BSO music director Andris Nelsons is helping to write the German city’s next musical chapter through an auspicious alliance

The Boston Globe

Photo: Elise Amendola/Associated Press

In Leipzig, classical music history is everywhere you turn.

At St. Thomas Church just a few steps from downtown, guides will tell you how Johann Sebastian Bach led the choir for 27 years. The city’s orchestra was helmed by Felix Mendelssohn himself in the 1800s. Half the streets in the city seem to bear famous composers’ names: Beethovenstraße, Mozartstraße, Haydnstraße, and so on.

But it’s a name familiar to Bostonians that’s helping to write the city’s next musical chapter: Andris Nelsons, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Though most Americans know Nelsons primarily from his perch at Symphony Hall, the conductor has a second musical home in Leipzig for part of the year — he has led the city’s vaunted Gewandhaus Orchestra since the 2017-2018 season, three years after he started leading the BSO. And rather than keep his jobs separate, Nelsons is tying them closer together.

In taking up his second post, Nelsons has linked both orchestras in a perpetual alliance. They’ve co-commissioned works and shared programming, like “Boston Week” in Leipzig and “Leipzig Week” at home. They’ve also started an ongoing exchange program between the two orchestras, sending a few musicians every year across the Atlantic to play with their counterparts for three months.

Next spring, the Leipzig orchestra is hosting a two-weeks-long festival dedicated to Soviet-era Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich in which both groups are set to perform.

Such an extensive collaboration is unusual, if not unheard of, according tomultiple conducting experts. The arrangement means the two orchestras share not just a leader, but something akin to musical DNA.

“There’s not a lot of precedent,” said James Bagwell, a professor of music at Bard College who has worked with Nelsons in the past. “That’s what makes this such an interesting project.”

The fulcrum of that project is Nelsons himself.

“I just — I love both,” Nelsons said in his dressing room earlier this month, amid another week of rehearsals before his scheduled Sept. 19 return to Boston for Opening Night. “But I never think, well, let’s try to push one orchestra closer to the other to try to find the same sound, because it’s not possible.”

Nelsons seems happiest when he’s talking about the music rather than himself. Boston’s sound is rich and intensive, he said, “a dark red wine, almost like a Bordeaux.” Leipzig has a similar depth but almost creamy sound, with “a transparency, which very much comes from the Church, from Bach and Mendelssohn.”

After years of ping-ponging between Germany and the United States, he’s nailed his routine when in Leipzig: booking the same room at the Steigenberger hotel eight minutes away, spending most of his time poring over scores for the next performance. Occasionally, he said, he tries to get in some trumpet practice, or stretch to keep up without his regular martial arts practice in Cambridge.

Even Nelsons’ dressing room is a snapshot of his split-screen life, from a set of Kukkiwon taekwondo textbooks neatly filed next to precariously stacked music scores, to the half-dozen trumpets lying scattered atop an upright piano.

Juggling the two does take a fair amount of compartmentalization, he said. “You open a drawer for now for Leipzig, you open another drawer with the composer,” he said, miming pulling some out from his head. “And then usually I go to Boston and open another one.”

Having other conducting gigs isn’t uncommon — jetting to another continent can even seem a prerequisite for top-tier conducting talent. Gustavo Dudamel, the music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, also leads the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra in his native Venezuela. Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä conducts an eye-popping three orchestras in Paris, Oslo and Amsterdam (where he is “Artistic Partner” and soon-to-be chief conductor), and is set to take up another posting atop the Chicago Symphony in 2027.

But most conductors don’t mix their ensembles on a regular basis. Nelsons, however, had such an alliance in mind from the start — in part because Leipzig already had deep ties to Boston.

Georg Henschel, the BSO’s first conductor, trained in Leipzig. Charles Munch, a Leipzig concertmaster, eventually led Boston’s orchestra for a dozen years starting in 1949. Symphony Hall was modeled in part after a version of the eponymous Gewandhaus performance hall that was later destroyed in World War II.

Nelsons isn’t even the first BSO conductor to lead the Gewandhausorchester, as it’s called in German. Former BSO conductor Arthur Nikisch — whose portrait hangs behind Nelsons’ desk — left Boston to lead the Leipzig orchestra a century ago.

“It wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God, what do we do with two orchestras?,’” Nelsons recalled. “It was, ‘Oh, Nikisch. Symphony Hall. Munch . . . There are so many things which kind of came together.”

That’s not to say there aren’t differences. Leipzig generally holds five rehearsals before a performance whereas Boston usually only allows for four. Leipzig also tunes to a concert pitch of 443Hz A, a smidge higher than Boston’s 440Hz. And unlike Boston, Leipzig has nearly twice as many musicians who rotate between playing at the Gewandhaus, Leipzig’s opera across the street, or in Sunday cantatas at St. Thomas Church.

But those add to the value of the program, said Dorothea Vogel, a longtime violinist who participated in the exchange in 2018.

No other orchestra offers the same opportunity for immersion in another ensemble, she said. Playing in Boston was also a chance to explore distinctly different repertoire, heavier on contemporary and 20th-century compositions.

“I was happy to see that it doesn’t matter where you come from,” she said. “Even if you don’t speak the language, you speak music.” Other experiences likewise transcended translation, she added: the frustration of taking the Green Line, seeing fireworks on the Fourth of July.

The enthusiasm is shared on both sides of the Atlantic, said Gunnar Harms, another first violinist for the Gewandhaus Orchestra and a member of its board.

“Would we enjoy having [Nelsons] all to ourselves? Possibly,” he joked. “But from the very beginning of his being Gewandhauskapellmeister there was a focus on a partnership with Boston.”

It’s unclear how much longer the relationship will last — Nelsons’ contract in Boston shifted earlier this year to a rolling basis, while his role as kapellmeisterin Leipzig is scheduled to end in 2027, barring a renewal. But he said he hopes the alliance will continue as long as he is music director. The two institutions are also thinking of “bigger projects” together, he teased.

During a Leipzig rehearsal earlier this month of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony, Nelsons leaned into the music, quite literally. He crouched into a diminuendo during a run of the second movement, before tiptoeing into the woodwinds’ crescendo response.

The orchestra, filled with musicians who had worked with him for years, seemed to anticipate every motion. At one point, he paused in the middle of a romping section, particularly heavy on the brass. He hummed the melody in a rich baritone. “Nicht zu lang,” he told the musicians in German. Not too long. He raised his baton. Again.

The violists traded smiles. Harms, sporting a “Boston Musicians” shirt printed in Red Sox typeface, nodded along.

More than 3,700 miles away from Boston, Nelsons somehow looked right at home.