Samuel Wong, music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic, which is visiting Ireland, talks to Michael Dervan about orchestras and cultural mixes.

Samuel Wong seems to have been destined for music. He was born into a musical family in Hong Kong and was taught piano from a young age. Although his father was an accountant, medicine and music were the dominant professions in his extended family.

His mother was an amateur singer with a love of opera, and his father shared her passion. "We had easily one of the best opera collections in Hong Kong." And the musical involvement, especially in choral singing, continued when his family moved to Toronto.

His rapid rise as a conductor, however, is the stuff of dreams. He was conducting a youth orchestra in New York, and receiving enough attention for Zubin Mehta, then music director of the New York Philharmonic, to listen to him for an hour working on Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

Mehta came and went and what followed was silence, until, seven months later, he received a phone call from the Philharmonic inviting him to become the orchestra's assistant conductor. Then the orchestra's laureate conductor Leonard Bernstein died, and Wong was left with the responsibility of taking over his programmes in December 1990.

The onset of the Gulf War the following month brought him some of Zubin Mehta's concerts in Washington DC. Mehta, he says, enjoyed quipping: "It took a war and a death to launch your career." It's a classic scenario. Bernstein himself burst onto the scene in 1943 by standing in for an indisposed Bruno Walter. Toscanini, aged 19 and playing in the cello section on a South American tour of Aida, took to the podium in an emergency, and conducted from memory. "It wasn't a rise. It was an explosion, to be thrust into the middle of New York and to be exposed like that when I was a total unknown. I'm glad the circumstances in which it happened allowed no time for terror. If I'd had six months to think about such a thing, I don't think I could have done it.

"The circumstances of stepping in to save the day, actually were the best circumstances to begin with a great orchestra. It's dream-like, when you think about it, to step in for Bernstein in Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony, which he's recorded twice with the New York Philharmonic. It was one of his signature pieces. So when it comes to the burden of history and the ghost of Bernstein, there was no time for terror or fear. Just awe and respect."

Until his breakthrough, it hadn't looked as if Wong was going to make music his profession. He had taken a liberal arts course at Harvard, where he became music director of the Bach Society Orchestra, getting his first experiences of building a season, hiring soloists and managing personnel at the age of 20. But then he turned to medicine. "Of course, when I decided to study medicine, that was when all the musical opportunities came." These included a fellowship at the Aspen Festival, work with community orchestras in Boston, and appearances at Carnegie Hall with the New York Youth Symphony.

"As I advanced in medicine, the music really started to come to the fore. I was a resident in medicine and eye surgery, at the same time I conducted the New York Youth Symphony. There was a remarkable day in my life in 1990, when I operated on three kids in the morning and conducted the New York Philharmonic at night. There was never another day like that in my life."

The call from the Philharmonic and his first concert with them mark a clear dividing line. "I don't think I could have done music as an amateur from that point on. I realised I'd tasted that pleasure and that kind of level and I would spend my time striving for that high. It's just as Richard Strauss puts it in that preamble to Death and Transfiguration. An artist's life is striving always for the higher level. Even on his deathbed he's still striving for the next level - that's the journey. That's the journey that's worth travelling for me, not to be comfortable or complacent or to collect trophies or to reach certain milestones, but the hard journey ahead and the rewards of that journey."

At the centre of the striving, says Wong, is the struggle to maintain "the integrity for the composer. Erich Leinsdorf has a wonderful book called The Composer's Advocate, which we supposedly are, rather than egotistical stars. We need to be a voice, to be an advocate for the composer, to look at the score very closely, and to understand, to read between the lines, and to research the historical milieu of the composer and to get inside the composer's mind. Leonard Bernstein had a wonderful phrase. When he conducted Mahlerhe said: 'I forgot myself, where, and when and who. I became Mahler.' Of course, that only happens once or twice, that kind of epiphany, that kind of trance. I think that's the ideal conductor, to be this vessel, this mouthpiece of the composer, to let the composer speak through you."

You have to be pretty tough, too. "You have to have a composition of steel, that's impenetrable by criticism and insult and duplicity and blame, verbal and physical challenges. Yet, and here's the rub, you have to maintain your sensitivity and vulnerability. You can certainly be like steel. But without an artist's Achilles' heel, you are no human, you are but a machine. That's the challenge."

As music director of the Hong Kong Philharmonic, a post he's held since 2000, Wong sees himself as "a figurehead, the artistic ambassador of a city", and "the centre of a wheel where the spokes radiate out to theatre and to painting and to opera and to dance".

Culturally, of course, Hong Kong is diverse, given the period of British influence; he struggles to find the right neutral description here, recalling the number of words that are used to deal with British rule in Hong Kong and its aftermath. The choice of words, he suggests, is every bit as revealing about the position of the speaker as descriptions of the situation in Northern Ireland would be.

He identifies the issues. "How do we grow a symphony orchestra, which is essentially a Western institution with Western history and traditions, in Chinese soil? And what does it mean to have a Western institution in a Chinese city?

"We have a Hong Kong Chinese orchestra, with all the traditional Chinese instruments. So what is a western symphony orchestra trying to be? A London Phil? A Chicago Symphony? Are we trying to be an American-style Western orchestra, or a European-style orchestra, a UK-style orchestra?

"Because of our history and our cosmopolitan flavour, my vision is that this is an orchestra that is akin to a United Nations. We have members from Britain, America and Europe, and we have also the pan-Asian aspect, players from Hong-Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, and Japanese and Koreans as well."

The backbone of the repertoire is mainstream European, but he's also interested in "the cross-fertilisation of Western elements and Eastern folk, seeing Western music through Eastern eyes". There's a sample of this in the orchestra's programmes in Belfast and Dublin, through Dragon Wings by Chen Guo Ping. There's also some music that traffics in the opposite direction, a suite from Busoni's Eastern-looking opera, Turandot.

"This is what most interests me," says Wong, "to be like a pollinating bee, to cross-fertilise between East and West."

Samuel Wong and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra perform at the Waterfront Hall in Belfast tonight (048-9033 4455) and the NCH in Dublin tomorrow (01-417 0000)