KEY POINTS:
Edo de Waart is the man who "discovered" John Adams in the 1980s conducting the historic recordings of Nixon in China and other works.
He is also an expert in the music of Strauss and Mahler, and comes to town this weekend with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.
When he was last in the country in 2004, with Lang Lang, De Waart had just been appointed chief conductor of the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra. "We have a good orchestra which is working very hard," is his sober assessment of his musicians, although he is proud of their recent concert performance of Der Rosenkavalier.
One problem is that audiences are conservative.
"They aren't exactly trampling down the doors and deluging us with emails to play more contemporary music," he laughs. "And when you have big names like Yo-Yo Ma, Lang Lang or Joshua Bell, they come in droves although when you have someone just as good but not a 'name', they won't come in the same numbers."
The HKPO fits his bill of an ideal orchestra - "musicians who respond and try to do what I would like them to do along with a willingness to work and be open-minded.
"I once had this conversation with Simon Rattle about how much more rewarding it is with an orchestra who likes to work with music rather than a famous orchestra that sits and looks at you, saying, 'Inspire me'."
De Waart agrees that these are tough times for orchestras. He chortles when I mention crossover concerts, drily commenting: "That ship has sailed for me.
"Almost every orchestra accepts that they have to dumb down to get masses of people in the hall but I still think that is not the smartest way.
"If we only played what our marketing departments or audiences wanted, we'd do the 1812 and Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth over and over again. That's wrong. That's not why we exist.
"We might have a museum function but we are a contemporary art museum as well as the museum of Vermeer and Rubens. We need to do the new as well as the old."
Friday sees him taking the NZSO through Planet Damnation, John Psathas' new mini-concerto for timpani and orchestra. It is an inventive score, De Waart tells me, although the composer's computer-realised preview was hard to live up to.
"It's so totally full-on, loud and dense; we can't play that way unless you have a 60-piece brass section," De Waart says. "Strings and woodwind can't make the same sound a computer makes. But this is the trend.
"Now the computer can do so much more, but sometimes it shoots past what is really possible."
This weekend's concert will also give us De Waart on home turf, with the big romantic scores of Strauss's Ein Heldenleben and Rachmaninov's Second Symphony. But we may get a surprise.
"I said to the orchestra that once you have heard Rachmaninov play you know how his music should be played," De Waart explains. "It's not fat and sentimental. I always feel there's a great homesickness in it, with Rachmaninov longing to be somewhere he is not."
Saturday's Strauss is a confirmed favourite.
"I've done an enormous amount of Strauss," De Waart says. "It's like sitting down with an old friend and you don't need to try to get back together. You sit down and that's it. There are few people in your life that you're that comfortable with."
This score is always fresh because De Waart admits: "I didn't study it a lot. I do that on purpose. I just want to let it happen. I know the piece almost from memory, so I look at it a couple of times and that's it.
"In rehearsal you can discover so many new things.
"That's the beauty of my profession. It's never the same and always moving."
