EDWIN Paling is the best-known musician in Scotland. He is also the least well-known musician in Scotland. The leader of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra will leave the organisation later this month after 34 years unbroken service with the orchestra, the last 31 of those as leader.

He is a figurehead of the orchestra. After all these decades he should be a reference point for any comment on its state and health. Yet even those who have worked closely with him have described Paling as an enigma, a private man, distant, perhaps withdrawn, elusive and massively discreet.

In all his time as the front man of the RSNO, Paling has never uttered a word publicly on RSNO business. Through all the crises that have catapulted the band onto the news pages, whether financial, political or industrial upheavals, Paling has remained steadfastly withdrawn from public view. At various points in the orchestra's history, it was suggested that now was the time for the leader, the captain of the team, to break ranks and go public. It never happened.

No-one knows better the inner workings of the RSNO than Paling. He has worked with all the principal conductors: Sir Alexander Gibson, Neeme Jarvi, Bryden Thomson, Walter Weller, Alexander Lazarev, and now Stephane Deneve, whose collective chief conductorships span almost half a century. He has worked with countless managers, chairmen, chief executives and generations of orchestral musicians.

He has also worked with the less than able conductors who have crossed the portal of the RSNO, whose reputation as being a graveyard for conductors is both notorious and legendary. As one of Paling's colleagues remarked privately: "Edwin is the one man who knows everything, and says nothing."

Now, at the age of 59, he's off to a new job and a new life in Tasmania, where he will be associate professor of strings at the University of Tasmania. It's a rich, complex, challenging post, and he relishes it. He'd always planned to leave the RSNO at 60, but brought it forward when he came across the new job on the internet. He describes it as "absolutely perfect, a gift for me."

Paling's career in Scotland was meteoric. All he had ever wanted to do was play in an orchestra. He had no ambition to be a concerto soloist. He was appointed to the then SNO in 1973, and within three years was leading it, offered the job directly by Gibson. Within a short time he was in the limelight with the massive and spectacular solo violin part for the orchestra leader in Richard Strauss's huge Romantic tone poem, Ein Heldenleben, the orchestral monster with which Paling will give his valedictory performances in Edinburgh and Glasgow this month.

Paling reckons the glory years for him as leader included the American tours with Gibson, the recordings and playing for Scottish Opera performances. However, the short era that he calls "the golden period" under the conductorship of the dazzling Neeme Jarvi was some way off. In Paling's earliest days the SNO was master of all it surveyed. They were thriving under Gibson's visionary leadership. There were no rivals in Scotland. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra didn't exist when Paling started. The BBC SSO was essentially a studio band. There was no Orchestra of Scottish Opera. "In those days there was just no competition."

And all the while, Paling accrued experience in the multiple tasks of a leader, including participating in all appointments to the orchestra (an area he has moved back from to a degree in recent years), and working with the conductors that came in to direct the band.

THAT, he says, is a primary function of the leader. "If I had to sum it up, the leader, the most senior position in the orchestra, is primarily a facilitator of rehearsals."

What does that mean? Paling answers carefully and precisely. "Most orchestral musicians in the UK like to work as quickly and efficiently as possible. My main job is helping the conductor to get the best possible result in the shortest possible time. That is what I've spent a lot of my time doing."

He's being oblique, and he's holding back. What does all of that say about conductors, whose job is to know what they want from an orchestra, and how to get it?

Paling seems reluctant to develop the theme, and I provoke him by reminding him of the RSNO's notorious reputation, at one time, as a destroyer of conductors.

Some have fled from the SNO. Many have been bruised. One told me he had had such a rough time from the players that he wouldn't go back for a pension. Another, pouring with sweat, gasped: "This is hellish; this lot eat conductors."

The dam breaks. "It's not an opinion that is new to me. I've heard this before." Paling considers the issue. "I think that conductors themselves are very demanding. The orchestra itself has an equal right to be demanding. In the middle of that there is a balance.

"But I do think that the orchestra has a right to expect a certain standard in the same way that conductors do. Conductors are not frightened to say if they're not happy. And nor were we. I do think the orchestra these days is much easier to work with than it used to be. But reputations tend to stick."

He reckons it all stems from the fact that "this is a very stressful job" and that there are occasions where players "might just bubble over and snap", especially if the man with the white stick is blind and deaf to their own professional capabilities, or is arrogant, rude, or dictatorial.

"If you're a conductor you have to temper your own self-belief with a sensitive, diplomatic way of getting through to people who have been playing the music you're trying to tell them about since you were a small child. One of the hardest things is how to actually start a piece. Precise beating won't get you anywhere. Really it's nothing to do with that at all." There are many conductors, he says, who just haven't a clue: "We've had conductors who, throughout the whole programme, have been less than clear. Then, you earn your money."

So what does he do? He takes charge. "The leader's chair is the only position from which you can be slightly demonstrative in your playing."

Over the stretch he considers the RSNO fortunate to have had a succession of principal conductors - very much including the currently postholder Deneve, about whose musicianship Paling raves - who have known what they were doing, were great accompanists and could secure the best results.

After his blazing Heldenleben finale, that's it. A month later he'll be off to Hobart, a place he loves, has visited many times, and where there are strong family connections. Meanwhile, the RSNO is head-hunting for his successor. RSNO: Ein Heldenleben, Fri 27, Usher Hall, Edinburgh; Sat 28, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall.