The news that conductor Alan Gilbert, a 40-year-old New York native who serves as chief conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, has been named the next music director of the New York Philharmonic, comes as a surprise, and a rather mysterious one at that. Mr. Gilbert, who will succeed the venerable current music director Lorin Maazel, is the first native New Yorker to win this job, which has been held by such world-famous musical legends as Arturo Toscanini, Willem Mengelberg, and Gustav Mahler. Mr. Gilbert is comparatively little known, although locally the New York Philharmonic — nicknamed the “conductor’s graveyard” for its treatment of visiting maestros — treats him like family. This is fitting, since Mr. Gilbert’s mother, Yoko Takebe, plays in the orchestra’s first violin section, and his father, Michael Gilbert, retired in 2001 after decades as a Philharmonic violinist in order to pursue a conducting career himself.

Although the news of his appointment surprised most music fans, Mr. Gilbert himself seems to have had some premonitions, since he has been quietly clearing his schedule of late, having already resigned from the chief conductorship of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra effective in 2008, at which point the lucky Swedes will get a splendid maestro, Sakari Oramo, as his successor. Moreover, in May it was announced that Gilbert would abandon another music directorship, that of the Santa Fe Opera, which he had conducted since 2001. Either the Philharmonic job came as a sheer coincidence, or Gilbert has been preparing for this giant career move for some time.

In many ways, Mr. Gilbert is a departure from the Philharmonic’s music directors of the past. He is certainly not a galvanic personality-driven ego, unlike previous hotshot young maestros hired by the Philharmonic as music director in past decades, such as John Barbirolli or Leonard Bernstein. At recent public appearances, Mr. Gilbert displayed a soothing, modest presence, belying his physical resemblance to a young Rex Reed. In an interview published online, Mr. Gilbert asserted, “The collective knowledge and experience in an orchestra is staggering. It’s impossible for a conductor to surpass or even equal that aggregate.” He added, “I would never say to an orchestra: ‘I think you should play this louder.’ I would say: ‘Could we try this louder?'”

This kind of exquisite, almost tiptoeing discretion should prove endearing to orchestral divas. Yet how good is Mr. Gilbert’s musicmaking? The evidence available on CD is sparse. This, however, may be a good thing, given the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s recent risky move in snapping up the flashy young Venezuelan maestro Gustavo Dudamel as its future music director, done to some extent on the strength of Mr. Dudamel’s major Deutsche Grammophon recording contract, which to date has only produced a puerile CD of Beethoven symphonies. For now, Mr. Gilbert has no prominent recording contract, instead making CDs for smaller labels such as Real Sound, of works such as Mendelssohn’s “Scottish” Symphony and the “Adagietto” movement from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, both with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. On July 31, Koch International Classics will release a CD of Mr. Gilbert conducting the Santa Fe Chamber Orchestra in works by Mozart, including the challenging “Gran Partita,” which will surely prove an acid test of his musicality. Mr. Gilbert’s performances on CD show an attractive willingness to put the music first, as in his discreet direction of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in “A Joker’s Tales,” a concerto for recorder and orchestra by Swedish composer Daniel Börtz, on the BIS label.

But while his CD list is sparse, his experience with orchestras has been abundant. Mr. Gilbert has led the Netherlands’ Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, the Berlin Philharmonic, and Tokyo’s NHK Symphony Orchestra, among many others. It will be intriguing to see how this “little orchestra brat,” as Mr. Gilbert referred to himself during an NPR interview in March, will deal with the special pressures the Philharmonic may bring. The issue of nepotism — raised last year when Lorin Maazel’s brother-inlaw, the wiry-sounding German violinist Ingolf Turban, made his New York Philharmonic debut — may not arise. If it does, New York audiences cannot claim they were not warned about the Gilbert family’s potential. Back in December 2001, Mr. Gilbert and his wife, the cellist Kajsa William-Olsson, as well as his mother, father, sister, and other assorted Gilberts, performed a well-received concert of chamber works by Beethoven and Brahms at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall. As the Gilberts have now proven, the New York Philharmonic family that plays together stays together.