On a mild summer mid-morning at Lavender Bay, there’s a halcyon calm that not even distant construction noise can penetrate – unless you’re Simone Young. Aurally clocking a pneumatic drill, the conductor in chief of Sydney Symphony Orchestra cocks her head in the direction of the sound and then works both her hands downwards in a shimmering motion as if sculpting the air between them: “I’m seeing that as a long column of ragged stuff.”
Remembering happier sounds, she casts her mind back to a recent Wednesday night on the podium at Sydney Opera House, conducting the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (SSO) and “our beautiful singer”, contralto Noa Beinart, in Mahler’s Third Symphony. “When she opens her mouth the sound is like a river of silk,” Young says, and you can almost see her toes curl with pleasure at the memory.
Young has synaesthesia. “To me, sound is something that is visual and three-dimensional,” she says. We’re sitting on the jetty facing her Milsons Point apartment block, with the bay to our right, Luna Park ahead, and Wendy Whiteley’s gorgeous “secret garden” up the hill to the left. Young gestures towards the greenery: “A really good painter will look at that group of trees, and they’ll be analysing all those different tones, perspectives, depths and shadows; it’s three-dimensional for them. And frankly, if I tried to paint that, it would come out two-dimensional.”
That, she says, is the difference between how she and the average person experiences sound.
Young is self-deprecating when talking about her synaesthesia and her other superpower, perfect pitch – the ability to identify a musical note just by hearing it, and (in inverse) to reproduce a written note accurately without a reference tone.
And yet: her innate sensitivity to sound has fuelled her extraordinary four-decade career, in which she has conducted the world’s top orchestras and most prestigious opera houses, from the Met in New York to La Scala in Milan and the legendary Bayreuth Festspielhaus, where in 2024 she became the first woman and first Australian conductor to conduct Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
Watching Young on the podium on Wednesday night – her expressive arm gestures, her body leaning into and flexing against the sound – it seems as if she’s sculpting a three-dimensional force that only she can see. There’s an easy assuredness to her presence – on the podium and on the jetty bench where we’re talking – that’s nothing like the stereotype of the overbearing conductor or exacting maestro.
Young suspects her father – a teacher turned solicitor and classical music enthusiast – passed his sonic superpowers down to her (synaesthesia and perfect pitch are thought to be genetic), as her mother was “completely tone deaf”. Her brother Tony, who died in 2013, was also musical – albeit in a very different way: as a virtuoso air guitarist, beloved in Sydney’s 1980s alt-rock and punk circuit for impromptu onstage performances with bands such as The Whitlams (whose song Chunky, Chunky Air Guitar was inspired by him).
“He saw me at work once and he said, ‘What you do and what I do is pretty much the same: you’re waving your arms around in the air and they’re playing the music’,” Young recalls, laughing.
Sibling jokes aside, conducting an orchestra is a physically strenuous vocation. We’re sitting rather than walking today to spare her knee, which has borne some of the brunt of the SSO’s Wednesday and Thursday concerts, which Young compares to two-hour step classes. “And that’s just the end product: it’s 12 and a half hours to get there, more than two and a half days of rehearsal beforehand.” Gone are the days when she used to “dance around” on the podium while wearing heels, she says with a rueful smile.
On the brink of 64, Young describes this period of her career as the “peak” years for a conductor. She flew into Sydney on Sunday evening straight from a string of engagements in Europe that took her to four cities over six weeks. On Monday morning she leapt into rehearsals with the SSO. “I’m totally wiped out,” she admits – though there’s little evidence of this during our conversation.
Young is used to operating at this level of intensity. “I wouldn’t take time off even when I had my kids,” she says. “I was back on the podium 10 days after my second daughter was born.” Then there was a decade-long stint from 2005 in which she did what she has described as “14-hour days, seven days a week” in the dual roles of artistic director of the Hamburg State Opera and music director of the city’s Philharmonic Orchestra.
“It’s a profession, but it’s also a complete obsession,” she says of conducting, “so you do tend to put it ahead of your own personal needs most of the time. People will sometimes say to me, ‘where do you get the energy from?’ I really have no idea. I can be desperately sleep deprived – but when it comes to conducting the music, it takes over.”
These days, as she juggles her SSO role (which has her in Australia between eight and 12 weeks a year) with work in Europe, days off remain rare.
On the day we meet she has a concert in the evening so “everything will stop at 1.30”. “If I can’t sleep, I’ll meditate. And then I’ll do very little before getting ready to start the evening. People know not to send me messages or emails with questions … I just want to be 100% focused.”
One suspects that this is integral to Young’s success: the ability to focus when it’s needed – and perhaps also the ability to switch off when it’s not. While her hobbies include a high-culture grab-bag of voracious reading, Duolingo and Wordle (which she plays in five languages), she also espouses the benefits of “20 minutes of completely pointless activity on an iPad”, name-checking Candy Crush and solitaire. She also knits – currently working on matching cardigans for her granddaughters.
Despite being a self-confessed workaholic and perfectionist, she says there’s “no greater joy than waking up on the day when I have absolutely nothing planned”.
Still, she has no intention of winding down – yet. “Being a conductor is a weird profession: you’re sort of still a beginner at age 40; at 60 you’re hitting your peak,” she says. Being one of very few female conductors at the top of a male-dominated field is even more unusual, and Young comments that “there hasn’t really been a woman ageing in this profession before, so it’s uncharted territory”.
“Most of my girlfriends have taken retirement or are talking about it, and they say ‘Are you thinking of winding down?’ But as long as the work is as interesting and wonderful as it is, and my health keeps up, then I would hope to spend the next 20 years travelling the globe and living this extraordinary life,” she says.
“It’s an incredibly privileged experience to be surrounded by beauty.”
Simone Young will be conducting Richard Strauss for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in September 2025. For performances in Paris, Berlin, New York and others from April through to June, see here
