Simone Young: Opera's Young one

Simone Young is much in demand at opera houses around the world for her direct conducting style, thoroughness of approach and musical integrity. In a rare visit to Covent Garden to conduct Macbeth, the energetic Australian tells Lynne Walker of her ambitions

"I really love singers. I enjoy working with them and I'm fascinated by what they do. We may drive each other nuts but we have a wonderful time trying to perfect this extraordinarily impossible art form that is opera." The Australian conductor Simone Young is still far better known in opera houses on the Continent than in Britain, where her engagements have been restricted to a handful of productions at the Royal Opera.

Chance brought Young together with the director Phyllida Lloyd for a new production of Verdi's Macbeth at Covent Garden, and two weeks into rehearsals it hadn't occurred to Young, until I raised the subject, that the production was female-driven. Jokes about weird sisters or ambitious queens running the show must be strictly off-limits backstage at Covent Garden.

When this long-postponed Macbeth was originally scheduled, before the Royal Opera House's temporary closure, Edward Downes was to have conducted. Apart from the gender of the conductor, the version of the opera has changed, too. Instead of the original 1847 version used in the concert performances that the ROH substituted for the staged production in 1997, Young will conduct the later Paris compilation dating from 1864, though without the complete ballet, "just a small chorus and ballet, which I think is significant in the structure of the third act".

She has conducted it in various versions, in Vienna, Munich and Houston, but this is the one that she considers most valid, both dramatically and musically. Apart from studying what the Verdi scholars have written, she has spent hours poring over different editions of the score, scrutinising dusty orchestral parts and scores in European opera houses, and tracing patterns between the other dozen or so Verdi operas that she has conducted.

This thoroughness of approach and her musical integrity, as well as something of her direct conducting style, may be attributed to the conductors who influenced her early on, particularly James Conlon in Cologne, Daniel Barenboim in Paris and Bayreuth, and Pierre Boulez. "I love the way Boulez's mind works. I spent four months trailing him from rehearsal to rehearsal, learning about the rehearsal process from what he chose to say, and not say. I never accept the status quo, and perhaps I even opt too often for a riskier course than is strictly necessary, but I'm always looking for a new means of expression through a particular work."

At present, that involves detailed preparation for Mascagni's Cavalleria rusticana and Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera, learning Puccini's La Fanciulla del West for her Los Angeles debut with Placido Domingo, and devouring everything she can find on Berg's Lulu, which she conducts next season. And as if that wasn't enough, she is brushing up her piano-playing to accompany a lieder recital in Sydney. "It seems a lot but it's all about partitioning the brain. Performing or rehearsing takes such immense concentration that it's not hard to switch off everything else and immerse yourself in the project in hand."

Her recent appointment as both Artistic and Music Director at Opera Australia has given her scope to introduce new talent, though not without arousing some controversy. One recent headline read, "Women Conductors Take Over Down Under", referring to the statistic that the new Melbourne opera season featured more women conductors than men. That line-up includes the American Karen Kamensek, highly regarded at the Vienna Volksoper; Julia de Plater with Sweeney Todd; and an English colleague of Young's from Cologne Opera, Julia Jones. The doyenne of women conductors, Jane Glover, has also been invited back and Sian Edwards, of whom we've seen too little in Britain following her brief unhappy tenure at English National Opera, is a familiar name in Sydney.

"A lot of what we view as resistance to women on the podium is actually nothing to do with musicians. It's a perception of the people viewing it from outside, be they management, board or audience, envisaging what the problems might be. If singers and instrumentalists have someone in front of them who is capable of encouraging them to play in a slightly different way, approach a piece from a different angle, then their job is more interesting and challenging.

"But conducting professionally is a tough life. I've spent far too much time away from my family and that's hard on them, on me, and on my husband. I can't deny that this career needs emotional strength, and maybe some women aren't prepared to make those sacrifices in their personal life."

Young herself hit the headlines many times as the first female to conduct at renowned musical institutions – two in Vienna, the Opéra Bastille in Paris, others in Munich, Hamburg and Tokyo. Yet though she has clearly moved a long way on from issues of gender, they do crop up every so often, as she noticed last month when she caused a certain stir as the first woman to conduct in the "holiest of holy" Brucknerhaus in Linz. One of the key houses in her career was the Vienna State Opera where, in 1993, she was the first woman conductor, paving the way for the admission of female instrumentalists into the orchestra. She has been constantly invited back there, conducting 25 different operas from Fidelio to Peter Grimes.

Why don't we see and hear more of her in Britain? "There's only so much time I can spend away from home, spreading myself across three continents. Up until now, I've avoided the concert scene in Britain because I didn't feel that I had sufficient knowledge of the repertoire to be confident that I could do a concert on two rehearsals. Recently, I've been in the luxurious situation of having my own orchestra and that allowed me to work through lots of repertoire with the Bergen Philharmonic."

Norway offered more than a new musical challenge. Young discovered the excitement of hiking on glaciers and the frisson of abseiling down cracks in the ice. She admits that her enjoyment of physically demanding pursuits brings out the dare-devil in her, but although she goes scuba-diving, she draws the line at bungee-jumping. A cricket fan, she's thrilled to have escaped from rehearsals of Macbeth to watch her elder daughter, Yvann, play cricket this summer. Young and her schoolteacher husband, Greg, with their two daughters now aged five and 14, have made their home in Sussex but they also have a house in Sydney.

"I'm only 41, but I was fortunate in achieving so many of my goals quickly. I'm a perfectionist, and I drive myself hard, and probably most of the people around me, too." And for three years in a row, that meant going round and round the globe, with a small baby in tow. "If you could collect points as a baby, Lucy would have been a gold frequent-flyer before she was two," Young chuckles. But even though she claims to have streamlined her activities to make them less physically demanding, she frequently works 14-hour days in the British summer months she spends with Opera Australia, introducing significant changes into many areas of the company's work, maintaining a high profile in the rehearsal room, as well as doing the rounds of politicians and sponsors.

Simone Young can't take on any other major role while she's running Opera Australia, but with her tenure in Bergen now over, she is looking forward to being in charge of a major symphony orchestra sometime. Till then, she says firmly, "the game plan is to have more time to penetrate deeper into scores and to become a better conductor".

'Macbeth' is in repertory at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London WC2, to 5 July (020-7304 4000)