A world-class conductor at 37, Simone Young is handed the baton as Opera Australia's music director

By MICHAEL FITZGERALD

erforming as the tragic Elisabeth in Opera Australia's recent Melbourne production of Tannhauser, soprano Lisa Gasteen felt the powerful waves of Richard Wagner's music travel through her and was mesmerized by the conductor's hands that helped shape them. "I don't know why a certain gesture or fluidity of movement through the hands creates a certain sound," she says, "but it does." Singers, musicians and audience all felt the force of those hands, their arabesques as compelling as Tannhauser's lavish sets. "It's as though the right hand is showing you what to do and when," the conductor explains, "and the left hand is showing you how to do it."

Not only are they "beautifully expressive hands," as Gasteen says, they are pioneering ones. Unique in the world of opera, they belong to a woman, Simone Young. The Australian-born, England-based conductor was the first of her sex to wield a baton at the fabled Vienna Volksoper, the Vienna Staatsoper and the Paris Opera Bastille. And at just 37, in a calling where 50 is considered young, her elegant hands are extending their reach. In October 1999 she debuts with the New York Philharmonic; in 2001 she will conduct her biggest score yet, taking up the post of music director of Opera Australia. Says Gasteen: "She's unstoppable."

Star quality helps, and with her titian mane and swooning style atop ever-present stilettos, Young glamorizes opera's usually faceless orchestra pit. "The feminine aspect has for once been an advantage," says Tannhauser director Elke Neidhardt. "It's part of her meteoric rise--that she is an attractive lady, and she does it well. If there is a choice between a short plump male conductor and an attractive female conductor, I would pick the female."

Initially, chance picked her. In 1985, while working as a rehearsal pianist for the Australian Opera, Young was thrust onto the podium for a performance of The Mikado when the operetta's conductor fell ill. Young shone, and soon after left for Europe with her husband to widen her skills. The German city of Cologne was hard for a girl brought up in the Sydney beachside suburb of Manly. "We were constantly depressed," Young recalls. "You're inside looking at this bleak weather and thinking of your friends and family at home in the sunshine." While working at the Cologne Opera, she immersed herself in the Rhine culture that gave rise to her beloved 19th century operas. Assisting conductor Daniel Barenboim at the 1992 Wagner Festival brought her closer still. "I learned more about Wagner in the hour and a half I spent conducting an orchestral rehearsal in the pit at Bayreuth than I could have in five years with a new teacher," she says.

It was Young's Australianness, she believes, that gained her access to the male bastions of European opera. "If you come from Australia," she says, "you're not expected to fit the mold." Nor did her style. Making her conducting debut in Berlin at 30, Young took a democratic approach. "I had to deal with the fact that at least two-thirds of the orchestra were considerably older than me," says the conductor, who made a practice of asking her musicians for advice. With youthful energy and a quick grasp of a variety of musical styles, Young followed up with debuts in Paris, Vienna and London's Covent Garden. "She has conquered with a mixture of her persuasive charm and determination, talent and passion for music," notes Mary Vallentine, managing director of the Sydney Symphony, which Young will conduct this week at the Sydney Opera House.

Despite the Teutonic march of her career, Young, the daughter of a lawyer and a seamstress, remains a curious blend of her Australian-Irish and Croatian heritage. "Simone doesn't stand on ceremony," says Opera Australia general manager Adrian Collette. "You don't sense that there is a distance between her as grand international conductor and the people she's working with." Soprano Gasteen notes an easy empathy with singers and musicians--"Did you hear how they were stomping for her?" she says of the orchestra at the previous night's encore--mixed with a puritanical rehearsal ethic: "She organizes her time down to the last minute." Adds Collette: "It's an obsession tinged with a very practical bent."

The thrilling sounds she elicited from the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra for Tannhauser last week honored the composer's desire to keep intact "the bond that binds the vocal rendering with the orchestral accompaniment." Says German-born director Neidhardt: "A lot of conductors are great egomaniacs, and while Simone knows what she wants, she sees that the product needs to span the two aspects." To enter Wagner's spirit, Young read the composer's letters and the writings of Nietzsche, who influenced Wagner's uber-tale of love, lust and loss. "None of us have hot lines to the composer," she says. "I try to be as true as I can to what I believe to be the composer's intention."

Yet she isn't elitist about her craft, likening Wagner's marathon The Ring of the Nibelung to playing a Test cricket match, and her role to that of coach, "to keep that team working at its absolute optimum." At home in England, she loves nothing more than watching the cricket. "When she relaxes," says Neidhardt, a former colleague at the Cologne Opera, "I see the Aussie girl I have known for a long time."

Right now she is a player at the top of her game. In her third season at New York's Metropolitan Opera in February, her conducting of Verdi's Il Trovatore was broadcast live to Europe, allowing her teacher husband Greg and 10-year-old daughter Yvann to listen at their cottage in Sussex--"which I think is pretty neat," says Young, who travels with the couple's other child, 11-month-old Lucy. Neat, too, is her career trajectory. "In 2001 I turn 40," she says. "It's a great time to be taking on the responsibility for more than just an evening in the theater."

When she takes up the reins of Opera Australia, Young plans to refocus her career as she might do with a piece of music; tightening here, flexing there. "We'll simply divide it up," she says of her freelance work. "One year Australia and Europe, the next year Australia and America." Simone Young's career is in very capable hands.