Quotes of the Day

Despite being on a diet, the maestro is running late from lunch. Yesterday it was Lucio's fine dining in Paddington ("wonderful"); today something "very light. I am trying to lose weight," says Gianluigi Gelmetti, the reigning musical head of the Rome Opera and new chief conductor and artistic director of the Sydney Symphony. Finally he arrives at the Sydney Opera House in true Italian style, accompanied by a translator and publicist, among others. After a few minutes of tentative English, he warms up to his subject. "I think it's a very important moment," he says of the coming Verdi Requiem - his coronation at the SSO - which unites 70 members of the Rome Opera chorus with the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs. As a musical marriage of "the eternal city of Rome and the city of the future, it's very symbolic," he adds. "It's very important, this moment." So important, in fact, that his interview is soon cut short, and the maestro is whisked away to a marketing meeting.

That was November, and three months later Gelmetti has arrived back in Sydney in high style. His diet, for one thing, seems to be working. Dressed in a priest-collared frock coat, he's looking trimmer - "piu magro," as he puts it. And his marketing department has been working overtime. Lining the streets of the CBD, in time for this week's Requiem at the Opera House, are banners welcoming Gelmetti to the city, with a portrait of the maestro looking as grave and august as a Roman emperor: All hail Gianluigi! When he first saw the street signs, "I was very touched by this manifestation of love from Sydney," Gelmetti recalls. "I was very near to piangere - to cry."

As a conductor at the podium, Gelmetti, 58, is a master at eliciting strong emotions - from his musicians, who he'll admonish to play al dente when he wants short, crisp notes. And from his fans, who adore this mini-Pavarotti with an almost pantomime performance style. "Some people think that he milks it a bit, but he's got this great warmth as soon as he steps on stage," says former SSO artistic administrator Tim Calnin, who helped bring Gelmetti to Australia for the first time in 1993. "He waves and smiles at the audience like he's greeting friends."

What they've come to expect is a more expressive conducting style than that of his sometimes stern-faced predecessor, Dutchman Edo de Waart. Gelmetti's performance of Ravel's Boléro two years ago has already passed into Sydney folklore. Loose of hip, his stomach thrust forward, he seemed to coax Ravel's rhapsodic wave out of his shoulders. Seeing him perform the same piece with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra a year before, the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel went so far as to say, "Gelmetti conducts with his stomach." Whatever the case, his expansive enjoyment of the music is infectious. "For a big guy, he's quite jazzy in a way," notes Calnin. "He's really got that rhythm in his bones."

Such is "the Italian sunshine" that De Waart hoped Gelmetti would bring to the technically assured SSO. With his arrival at the orchestra, Rome would seem to come to Sydney, as the Verdi Requiem marketing goes. "He was born in Rome" - to a businessman father and poetess mother - "and he's deeply Roman," Gelmetti's Rome Opera concertmaster Vicenzo Bolognese has said. "Romans can keep the right distance with power - a true Roman can act politically without becoming too involved." As chief conductor since April 2000, Gelmetti has helped revive that city's ailing Opera House, as well as the musical reputations of such early 20th century composers as Ottorino Respighi, whose forgotten opera Marie Victoire he premiered in January.

His own career has followed an eccentric path. A junior swimming champion, Gelmetti initially studied composition and classical guitar before finding a mentor in the somewhat mystical figure of Sergiu Celibidache, the Romanian-born conductor who famously declared that recorded music was like kissing a dead woman. As principal conductor at the Stuttgart Radio Symphony and the Monte Carlo Philharmonic, Gelmetti later found success - but not fame. Instead, when the SSO's then artistic administrator began telling international arts managers about Gelmetti's appointment in 2002, "many of them had never heard of him," Calnin recalls. "I think it's because he's gone against the star system that a lot of the big artist managers push. He's not interested in that sort of career at all. He's gone after an artistically satisfying project."

Gelmetti likens conducting to erecting a cathedral of sound. "With a cathedral, you must have the right proportions, the right balance," he says. Already he's begun tinkering with the SSO's architecture. Building from the foundations up, he'd like to hold master classes - as he does each summer at Siena's Accademia Chigiana - with young Australian conductors, to fill the ranks left by expat stars Simone Young and Sir Charles Mackerras. "We have a fantastic orchestra, fantastic soloists, good composers - why we have not conductors?" he asks with a rhetorical flourish.

But Gelmetti's pet project is to create a distinctively Sydney sound. For this he'd like to add volume and depth to the strings' middle and low registers. "In orchestras around the world, we have 16 first violins and eight bass. It's a nonsense!" he proclaims. "It's absolutely unbalanced." Gelmetti's quest for a Sydney sound begins in earnest this week. For the Verdi Requiem, he's bolstered both the cello and double-bass desks, as the composer originally intended. "He's played with that a bit in Sydney and it's fabulous," reports Calnin, now with De Waart at the Hong Kong Philharmonic. "So you get a more complete string picture in which the top voice is still perfectly clear, enriched by what's underneath. It's a brilliant idea." A blast of basso profundo - that's the only extra weight the maestro wants to carry in Sydney. Now to turn dream into thrilling reality.

• Michael Fitzgerald
• Italian maestro Gianluigi Gelmetti brings grace and gusto to the Sydney Symphony Orchestra