Conductor Daniele Gatti connects with his audience in the moments just before

WITH one gesture, Daniele Gatti can create an entire musical statement. Around Gatti, there has always been sound and occasional fury, there has been speculation and gossip, but when the conductor waits before that first downbeat of a performance, there is often simply silence. As there was for an extraordinary length of time before Schoenberg's Verklaerte Nacht on Gatti's much-anticipated and now-legendary first appearance with London's Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (RPO) as music director.

'It was very important to get the right silence, the right tension,' he says.

That is the moment, he believes, when a conductor must establish his or her contact with an audience, and make a mental and spiritual connection.

'We live in impatient times,' he says. 'People turn up at the concert in different frames of mind. Some are tired, some are relaxed, some are anxious, some are late, some in bad moods . . . But when the music starts, time stops, the air you breathe is different, the imagination can roam free.

'So those moments immediately before the performance are crucial. It's where you draw the audience into your confidence, share your mind. The tension, the atmosphere you create colours the entire performance.' And yet to Gatti, widely recognised as the most exciting of the young generation of conductors, the precise moment of attack is of less importance than fluid, beautiful sound. You will have experienced it last night if you heard the RPO at Tsuen Wan Town Hall, or if you are lucky you may still get a ticket for tonight's performance at the Cultural Centre Concert Hall or tomorrow's at Macau Cultural Centre.

Gatti offers symphonies that are living things, full of musical meaning and emotion. Tonight, the RPO plays Schubert's Symphony No 8 in B minor, the 'Unfinished' symphony, with its dark start and peaceful second movement, and then a major mood shift to Mahler's Symphony No 5 in C-sharp minor, the sprawling brilliant work with which Gatti is most associated.