Used to the Challenge

The stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion has been transformed into the fanciful world of a bygone-era western movie: On one side, a cutaway cabin complete with a politically questionable Indian couple inside and a hitching rail outside; on the other, a woodsy hill with a tunnel passageway.

An extremely patient pinto named Flash, saddled and bridled in his western show-biz best, is being ridden for the first time by game but tentative soprano Catherine Malfitano. Around and around the circular track they go, disappearing into the mountain tunnel and emerging around the other side again--sometimes together, sometimes not.

Malfitano, who is making her role debut as the Bible-toting and saloon-owning heroine Minnie, and Flash, who has a non-singing role, star with Los Angeles Opera artistic director Placido Domingo in Puccini’s “The Girl of the Golden West,” opening Wednesday at the Music Center.

Yet there is more than one stylish heroine on stage on this recent night.

Looking like yet another Minnie, conductor Simone Young holds forth from the front of the stage, guiding pianist and singers through sections of the score even as Malfitano and her mount make their rounds. Like the soprano, she has long hair and wears a flowing black dress. But her footwear is definitely not of the cowgirl variety.

On Young’s feet are what must be the single most you-go-girl pair of stilettos worn by a conductor, well, anywhere, ever. About 5 inches high, with metallic heels and leather straps adorned with buckles, they’ve already become the talk of the building. “It’s a bit of a personal quirk,” Young says of her passion for shoes, walking impressively well on the delicate devices as she makes her way to a rehearsal-break dinner.

It’s also the kind of unapologetic gesture that typifies the personality of this woman who is not only an internationally recognized conductor, but also the music and artistic director of Opera Australia.

“There’s nothing I like better than a challenge and nothing I like better than proving critics wrong,” Young says. “So somebody says, ‘No, you can’t possibly do that,’ that’s just incentive for me to get in there and do that. Maybe it’s just the Irish in me.”

Even in 2002, going against the grain is often the lot of the Minnies and Simone Youngs of the world--women who operate in realms still overwhelmingly dominated by men. “It keeps coming up every time I go to a new city and, once again, it’s the first time they’ve had a woman conducting,” Young says. “For example, here. I hadn’t realized it’s the first time you’ve had a woman conducting at the Los Angeles Opera.

“I was the first woman to conduct in both houses in Vienna, the first woman to conduct in Munich at the opera and in Hamburg at the opera and in Paris at the opera and just recently in Linz at the Bruchner House,” Young continues, reciting a litany obviously not for the first time. “It surprises me every time. And yet, it shouldn’t. It’s still the way of the world, and it’s going to be a few years before things change. It’s a reality that’s changing, but it’s still the contemporary reality.”

As Young’s experience attests, such change typically happens one person at a time. “The nice thing is I think I’ve got to the stage where it’s not really an issue as far as I’m concerned,” she says. “It’s just about the work now. As anybody will tell you who works with me, it makes absolutely no difference after the initial surprise and the constant amusement at my shoes.”

Based on a 1905 play by American playwright and producer David Belasco, Puccini’s “The Girl of the Golden West” is set in a mythical version of Gold Rush California. The picaresque tale follows Minnie, whose heart is stolen by fugitive bandit Dick Johnson (Domingo, who will share the role with Luis Lima), whom she redeems with her love.

It’s a work that admirers often acknowledge as something of a guilty pleasure. “I adore it,” Young says. “It’s an absolutely gorgeous score.” But, she is quick to add, “it’s problematic.”

The problems lie in the libretto’s racial, ethnic and cultural stereotypes. “It’s the original spaghetti western, it really is,” Young says. “It’s a great story, it’s just got some very strange moments. The Italian-speaking Indians--they say ‘ugh.’ Actually its ‘oog’ in Italian. With contemporary sensibilities, some of that’s a little cringe-making. We have to make it as feasible and as belonging to its time as is possible.”

While the opera is extremely accessible, there are several reasons why it is not performed as often as, say, “Madame Butterfly” or “Tosca.” One is that it is more difficult to cast. “It takes a rare combination of three exceptional principals,” Young says. “You need an exceptional woman as Minnie. She has to be able to do anything vocally, from really soft to really big, up high to down low.”

There are many other aspects that make it deceptively difficult, and pricey, for any company to stage. “It’s a huge score in orchestration, with quadruple rather than just triple winds,” Young explains. “You have a lot of soloists. It’s a lot of difficult chorus work to do. There’s a lot of stage business that has to be there. You have no idea how long a realistic fight in a bar takes to rehearse when it has to fall in a specific musical framework.”

Difficult as the show may be, however, it holds a special place in Young’s memory. She recalls, “The irony for me is that it’s the first opera that I observed Opera Australia doing, 20 years ago, when I was still a student.”

Now 41, and leader of that company, Young was born in Sydney and educated in Catholic school there. “I went to convent school, all girls, which was actually quite good,” she recalls. “I was writing musicals and putting them on myself, conducting from the piano. I was conducting long before I realized that’s what I was doing.”

Young attended New South Wales Conservatorium in Sydney. “I set out to be a musician,” she says. “I trained as a composer, but I was kind of discouraged from doing it by my parents, because music was viewed rather as a waste of brains. As a composer, I was the only girl in the course, but hey, that was kind of fun. I’d won prizes and scholarships as a high school student as a composer, so it seemed to be that that was the way I was going to go.”

Young didn’t formally decide to become a conductor, at least not while at the conservatory. It wasn’t until she left, and even then it wasn’t something she decided, but more a choice that evolved.

“I threw in my studies and started teaching myself,” she says. “I left the conservatorium and worked for various amateur opera and musical groups, and very soon discovered that I knew a whole lot more about it than the guy who was at the front waving the baton.”

Young soon took over a few of these amateur groups, and that became her first real conducting experience. She assumed she would become an assistant conductor--a pianist who works in opera and works with singers. “And that’s what I started doing,” she says, “but at the same time I was doing all this amateur conducting and that was how I got into it.”

Young got her first job as an assistant conductor at Opera Australia when she was 22. Only three years later, the big moment that all show business aspirants dream of came her way.

“There was a day in 1985 when the chorus master”--who was conducting--”fell ill and I was the best person on the spot to take over the show,” she recalls. “So I stepped in at a few hours’ notice and made my opera house debut in Sydney with ‘The Mikado,’ an operetta, at Opera Australia.

“It was at the end of that performance that I stepped out of the pit, having conducted the performance, thinking, you know, this is really where I feel most at home,” Young says.

“I felt confident that this was really what I wanted to do.”

Now she’s in charge. Since January 2001, when Young became artistic director, she has been responsible for making all artistic decisions for the company, which is based in Sydney and Melbourne, and which has an annual operating budget of about $29.8 million. The company presents 20 operas a year and more than 200 performances. “It’s a huge organization: two cities, two orchestras, two choruses,” says Young, who also served as the music director of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in Germany from 1999 to 2002. “And that’s why I’ve cut back on my foreign engagements.”

In the top job at a company for more than a year now, Young has gained perspective, even looking back on her own big break. “Would I have given a 24-year-old that opportunity--forget male or female? I guess if I had been confident in the kid’s ability, I would have. But it was actually quite a big call.”

A call well made, judging from how things have gone for her since. The year after that debut, Young received a grant that took her to Europe to observe conductors and work with other companies. “That was a fantastic year of studies that I spent in Paris and Cologne and a little bit in London, watching some of the best and some of the worst rehearsals I’ve ever seen and learning a lot from both,” she says. “Cologne offered me a job, and that was when, in mid-1987, I moved to Europe and started six years with Cologne opera.” That led to a series of debuts in key European houses in the early 1990s in such cities as Berlin, Vienna and Paris.

She has cut back her opera conducting to the point where she is doing little outside Australia until 2004. In part, that’s because of the tremendous demands of running Opera Australia. In part, it’s to accommodate the rest of her life.

Her family lives in the United Kingdom, and she divides her time, as is typical of someone in her line of work, among home, Australia and where her conducting takes her. “We try to set a limit of four weeks,” says Young, who has been married for 20 years to a high school language teacher--a “civilian”--and with whom she has 5-and 14-year-old daughters. “We spend more than half the year together, which is not bad going. It’s not ideal, but it’s one of the juggles that you have to do if you want to be in this business.

“It would be considered perfectly normal and a reasonable way of life for a man,” she says, with a twinkle in her blue-gray eyes and her well-shod feet firmly on the ground. “But it’s extremely unusual for a woman.”

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“THE GIRL OF THE GOLDEN WEST,” Los Angeles Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. Dates: Wednesday, 6:30 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, and Sept. 10, 13, 16 and 19, 7:30 p.m.; Sept. 22, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 22. Prices: $30-$170. Phone: (213) 365-3500.

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Jan Breslauer is a regular contributor to Calendar.