Simon Woods has been itching to get out of his chief executive’s chair at the RSNO and have a good old-fashioned head to head about something close to his heart.

“Whenever I speak publicly, it’s always about the business: about programming and repertoire, soloists and conductors, RSNO artistic policy and strategy.”

So what does he want to talk about? Music. Particularly the music of Robert Schumann, about which he clearly has a missionary zeal. Specifically, he wants to talk about Schumann’s four symphonies.

There is a context. Schumann, the 200th anniversary of whose birth falls next year, is among the greatest of the 19th-century Romantic composers. He is revered for his concentrated and emotional songs. They are all short and Schumann’s problem, history has decided, is that when he tried to big it up and write symphonies, he fell flat.

His four symphonies have been thumped, dumped and derided over the generations. The director of one German orchestra, asked to include a Schumann symphony in his touring programme, declared: “Schumann we cannot and will not play.”

Critical demolition of Schumann as a symphonist persists. In 1986 the New York Times said of the symphonies: “With their formal awkwardness, thick orchestrations, earnest pictorialisms and lumbering rhetoric, they clearly cannot challenge the greatest masterpieces of the symphonic genre.”

Woods, as a young musician, had his own problem with Schumann. “When I was growing up, Schumann was a slightly mysterious figure. He didn’t have the grandeur of Beethoven or the sublimity of Mozart. He didn’t have Mahler’s passion, Bruckner’s big religious feeling, Brahms’s weight and authority or Mendelssohn’s lightness of touch. He never really fitted.”

All that changed when Woods bought Giuseppe Sinopoli’s recording of the Second Symphony. He was hooked. “For about a month I played it every single day, and started becoming very interested in the dialectic that goes on in the piece about illness and health.”

The obsession led to the other symphonies. Gradually he was drawn into their orbit. “At about 20, suddenly I switched on to this music in a way I never had before. And now I love the Schumann symphonies above almost anything else in 19th-century symphonic music.”

What’s to love? Woods goes through the nuts and bolts of them, especially the Second Symphony, without whose slow movement, he says, the big slow movements of Bruckner would be “inconceivable”.

“But the core of Schumann, to me, is the contradiction, the dualities between male/female, extrovert and introvert, heart and intellect, which he defined himself in his twin personalities and which are clearly enshrined in the symphonies.

“These, to me, are an essential characteristic of the music, and things which everybody wrestles with. In whatever job you’re doing, whatever relationship you’re in, through life you wrestle with the head and heart. It’s all in the symphonies. And it’s that contradiction – a life thing – I find so compelling in Schumann. The genius of the symphonies, to me, is that they are the most personal, intimate Romantic expressions, but constructed in forms that are very Classical.

“I cannot think of another composer who so perfectly balances and reconciles

the Romantic and the Classical spirit, and the inter-relationship between form and expression.”

Woods doesn’t dismiss the fact that there are problems with Schumann’s orchestration: “Every conductor has to find his own solutions.”

Part of the problem, he says, is historical. “No other 19th-century composer has suffered so much by the change in sound of the modern orchestra. String sections have got bigger and modern instruments are louder – there is a fatter sound, so the problem in Schumann’s music has become exacerbated, and every conductor has to find a way of getting at that.”

At that point the chief executive’s hat goes back on, because Woods’s RSNO will this season play a complete cycle of the symphonies, the first by the RSNO in almost 30 years. With the knowledge that there is still missionary work required, Woods has chosen his conductors carefully.

Music director Stephane Deneve wanted the Fourth Symphony. Sir Roger Norrington, a world authority on the symphonies, whose recording of the cycle with his Stuttgart orchestra is revelatory, will take the Second. Sir Andrew Davis has a passion for the Third, The Rhenish, and will take it. And Woods has asked the fast-rising Czech conductor Jakub Hrusa to launch the cycle with the effervescent First Symphony, The Spring. Simon Woods can’t wait. He’s not alone.

RSNO plays Schumann’s Spring Symphony, November 5, Ayr Town Hall; November 6, Usher Hall; November 7, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.