Simone Young

Simone Young ( born March 2, 1961 in Sydney ) is an Australian conductor, opera director and university professor.

Life

Simone Young is Irish- Croatian descent. Her father is a lawyer and his mother a seamstress. First experiences with music she made as a five year old at the piano her grandmother.

She studied composition and piano in her hometown of Sydney and began her Dirigierkarriere 1985 at the Sydney Opera House. At the age of 24, she was there for the first time in an orchestra pit after they had to fill in for an ailing colleague.

In 1986, she led a grant from the Australian Ministry of Culture to Europe. In 1991, she was assistant to James Conlon at the Cologne Opera and thereafter by Daniel Barenboim at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin and at the Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth. Barenboim, enabled her to its extensive network of contacts in the music world working with outstanding orchestras, became one of their biggest sponsors. Since then she has at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in London, conducted worldwide at the Vienna State Opera, Opéra Bastille in Paris, at the Metropolitan Opera in New York and other major opera houses as well as many famous symphony orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic, the Munich Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle Dresden, Staatskapelle Berlin, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Stuttgart Philharmonic, the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

From 1999 to 2002 was chief conductor Simone Young of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra from 2001 to 2003 and principal conductor and artistic director of Opera Australia in Sydney and Melbourne.

Since 2005 she has been director of the Hamburg State Opera and Hamburg Music Director. As she announced on 8 November 2011, she will let her contract expire in 2015. Since 2006 she is a professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg.

Awards

• 2005: Goethe Medal
• 2006: Conductor of the Year, an award of Opernwelt
• 2007: Free admission to the Academy of Fine Arts in Hamburg
• 2008: Presentation of the Brahms Prize by the Brahms Society Schleswig- Holstein
• Honorary doctorate by the universities of Sydney and Melbourne; Member of the Order of Australia
• Chevalier des Arts et Lettres
• 2010: Honorary Membership in the Richard -Wagner -Verband Hamburg