Simone Young AM (b. 1961) is one of the leading conductors of her generation. At 25, she became the youngest resident conductor at Opera Australia, and was the first woman to conduct at the Vienna State Opera and at the Bastille Opera in Paris. Director of Opera Australia from 2001 to 2003, she then worked for ten years, from 2005, as the Artistic Director of the Hamburg State Opera and Music Director of the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra. Based in Sussex, England, Young is returning to Australia in 2022 to become the Sydney Symphony Orchestra's chief conductor.
Bill Henson AO and Young share a love of German Romantic opera, and this connection constituted the foundation of the relationship between sitter and artist. Henson says of the portrait: 'I was interested in the way great music affects us. The sheer force of such beauty causes us to fall in love. It is that love that I wanted to see transform the subject’s appearance. But strangely, to suggest any of this, one must step back … Only across such a distance might one describe such intimacy and such longing.' Young herself has compared the portrait's structure to the three acts of an opera.
Commissioned with funds provided by the Farrell Family Foundation and the Basil Bressler Bequest 2002
© Bill Henson
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