We’re not going to recapitulate the details of Bramwell Tovey’s initial meeting with Leonard Bernstein, save to say that the two conductor-composers first spoke when Tovey was a last-minute replacement for Lukas Foss at a 1986 festival of Bernstein’s music. (For Tovey’s videotaped account of that event, visit the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s YouTube channel.) But the VSO’s soon-to-depart music director had encountered the Bernstein charisma prior to that, as he reveals in a telephone interview from Saskatchewan, where he’s guesting with the Regina Symphony Orchestra.

“I had actually been up close once before, when he had conducted a recording session of Mahler 2 [Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2] with the London Symphony Orchestra in Ely Cathedral; I think that was two or three years earlier, maybe even longer,” Tovey recalls. “I didn’t get to meet him that day, but I had been struck by his magnetism and his musicianship, sort of firsthand, on that occasion. Of course, there was the whole television persona, which had been regularly broadcast at that particular time, but after actually being with him, and realizing that what you saw on TV was what you got up close, I found that what I really admired about him was his extraordinary articulacy. He was extremely well-spoken and erudite when he started talking about music in an intellectual fashion. He was also extremely emotional, but he was able to maintain this very articulate commentary on music.

“Probably what remains with me most was the fact that he was so uninhibited when he performed,” he continues. “Like so many classical musicians of my generation, I had sort of grown up having my instincts squashed a little bit, and he wasn’t bothered by this at all. As far as he was concerned, he was setting the new rules of engagement.”

Rules, it could be argued, that Tovey and most other conductors of his generation happily adopted, bringing a renewed sense of physicality in classical-music performance as a counterweight to the Apollonian intellectuality of Bernstein’s creative opposite, Pierre Boulez. Still, the VSO’s bandmaster admits to finding himself both happy and slightly puzzled that in Bernstein’s centenary year he’s devoting most of the orchestra’s annual Spring Festival to his former mentor’s work.

“I never thought his music would live very long after his death,” Tovey confesses. “But I’ve been pretty blown away by the way his works have not only held their own, but have grown in stature. Who would have thought that we’d be performing every single work that Bernstein wrote in his centenary year? It would have been unthinkable back in 1990, because he was pretty much famous for West Side Story and what people felt were a number of overblown pieces, like the symphonies and the Mass. And now they’re all incredibly popular.”

Yes, the VSO will perform Bernstein’s symphonic adaptation of his most famous musical during the Spring Festival. Other highlights on the agenda are Serenade, with violin soloist Augustin Hadelich, and Chichester Psalms, with choirs from UBC and the Langley Fine Arts School. But the piece Tovey might be most looking forward to performing is Bernstein’s Symphony No. 2, also known as The Age of Anxiety. It is, he says, a piece he’s never conducted before—even though he was in the audience when Bernstein and pianist Krystian Zimerman filmed an incandescent and evergreen rendition of the work with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1986.

Does he have any recommendations for listeners who might also be fairly new to that work? Counterintuitively, given his respect for Bernstein’s erudite and elegant musicological writings, Tovey says it’s best to enter The Age of Anxiety without paying too much attention to the composer’s copious program notes.

“In learning the piece, I thought, ‘What I really need to do is just get to grips with the music,’ ” he suggests. “I find that the best way: listen to the music, let the music soak into you, and then see what the program can contribute to your understanding, as opposed to reading the program and then trying to understand the music.

“It’s just a different way of going about things,” he adds—and Bernstein, who belied his sonic conservatism with a keen interest in radical politics, would probably approve.

The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s Spring Festival runs at the Orpheum from Saturday (March 17) to March 26.