Frau Young takes Hamburg

[The Age, 5 September 2005]

Last Thursday, Simone Young conducted her first performance as music director of the Hamburg State Opera. She talks to Michael Shmith about her new life a world away from Opera Australia.

Hamburg is a place that takes its culture seriously and never forgets its musical heroes. On the front of the Staatsoper building, a relief image of Gustav Mahler in profile stares blankly at a city he would not recognise. Hamburg, where the composer and conductor was the opera's music director from 1891 to 1897, was his "tryout" for Vienna.