‘Watch this space’: SSO’s first female chief conductor drops major clue on future

Like many of us, Sydney Symphony Orchestra chief conductor Simone Young sometimes struggles to navigate a hyperactive, fragmented modern world where attention is measured in the smallest fragments of time.

“Everything happens in shorter and shorter sound bites,” she says. “If it’s not over and done and devoured within five minutes we’re moving on to the next thing. Just look at people repeatedly pressing the call button at an elevator, for example.”

But Young believes the sanctuary of the concert hall may offer at least part of the answer.

“When you come to a concert hall you’re in a frame of mind that you’re going to be taking something in for a couple of hours,” she says. “It’s a whole different space. A classical concert allows your imagination room to fly.

“There’s a great line from [13th-century Persian poet] Rumi: ‘When I am silent, I fall into that place where everything is music’. That describes what I feel about a concert hall and classical concerts.”

Young was speaking as the SSO prepared to launch its 2026 season, having just arrived in Sydney from the fabled opera house at Bayreuth, Germany, where she had conducted two complete cycles of Wagner’s monumental Der Ring des Nibelungen.

She will open the season with Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth) – “a radiant meditation on life, beauty and impermanence” – and close it with Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the apocalyptic finale of the Ring cycle.

That Young should choose these two works as bookends to the season is no accident.

“They do relate to each other in the fact that they are late works of composers who were very related to one another,” Young says. “Some might think that it’s a slightly pessimistic way to look at 2026 to begin and end with. But on the other hand they both also talk about resurrection and rebirth … This is the end of something but something new is also coming.”

The Ring cycle consists of four operas, adding up to more than 14 hours of music. Young is performing each work over four years in Sydney, a massive undertaking of which she is very proud.

“It’s very exciting to finish it here in Sydney,” she says. “This is the first Ring cycle here in 20 years.”

Wagner’s magnum opus is, says Young, quite simply “transformative”.

“It’s not just the length and the difficulty. There is something about the breadth of the soundscape and the scope of the material within it that moves from spectacular complexity to great simplicity.”

If Wagner is vast, Mahler is endless. At the close of Das Lied von der Erde, the female soloist repeats the word Ewig (eternity) nine times.

“In contemporary terms, it’s a time loop of this eternity,” says Young. “It takes you into a whole different space, seeing the space between the horizon and the sky.”

Next year’s season aims to strike a balance between new music and some of the best-known and best-loved works in the classical repertoire.

World premieres from Australian composers Lisa Illean and Ella Macens, and Australian premieres from Max Richter and Bryce Dessner will rub shoulders alongside Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, Mendelssohn’s Elijah and the Elgar Cello Concerto.

Young became the orchestra’s first female conductor in 2022 and next year marks 30 years since she first conducted the SSO. Much has changed, not least her own sense of self-possession.

“[Back then] I was much more nervous,” she says. “The transition of the life of a conductor goes from when you are worried about what people are going to think of you to when your only concern is how the orchestra can give their best.

“The truth lies in the score, and the job is to communicate that which is within the score to the audience via the musicians.”

“The truth lies in the score, and the job is to communicate that which is within the score to the audience via the musicians.”

Simone Young

As one of the world’s most in-demand conductors, Young splits her time between Europe and Australia, but she is always happy to come home.

“I’m very proud of Sydney, my orchestra, my organisation, but also our public, in that we’re one of the last orchestras in the world who actually play four concert weeks.

“It’s incredible that we can have close to 9000 people come in a week. That immediately beats down all those people who say we’re not relevant. Clearly we are.

“It is a cliche that every orchestra is a microcosm of the city it belongs to and has some of that character but I think this is probably the orchestra where I am able to be myself most of the time, because I’m a Sydney girl.”

Next year, technically, marks the end of Young’s five-year tenure with the SSO. However, there remains, she says, “unfinished business”.

“I don’t believe my work here is finished,” she says. “Discussions are under way. Watch this space.”

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