A sort of antidote to TAR, where the conductor was demonised, KNOWING THE SCORE tends to canonise Saint Simone with no scores to settle.
Directed by Janine Hosking who made the outstanding THE EULOGY, the feature documentary on Geoffrey Tozer, KNOWING THE SCORE is a sequel to The Young One, the 1995 archive documentary depicting conductor Simone Young, determined to be her best – no matter what the odds.
The film is motivated by Simone’s planned return to Australia for her appointment is the first female Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2022 and catches the rehearsal process and first performance at the reopening of the Sydney Opera House.
Emerging from the shadow of COVID-19, the Concert Hall reopens after two years for major restoration with a grand event, a resonant performance of The Mahler 2 – Resurrection Symphony.
The film features footage of Simone with all the great orchestras of the world. These include the Vienna Philharmonic – where she was the first woman to ever conduct the orchestra in 1993 (they didn’t allow women to audition as players until 1997), the Berlin Philharmonic, Paris Opera Orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic – whose Chief Conductor Leonard Bernstein inspired 13-year-old Simone to become a conductor upon her first visit to the Sydney Opera House.
Since then, Simone’s career has weathered many highs and lows from young trailblazer to a woman at the top of her game – until the shock rejection in 2005 from her own country when her contract was not renewed by Opera Australia in a blaze of humiliating headlines and media speculation.
There’s a resonance of THE EULOGY here, where Paul Keating blamed bitchiness in the bureaucracy and management of our elite music organisations for Geoffrey Tozer’s failure to ascend the stratosphere of super stardom.
The hope here is that Simone Young will fare much better. Have faith.
