One of the most eagerly-awaited partnerships in music begins in earnest tonight when Donald Runnicles returns to his native Scotland to conduct his inaugural concert as the new chief conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

His debut at Glasgow City Halls, where he will conduct Mahler’s First Symphony, was hailed by James MacMillan the composer as a “big moment” in Scottish music.

“He is without doubt the greatest conductor that Scotland has had since Sir Alexander Gibson. He is a musician with a truly international reputation, and the fact that he has decided to come back is a great thing itself, because so many move away,” he said.

Runnicles will combine his new role with his post as general music director of Deutsche Oper Berlin, which he began last month. His permanent base is in Germany, but he will conduct the BBC SSO in more than 20 concerts in his first season and will drive the artistic direction of the orchestra for at least the next five years.

The conductor was born and raised in Edinburgh and studied music at the University of Edinburgh. At 10, he was a member of the boy’s choir in the Edinburgh Festival Chorus and in the early 1970s he sold programmes at the city’s Usher Hall for the Scottish National Orchestra, and at the Festival.

He has said that he was inspired to pursue a career as a conductor by watching and hearing a “visceral” Leonard Bernstein conduct Mahler’s Second Symphony in 1972.

He returns to the Usher Hall on Sunday for a recording for BBC Radio 3. “It is a remarkable acoustic. I do a lot of work in Vienna, Berlin and the States and I speak to many orchestral members,” he said. “ So many of them speak fondly of concerts here. It is a remarkable place — large but not too large, it can carry the biggest and (most) dynamic of orchestral scores, and at the same time can carry the quietest. It is an instrument in itself.”

Runnicles takes on his new role after 17 years as musical director of the San Francisco Opera, where he recently premiered Doctor Atomic, the latest opera by his friend John Adams.

He was first brought together with the BBC SSO by Sir Brian McMaster at the 2001 Edinburgh Festival when he conducted Berlioz’s Les Troyens, a concert described by The Times as “one of those evenings when lightning struck ... there was throughout a truly epic breadth to his reading”.

Insiders speak of the flowering of a love affair between conductor and orchestra. He went on to conduct the Scottish premiere of MacMillan’s Third Symphony, Silence, in April, 2008, in yet another critically-acclaimed performance. MacMillan said that he had watched many concerts and spent hours considering the defining characteristics of great conductor. “There is a charisma about special musicians which communicates itself through their personalities,” he said.

“Donald does that. Great conductors have a magic, which is imperceptibly transferred in a look or a gesture. You can’t have that without intelligence.”

Return of the Maestro: Donald Runnicles and the BBC SSO live in concert, BBC Two Scotland from 8.30 tonight.

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