Above: Chief conductor of Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Simone Young. Photo credit: Peter Brew-Bevan. Featured image-Simone Young with the SSO. Image supplied: Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
The ‘Simone Young Conducts’ concerts in any busy Sydney Symphony Orchestra year are anticipated and special musical events at the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall.
Concerts such as this recent one, dedicated entirely to one composer and devised by the star conductor returned from Europe to us,are testaments to the talent and vision of the great composers involved. They also shine with the clean, passionate, precise nature of Young’s interpretation and music making experience in Europe.
Leading a responsive Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Simone Young has structured illuminating programmes dedicated to Wagner, Mahler in her past three years as Chief Conductor. Recently she chose to spotlight the genius of Richard Strauss in her signature masterclasses of interesting major works in magical, unprecedented interpretation.
This programme emphasised the variety of the composer’s output, with works from late back to earlier periods, from the intimate to the huge scale, the familiar to lesser known.
The three works on offer supplied a stunningly cross-genre, diverse demonstration of Richard Strauss’ output. They demonstrate his prodigious power of musical shape, characterisation and comment, an intense dramatic focus and experimental, adept aptitude for communicating through ingenious, even daring orchestrations.
These qualities were dug out and held boldly before us with freshness and an air of discovery. These important works were thrust into the Sydney Opera House revived acoustic over an inspiringly hued one and three quarter hour midweek concert by the successful partnership of our flagship orchestra and its Chief Conductor Simone Young AM.
This ‘Simone Young Conducts’ event had a collaboration with Australian pianist Andrea Lam at its centre. The central placement of a work for soloist and orchestra followed something of a standard model, where the music for featured orchestra alone is broken up with a concerto.
However Richard Strauss is anything but cliche. This chameleon concert’s ability to switch between compositional periods of the composer’s life as well as concepts or preoccupations furnished us with an atypical short early work , Burleske (from the 21 year old Strauss), full of intricate layering between soloist and band, and intelligent musical caricature.
Andrea Lam, fresh from a successful ABC TV hosting/ judging role on reality TV show The Piano, gifted us with an elegant, erudite reading of this clever work. Her handling of the filigree-versus-change of pace to musical portrait material and some fiendishly difficult insertion of gestures was paramount here. Strauss’ youthful genius with a piano part of rhythmic, expressive and spiritual spontaneity is a challenge, but the blending here of the shapes and parodies of sentiments heard in works from Wagner plus Brahms was a thrilling spectacle.
The athletic and academic whirlwind that made this piano and orchestra gem sparkle was also in evidence right from the start of the concert. Strauss’ dense, shifting study for 23 solo strings, his Metamorphosen (from a globally exhausted 1945) was also given the momentum and colourisation to shine clearly as emotional undulations and progressive orchestrations between solo and sectional dialogue.
Andrea Lam’s encore offering of Chopin’s Nocturne in C sharp minor Op. posth was a gentle penetrating version with exquisite use of rubato especially in the central section. The smooth clear control and evocation of stillness was a nice conclusion to the ever-changing Straus romp which preceded it.
Above: Pianist Andrea Lam played Richard Strauss’ ‘Burleske’ with the SSO. Image: detail from photo by Lisa-Marie Mazzucco.
This was a formidable celebration of the intimacy and churning stilllness this composer was possible of, as well as the introspection following world crises that often finds its multifaceted and multicoloured fallout settling into music created by sensitive , prolific artists.
From the opening layers of Metamorphosen, with gestures reaching upward, we could settle in for the gentle rocking ride of Strauss’ festival of flux. SSO strings were world class here, led with capable clarity by Simone Young, whose ability to plan or pace trajectories with finely graded details showed us why she is one of the world’s leading conductors, in the past years presenting memorable Sydney concert monts of Romantic and post Romantic music with the SSO.
Following interval an absolutely huge orchestra was harnessed by Simone Young as it journeyed across the narrative of Friederich Nietzsche’s Übermensch in the continuous nine movement tone poem, Also Sprach Zarasthrustra (1896). An attempt to clap after the brilliant brass plus orchestra evocation of a sunrise in the introduction (a landmark borrowing of classical music in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey). But the orchestra had launched into the body of Strauss’ programmatic romp.
Much was made of the chance to rduce textures and immensity to the intimate- in contrasting moments such as ‘Of the great longing’ or ‘Dirge’. If this concert’s Metamorphosen could be described as SSO strings and soloists interlocking to develop fragilities and emotions then the extended orchestra Simone Young exploited took human sensitivity and hurled new otherworldly natural states at us in a constant exciting cavalcade of superhuman orchestral strength. Where musical fitness and control of successive high points supplied music with breathtaking vividness.
As an introduction to orchestral or concerto music for the new SSO concertgoer, this would have been a baptism of sonic fire. For SSO subscribers, reviewers and even members, this well structured roast of Richard Strauss reinforced for us his skilful writing for orchestra and an inimitable pianism his young humanity was possible of. The imagery, colour, characters and swirling or stepped climactic moments created by conductor and performers supplied a riveting retrospective of immense variety and verve.
From 31 Oct 2025, Simone Young conducts Sydney Symphony Orchecstra in concerts featuring Janáček’s ‘Sinfonietta’, Dvořák’s Cello Concerto with superstar European cellist Kian Soltani and the ravel arrangement of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
