Simone Young is sitting cross-legged and barefoot on the couch in her bunker-like dressing room at the Sydney Opera House.

She’s a little jet-lagged, she says – having just returned from conducting two complete Ring cycles at Bayreuth – but you wouldn’t know it. For the Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, conversation about music, punctuated by jolts of coffee, is a reliable tonic.

We’re talking about the SSO’s 2026 season, a year of music bookended by two contrastingly colossal works: Mahler’s Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth) and Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, the concluding chapter of his Ring Cycle.

“I like the idea of opening and closing the season with a bang,” Young says. “But it’s not just about scale and volume. For me, it’s about creating the physical experience – the literal connection made by sound waves travelling from the instruments to the audience. Even in a room with 2,000 people in it, the experience should be incredibly intimate.”

“It’s like theatre,” she says. “I...