Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the 37-year-old French Canadian maestro whose meteoric rise has astonished the music world, just took over as the Philadelphia Orchestra’s eighth music director. Last Thursday, he took the time to speak with AJ Goldmann on the eve of opening the 2012-2013 season with a gala concert that featured Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, Ravel’s Shéhérazade and ‘Mein Elemer’ from Strauss’s Arabella, sung by Renée Fleming.

In a few hours, you take over as the eighth music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra. How’s the pressure level?

 I would replace the word pressure with a sense of being humbled by the responsibility and the great trust that is being put in me to curate and nurture this wonderful institution, and to bring my own artistic vision, but also to incorporate this vision into the history of this orchestra. I don’t see it as pure pressure in terms of ‘will I deliver?’ The beauty of what happens with this orchestra is that I have been able for the past year and a half to develop my relationship with them and the audience as music director designate. It feels now that I’m starting for real and we already know each other, so I can really begin and go for it. But I would be lying to you if I said that this morning I woke up and it was only another day at the office. I feel more butterflies in the stomach than normally.

The last year has been especially difficult for the orchestra, which just emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July. Have the musicians emerged from the crisis with a renewed sense of mission or an altered consciousness?

Everyone at this point wants to give, to make music and to really focus on music. For the musicians, it has obviously been a very difficult year - a year of being more aware and conscious of the challenges awaiting us, not only in Philadelphia, but also all over the world. It’s a very rough beginning of season for many symphony orchestras across the United States and I think everyone’s very sensitive. In Philly, the challenge is specifically to share this joy of making music with more people in the city, so that every Philadelphian remains, even more that they are now, proud of the orchestra. In a way, I’m happy that I’m arriving at this moment, because we have to look forward and move forward and believe that this orchestra can continue to thrive and convince even more people of its wonderful qualities.

How did you help put together the coming season?

Being named music director designate meant that I could start right away to implement my artistic vision to everything. Specifically, the [Leopold] Stokowski anniversary is very important for us. We wanted to include some of his transcriptions and to programme a little in the way that he programmed himself, which was not the usual overture-concerto-symphony. It was very often the reverse. We are doing a tribute throughout the season and will continue this strand next season. I’m very excited that our regular partners, soloists and guest conductors have appreciated being part of this new journey and new approach to programming.

You’ve led many ensembles, both as music director and guest conductor. You also lead the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orchestre Métropolitain. What makes working with the Philadelphia Orchestra so unique?

Orchestras have their own sound and it’s up to us conductors to take care of keeping that sound, keeping those qualities and not trying to work against them, in order to add to the variety that is important to our world. When I come to Philadelphia, I find a sound with great personality. Its characteristic has a lot to do with generosity: the sustained quality of the string sound; the way the musicians know how to speak up when it’s time in the winds, and how to relate to each other; a certain darkness of sound, a certain body and weight, while being extremely rhythmically precise. And that’s something very special. Of course, we need to take that sound and then adapt it to all the styles of different repertoire, but never lose the depth of color that’s really characteristic of this orchestra.

How do you plan to balance between the orchestra’s tradition and putting your stamp on things?

I think to put a stamp on a sound happens naturally, because we immediately clicked – the orchestra and myself – right from my first visit as a guest conductor. There was an immediacy of understanding: I gave the musicians space in my conducting so they felt entitled and free to express their own sound. What I need to do now is to encourage the orchestra to reconnect with the roots of that sound, which came from the old hall, the Academy of Music, where Stokowski and Ormandy shaped that particular tonal quality. This is my first goal, to have the orchestra find the tools to reconnect with this and, by doing so, I’m actually putting my own imprimatur on the orchestra. But of course, there are all the approaches of different styles. When I do Brahms, there’s a specificity (like tonight in the Fourth), a certain way of considering the values of notes etc…of course this is limitless. But I never forget that I don’t want to work against what has been the tradition of this orchestra and by doing so I’m sure that I will renew and rejuvenate these great qualities which [first] made the orchestra so famous so many decades ago.

You are well known as a user of online social media. How do you feel a conductor in the 21st century needs to be adaptable to new technological realities?

Music is all about communication, and conducting is all about communication: communicating a vision to the musicians of the orchestra so that they can communicate it to the audience. If I look at my own predecessor Stokowski, he’s such a great example of using what he could at the time to communicate more with his audience. In his concerts, there were a lot of visual elements. He could repaint the shell for one concert in order to create a different atmosphere. Obviously, he was famously interested in film and this is how Fantasia came about and made the Philadelphia Orchestra known to so many generations of young Americans. So I believe that if Stokowski had lived today, of course he would be on Facebook and Twitter. I’m not so sure that we are so very different. I’m just trying to be someone of my time. And I think this is what’s needed from conductors and orchestras. It’s more than simply maintaining a Twitter and Facebook account. It’s about speaking to the hearts of our audience, and we use whatever means we can.

Watch an excerpt of Nézet-Séguin conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra in the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony during his first performance as music director designate: