Riccardo Chailly, who has conducted some of the best orchestras in the world, appears at Symphony Hall tonight. Christopher Morley speaks to a man with an infectious passion.

Riccardo Chailly brings one of the world’s most venerable orchestras, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, to Symphony Hall tonight in a programme which is almost a reunion for all concerned.

This amazing orchestra – Mendelssohn was one of Chailly’s predecessors as Kapellmeister (music director) – has visited before, most notably in the inspiring complete Beethoven symphony-cycle under its then music director Kurt Masur, given over one week in the autumn of 1991, the first year of the hall’s existence.

And Chailly too has visited before, with Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, when he was music director of that august ensemble.

One of Norman Perryman’s evocative paintings, vibrant with personality, of performers who have appeared at Symphony Hall, is of Chailly conducting on that occasion.

The conductor is thrilled when I inform him that it is one of those gracing the walls of the Green Room which has seen so many illustrious musicians pass through.

I ask the maestro what was his chief memory of that visit to Birmingham, and his reply is instant: “Oh, the exciting discovery of the hall itself!”

This much-travelled conductor has directed so many of the world’s greatest orchestras, and I ask him about their individual characters.

“The important thing is to bring fresh air, and to get them to play with a deep, communicative voice.

“When I conduct Mendelssohn and Schumann in Leipzig, the city where they are most associated, and where layers of tradition have accumulated to weigh things down, I want to be faithful to the original swift metronome-markings, and show that we can achieve the ‘unplayable’ approach.”

One of the works in Chailly’s programme tonight is Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony, composed well over a century ago, but, as the conductor tells me, the performance he recently conducted in Leipzig was only the third ever in the city.

We discuss the distressing fact that until very recently, this wonderful work was usually performed with cuts. I remember one eminent Russian conductor telling me that, yes, his recordings of the symphony might be complete, but he had to use the cut version in public performance as the audience might get bored. What is Chailly’s reaction to that?

“Unthinkable! If you stick to the score it will pay you back enormously.

“There’s so much clarity there, no honey and sugar.”

Leipzig is obviously Chailly’s musical base, and his musical home, as he puts it, is “wherever I am”.

But his family home is very close to Milan, “where my children and grandchildren are”, and it is in that city’s elegant La Scala opera-house where he will return in 2015 for a production of Puccini’s last and grandest opera, Turandot.

Previously, Chailly had been noted as much for his work in the opera house as in the concert hall, but the taking-on of music directorships of some of the world’s great symphony orchestras of necessity entailed a diminishing of his appearances in the pit of operatic theatres.

“I’ve conducted no opera since 2008,” he tells me, “but in December I’m conducting La Boheme in Valencia, and then the Turandot in Milan in 2015”.

We then go on to have a hugely interesting conversation about this Puccini opera, unfinished at the composer’s death, and rather clumsily completed for its premiere by the composer’s student, Franco Alfano.

“But there’s a much better conclusion by Luciano Berio,” Chailly enthuses, recounting how Puccini’s sketches for the finale were discovered in the estate of an elderly widow, and collated by Berio, probably Italy’s greatest composer since Puccini himself.

“And it ends very quietly, instead of with Alfano’s choral finale.” Chailly’s return to La Scala, bringing Berio’s completion, will be quite an event.

Preceding the Rachmaninov symphony in tonight’s concert is the Second Cello Concerto of Shostakovich, with Lynn Harrell (himself a Symphony Hall favourite after his appearances with the CBSO and Simon Rattle – their performance of Walton’s Cello Concerto lives long in the memory and on disc).

Riccardo Chailly is enthusiastic about working with Harrell again. “He is such a wonderful musician – he always puts the music first! And the Shostakovich Concerto is such a special work. I’m really looking forward to it!”

* Riccardo Chailly conducts the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in works by Shostakovich and Rachmaninov at Symphony Hall tonight (7.30pm). Details on 0121 780 3333.