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CBSO artistic director Andris Nelsons has taken up a new position in the US. He talks to Christopher Morley about the challenges ahead on either side of the Atlantic.

When I first registered “Andris Nelsons” as a daily Google alert for me I began to receive a barrage of references to some American baseball-player or other, followed by a few mentions of the young conductor who was “leading” (as the Americans say) our City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Gradually the baseball chap took three strikes, and the musical Nelsons took centre stage.

A couple of years ago the American press became full of rumours that Nelsons was set to become the next music director of the august Boston Symphony Orchestra, having made a spectacular debut standing-in for the ailing James Levine.

And now those rumours have come true, Nelsons having accepted that position, which begins at the start of the 2014-15 concert season, the end of which sees the termination of his permanent contract with the CBSO (there will be a rolling contract year-on-year after that). And Google alert is once again bursting.

“As I remember, you once asked me one-and-a-half years ago about Boston,” Andris tells me from Amsterdam, where he is preparing for a concert with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

“At that moment I didn’t know anything, and nobody else did! Really, this decision has been made recently; for whatever reasons, they took time, but then actually that decision was made very quickly.”

Andris has told me several times how much he hates flying. How is he going to cope with all this travelling, especially as he still lives in his hometown of Riga?

“There are so many things where I thought how I’d manage. I’m very Europe-orientated, but I think in my mind, and in any other people’s minds, this is founded in the city. And also in America, there is that tradition for city orchestras; and that was very familiar to me. It is not so far away.