‘Women love him’: Umberto Clerici’s wife opens up on being married to the ‘Brad Pitt of music’
It was a date neither of them wanted, but when handsome Italian cellist Umberto Clerici met whip-smart lawyer Sophie Given it set the bar for a perfect score.
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Google Umberto Clerici and by far the biggest search is for “wife”.
It beats “cello”, the instrument for which he is internationally renowned, and “conductor”, the role that is taking him on the same global trajectory.
Perhaps this is understandable when Clerici, according to that wife of intense interest, is “the Brad Pitt of music”.
“This is a man who men want to be and women want to be with,” she says.
It’s true that Clerici, chief conductor of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, exudes celebrity-like charisma. Or maybe it’s just that he’s Italian.
When we meet in the lobby bar of The Inchcolm by Ovolo Hotel in Brisbane, he immediately takes my hand and kisses it.
His wife smiles warmly – she’s used to it, and not the least bit bothered.
When it comes to a power couple, these two are it.
Clerici, born into a wealthy family in Torino in Italy’s north, is feted by audiences the world over, and Sophie Given – Judge Given, if you please – is also at the top of her game, rising above a difficult childhood in Hobart to a coveted position in the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia.
The synergy between music and law might not be immediately obvious, but it is very real in this big, bold love story that almost never was.
“I was dragged kicking and screaming to meet him, and he didn’t want to meet me either,” laughs Given, 45.
It was June 2014 when the single mother was roped into going to a concert in Sydney after her friend’s husband, an Italian who had been personally invited by Clerici, pulled out.
“That morning I was having coffee with some Year 1 mums and I had a head cold and felt awful and said, ‘I’ve got to go to the symphony tonight and I’ve got to meet this guy and he’s Italian and he’s a cellist’; and they were all looking at me like I was insane. They slapped me around and said, ‘Go out at lunchtime and buy a new dress’,” she recalls.
Clerici had not long arrived from Italy as one of two principal cellists with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
“I didn’t know yet if Australia was the right place for me to stay, and I’d recently broken up with somebody,” the 42 year old says.
“I was on a year’s probation with the orchestra so a relationship would make everything more complicated.”
But when Clerici met Given after the concert, he says “there were fireworks”.
A few days later the pair had pizza and a glass of wine, their first kiss, then Clerici left to perform in Asia and Europe.
“We messaged all day, every day, for eight weeks,” says Given, who was smitten but not letting her heart rule her head.
“Traditionally, if you’re a woman and you end up in a blended family situation, you take on his kids, and I had been a stepmother before and it’s not easy. So I have full respect for how patient he is with my daughter.
“I had decided it didn’t matter who it was – if they had children and an ex-wife, that was not happening, and it’s really hard to find people like that when you get to a certain age.
“He fit the non-negotiables.”
The couple married in the opulent 15th century Basilica del Corpus Domini in Torino in 2017.
Today, home base is Sydney, with Given’s 17-year-old daughter Jemima and one very spoiled bernese mountain dog called Pablo.
Clerici’s appointment as chief conductor of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra in January 2023 sees him spend roughly 12 weeks a year in Brisbane then he travels extensively across Australia and internationally.
“I’m away for almost eight months of the year but it works for us,” he says.
Given adds: “Our dynamic has always been that he travels. When he is away, I miss him, but there are advantages, like starfishing in bed.
“It just feels like a normal marriage, there’s no part of me that goes, ‘oh my God, he’s gone’.”
Umberto Clerici was unlikely to be intimidated by the whip-smart Sophie Given. His family is legal royalty in Torino – and he himself was destined for a career in law.
Umberto’s mother Antonietta Fenoglio is a judge, his father Elio Clerici a barrister and his late maternal grandfather Giovanni Fenoglio – best man at his wedding at the age of 97 – a retired chief judge.
“We are judges and barristers for many generations,” says Clerici, which is the reason he and Given were permitted to marry in the Basilica del Corpus Domini, whose congregation comprises the judges of the courts of Torino.
But in an astonishing break from tradition, Umberto – or “Umbi” as his wife and family call him – chose music, as did Alessandro, his brother three years his junior, who is a violinist in Milano.
“My mother wanted us to have a musical education and we went to the new Suzuki school in Torino – she thought it was a much nicer experience to play in an orchestra, the social element of it, and she was right,” Clerici says.
At age five, he was given the choice of cello or violin; the cello won because it “sounded less like a cat in a washing machine”.
By age seven, he had fallen in love with the instrument.
His father was not impressed.
“Early on, my father didn’t approve of me being a musician because we are an old, conservative family and he said no, my brother and I had to be barristers, but my father didn’t like being a lawyer himself so he was not very convincing,” he smiles.
“But then he forced us to make a conscious decision, not to be capricious, and prove to him music could be something.”
Clerici went on to win several prizes, including the Janigro Competition in Zagreb, the Rostropovich in Paris and the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow.
By the age of 17, he had performed Haydn’s D major cello concerto in Japan and before joining the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2014, played with renowned orchestras across Europe including his home town’s Teatro Regio di Torino.
Conducting came to Clerici almost by accident. In 2018, the Sydney Symphony had been hired – by an international judge convention – to play at the Opera House.
“The SSO said we need a conductor, but we don’t have the budget, so how about you do it?” recalls Clerici, who studied for months prior to understand all the instruments.
“I was suddenly in charge of my colleagues but they loved it, and from there it went crazy and now I’m conducting everywhere.
“Usually, you get a chief conductorship after 10 or 15 years, not after a year and a half, so it’s gone very, very quickly.”
In 2024, Clerici will conduct Elgar’s cello concerto with Steven Isserlis for the Volksoper Vienna and debut with the Orchestra del Teatro Massimo in Palermo and the Orchestra Regionale Toscana. Does he miss Italy?
“I do. It’s very different from Australia, which relies on the functioning of procedures. There are rules and clear boundaries and that makes the society work well,” he says.
“But Italy relies on the interpersonal relationship. Something is either possible or impossible, according to who you know, not the procedure or rules involved.
“For example, a restaurant can stay open for an hour more if it wants, or a post office can close an hour earlier if someone has to go to a cousin’s wedding.
“This translates to the arts as well. Here my job in Australia, my mission, is to open the boundaries of possibility.”
Clerici spends a lot of time studying scores for upcoming performances.
“A conductor’s job is to know all the parts, how they interact, so there is a lot of planning,” he says.
“There are 90 musicians in the orchestra, everybody has a single part, so how do they sound together?
“Also, how do you convince the orchestra, while moving your hands, but also in rehearsal with a minimal amount of words, to get on board with your interpretation?
“As a chief conductor, it’s your role to shape the orchestra.
“In a way, it’s like being a director of a film, except you’re also part of the performance.”
Like her husband, Sophie Given baulked at becoming a barrister. It was on the insistence of her mother – from whom she is now estranged – that she do a law degree.
“I didn’t want to be a lawyer, including for the 20 years that I was a lawyer,” she laughs. “Being a judge – now that’s different; I love it.”
Growing up in Hobart in a single-parent household after her father left when she was 18 months old, Given was “quite precocious”, “utterly unmusical” and “very intelligent but incredibly lazy at school”.
She was one of those enviable kids who could cram for exams, with brilliant results.
So bright that she skipped Year 1, several subjects in Year 10, and graduated from high school at age 16.
“My mother had a strange view that the only degree she would pay for me to do, in the sense I could stay at home, was law – this was because she had wanted to be a lawyer but her parents forced her to be a teacher … yet she failed to see the irony.”
Given chose the quickest degree possible, straight law at University of Technology Sydney, and began her career at 21.
She hasn’t seen her mother, who now lives in England, since Jemima was two, and Clerici has never met her.
“Family has always been a tricky area,” Given says.
“My mother was always very difficult and after my father bolted, his parents, who were Polish immigrants, stepped in and helped financially and they were basically my parents.
“My grandfather died when I was 11 and my grandmother at 13 so that was horrible.”
Her mother remarried when Given was 16 and Given remains close to her stepfather, whom her mother left when Given was in her late 20s and pregnant with Jemima.
“Explaining my family background requires charts, a graph and an easel,” she laughs.
When Given’s first marriage dissolved, she stuck with the law out of a sense of responsibility to provide for her daughter.
By late 2021, she’d made partner with HWL Ebsworth and was regarded as a gun litigator, specialising in government and administrative law.
Then, on an otherwise unremarkable Thursday, she was tapped to become a judge.
“I’d just finished a meeting with my team of 15 lawyers and said, ‘Well, it looks like it’s going to be a quiet Thursday.’
“That afternoon I answered a random call – it was (then attorney-general) Michaelia Cash – and she said the Governor-General had made me a judge.
“It is a bit like being kidnapped by aliens because one day you’re just minding your own business, the next you get beamed up to the mothership.
“I had to retire from the partnership, effectively immediately, it was really strange.”
The Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, the merger of two courts in September 2021, deals with family law, migration law and general federal law. Given is a Division 2 judge in the latter, covering bankruptcy, fair work and human rights.
“My work is really challenging – there is no one who ever comes into your courtroom and is having the best day of their life, so you’ve got to have a huge amount of humanity,” she says. “It’s about listening, not speaking; it’s about solving their problems, not demonstrating how clever you are.”
The marriage of Clerici and Given has not been without its own challenges.
In 2015, six months after meeting, Given flew to Italy to meet Clerici’s family. It didn’t go well.
“Umbi’s mum was quite difficult,” Given says.
“I was the first non-artist he’d ever been with, and she was used to being queen bee, very intimidating to whoever they were, and I wasn’t having a bar of that. “When you’re older, you go, ‘I already have my own life, you don’t scare me that much, and you’re not the grandmother of my children.’
“When you meet as adults, there has to be a certain amount of mutual respect there – she was trying to put me off; it didn’t work and now she and I have reached a good point.
“We still don’t have a common language, I speak decent enough Italian and can understand it; I just can’t answer back, which is also a good dynamic.” As for the relationship between Clerici and Jemima, that also took time.
“Now they’re as thick as thieves,” says Given. “But she was very stand-offish at the beginning – and he’s not used to that.
“This is a man who men want to be and women want to be with, women of all ages love him.”
Given credits Clerici with strengthening their family unit.
“He will tell either of us if he thinks we’re in the wrong, or right,” she says. “He’s a stable influence and a pretty shrewd judge of character and quite emotionally intelligent, so if he calls it that way, Jemima and I listen.”
All these years later, Given is still amused by the behaviour of Clerici’s adoring fans.
“He’s almost Brad Pitt famous for what he does, and his fans are not much interested in me, which is fine, because as a judge I can’t really talk about what I do,” she says.
“But I once went to a concert with a girlfriend who got very excited because these two elegant older ladies sitting next to her were looking at the program and pointing at Umberto’s photo.
“My friend said to them, ‘Oh, my friend here is married to him,’ and one of them looked me up and down and was like, ‘You!’, with some disdain.’’
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