Sydney Reviews

Left - Baiba Skride. Photo - Marco Borggreve. Cover - Simone Young. Photo - Reto Klar

The concert began with the prelude to Act III from Wagner’s Lohengrin, whose title role is the original knight in shining armour. Simone Young conducted it with such sweep and energy that it seemed to have just three phrases. It served to open the eyes of the audience to wonder at what was to come.

Baiba Skride, a violinist born in Riga and now resident in the UK, gave a flawless performance of Symanowski’s first violin concerto, with double stopping to die for and a sound so powerful that it carried effortlessly over the huge orchestra demanded by the composer. This concerto is a searingly erotic work, and Young and Skride swept the audience seamlessly through its five-section, one-movement design, “barely quieting one passion before arousing another” as CPE Bach would say. Young gave its richly coloured Firebird-like textures a remarkable blend of transparency strength, all the time moving the music forward through different emotional landscapes through flashes of Ravel and Strauss and Skryabin. Skride’s playing was just amazing – authoritative, utterly controlled, a gorgeous sound reminiscent of Nathan Milstein (in case any of my readers remember what he sounded like) – and she’s not yet 30!

After the interval Simone Young came in and waited for silence to begin Bruckner’s 7th Symphony. Her charisma was so luminous that she almost succeeded, even with Sydney’s audience – the air was electric. But then one of the cellists needed to adjust her instrument, and someone, inevitably, coughed…out of which the music, coming like Beethoven’s 9th out of nowhere, began. She took the opening so expansively that I thought we’d be still sitting there (perfectly happily) at midnight. But I soon realised that she was performing this work like Barenboim conducts Wagner – with enormous and almost constant variation of tempo. In performances of Bruckner this is much more surprising than with Wagner who as a conductor took tempo flexibility to new extremes, whereas Bruckner’s music is often deemed to rely on steady tempos to allow its enormous architecture to work. I found Young’s approach irresistibly compelling. From the very beginning she shaped the music with a sense of line so intense that at no time were those moments, so frequent in Bruckner, where a long cadential passage signals perhaps too clearly the end of a section, allowed to interrupt the flow.

And what sounds she got from this orchestra! The SSO is a wonderful orchestra, but does not always sound like the Vienna Philharmonic as it did last night. The strings, especially when they played alone, were vibrant to the point of ecstasy. The brass were strong without being overbearing. And the Wagner tubas in the slow movement – has anyone any idea how hard it is to play those instruments? But they played with perfect blend, and produced a sound somehow infinitely more sorrowful than even horns might manage. And when this majestic elegy for Wagner closed, and the Wagner tubas played together with the horns, the chording was sublime.

The scherzo produced some surprises. I’d never thought to connect the Vienna of Bruckner with that of Lehar, but Young conducted the dance-like bits of the scherzo just like that. And that alternated with slightly demonic passages where she seemed to be like an Alberich feverishly exhorting his Nibelungs to forge gold. In the finale she refused to allow any sense of longueur – whenever the brass seemed to hold the tempo back the strings would pick up the tempo, ever more impatiently, pressing on to the coda with unstoppable energy.

Simone Young is one of the few really great conductors I have ever heard live. And, pace the late Charles Mackerras, and even Stuart Challender, I will go so far as to say that she is the greatest conductor Australia has yet produced. Antony Walker is on the horizon – may we treat him well.


Sydney Symphony presents
Romantic Rapture

Conductor Simone Young
Violin Baiba Skride*

WAGNER Lohengrin: Prelude to Act III
SZYMANOWSKI Violin Concerto No.1
BRUCKNER Symphony No.7

Venue: Sydney Opera House
Season: 5 August 2010 1:30 pm – 7 August 2010 2:00 pm
Visit: www.sydneysymphony.com


* Arabella Steinbacher is unable to perform at these concerts as originally scheduled