'At the concert was the producer of Philips Records, who recorded all of [conductor] Bernard Haitink's performances with the Concertgebouw [Orchestra]. He ... invited me to record as soon as possible all of Mozart's chamber works for wind instruments. That's how I got a contract with Philips to do other things.'

The 'other things' began with his first job as a professional orchestra chief, for the Rotterdam Philharmonic, also in the Netherlands.

'I went to the city government and met with the officials there. I told them we had a chance to make recordings for Philips with the Rotterdam Philharmonic, which was a first', because recording contracts usually went to top orchestras, such as the Concertgebouw.

De Waart asked the city government for funding, to wrest some of the promotional control from Philips.

'They agreed and we worked like buffaloes for those recordings, but it was great fun working with the players there, and they say [he points at a record cover showing red-nosed Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, who suffered from alcoholism], 'This is Edo after a wild night!''.

The animated conductor's laughter diminishes quickly when he remembers his time behind the Iron Curtain.

'It was then the height of the cold war and I had to go through the scary Checkpoint Charlie to get to the other side of the Berlin Wall to conduct. There were those towers, sandbags and guns you walked through to that crummy little hall, where emotionless officers would check your papers and the amount of money you brought in. I was always afraid that they would decide to close the border during my stay in East Berlin and I would be stuck there. It was a nerve-racking 45-minute check, which felt like forever.

The two top orchestras he conducted and recorded with in socialist East Germany were the Staatskapelle Dresden and Leipzig Gewandhaus. He calls the Dresden band, with which he recorded two albums of Mozart serenades, 'a beautiful, fantastic, really top-class orchestra'. The Leipzig orchestra, on the other hand, sounded 'sluggish, heavy and slow'.

'I was recording Kurt Weill symphonies with them. But they didn't like the works and were not very friendly at first. So I had to work very hard to win them over and, at the end, they were extremely nice to me.'

Both were world-class orchestras and Philips paid them almost nothing for their talents.

'In the West, we were so stupid, of course, and we wanted so much money that America lost a lot of its recording contracts. Take recording a Beethoven symphony as an example. If the session used only 60 of the orchestra's 110 players, you still had to pay all 110, even though some were just sitting at home.'

The recording the maestro speaks most passionately about is one he made with the Monte Carlo Opera Orchestra.

'That orchestra was a joke and I was sent there to record Gershwin with a German pianist, Werner Haas. It was a disaster and I had to work my head off! I spent seven days on just one recording. The players were good musicians who did not want to live in Paris and wanted to have a good life in Monaco. They were lazy and took a siesta after the morning recording session and returned in the afternoon smelling of wine and garlic. This was not fun.'

Nonetheless, the album received a full three-star rating from the authoritative Penguin Guide to Compact Discs, which describes it as being 'not only buoyant but also glamorous' with 'a cultured, European flavour to this music-making that does not detract from its vitality'.

He went one better - three stars plus a rosette - with his recording of Bach concertos with Arthur Grumiaux, considered one of the greatest violinists of the 20th century.

'He was an incredibly wonderful musician, a perfectionist, and so he used a lot of splices in his recordings. When he didn't like something, he would stop, record again and go 10 bars of music further, and then stop again. What's most amazing is he played the alternate takes exactly the same, so it didn't matter which take you used. It was so perfectly put together that even I couldn't tell where the splices were.'

De Waart is now famous for performing works by Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, but the two composers do not figure in his early recordings.

'I didn't feel I was good enough to record Mahler. Not until I turned 40 did I begin to record Mahler, with the San Francisco Symphony. The Fourth Symphony is the first one I recorded because it always has a soft spot in my heart.'

The maestro left San Francisco and joined the Minnesota Orchestra in 1986. Around that time he began to record for Virgin Classics, for which he produced a series of large symphonic works by Mahler and Strauss. New engineers aside, it was the hall acoustics he had to come to terms with.

'The sound at the Minnesota hall was very bright and difficult to get used to. Davies Hall in San Francisco wasn't very good but the hall in Rotterdam was very good. The old church in Dresden where I made the recording was wonderful, too,' he recalls.

Despite poor acoustics at the Cultural Centre, in Tsim Sha Tsui, the maestro says most of the major performances with the Hong Kong Philharmonic have been recorded for the ar- chive, including Mahler and Beethoven symphonies, Strauss operas Salome and Elektra and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

'It's hard to say which one I like most. It's like asking which of your children you like best.'

De Waart is keen to ensure that his current posting is not the first he'll leave without a commercial recording as a memento. He will conduct just five programmes during his last season in Hong Kong.

'We will all have to agree on how we do it, such as the issue of proceeds. But that would not be a problem as I will not ask for a ridiculous amount of money. It would be great if we could bring out some Hong Kong Phil recordings.

'It's more a matter of experience than anything else,' says de Waart, explaining the lack of ability his current players have compared with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, with which he recorded Wagner's Meistersinger, the CD released in 2009. 'Although we have had a lot of turnover - some by our request and some leaving for better jobs - if we can hold on to what we have and we get a good successor to me, who works hard, this orchestra can play really well. It's right there, it's right in front of us, we can see it.'

Two years should be enough time to achieve parity, he says.

A football fan, de Waart likens the Dutch band to a team having played in the European Champions League 10 times and once having reached the semi-finals. The Hong Kong orchestra, he says, has 'made the league for the first time and probably would get beaten by Real Madrid in the first round'.

'The Netherlands Radio Phil is a weathered orchestra. They've been there. They have the experience and the knowledge. They always have good guest conductors. Here in Hong Kong, it's not easy to get them, but it's getting easier. So it's absolutely a matter of continuation of what we have done together.'

Another obstacle in Hong Kong, says de Waart, are the acoustics.

'We don't play at a great concert hall here. The Netherlands Radio Phil performs and records all its concerts at the Concertgebouw, which has one of the greatest hall acoustics in the world.'

'It would be a big mistake for the new cultural district to have no concert hall,' is an often quoted statement the maestro made during a press conference in 2004, shortly after joining the Hong Kong Phil. Last March, after having announced he would leave at the end of his second contract, he said: 'We need a top-notch concert hall here. We deserve it, the people of Hong Kong deserve it. Presumably that's going to happen. It won't be on my watch but I will be happy to, in maybe five or six years, come back and do a week at the new hall.'

However, the maestro, who has been outspoken since his Rotterdam days, reserves most of his frustration for government officials. Soon after he announced his departure, he gave voice to his disappointment.

'What is so sorely missing in the whole Hong Kong arts outlook is that, while we are thankful for government support, I have never felt they want to go with us,' he said. 'Once we had a meeting and we talked about the new concert hall [in West Kowloon], [Chief Secretary] Henry Tang [Ying-yen] said, 'I want you to open it.' I said, 'If we do that, if we look at five to six years from now, when the whole world will come to Hong Kong and listen to the new hall and the orchestra, we can't do as we are now. We need to be bigger, we need to have four woodwinds, not three, we need to have a solid body of strings, we need good soloists.' At that point, he said, 'Do we have to hire the Berlin Philharmonic?' I said, 'I guarantee you, if you help us a little bit, and I'm not talking about US$20 million a year, you don't have to hire the Berlin Philharmonic.'

He also recalled asking a 'high-up official, about the highest' for the HK$10 million that was cut in 2002, in the wake of the Asian financial crisis.

'I asked, 'Now that the crisis is over, are we getting it back?' 'No, you will never get it back,' was the answer. Well, at least he was honest. So I said to him, 'What would you like the art life of Hong Kong to be like? Dusseldorf? Manchester? San Francisco?'

'Then I said, 'If I may answer my own question, I think San Francisco is the city you should look at: a medium-sized American city, not horrendously rich, not poor, very cultured. It has a very good opera, an excellent symphony orchestra, good conservatory, some very good theatre. Is that too much to ask? We are way richer than San Francisco. You give taxes back here. Just give it to the arts or arts education. Give it to the Academy for Performing Arts, they are struggling. Give it to the [Hong Kong] Sinfonietta, they are almost dead. They have no money. Give it to us, then we can compete on the level of international orchestras. It's one thing to say, Asia's World City, blah blah blah. Every world city has a first-rate orchestra. We might have a good orchestra but it might never be up there if you don't support it.'

'The official replied, 'It's not politically doable at the moment.''

The maestro emptied his coffee mug and, looking relaxed, offered some pearls of wisdom.

'Now that I understand a little bit of the psyche at work here, I would probably be more careful in my criticism towards the government and do it in a different way, more quietly. I come from a country where we call it as we see it. If it's not good, we say it. There is no loss of face involved. I realise now, when you are very critical here, people don't fight, they back off. It's a problem for a Westerner to come here and work to not lose your energy or your willingness to get things done.

'After eight years, you need new impetus. If it isn't there - while I love this orchestra dearly, I will miss them - I need to go somewhere else.'

BACK TO THE PRESENT and, says de Waart, the orchestra-building mandate he was commissioned to undertake at the Hong Kong Phil is 'on schedule'; the band now 'would be in the top part of the middle-tier of world orchestras, absolutely possible to go to the top 40 or 50 really outstanding orchestras. On a good night, we might be in there.'

He believes some of its performances deserve to be put on record and, at one point, almost were.

'There was a time when the Jockey Club expressed interest in helping us do a series of recordings. [Former Hong Kong Phil chief executive] Tim [Calnin] and I went there. But then we just let it sit. I don't know what happened but they never came back to us.'

De Waart is a fervent believer in the survival of recorded music.

'Whether we stream it or make it downloadable, I am sure the recording industry will survive. Future technology could provide millions of Chinese audiences with all Mahler symphonies on just a tiny memory stick. I am convinced that will happen.'

But the maestro becomes noticeably nostalgic when discussing his record collection.

'I love vinyl. I think there is something special about vinyl, the way you hold it in your hands and put it on the turntable. There is a ritual that I miss. It's sad.'