From the BBC, and Norman Lebrecht, you have just a few more days to listen to Simone Young, Music Director at Hamburg Opera, about school and youth in Sydney, about 'faith' and music making, about her early time at Opera Australia particularly with Stuart Challender, about cracking it in Europe, about prejudice and gender, about hard work and study and research, about music making, and about her time as MD of Opera Australia and how and why it ended. It was a pretty gutless severance, a phone call from her manager to say her contract wasn't being renewed.
She seems to carry no bitterness, is rooted in Australian (she uses words like soul, brain and happiness), and you feel the outstretched hand, waiting for the new pit, because it essentially comes down to that. I've no doubt it will happen although the philistines who run our country, on every level, dent even the most optimistic punter.
Simone Young conducts the Sydney Symphony Orchestra this week in the Concert Hall.
(Before this slips away, I should note that Simone points out she left behind a deficit of $40,000 not the projected $2 mill they were wringing their hands over. And audience numbers were increasing at 10% pa. What I had forgotten was that there was this 9/11 thing in 2001.)
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