This work is so massive, the Opera House stage has had to be rebuilt

It’s no secret that Sydney Symphony Orchestra chief conductor Simone Young has long had a particular passion for monumental works in the repertoire – the bigger, the better.

Her name has become synonymous with the compositions of Mahler and Richard Strauss, and she is among the world’s greatest exponents of Wagner’s vast The Ring Cycle.

“I do have rather a passion for these massive works,” says Young. “There is something about that size of apparatus that I feel very comfortable with. I’m probably a distance swimmer, not a sprinter.”

Now Young is set to ascend for the first time another of the pinnacles of the Western canon – Schoenberg’s epic Gurrelieder, which receives its Sydney premiere this week.

Simone Young and the Sydney Symphony Orchestra after the season-opening performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.Credit: Jaimi Joy

The work, completed in 1911, calls for an orchestra of 145 musicians (including four harps, four piccolos and two contrabassoons) plus a chorus of 285 voices. It is so massive it will require extensions that will nearly double the size of the Sydney Opera House stage.

“I’ve never actually heard the work live in a hall,” says Young. “I know it only from recordings and the score. It is such a huge work and so extravagant in its forces you have to have a really good reason to do it – and Schoenberg’s [150th] anniversary provides us with a good reason. It feels like a once-in-a-lifetime event.”

Directing such a massive number of instrumentalists and singers on stage, both in rehearsal and performance, presents unique, practical challenges.

“Just controlling the coffee breaks is going to be monstrous!” laughs Young. “Fortunately, that is someone else’s headache. I’m very curious to see how the acoustic responds to this extra extension [to the stage] and how well we hear one another – what kind of lag there is between front and back.”

Simone Young: “I’m probably a distance swimmer not a sprinter.”

Young, 63, is having something of a moment in her already stellar career, having been named earlier this year as the first woman to conduct The Ring at the storied Bayreuth Opera Festival. Meanwhile, in a fresh vote of confidence in her work, Sydney Symphony Orchestra last month announced her tenure would be extended another two years.

“We’re just having a great time,” she says. “Sydney audiences are supporting us, and I’m very happy with the orchestra. They seem to be very happy with me, and Sydney loves us, so why not?

“My ambition has always been to make Sydney Symphony the hot ticket in town. We can’t compete with Taylor Swift, but a different kind of hot ticket. The support and welcome we get from the audience when we walk on stage is just wonderful.”

Cate Blanchett plays Lydia Tar. Credit: Focus Features

The mysterious world of conductors is also having something of a moment in popular culture with movies such as Tar, Maestro and the upcoming The Yellow Tie, about Romanian maestro Sergiu Celibidache.

Despite this, there remains a wide level of popular ignorance about what a conductor actually does.

Young explains it thus: “There is actually nothing that I do physically that creates a sound. I don’t bow a string. I don’t touch a key. I don’t hit a drum. I don’t blow into a flute. But there is a trust between the musicians and myself that what I do guides them and develops them and trains them to be the best they can be. And that’s what a conductor does.”

When it comes to the vexed question of the ageing of concert hall audiences and how to attract younger patrons, Young remains sanguine.

“That’s a question people have been posing to me for 40 years and there must have been some new people come along in those 40 years – the houses are still full,” she says.

“Of course, the magic thing that we’re always looking for is how do we get people to make that first step? You want to turn single ticket buyers into subscribers, you want to turn subscribers into patrons, and you want to turn people who’ve never been to the symphony into those single ticket buyers who come for the first time. So, of course, we try to do a range of repertoire that is also going to appeal to first-timers as well as to people who’ve been faithful to the orchestra for 50 years.”

However, keeping the audience front and centre when programming concerts does not mean “just playing top 100 hits”.

“If the audience trusts us, then we can be more ambitious and more adventurous in trying to expand the audience’s vision of the composers and the soloists and the works that they want to hear,” Young adds.

Despite having achieved success at the highest level in such a notoriously misogynistic field, and once being told [by a man] the best she could hope for would be to become a great assistant conductor, Young prefers not to dwell overly on issues of gender.

In the recent ABC documentary, Knowing The Score, she says: “What does being a woman have to do with conducting? My tits don’t get in the way.”

She does admit, however, that being seen as a role model is a “huge responsibility”.

“[But] I would hope to be encouraging aspiring musicians across gender and race,” she says “Classical music has always been the branch of the arts that’s been the slowest to get on board with social change. In the past 300 years there would be the change in literature first, and then it would go to visual arts, and then it would some time later end up in the classical music world.

“I mean, look back at the 1950s – there were hardly any women violin soloists. Today, if you want to name the 10 best violin soloists in the world, at least half of them will be women. So 50 years is a good measure of change.

“There are arguments for and against positive discrimination whether we’re talking about gender or race. I don’t really have anything to add to that argument because, for me, it’s always been a question of just getting out there and doing it.”

Young says her Irish and Croatian heritage, which makes her “bolshy on both sides”, has served her well in her career to date.

“There’s nothing that anybody can ever do or say that will encourage me more than to tell me there’s something I can’t do,” she says. “I’ll set out to prove them wrong.”

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