CONDUCTORS of orchestras seem like exotic beasts: the same genus as film or theatre directors, perhaps, but a different species. And while all share the same basic habitat, you're more likely to find conductors in the upper branches where the view is good and the seats are priced accordingly – in their case the rarefied surrounds of the world's opera houses and concert halls.

In the popular imagination they're figures of mystique or, if you're Bugs Bunny or Morecambe and Wise, figures of fun: wild-eyed, aloof, autocratic, done up in penguin suits and dicky bows. Not for nothing are they sometimes referred to as “maestro”.

Though he certainly has the hair for the part, principal conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Robin Ticciati is none of these things. It's hard to be when you arrive for an interview dressed in tracksuit bottoms and a defiantly un-tucked shirt and, while the immediate surroundings are certainly rarefied – Edinburgh's plush Balmoral Hotel, a sort of home-from-home for the 33-year-old – Ticciati seems more like an antidote to the precious and the elitist rather than an embodiment of it.

Here's a story he tells within minutes of sitting down: he's in a park somewhere at the height of the Pokemon craze. It's a beautiful autumn day but nobody's looking at the trees or the sky. They're staring at their phones instead.

“I don't want this to come out as a judgement but I thought, 'How many people are in contact with the earth?'” he says. “This bombardment of internet technology and hand-held devices for so many things is incredible. Look at everything that's possible. But I think one thing it does do is nullify and deaden what it is to be truly human, and I think classical music is a gateway to making those connections happen. Because that's [all] we have – human relationships.”

To his mind, then, Ticciati is an “ambassador” for something blindingly simple: a mission to connect people with themselves and with each other through the power of music. And the wider and more profuse those connections – and the deeper into society they can be worked – the better.

“I'm so passionate about the qualities that classical music brings, which is to do with listening, silence, communication, trust,” he says. “It's the foundations of humanity and what we do. That's one of the reasons why I think it's so important to try and get people involved. Don't get me wrong there are many ways of living and many good ways of living. I just think classical music is also a wonderful part of how to live.”

He is, in short, an evangelist.

London-born of Italian and Swedish descent, Ticciati's tenure at the SCO began in 2009 and will only end after the orchestra's 2017-2018 season, making him one of the organisation's longest-serving “chiefs” (his word).

Under his stewardship, a long-cherished plan to give the orchestra its own, purpose-built home has come to fruition and been greenlit – a £45 million headquarters, recording studio and 1000-seat performance space behind the Royal Bank of Scotland's historic Dundas House building in Edinburgh's St Andrew Square – and the orchestra proper has established itself as among the world's best.

Ticciati, meanwhile, has cemented a reputation as one of the most inspiring young conductors around, a fact which explains the two other hats he now wears: musical director of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera (he was appointed in 2014) and musical director designate of the prestigious Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. Ticciati, who now lives in the German capital, will take over for the 2017-18 season.

It's safe to say he'll be missed in Edinburgh. But leaving the capital and the SCO will be a wrench for him too. Having initially been appointed for a three-year period, he twice extended his contract so it's clear he found Scotland, its people and its musical culture to his liking. He was never a full-time resident of Edinburgh but became a familiar enough figure in his preferred haunts, such as the coffee shops where he would pore silently over whatever score he was tackling next, be it Bruckner, Mahler or Mozart.

“I hope I have infiltrated the atmosphere of music-making in the city and made people excited about what happens,” he says. “In terms of walking the streets, in terms of seeing the buildings, I feel at home here now.”

As for his two contract extensions with the SCO, they were no-brainers. He did it, he says, “because they're wonderful”.

“It's a very simple answer. But to elaborate on it, you can only do so much in three years. You can do a little more in six and then to go even further you have to extend again ... when the relationship with an orchestra is right you feel that you're playing off one another. I push them, they push me, and you always see that there's somewhere else to go. So I didn't come to a feeling where I thought there's nothing else to do here.”

Next up for the SCO is this week's performance of Beethoven in the company of classical superstar (and proud Ayrshire girl), Nicola Benedetti. Ticciati next picks up the baton the week after in a programme featuring the acclaimed Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires, who'll play two Mozart concertos as well as Antonin Dvorak's Legends cycle. Then, in February, the orchestra takes off for a seven-date European tour which includes concerts in Paris, Salzburg, Toulouse and Rotterdam. During Ticciati's tenure, the orchestra has been as far afield as Philadelphia, Atlanta and Seongnam in South Korea.

“Taking the orchestra outside of Scotland has been a really important mission of mine because I want them to shout from the rooftops, 'We are here, one of the best chamber orchestras in the world',” he explains.

But on the subject of the orchestra's new home and its decades-long gestation, he describes having had “a fight”. What does he mean exactly?

“Maybe when I talk about fighting I was referring also to classical music itself,” he says. “I think it can be a force for good and if you believe that passionately about it you have to fight to get it out there to people and to shout it from the rooftops.

“The Queen's Hall [the SCO's current venue] has some beautiful qualities – its intimacy, its shape, its history, its particular acoustic – but the SCO needs a world-class venue. Was it a fight? No not a fight. But of course it was a struggle because some people will say it's not needed.”

Ticciati also talks enthusiastically about El Sistema, the publicly-funded project initiated in Venezuela in 1975 which took music education into some of the country's poorest areas and later produced one of the superstars of the conducting world, Gustavo Dudamel, a man to whom Ticciati is often compared. In 2008, the year before Ticciati took up his position at the SCO, Sistema Scotland was launched in Raploch in Stirling. Today, there are two other similar projects in Glasgow's Govanhill and Aberdeen's Torry districts.

“I came from a family where my parents loved music, there was music in the household, I saw that my brother played violin and through I'd really like to do that,” he says. “So it is about opportunity and it shouldn't be about opportunity, it should be for everyone. That's what's Sistema in Scotland is about – really getting music to people who don't have the opportunity or the money or, in a sense, the open eyes for it. It's to get at them and then the gateway will become wider and more people can get through it.”

“Gateway” is a word he uses a lot and he makes no bones about the fact that his own access to the portal was smooth and easy. As well as having parents who loved music and a brother who played (and still does), his Italian great-great-grandfather was a representative for Bechstein, the celebrated German piano manufacturer. It was on a working trip to England that he fell in love with Oxford and decided to stay. “A classic immigrant story,” says Ticciati.

The conductor's cello-playing father became a barrister and sent his son to St Paul's, the famous London public school whose lengthy alumni list includes one George Gideon Oliver Osborne. From there Ticciati want to Clare College, Cambridge to read music though by that point he was already dead set on a career as a conductor and had been since an encounter with Sir Colin Davis while playing with the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain as a teenager.

“The conductor stood up and said to the clarinettist who started the piece: 'I hope you enjoy the journey',” he recalls. “And I thought: 'I want to structure these journeys. I don't want to just play the violin, I want to stand outside and yet play every instrument'.”

A Eureka! moment, then – or a gradual realisation that the baton was his preferred instrument?

“I think it was somewhere in between. It felt so natural, the idea, that it almost couldn't have been a Eureka! moment. So there must have been some underlying feeling all along. I was 13 at the time but it just felt so natural that that was the route.”

And so, with the precocity of youth, he wrote to Sir Colin Davis, then principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and asked if he could come and watch him rehearse. Amazingly, Davis replied.

“He wrote this wonderful letter back saying, 'So you want to be a conductor dot dot dot'. It was this really cryptic thing, as if to say, 'Are you really sure what you're letting yourself in for?'”

At the time, Ticciati assumed it was all about just waving your arms around. Two decades on, he knows better. Three or even four decades on again – conductors tend to have long careers – he may have further, deeper revelations.

“I realise more and more that conducting is a philosophy,” he says. “It becomes a way of being, if you treat it with care. It can teach one so much about people. Yes I know there's a hierarchy. Yes at the end of the day I tell people where to start and stop. But actually what happens in the middle is so dynamic on a human level that it has also become a wonderful way to grow as a person. I had no awareness that it would encompass any of that.”

Beyond his technical abilities, perhaps Ticciati's real gift is his ability to be transported by music. “If something moves me deeply in the music I can sit there and weep in front of the score,” he says at one point. His belief is that that deep engagement can be learned and it's what he seeks to instil in audiences. “It's about making the audience feel what I felt in that seat on my own. And that's an amazing journey to go on and it calls for a lot of self-analysis and introspection,” he says.

At the very least it's a worthwhile ambition, but if it takes his level of immersion it's probably not for everyone. So is it hard, undergoing that level of self-analysis and introspection?

“No,” he says. “It's constantly fascinating and revealing. And dark. And yes, I go into very, very low places. But it's not hard.”

I have a fond image of him kicking back with a Leonard Cohen CD to lighten the mood a little, but by his own admission there's little space in his life for any other sort of music.

Actually that's not quite true. “I think the next type of music that has emerged for me is silence,” he says intriguingly. “Just simply trying to find silence ... It's like gold. Where can you go?”

Now I know why he was so discomfited earlier when two loud hotel guests barrelled through the doors of a whisky bar we had had to ourselves until then.

“You need space to look into yourself,” he continues, “and I realised that in my years so far I haven't really experienced true stillness.”

So that moment when the audience is quiet, when the orchestra is waiting and ready but the performance hasn't started, is that now the best bit of the evening for him?

“Almost,” he says. “But that's what music comes out of. And what do we end with? Silence.”

And then applause, I suggest. He gives a laugh I'm going to have to describe as pianissimo.

“And then applause,” he repeats. “Hopefully”.

The SCO season continues on Thursday Jan 19, 2017 (when Nicola Benedetti performs Beethoven at the Usher Hall (also Glasgow on January 20 and Dumfries on January 21). Robin Ticciati conducts a programme of Dvo?àk, Haydn and Mozart with pianist Maria João Pires later this month (Jan 25 in Perth, 26 in Edinburgh and 27 in Glasgow) before taking them on tour throughout Europe (www.sco.org.uk)