To some, this afternoon's performance of Handel's Messiah by the RSNO and its chorus will seem a deeply unfashionable affair. We live in an age where there is a pronounced appetite for a slimmed-down, fleet, swift Messiah with minimal forces, perhaps just one or two singers to a part, accompanied by a small ensemble of like-minded specialist instrumentalists.

For listeners and musicians so inclined, the concept of a large scale performance featuring a modern symphony orchestra and a huge choral society, however adept, might be anathema. It will imply a heavyweight, inflated, overburdened, probably sluggish and possibly turgid performance of Handel's great masterpiece.

There is one factor in today's RSNO performance which almost guarantees that none of these reservations will apply: the presence of Roy Goodman as conductor.

As anyone who has experienced Goodman's Messiah on his several earlier visits to the RSNO will confirm, Goodman can lift a Messiah performance beyond any definition of fashionable, and way beyond any potential limitations of the modern symphony orchestra in unfamiliar stylistic terrain. All being well with the thousand variables that can affect any live performance, this afternoon we can expect a Messiah that will go like the wind, have real meat on its bones, a rock-solid structure to its shape, a highly dramatic sense of continuity and flow to its progress, a rare sense of connection between its multiple movements, and a sense of drive and articulation throughout its three-hour span that, when it all works, can be breathtaking.

It will also have, to whatever degree possible in the extremely limited rehearsal time, a real sense of baroque style: the strings will be playing from Goodman's own parts, all bowed and marked up by the conductor who is one of the most experienced, though least trumpeted, of Britain's period performance specialist conductors.

Apart from his technical and stylistic armoury, however, Goodman has one other weapon that marks him out from some of his peers: his rampant enthusiasm and conviction for working across the borders, as it were, of period performance and modern resources. He's just back from New Zealand where he directed an intensive three-week festival of Baroque music with the Auckland Philharmonia, with one week each devoted to Italian, French and German Baroque music.

He said: "This was an extraordinary adventure by their artistic management, staging a Baroque festival with a modern symphony orchestra in a big 2,200-seater hall, using as many of the symphony orchestra players as possible.

"It's something I really love doing, and it is absolutely not a problem for me to do Messiah with a symphony orchestra and a large chorus. In fact I was delighted, when I first met the RSNO, to find that we could travel somewhere."

Indeed, Goodman, now in his late 50s, could be said to have travelled a remarkable distance himself in his career. He started young, making his first recording when he was just eight, as a boy treble singing Bach's St John Passion with King's College Choir Cambridge, with Peter Pears singing the role of the Evangelist.

A few years later he was seriously in the limelight as the boy treble soloist on Decca's famous recording of Allegri's Miserere. Though he went on to become a fellow of the Royal College of Organists by the time he was 21, he was principally to become known as an outstanding violinist, though not a specialist in the historical or period performance style with which he was later inextricably linked.

"At college I never specialised in Baroque music. Why? There simply were no Baroque violins, and only after college did I become fascinated."

That fascination led to a careful and modest entrance into the esoteric world of period playing. "I began with seventeenth-century consort music: very simple music where you might just have four or five notes in which to make your point. We were already a million miles from the phrasing of a Mahler or Bruckner symphony, with only a few notes with which to give the character of a phrase."

Within a few years he had travelled another million miles, and was a principal violinist working with the elite conductors of the early music movement, including Frans Bruggen, John Eliot Gardiner, Christopher Hogwood, Rene Jacobs, Ton Koopman, Charles Mackerras and Roger Norrington, who remains a mentor for Goodman. He played with all the bands, including the Academy of Ancient Music and the London Classical Players. He was also first concertmaster with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment.

But the golden age of Goodman blossomed in the years between 1986 and 1994 when, as principal conductor of the Hanover Band, he brought his characteristic earthy vitality and drive to historically-informed performances of classical music. During this period, Goodman and the band played the first complete sets of symphonies by Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann on historical instruments (and, for the boss, the Schumann set on disc is the best thing they ever did). Arguably, his Haydn symphony project on record was one of the most important - they got 60 of the 100-plus symphonies on record before problems, financial and artistic, led to "a major split" and Goodman resigning.

Goodman has reservations about the quality of some the early recordings. "We didn't give enough concerts; we spent too much time rehearsing and recording in the studio".

He was also overloading himself, personally. "In 1986 I went schizophrenic. During a six-week period I made three recordings of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. I conducted my own with the Hanover Band, I was leader and concertmaster on Hogwood's with the AAM, and I was principal second violin with Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players. I found I wanted to save things for my own performance, and simply couldn't get as involved in the others. I felt compromised. So I stopped playing for other groups."

Though he has never given up his involvement in period conducting and playing, his career has broadened immeasurably following an invitation in 1989 to conduct the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in a programme featuring the music of Haydn and Sibelius, a moment he considers "a catalyst" for his wider career. He conducts all over the world now, is principal guest with the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted the world premierie of Philip Glass's Saxophone Concerto, will be conducting Schumann and Barber at Donald Runnicles's Grand Teton Festival in Wyoming, and chamber symphonies by Schoenberg and Schreker in Sweden.

But first, this afternoon, it's back to Handel, and the work of which Goodman never tires.

"Messiah is a pinnacle work. It's unique in Handel's output. Our familiarity with it makes us feel that much of it is typical of Handel. But you pick any aria or chorus and try to think of another Handel work that's similar.

"Every time I do it the work wakes me up with its staggering originality. We take so much of it for granted."

  • Roy Goodman conducts Handel's Messiah, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, today, 3pm.