worked with most of the world’s great orchestras for more than three decades, and mastered six languages, still retains her Aussie accent.
“I think of myself like a sports coach: I bring it all together,” she says. “One hundred people are basically doing what that one person wants.
“But I think the days of the domineering dominating maestros of the 60s and 70s, and certainly of the decades before that, have moved on.”
‘I was basically the only woman conducting in Europe’
Young grew up in the Sydney beachside suburb of Manly, where even as an infant she showed an exceptional affinity with music, bobbing her head to and fro in time with a beat. She would ride the ferry into the CBD with her father, watching the sails of the Sydney Opera House take shape; her first concert experience was soon after the building opened. (“Bernstein conducting the New York Phil in Tchaikovsky six – a revelation,” she says.)
She began her professional life as a répétiteur, playing piano to accompany rehearsing singers for what was then known as the Australian Opera. She studied under all three of Australia’s greatest conductors – Charles Mackerras, Richard Bonynge and Stuart Challender – and at the age of 25 became the youngest person and the first woman to hold the post of resident conductor with Opera Australia. The next year, in 1987, she was named Young Australian of the Year, collected an overseas study grant from the Australia Council, and left the country to pursue a career in what her husband Greg Condon described to her as “an industry of broken dreams and disappointed hopes”.
By the late 1980s she was working as Daniel Barenboim’s assistant at the Berlin State Opera and the Bayreuth Festival.
“For the first time I have seen a woman conductor who completely asexualises her gestures,” says a young Daniel Barenboim, from a 1990s interview that features in Knowing the Score. It’s meant as a compliment.
Young laughs heartily when asked about that comment. “For the sensibilities of 2023 it’s unwieldy and awkward, but I think what he was trying to say was that my gestures were not attuned to my genderised physicality, that my gestures were completely drawn out of – and focused on - creating the musical sound.
“I rather liked it because if you turn the clock back to the 90s, I was basically the only woman [conductor] working in Europe … To Daniel Barenboim, I was a conductor.”
Young remains the only woman to have conducted both the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras. On the day in 1997 when the latter voted to end its centuries-long ban on hiring female musicians (the sole woman player was contracted harpist Anna Lelkes, who was obliged to perform behind a screen), she was on the Viennese podium, conducting Wagner’s marathon opera Lohengrin and seven-and-a-half-months pregnant (“and the stomachs of some of the men around me were considerably larger”).
“I like to think that my now gorgeous daughter Lucy … and I were directly responsible for the positive outcome of that vote,” she says.
Having earlier admitted to being picky and a technician’s nightmare, Young concedes she may also be accused of lacking tact at times – something of a necessity in her profession. What the conductor does not own up to is “control freak” and “perfectionist”, two of the adjectives thrown about when she was effectively sacked as Opera Australia’s music director in 2002, midway through her contract.
“[Young’s] future visions for the artistic growth of the company are not sustainable by OA in its current financial position and we have reluctantly concluded that we have to seek another path,” OA’s chief executive, Adrian Collette (now chief executive of the Australia Council) told the Age at the time.
Young says it was “a myth” she was sending the company broke with her demands, and was crushed by the decision.
“Suddenly that was all ripped away,” she says. “I found it devastating.”
The turbulent period that saw Young seek refuge back in Europe is covered in Knowing the Score. (“What was shocking about it was how badly she was treated,” says Lebrecht in the film.)
Young did a lot of soul searching before deciding to return to Australia to take up the position of chief conductor with the Sydney Symphony mid last year. On the cusp of her 62nd birthday she is shrewder and more resilient.
“When I took on the position [at Sydney Symphony] as chief conductor I very deliberately made sure I was only responsible for the musical aspects of the position. I may develop that position into something more when it comes to talking about renewal of my contract – but that’s future music.”
Knowing the Score is in cinemas around Australia from Thursday 16 February
