The day before I meet conductor Antonio Mendez at Media City in Salford, he takes a taxi from Manchester airport to the BBC Philharmonic’s rehearsal studios and gets chatting. The driver wants to know: what exactly does a conductor do? “So we end up comparing it to football managers,” Mendez says. “After Alex Ferguson, Manchester United had the same players, but they did not have the same results.”

Which might sound corny, but Mendez turns out to be one of the most articulate and unpretentious conductors I’ve ever heard expounding on the dark arts of conjuring great music with a baton. “One way of thinking about it,” he says. “A conductor’s job is to give, give, give without expecting anything in return. Give energy, musicality, give professionalism, give a smile, give confidence. It sounds basic but it isn’t easy. Simon Rattle once said that if you don’t need a massage after conducting a Beethoven symphony then you haven’t given enough…” Does Mendez always need a massage after conducting? “I don’t always get one, but I always need one!”

The 31-year-old Majorcan is sharp-dressed, clean-shaven, handsome. A wheelie suitcase full of scores is the only clue that sets him apart from the slick TV types milling around this brave new world of Media City. At this stage in his career he’s going through the relentless game of ‘guesting’ — which means he doesn’t have any regular position, no fixed relationship with any one ensemble. Instead it’s another week, another city, another orchestra, notching up repertoire and, hopefully, good rapport along the way. This season he’ll stand in front of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the Spanish National, Dresden Staatskapelle, Auckland Philharmonia, Iceland Symphony, Frankfurt Radio Symphony and several other orchestras. He made his debut with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at last summer’s St Magnus Festival in Orkney and is back next week to conduct Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. I get the sense we’ll be hearing more of him yet.

Mendez has plenty to say about the experience of walking into a new hall full of new faces and having to work out quick-sharp how to get the best from that particular group. “There are two kinds of orchestra,” he explains. “Passive and active. Orchestras that wait for the conductor to give something, and others — like the SCO — that offer something from the start. My first job is to find out which kind of orchestra I’m working with. That much I can tell in the first couple of minutes.” He looks for signs in body language, how responsive the players are, who in the group might be “a potential problem character.” He says there are five crucial members of an orchestra to get on side: leader, principal double bass, principal oboe, principal horn and timpanist. (“A good timpanist makes your job very easy; a bad timpani player makes your job very, very difficult.”)

“Basically, we should all be trained as psychologists!” he laughs. “So much of my job is about assessing personalities, but I don’t know any conservatory where that skill is formally taught. Anybody can learn to conduct in half an hour — I mean the technicalities of waving your hands about. And yet master conductors are 60 or 70 years old.” And him, aged 31? “I feel like I’m completely at the beginning, And if I didn’t feel like that, I would be a fool.”

Mendez had little live experience of orchestras or opera houses growing up in Majorca, but he knew he wanted to be a conductor. At 18 he moved to Madrid to study violin, piano and composition — “a conductor should have good background knowledge” — but really his education happened in the city’s concert halls, where he would sit in on day after day of rehearsals and, unable to afford ticket prices, sneak into evening concerts. He still believes that students sneaking in without paying should from a crucial part of any healthy concert audience.

At 23 he moved to Berlin and officially began studying conducting; now he lives in Leipzig with his French girlfriend, a harpist in the illustrious Gewandhaus Orchestra. Nearly a decade of life in Germany has sunk in, he says, because despite being marketed as a Spanish conductor, it’s in Germananic repertoire that he feels most comfortable. His choice of SCO programme is Haydn’s Symphony No 99 and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony: “I wanted to conduct this orchestra in music where I’m really at home. Beethoven feels at home for me. That doesn’t mean I do it well,” he adds. “That’s for others to judge. But there are composers where you feel you don’t need translation, you don’t need the dictionary. That’s the case for me with Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms.”

In 2012 Mendez won second prize at the Nikolai Malko Competition for Young Conductors in Copenhagen and says the event changed his life. “Many managers and agencies got in touch in the days after the competition and I had no idea what to do.” So he contacted Bernard Haitink, the great Dutch conductor, and asked for advice. “He told me that what I do in the next five years is not important, that it’s what I do in the next 40 years that counts.”

Maybe that explains Mendez’s remarkably rational attitude to the long game he’s playing. “I’m a rational person,” he shrugs. “I learn something new every single week, something I could do better. There are a lot of orchestras and a lot of conductors. If it doesn’t work with one or two each season, that’s ok.”

Yet he’s also straight-up about wanting a steadier relationship. “I would love a chief conductor position”, he says, and reveals in some detail what he means by that. “It’s a commitment not just to an orchestra but to the community as a whole. Some conductors have three orchestras in three different continents” — he’s careful not to name names — “but is that ethical? Moral? Fair? Fifty years ago a conductor was a part of the community, around for a lot more than six or seven weeks in a year and not just there for the nice symphony concerts and recordings. A chief conductor should go to schools and hospitals. Abbado went to the factories in Milan in the 1960s. Everyone should know that there’s an orchestra in their city, and — for better or for worse — the chief conductor is the face of that orchestra.”

Antonio Mendez conducts the Scottish Chamber Orchestra at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, on January 21, City Halls, Glasgow, on January 22 and the Music Hall, Aberdeen, on January 23