Later that month, Young will flip the switch with a program of Elgar and Vaughan Williams in which concertmaster Andrew Haveron plays the Elgar Violin Concerto. The occasion is a celebration of Haveron’s 50th birthday (a date he, coincidentally, shares with Young herself).
Superstar Chinese pianist Lang Lang will return to Sydney.Credit: AP
“It’s long been a tradition in America and Europe that you celebrate important birthdays – key members of the orchestra, key composers, conductors and so on,” says Young. “It’s a tradition I rather like, and it’s about building a personal relationship between the players and the audience. I think that’s really rather special. And it gives me the chance to indulge my latest musicological passion, which is the less-known symphonies of Vaughan Williams.”
Young returns in September with a Richard Strauss program featuring one of the best known works in the classical repertoire – or at least its opening 21 bars – Thus Spoke Zarathustra, made famous in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“I’ve done the work so many times,” she says, “and invariably there’s a slight ripple or murmur that goes through the concert hall when the double basses start up after the big bit everybody knows.
“For me that that’s almost part of the score now. It’s a fabulous work. It’s more than just that massive statement at the beginning. It’s quite reflective in places, celebratory in others and in others, stormy. I love the fact it starts like that and yet it finishes so gently in an ambivalence of major and minor. It’s a wonderful work.”
‘The Ode to Joy is extraordinary. The words are eternal and the music is one of the great melodies of all time.’
Simone Young
Mussorgsky’s timeless Pictures at an Exhibition follows in November, a work Young describes as colourful and dramatic, adding it is a “great program for anyone to bring along a mate who’s interested but never taken that step”.
Young then returns to the repertoire that she has made her own with Wagner’s sprawling Siegfried, a work she calls “brilliant – as in the facets of a diamond”.
She rounds out the year with a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and its glorious Ode to Joy.
“I’ve never done it in Sydney,” she says. “It’s a lovely way to finish the season. The Ode to Joy is extraordinary. The words are eternal and the music is one of the great melodies of all time.”
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Young’s concerts are part of the SSO’s broader program for the year, which features 44 programs, including the return of principal guest conductor Donald Runnicles and visits from piano superstars Lang Lang and Daniil Trifonov and violinists James Ehnes and Arabella Steinbacher.
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