Conductor Mariss Jansons’s phenomenal gift for musicmaking was brought home to me in the mid-1990s at a concert by the St. Petersburg Philharmonic in its home city. On the program was Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony, a warhorse I had no particular interest in hearing. Yet scarcely a measure went by before I was held rapt. Every musical phrase seemed to speak with new eloquence as if fulfilling a role in a spellbinding discourse. In its command of both detail and structure, his reading was transformative.

New Yorkers have the opportunity to experience the magic of Mr. Jansons beginning tonight when he leads the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam in the first of three concerts in Carnegie Hall. The orchestra is one of two major European orchestras Mr. Jansons currently heads, the other being the Munich-based Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. As he explained in a telephone interview with The New York Sun, each orchestra comes to New York in alternate years, thus permitting him to make annual visits.

At one time, the Latvian-born, Soviet-trained conductor spent most of his time in America. For seven years he led the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, but that relationship ended in 2004 because, according to Mr. Jansons, he was tired of jet lag. His posts with the Concertgebouw and the Bavarian Radio Symphony are relatively recent, dating from 2004 and 2003, but commuting between those cities is a breeze, while getting back to St. Petersburg, which he and his wife still call home, is a bit more of a trek.

Most would rank the Concertgebouw, truly one of the world’s great orchestras, a notch above the Bavarian Radio Symphony, but you won’t find Mr. Jansons showing favoritism. Both are “very high class with a special musicality,” he said in English that was slightly unidiomatic but very fluent. “The musical intelligence is the best you can wish for. They feel the music so wonderfully.”

“The Concertgebouw has a great tradition and a very special sound,” he continued. “It has specialties, like Bruckner and Mahler, but it plays all kinds of music, including Baroque. Holland was the first country to play music with original instruments, and the orchestra can play in different styles, depending on the conductor.” He also extols the fabled Concertgebouw hall. “A good hall creates a good orchestra. This is one of the few orchestras that can play wonderfully French music.”

Mr. Jansons brought an agenda for change to neither orchestra. “It’s bad to come in and say, ‘Now we must do something new.'” Instead, he chose to conduct wide-reaching repertoires. “I conduct everything so we can understand each other and build the chemistry — that may lead to something new.”

Tonight’s concert is entirely French, consisting of Debussy’s “La mer” and Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique.” Tomorrow brings Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, with soloist Yefim Bronfman, and Brahms’s Second Symphony plus “De aankomst” (“The Arrival”) by the contemporary Dutch composer Otto Ketting. Wednesday offers a sampling of the orchestra’s Mahler tradition with the Fifth Symphony, along with Strauss’s “Don Juan.” Mr. Jansons was born in 1943 in Riga to musical parents: His father was the conductor Arvid Jansons, his mother a singer. He studied conducting at the Leningrad Conservatory and later with Hans Swarowsky in Vienna and Herbert von Karajan in Salzburg. His training thus has a German dimension, which traces back German cultural influences in Riga, and a Russian one. In Leningrad, he became assistant to the legendary Yevgeny Mravinsky at the Leningrad Philharmonic, a post his father held before him.

Forging out on his own, he took over the Oslo Philharmonic and systematically built it into a world-class orchestra. In 1996 he had a heart attack while conducting a concert performance of “La Bohème” in Oslo, an event that grimly recalled the fate of his father, who suffered a fatal heart attack on the podium. But Mr. Jansons soldiered on with the aid of an implanted defibrillator, and remains careful about diet, exercise, and weight. At 65, he looks fit and even boyish.

One advantage of the Concertgebouw post is that it involves occasional forays into opera, for which he developed an early passion.”I’ve done ‘Lady Macbeth of Msensk’ and next year will do ‘Carmen.’ The opera company [Amsterdam’s De Nederlandse Opera] doesn’t have a regular orchestra, so people get excited when the Concertgebouw plays.”

Earlier this decade, Mr. Jansons was in the running for music director of the New York Philharmonic, a post that went to Lorin Maazel. Reportedly, he offended the orchestra with a phrase-by-phrase approach to rehearsing, which the musicians found patronizing. Mr. Jansons addressed the issue without betraying any regret. “Overrehearsing is bad. But you need to rehearse until every musician feels free and knows what to do. Then there can be spontaneity, something that wasn’t in the rehearsal. And if you have a model of the sound you want, you have to rehearse until you get the results. Some things need to be done your way. Rehearsal technique means more than making everything technically right: ‘I beat this in four, this in two; a little louder here, a crescendo there.’ It is very important to feel the music completely in your heart and soul.”