Now doing what comes naturally

Danzmayr's progress towards the conducting arena had been looking good. He was optimistic. He had been working for three years with American conductor Dennis Russell Davies, at that time chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony, Stuttgart Chamber and the American Composers' orchestras.

Davies, who was also professor of conducting at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, took the young student, Danzmayr, under his wing. Danzmayr took to it like a duck to water. By his own admission, he didn't have a clue how to conduct, but loved it, idolised Davies and modelled himself on the idiosyncratic American.

"I adored Dennis and his way of conducting, especially his coolness. The more I was in his class, the more I copied him." Without knowing it, Danzmayr was sowing the seeds of his own future humiliation.

After three years, Davies summoned him to a meeting, summarised his progress and announced: "It's time I got rid of you." Danzmayr grins from ear to ear.

"Denis was absolutely right. After all this time and experience with him, I needed new impressions. I had to get away."

Davies proposed he should go to the ultimate finishing school for conductors - the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and that he should work under the mountain man of Finnish music, the great conductor Leif Segerstam. Davies made the contact, Segerstam agreed to take the Austrian into his class at for a year and Danzmayr headed off to Helsinki.

He wasn't long in coming down to earth as Segerstam, renowned (or notorious) for his brutal directness and honesty, began laying into the young Salzburger. "The very first thing he said to me was, You are completely unnatural. You're no good. In fact, you are very bad'." Danzmayr, a bit of a tough nut and stubborn with it, took it on the chin. But it went on and on.

"After three months with Leif, I had heard nothing other than how bad I was." The tirade of insults was unstoppable. "I made some conducting movement in a piece and he mocked, Oh, this was just for the gallery, wasn't it? You are not being yourself. You look stupid. You are so bad'."

Danzmayr's stubbornness made Segerstam more relentless. "I got really angry. I thought I was going to Helsinki to get the finishing touch, the polishing. But he didn't want to change me a little; he wanted to change me completely. He smashed me into bits."

Inevitably, Danzmayr's confidence began to seep away. He felt undermined. His frustration was intensified by the fact that, deep within himself, he was beginning to see Segerstam's point. "I realised that, before I had come to Helsinki, I had lost the connection with myself in conducting. I was trying to copy Dennis Russell Davies, and I was a bad copy. I was just a puppet."

Acknowledging that fact didn't stop the confidence draining away. At one point in the middle of all this he returned to Salzburg, where things had previously been going well for him. He had a concert to conduct with the Mozarteum orchestra. The rehearsals, he said, were "a nightmare". He felt as though the rug of stability had been pulled out from under his feet.

"The concert was fine, but I went afterwards to ask the orchestra chief if there was any chance of being re-invited." The chief agreed that the concert had been wonderful, but then devastated Danzmayr by telling him that at least half the orchestra thought his rehearsal technique and his way of rehearsing were "a mess". The chief then dropped the punchline: "Let's maybe think again in four or five years."

By the time Danzmayr got back to Helsinki, Segerstam knew what had happened in Salzburg. He watched a video of Danzmayr conducting and said to him: "You know, the standard here is really high. You have to show us that you know what you're doing."

Recalling this moment in the RSNO conductor's room, Danzmayr falls quiet. After a long, uninterrupted pause, he says, very softly: "At that point, I was a little bit weak. I needed somebody to tell me it was going to be fine."

He was then at breaking point. Within days, he fell seriously ill and was totally out of commission for three weeks. Perspectives and priorities change in the face of illness. On returning to the academy, Danzmayr felt his own attitude had changed. He noticed a change, too, in Segerstam, who pointed out to the Austrian that, if he went out and conducted as himself, he would win a competition. If he went out and played a role, as he had always done, he would be knocked out in round one.

"It was true," reflected Danzmayr. "Before, when I took the baton, I was thinking, Okay, how do I hold this? Where do I lie it in the hand? How should I stand? How do I make the orchestra watch me? How do I make it all look good?' "

In his last week in Finland he threw caution to the winds and said, what the hell. He was to conduct Brahms's Second Symphony. "I remember I let everything go, grabbed the baton and just started, trusting the orchestra to play well, not worrying, not caring, not blaming myself if something wasn't completely together. It was like breaking out.

"Segerstam had shown me that I was not being myself, I was playing a role, I was being unnatural, I was wearing a mask. He wasn't trying to destroy me; he was trying to destroy the mask to release the conductor inside. I felt genuinely liberated."

And that is exactly what brought RSNO music director Stephane Deneve, his chief executive Simon Woods and the players of the orchestra out of their seats when Danzmayr auditioned for the new RSNO post. There were more than 100 applicants, but they immediately offered the young Austrian the job. The chorus of artistic and administrative voices from the RSNO was unanimous: "He's a natural." Well, he is now.

• David Danzmayr conducts RSNO Classic Bites, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, Wednesday, April 2, 6pm.