It can take a while to fill a new position, especially since Eschenbach tends to have a very particular idea about what he’s looking for. Instrumental color is important to him; he also places a premium on players listening to each other, rather than simply following his baton. “There’s a lot of chamber music going on,” says Nurit Bar-Josef, the orchestra’s concertmaster.

His specificity drives some musicians crazy. Eschenbach talks a lot in rehearsals, and has the orchestra play phrases over and over to get the effect he wants. Preparing for the South America tour, he had the orchestra spend almost two rehearsal sessions on Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony — a piece so familiar to orchestra musicians, Bar-Josef observes, that if you “wake us up at 2 a.m., we can play that piece.” Many musicians in Philadelphia or at the Chicago Symphony, which Eschenbach led as music director of the Ravinia Festival from 1994 to 2003, felt they were above this kind of thing, and there are some NSO musicians who don’t warm to it, either. But “I think this orchestra has been eager to try something new,” Bar-Josef says, and “although there may be some people who are still unhappy, there are certainly a lot of happy people.”

The tour, the orchestra’s first international excursion with a music director of its own in nearly a decade, should make people happier; at least, it got off to a good start in Mexico City, where according to different headlines it either “seduced” or “conquered” the public. South America is a friendly place for this maiden voyage; no major U.S. orchestra has toured this region for nearly a decade, and audiences are excited.

Even lasting change may not be enough to elevate the NSO to the uppermost echelons of U.S. orchestras. But Eschenbach appears to be looking for slow building rather than a stardom that may in any case elude him. He remains the highest-profile conductor the NSO has had since the days of Mstislav Rostropovich, and at the helm of the NSO, he seems, after a long period of feeling underappreciated, to be having fun.

“Before I began here,” he said, “I thought it would take longer to get the orchestra sort of out of its cage. To let them have fun with music. I thought that process would take longer, and it didn’t.”