Passing the baton

So why is he going? Seven years is short innings for someone who, by his own description, enjoys "nothing more than a long-term relationship with an orchestra". He was music director of San Francisco Opera for a whopping 17 seasons, and shows no sign of cutting his work with Deutsche Oper Berlin where he's been general music director since 2009. I ask whether he plans to take on another orchestra. "Never say never," he replies, "but I'm not looking."

That the BBC SSO announcement came less than a month before his 60th birthday is not coincidental. "This is purely about finding a balance between my professional and private life," he tells me, setting his baseball cap on the restaurant table and absentmindedly smoothing his chaotic fleece of grey hair. He has spent the day rehearsing Berg's opera Wozzeck and seems a little preoccupied. "Time with my family is precious, and in some ways it's becoming more precious." He glances up over his pint. "You're way too young to know this, Kate, but let me tell you: age is like a sandglass. The years just fly by. Certainly as a parent you've got to make the most of the first 10 years because it is unbelievable that I have an 18-year-old in college right now. Where did the time go? I used to think that 60 was ancient - some unimaginable age when you'd get to ride the buses for free and go swimming at 11 in the morning."

So now that he's turning 60, does he feel ancient? Will he start swimming at 11 in the morning? "Honestly, I feel like I'm 35. I really do. One of the great advantages of music is that you're always discovering new things, starting each concert afresh. There's nothing remotely routine - at least, there shouldn't be. You're always setting yourself a new bar, and that keeps you young."

Still, the numbers do mean something. At 30, 40, 50, he set himself certain goals; "I guess 60 is a bit of a watershed," he concedes. "I'm re-evaluating relationships, re-evaluating the pacing of the year. I'm actually trying to build in little vacations here and there. I used to dream of a sabbatical - I've never managed it, but I'd like to go on the record now and say that, perhaps in four or five years, I'll take nine months off." Then he will ride the buses for free, he laughs, and swim in the morning, maybe set off in a car from one coast of America with his wife Adele. He'll play the piano more - he loves chamber music but never gets the time. "All of that: that's why I've drawn a line in the sand."

The work Runnicles has done with the BBC SSO has produced unforgettable performances. He describes his relationship with the orchestra as "taking on an added dimension" during last year's Tristan und Isolde, when he split Wagner's opera across three captivating concerts. "I marvelled at the way in which the musicians were so quick in a repertoire that is supposed to be foreign to them," he says. "I'm steeped in this music; I've lived with Wagner all my life. But the trust and respect they showed me in trying to live up to that was genuinely moving."

Opera stands out as Runnicles's major contribution to the BBC SSO. He calls it "the missing link" for the orchestra - "if you play the tone poems of Richard Strauss without steeping yourself in Wagner's sound world, you are massively missing out. I could see it on the musicians' faces during Tristan: all those late romantic symphonies they're so familiar with - well, Tristan is where it all began."

There is a broader societal point here, to do with serious opera being an increasingly missing link for Scottish audiences as well as musicians. One of Runnicles's formative experiences as a boy was a Scottish Opera production of Das Rheingold in 1971. Nowadays there is little chance of a Rheingold or a Tristan or a Wozzeck in this country unless it's August or unless the BBC SSO is performing it. Runnicles is keenly aware of the responsibility that places on his shoulders.

"Without that production back in the 1970s it is quite conceivable that I wouldn't have got involved in opera in the first place," he says. "The moment was seminal, pivotal, whatever you want to call it. Generations have been born since who cannot know that this country had an internationally acclaimed opera company that didn't shy from the big works of Strauss, Debussy, Wagner. It was a huge and courageous company; one had the impression that it was indestructible. And now for a variety of reasons those works aren't being performed.

"In coming back to Scotland I was eager to bring my 35-year love affair with opera and give something back. It is a birthright of young people to be exposed to great opera. It changes lives - look at me. And to think that there are young people out there whose lives won't be changed because they don't have access to it? Well, therein lays this labour of love."

There is an unmistakable romance in the way Runnicles speaks about Scotland. His accent is more California than Edinburgh, his tan is far too fresh to be a product of our late autumn sun, his musical heartland has been fixed in Germany ever since that 1971 epiphany. Yet being a 'Scottish conductor' always mattered. "The identity shaped me because I had to fight the inherent inferiority complex we have as Scots," he explains. "I had to fight the feeling that anyone serious in classical music comes from Germany or Italy or France and has a foreign sounding name" - though he jokes that he's had enough variations to classify as more exotic than the lot. "But truly, for a great deal of my working life I've been bracing myself for the moment when somebody knocks on the dressing room door and says, 'maestro, I'm afraid this isn't quite good enough. It isn't quite profound enough'."

Presumably he doesn't still expect that knock on the door. "I suppose not," he says, and thinks for a moment. "But in some ways I wouldn't want to be without it. It keeps me grounded. There's no sense of entitlement, you know? Just humility and gratitude to have spent my life in music. What more could I want?"

Donald Runnicles conducts Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with the BBC SSO at City Halls, Glasgow on November 13, the Music Hall, Aberdeen, on November 14 and the Usher Hall, Edinburgh on November 16, www.bbc.co.uk/bbcsso