Simone Young’s cup cake belated Beethoven birthday bash

With lavish plans for Beethoven’s 250th birthday scuppered last year, SSO conductor Simone Young threw a tea party with a cup cake and candle for her latest concert.

Soprano Lauren Fagan made her Sydney Symphony debut singing Beethoven.

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With COVID-19 scuppering lavish plans to celebrate Beethoven’s 250th birthday last year, Sydney Symphony’s incoming chief conductor Simone Young settled for an afternoon party with a cup cake and candle for her latest concert.

Young, who has been in quarantined in a hotel since arriving back in the country, directed a program of three works for her second series of the year at a packed out Town Hall where sections of the auditorium had little or no social distancing.

Masks, however, were mandatory, as was checking in with Q codes and plenty of opportunities to hand sanitise. A seat in the gallery gave one a good view of the amount of hygiene control staging an orchestral concert entails. Seats and music stands have to be wiped down during breaks and the “spit mats” for the brass players – absorbent mega wipes used to collect the condensation – need to be removed and replaced.

PROJECTING

Musicians wander in from backstage with masks on, only removing them when they sit at their socially distanced places. For this concert soprano Lauren Fagan was placed 15 or so metres away from the rostrum, behind the string section and in front of the woodwinds and brass. As Young told the audience the British-born Australian singer, making her SSO debut, would have no problem projecting – and she didn’t, her rich and powerful timbre cutting through in Beethoven’s dramatic concert aria, Ah! Perfido (Oh, faithless one), a work which runs the range of emotions and showed why Fagan was selected for Covent Garden’s prestigious Jette Parker Young Artists Program.

Any COVID cobwebs the musicians may have had were blown away in the opening work, the third Leonore Overture, originally composed for Beethoven’s sole opera, Fidelio.

A couple of entries in the woodwinds were a little less precise than usual, but Young and her forces were well warmed up and tight for the main work on the program, the Symphony No 7. There has always been a special chemistry between Young and the SSO and it promises some great music for the years ahead when the orchestra returns to Sydney Opera House next year.

Young is back in July-August to conduct three concerts of works by Bach and Brahms, culminating in Mozart’s Requiem.

The Beethoven concert is repeated at Sydney Town Hall on Saturday, February 20, at 2pm.

DETAILS

● CONCERT Sydney Symphony Orchestra: Simone Young Conducts Beethoven

● WHERE Sydney Town Hall

● WHEN Thursday, February 18