Benjamin Zander is no ordinary conductor - no battles of the wills for him. The results are glorious, writes Arminta Wallace

Benjamin Zander is moving house. "I have electricians all over the place, and plumbers and carpenters," he says when he answers the phone. Thanks to crossed e-mails and transatlantic time zones I have, it seems, called a day too early. I apologise, commiserate and scrabble for a piece of paper on which to inscribe a new time and number. This is, after all, a sought-after conductor and best-selling management guru whose forthcoming Dublin concert with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra has been selected by this newspaper's classical-music critic as one of the unmissable events of 2004.

Then down the line from Boston comes the unmistakeable sound of a man chuckling to himself. "You know, people always say moving house is an awful emotional experience, but I'm just having the best time today," declares Zander. "I'm mad about my new house and thrilled to think I'll be spending the rest of my life there." In any case, he adds, the removal truck hasn't arrived yet. "So why don't we talk now?"

To put this story in perspective you need to pause for a moment and think about conductors. In the world of classical music the conductor is not just king but something approaching an emperor of the Caligula kind, a dictator who gets the best out of orchestras by getting the better of them in a mammoth battle of wills.

He is addressed, in hushed tones, as maestro. Conductors don't expect to be answered back or messed about, and they certainly don't change their plans to suit humble, harassed hacks. In this, however, as in many other aspects of musical practice and leadership theory, Zander habitually turns convention on its head.

"I had been conducting for 20 years," he writes in his book, The Art Of Possibility: Transforming Professional And Personal Life, "when it dawned on me that the conductor of an orchestra does not make a sound." He suddenly understood, he says, that the real power of the conductor derives from his ability to make other people powerful, that instead of forcing musicians to express his musical vision he should be enabling them to express themselves.

"It's like taking out the stopper so life pours out of people," he explains into the phone. "In music, as in all aspects of life, we've codified it and dogmatised it and made it into such a ritual that it loses its meaning, value and expressive excitement. I think our job as leaders, whether as journalists, parents, politicians, conductors or religious leaders, is to release that quality, that energy, that sense of adventure and risk that is in everybody."

Zander's engaging brand of positivism makes him a big hit on the conference circuit, but he doesn't just preach a gospel of adventure and risk. He practises it as well, with spectacular musical results. In 1979 he founded the Boston Philharmonic, a community orchestra made up of students, amateurs and young professionals that has been consistently praised for performances of searching intelligence and incandescent passion. His series of Mahler recordings with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London has garnered both critical acclaim - the Sixth Symphony was chosen as the best classical recording of 2002 by High Fidelity magazine - and commercial success, not least because each recording includes a bonus CD featuring Zander in full (and, it must be said, pretty irresistible) discursive flow.

Much of Zander's risk-taking derives from his approach to musical tempos. The adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony, famously used on the soundtrack to Luchino Visconti's film of Death In Venice, has been getting slower and slower since the mid-1960s; one recording clocks the movement at a venerable 15 minutes. Zander's takes just seven. On his début recording with the Boston Philharmonic, the final movement of Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring - never music for the faint-hearted - becomes an exhilarating roller coaster of gut-punching impact. "Yes, well," he says, "that's a virgin dancing herself to death there, at the end of The Rite Of Spring. You need to feel the risk, the fear of the dance. In the usual run-through she hardly breaks a sweat."

On paper, and especially in The Art Of Possibility, which he wrote with his wife, the psychotherapist Rosamund Stone Zander, the energy and dynamism of Zander's approach suggest a New World take on life. But his biography and his accent reveal his Englishness, and he is delighted that the programme for the Dublin concert includes a piece by another Benjamin, whom he knew.

"Britten's Simple Symphony is a masterpiece, and it was written on tunes that he wrote between the ages of nine and 12: beautiful tunes, every one of them. It's kind of touching for me, because I got to know Britten when I was nine and went to Aldeburgh" - the Suffolk town where the composer lived - "for three summers with my family. I wouldn't say I studied with him - that's much too grand a word - but I did meet with him many times to go over my compositions.

"I have a tremendous affection for his music and for the amazing generosity of spirit that comes out in that piece. Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto is also a very youthful work. He probably showed it to Haydn and Haydn said: 'Oh my God, Beethoven, what have you done?' Because you see signs of the real Beethoven in it. And then Brahms's Second Symphony is the work of a mature master at the absolute height of his powers - a radiant piece of unqualified genius.

"The secret of Brahms is that it's really all chamber music even if it's written for a big orchestra. And the question is, can you get 90 musicians to feel it as freely as if they were a piano trio, that intimacy of expression where all the players are listening so carefully to each other? With orchestras it tends to get a little bit amorphous, a little impersonal, like a big corporation. But there's nothing stultifying or set in its ways about this music, provided you have a bunch of people who are willing to go on a journey of rediscovery with you."

The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra is, he says, precisely such a bunch. "My experience with them the last time was tremendously exciting. They are willing to go out on a limb, and they play fabulously, and so I'm going to invite them closer and closer to the edge."

For those who have tickets to the concert, it's time to fasten your seat belts. For those who haven't, the essence of Zander is to be found in The Art Of Possibility, where he articulates what he calls Rule Number Six: "Don't take yourself so goddam seriously." And the other five rules? "There aren't any."

Ah. But doesn't the classical-music world take itself extremely seriously? Isn't it all hypercompetitive, hyper critical? "Yes, well, you see," says Zander, "I don't play any of those games. It's not a competition for me. It's an expression of humanity and all that a human being can be, and so there is no competition in it. Either I get invited to conduct or I don't. And if I get invited, well, that's fine. In that sense I don't have a career at all."

But he does have a new house to get to. "And it's all going beautifully." He covers the mouthpiece and calls out to someone on the other side of the Atlantic. "Do you think our move is going beautifully?" "Lovely," comes the muffled reply. "You see? The carpenter says 'lovely'. And, oh, I'm glad to see he's got the tea water up. So pop the kettle on and we'll all have a cup of tea." A chorus of laughter rattles into the earpiece. Move? This man could move mountains.

• Benjamin Zander conducts the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra at the National Concert Hall on Friday. His recording of Mahler's Third Symphony with the Philharmonia Orchestra is released on Monday