In touch with inner self

By WILLIAM DART

Kenneth Young is down south this week, conducting Madame Butterfly for the Royal New Zealand Ballet, so he won't be at the premiere of his Piano Concerto tomorrow night. But he is confident it's in good hands with Michael Houstoun and the Auckland Philharmonia.

Establishing himself as a composer with his first symphony in 1987, and working on a second to be performed next year, Young likes tackling the larger canvases, and the new concerto is no exception.

"I had in mind a 15-minute Divertimento which would ease Michael back into playing with both hands again," he tells me.

"But always when I start on a course, something else seems to take over. I've always passionately believed the subconscious plays an important role in composing, and when I look back at this score this is very much the case."

All of which is crucial in ensuring that his music relates to an audience.

"I don't think you can create something which moves and excites people, which makes them think and relate to their own subconscious being, by writing in a conscious manner all through."

Young admits his music is audience-friendly and that "neo-Romantic" is a fairly accurate description ("Jack Body calls me that and I guess he's not too wrong," he laughs).

This is a composer who puts great store on the tune.

"I was told by my teacher at school that I had a talent for writing melody and I try to use that. I quite like melody, really," he muses.

He points to the second movement of this new concerto as "unashamedly romantic". Its emotional engagement comes from his experience with a dying mother, which has enabled him to "write a work which Michael could interpret. I didn't want to produce something cold, but something he was able to shape."

It includes quotes from Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms - "I was lying in bed at nights and those Hallelujahs wouldn't go out of my head" - and this Andante is "very much about this redemption thing even though I'm not a religious person in that sense".

The political thrust in the first movement has echoes of Shostakovich. "This sort of sneaked into the movement," Young confides. "The piece is a private statement about how I deplore today's despotism, imperialism, prejudice and greed, just the sort of thing that my mad, passionate hero Dimitri was dead against.

"The whole development section is just one huge accelerando. It's like a statement in itself."

Houstoun has been a valued colleague throughout. Young "drip-fed" the pianist music and appreciated the feedback.

"The beauty of collaboration is that the performer can give you an insight into your own music that you didn't have yourself.

"It has been mainly a matter of pointing out how things might be phrased a lot more carefully through different ways of articulation, bringing out inner parts that hadn't occurred to me. Michael isn't inside my head so he doesn't know the melody like I do."

Young is also one of our most experienced conductors, the man behind the recent CD of David Farquhar symphonies. He has taken New Zealand music around the country and beyond, conducting his fellow composers' work in Scotland and Australia.

Later this year he will conduct Anthony Young's The Farewell, which the AP premiered a few months ago, at the Australian Composers' Orchestral Forum in Hobart.

Young is keen on what he calls "the young breed of composers" - although there is cause to worry.

"I'm a bit of a reactionary, I suppose," he laughs, "but you've got to get them away from the sequencers. Let these people use their brains and develop their technique."

Performance

* What: The Auckland Philharmonia with Michael Houstoun

* Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Thursday, 8pm