ROBIN Ticciati strides up to me in Barnes, south-west London, one bright Saturday morning in September. This is in itself remarkable because in February the conductor suffered a herniated disc and for several bed-bound months the prospect of walking was a remote glimmer, let alone striding, let alone conducting. After a summer of intensive physio and painful cancellations – he had to pull out of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict at Glyndebourne, among other engagements – he returned to the stage in August to conduct the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette at the Edinburgh International Festival. “It had to be the SCO I came back to,” he says. This will be his last season in Scotland as principal conductor (next year he takes the helm of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin) but he still thinks of the orchestra as home.

It would be easy to romanticise that Berlioz concert as a return to form, a spiritual reawakening, “an augenblick moment”, Ticciati jokes, but in reality it was more a question of getting from one end of the performance to the other.

“Actually what was tremendously helpful was how matter-of-fact the players were about the whole thing,” he recalls. “How they didn’t tiptoe around me. It was business as usual, and that took the emotional pressure off so I could deal with the physical mechanics of being back on the podium.”

He needed to rediscover how to make his body work as a communicative tool again: how to find the stamina and freedom of movement to conduct expressively without doing more damage to his back. This is likely to be a long process and he has been advised not to do too much too soon, which is why it was recently announced that he has withdrawn from the SCO’s second week of programmes. (Thierry Fischer has stepped in to conduct the premiere of a piano concerto by Martin Suckling and Strauss’s ballet music Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme in the second week of October.)

For a musician whose instrument is his body, whose public face is his back, the pain of the past six months goes without saying – or at least it does for the purposes of this interview. What Ticciati does want to talk about is “getting a sniff of what it meant to spend six months just thinking about music,” because here he is able to identify some positives. “The way the industry works,” he says, “there’s a danger you start consuming classical music like fast food. You get the sugar rush, the sense of feeling full. That click-bait multimedia greyness is always just around the corner and for it not to become parasitic the moment I let a little bit in… for me that takes a huge amount of mindfulness. And mindfulness is one thing I have thought about a lot in recent months.”

“Of course,” he adds, “all this went hand-in-hand with not being able to breathe, not being able to stand up properly. So the few pieces of music I did choose for my body and mind to take in became incredibly special.”

Those few pieces of music included the three Mozart symphonies Ticciati will conduct in the opening concerts of the new SCO season: numbers 39, 40 and 41, the last symphonic works Mozart wrote. There is juicy speculation around why these astoundingly inventive scores even exist: no sign that they were commissioned, or that they were intended for a specific performance, or that Mozart received any money for them – which, given his pressing financial issues, leaves a fair number of intriguing question marks. Did he write them for fun, for exploration, to test his own boundaries? What were the radical new directions he intended for symphonic form?

For Ticciati that intrigue offers a whole lot of interpretative potential. “What is the fugue at the end of the Jupiter? What on earth is that introduction to 39? Why does 40 begin in the shade and tremoring? I have no idea! And that is so exciting!” He has performed these works before, as a student at Cambridge and various occasions since, but always as individuals. “Now I want to explore them as a tryptic. What do they mean? I’ve come to the conclusion that we just don’t know. Whether Mozart had enough money, or did them for a subscription concert that never happened, or maybe it was something much bigger… And the not knowing is giving me such a thrill about how to look at these scores again. To go again into dots, dagger, phrase lengths. I hope I don’t ever take looking at scores for granted, but maybe you can take looking at a friend for granted.”

He also says he wants to use this programme to “take new risks” with the orchestra. He smiles at his own cliche here and acknowledges that "risk" is a relative term: there will be no radical restructuring of the 18th century concert format, no beanbag seating, no bold new lighting or performance space or dress-code or performance etiquette. The big risk SCO-style is that the string players will be using gut strings for the first time in the ensemble’s history (former principal cellist David Watkin often played on gut, but never the full section). The reasoning for this goes beyond aesthetics or sound-colour or historically informed performance, though there is all that, too.

Perhaps it goes back to Ticciati’s point about not taking old friends for granted. “I want to push our relationship as far out of our comfort zone as I can. I want them to give me different sounds – I want it to sound like a different orchestra. Because we don’t shake things up enough. Myself, the SCO, the whole classical music establishment. There’s a default setting and it’s way too easy to rely on it. When muscle memory kicks in and the result is playing that doesn’t question and probe. How do we present our music – the music that people know, not just new music – in a way that isn’t always like wallowing in a warm bath? Using gut is not going to cause a revolution here, but I picture turning the wheel of a tanker and it taking a long time for the ship to change direction. I don’t want these details to seem cosmetic. They’re small, but they’re significant.”

Robin Ticciati conducts Mozart’s symphonies number 39, 40 and 41 at Perth Concert Hall tonight, the Usher Hall, Edinburgh, tomorrow and Glasgow City Halls on Friday.