These young podium masters inject their personalities directly into the score, which, far from diluting the music’s meaning, seems to bring it much more sharply into focus, the same way both Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh have nailed Shakespeare characters in performances of equal clarity and validity. The proof is in the performance. The old Rage for Order wasn’t tradition. It was just a bad habit.

“When my conducting started to really work, at first I wanted to figure out why it was working,” Nézet-Séguin explains. “Then I decided not to, because that might take it away. I didn’t enter conducting competitions as a student. I didn’t develop that way, through constant scrutiny. So I won’t ask myself now how I do it.

“It’s not a formula,” he adds, grinning. He shares with Toscanini — apart from the fact that they both knew Giulini — a comparatively untutored greatness. They found their separate ways to classical stardom, bypassing the academia that threatens to engulf the music, and their individuality is equally audible and enthralling.

At the podium during the Ravel concert in Toronto, Nézet-Séguin seems more to channel the music than conduct it. He wears all black, and his stage style has a dance-like, weaving grace; he moves his whole upper body in a sort of physical incantation. He multi-tasks by cueing some players while congratulating others with sly, affirming eye contact for making entrances perfectly a moment earlier. As he does so, the psychic barrier separating audience from performer disintegrates. The musical communion felt by everyone generates a shared aura of excitement and purpose. Listeners lean forward. We are involved in a transcendence — and it is one that needs us.