Simone Young’s Hamburg assistant goes nuts for Wagner

Sydney Opera House, August 1

Nicholas Carter, who conducted the Sydney Symphony in a spirited concert this week, is a young Australian musician who is currently Simone Young’s assistant in Hamburg. He also conducts at the opera there and has had many engagements in Germany and beyond.

Carter has developed more confidence since I last saw him in action; he’s on top of every note, perhaps too much so at times. I appreciated the elegance as well as the strength in his Haydn, and he accompanied Janet Webb effectively in Lowell Liebermann’s unusual and dazzling flute concerto. I was most impressed when Liebermann allowed his broad orchestral tutti’s to reach out to us in the breaks between the solo passages. It is very lovely music. The composer set much of the flute writing in the lower range of the instrument, a very brave thing to do in a flute concerto, and Janet Webb’s warmth took advantage of that. She was equally brilliant in the more athletic sections of the score. It was top playing from one of our best instrumentalists.

Writer and broadcaster, Andrew Ford, was on hand to give us some pithy...