Sydney Symphony Orchestra chief conductor Simone Young has declared the Opera House concert hall one of the best in the world following its 2½-year, $150 million refurbishment.

Young spoke as she nears the end of her first, triumphant series of concerts in the new-look hall, which began with a performance of Gustav Mahler’s monumental Symphony No.2, The Resurrection.

In his five-star review of the July 21 concert, Herald critic Peter McCallum heralded the new acoustics “a sound for the generations – for the next hundred years, climate allowing”.

The radically different sound revealed itself to Young the week prior, when she and the orchestra experimented with the new acoustic “petals” suspended above the stage.

“We were trying out various constellations and positioning of the orchestra under various heights of those wonderful petals, which we can move up and down to optimise the space for a particular work or size of orchestra,” she says. “And we were just blown away by the clarity and the beauty of the sound. It’s just marvellous.

“I would play a passage through with the orchestra and then my assistant would continue to conduct it a few times while we tried different constellations and arrangements and slowly came to a set of what are, for us now, the sort of default settings that we will start in, but it’s not the work of a week, it’s the work of quite a few months.”

She found a lower setting for the petals worked best for smaller ensembles, while moving them higher for the massive sound of the Mahler “somehow optimised the overtones”.

Young was prepared for the huge interest in the reopening of the hall but has also been gratified by the continuing enthusiasm for this series of concerts, which has included visits from violinist Hilary Hahn and pianist Javier Perianes.