'I know there have a been a few problems in the past, but I am here with a mission of my own and I am just looking to the future with the Hong Kong Philharmonic,' he says, settling into one of the Purple Cloud suite's sofas. De Waart was confirmed at midnight as the successor to the sometimes controversial musical director Samuel Wong. His post begins in September next year, and when he eventually takes up the baton he'll spend at least 14 weeks in Hong Kong in each of the following 10 years, hammering the orchestra into one of the world's finest.

It's no easy mission. To say the orchestra has had a few problems is like saying a few disgruntled marchers turned out on the streets last week. The past three years have seen the orchestra live through a saga worthy of a soap opera. It's a recent history with all the elements of the most riveting potboilers: political intrigue, wild tantrums, barbed insults, and industrial walkouts. For de Waart, this is grist to the mill. Every one of the five major orchestras he headed before coming to Hong kong were in some sort of trouble when he took over.

'The five orchestras I have worked at I have left in considerably better shape than I found them,' he says. 'I hope to do the same here.' His work may be cut out for the first year.

The man at the centre of the orchestra's recent controversies, Samuel Wong, will remain as senior conductor for at least a year into de Waart's tenure. Wong, a former eye-surgeon turned conductor, was appointed in 2000. After sacking 15 players, he watched as 34 left over the next three years. At one point he was relieved of his duties as musical director, only to be reinstated when Home Affairs Secretary Patrick Ho Chi-ping intervened. If that wasn't enough, the unrest coincided with a number of spats among players in the orchestra. It all smacked of an organisation out of control. An unofficial survey last year of the orchestra reportedly showed 80 per cent of players were dissatisfied with their conductor.

De Waart, diplomatically, claims to have heard there were problems, but professes to know few details. 'I know Samuel very well and he is a very good conductor,' is his response. 'But sometimes things just don't work. Sometimes, it is a case of the wrong person at the wrong time. I know - it has happened to me.

'I believe Samuel tried very hard to make it work but it just didn't happen. That's not to say it can't happen and not to say that he won't do well elsewhere.' De Waart concedes that he was approached specifically to tackle the orchestra's problems. 'It is possible that I am considered something of a Mr Fix-it,' he says. 'They [the orchestra managers] were certainly looking for someone who could do that and someone who has a world view. I have been all over the world. I am in the truest sense a world burger, not just a hamburger,' he says with a little giggle at the odd metaphor. 'And I also bring very much an international view to the local situation.'

De Waart comes to Hong Kong at the end of a 10-year stint at the helm of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, the latest high-profile appointment in a distinguished career that has elevated him to the upper echelons of classical music. Almost a child prodigy, he became at 23 assistant conductor to Leonard Bernstein at the New York Philharmonic after winning the coveted Dimitri Mitropoulos Conducting Competition. Before that he had been a star oboist with Holland's Concertgebouw Orchestra.

His major appointments since then have included stints at the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra. He has guested with scores of other orchestras and conducted in almost every country that has a symphony hall. He first visited Hong Kong in 1974 with the London Philharmonic for the city's first music festival and returned again in 1979 with the Rotterdam Philharmonic.

These experiences partly encouraged him to accept the job offer with the Hong Kong Philharmonic. 'I remember, vividly, how I was taken by the city, by its enormous energy - it almost overwhelms you. And the mix of cultures is fantastic - it's just unbelievable,'' he says. 'Some cities you land in and you think 'yeah' this is right and others you land in and you don't get anything. This was one that felt right.'

De Waart has done his homework and has some definite opinions on how he will spend his 10 years in Hong Kong. Chief among those aims is to make the orchestra one of the world's greatest. 'Every great orchestra in the world - even Berlin's and Vienna's, the two greatest - has started by someone saying 'this city needs a great philharmonic'. And Hong Kong is a city that deserves one. Everybody has heard of Hong Kong, but they haven't heard of say, Birmingham or Cleveland, but they both have great orchestras.

Despite the recent squabbles, de Waart believes he has inherited a group of players who have the potential to fulfil his achievement. Ostensibly brought to Hong Kong to conduct two shows this weekend - the third part of the orchestra's Summer Piano Festival - he was also on a fact-finding tour to see whether he liked his prospective orchestra.

'I was very pleasantly surprised,' he says. 'We had two rehearsals together and I didn't demand anything less of them than I have any other orchestra I have conducted. And they were very good. Orchestras very quickly respond to clear and knowledgeable direction and I responded to their playing.'

He concedes there is a lot of work to do, but he believes the foundations are there to put Hong Kong on the world musical map. 'I realise I am no Gus Hiddink [the Dutch football manager who turned South Korea from no-hopers to a world-reckoning team in the last World Cup] and Hong Kong will never be a Berlin or a Vienna, but it can be a very good orchestra,' he says. 'The players are hard workers and I am encouraged by that. All the material is there and basically, there is nothing they couldn't do ... the sky's the limit.'

De Waart says that at this stage of his life his big personal ambitions have been fulfilled, and for the past few years he has been looking for a job that will challenge him; something that would give him a chance to give back to develop an art form that has given so much to him.

'This is exactly what I needed, exactly the challenge that I was wanting even though I was not aware of it so much until this offer came,' he says. 'Because it appeals to things other than just repeating what I have done before with my life.'

Hong Kong's greatest challenge is its audience, he says. So far he has worked in only Western markets, among cultures that have a tradition of watching orchestras play long pieces of music. Although he believes the desire to listen to contemplative music in quiet surroundings is a universal one, he realises that something will have to give to attract a mass Chinese audience.

'The symphony orchestra is a middle European invention and as such you cannot just make a bicycle out of a car. But I want to find if there is a way - and I'm sure there is, even though I don't have the precise answer yet - to make this somewhat old-fashioned institution move smoothly into the 21st century in a culture where it didn't come from originally, but where there is great interest and a wealth of good musicians that are bursting out of the woodwork everywhere.

'There's no doubt in my mind that the normal subscription theories, and the things that we have done in the West for the past 100 years, are not going to be good enough to make it for these audiences. We will have to speak to them in a way that will bring the audience to us.'

In Hong Kong's challenge may be a solution to a broader problem that has been dogging symphony orchestras all over the world in recent years - declining interest and fortunes. With attendances plummeting, ageing audiences and dwindling incomes, the symphony orchestra as an entity is threatened by a mass media that produces ever more alternative uses for people's leisure time.

De Waart sees Hong Kong as a laboratory in which he can experiment with ideas that he hopes will ultimately help rekindle interest in orchestras worldwide. He has plans to play around with programmes, experiment with players, try out new talent - especially from what he calls the untapped riches of China's musical heritage - in a manner that could set the benchmark for other orchestras.

'There was a report in the New York Times that said the symphony orchestra was dead,' he relates, a little saddened by the assertion. 'It faults administrations of orchestras for not having reinvented themselves around the changed world, like some people might criticise the Pope for not encouraging women to take part in the church.

'If we keep on like that, we will be in trouble. But it may well be that Hong Kong, which is so diversified, could be one of the places where you do make a stand with the symphony orchestra and how you present it, in a way that could lead to a healthier situation elsewhere.

'This orchestra needs to be on the cutting edge. We need to take risks and from that risk-taking we may be able to come up, in the next five years, with a model that might lead the way to a lot of European orchestras changing and surviving.'