IF IT'S Monday, it must be Jerusalem. This week the maestro is in Jerusalem to give a piano recital; but if the interview had taken place last week, the phone call would have been to either Birmingham or Berlin. Such is the nomadic lifestyle of the modern musical celebrity.

But then Daniel Barenboim has been wandering the musical universe since he made his debut in Vienna in 1952. Born in Argentina, educated in Israel, a veteran of the international concert platform, a sought after interpreter of opera and currently the music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, he has been associated, at one time or another, with the most glittering stars of the European musical firmament - the Bayreuth Festival, the Theatre des Champs Elysees, the Vienna Philharmonic.

Now a robust 54, the unruly curls which were the trademark of the younger Barenboim tamed to distinguished steel, he manages not just to juggle the three components of a busy career but to make it sound easy. "My main occupation, if you want to call it that, is the Chicago Symphony and the State Opera in Berlin those are at the centre of my activity, and the rest is the piano playing. The only thing I do outside of that is conduct a few concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic and go to Bayreuth in the summer. I spend five months in Berlin and four with the Chicago Symphony."

It is his Chicago hat which Maestro Barenboim will be wearing when he brings that august band of musicians to Dublin next week for a concert in the visiting orchestras series at the National Concert Hall. It won't be his first visit to Ireland - he played here before, with his late wife, the cellist Jacqueline du Pre. "A long time ago," he says simply. But he makes a point of adding how much he is looking forward to the forthcoming visit. "I know so many Irish musicians. They're all over, because there has been so much emigration from Ireland. Like the Jews. You find Jews, Irish and Italians in every orchestra. So I'm glad" and he laughs, a gravelly Jewish laugh "to come back to the source."

ORCHESTRAL tours are grand affairs which involve multi complicated logistics - and often controversy, as the National Symphony Orchestra discovered when, basking in the warmth of its reception at the Hong Kong Midsummer Classics Festival it returned to Ireland to find cold water being assiduously poured on the whole enterprise. Nobody presumably, would dare to suggest that a tour of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is a waste of taxpayers' hard earned dosh - but if the NSO tours to raise its profile abroad, what is there to be gained from touring when you are already one of the world's best known bands? Daniel Barenboim is in no doubt.

"Oh, it's important for the musicians," he says, "because when you re on tour the concerts actually play another role in the daily lives of the musicians - at home they have their families, they have their students, they teach, they have many other activities, and the concerts are just a part of their lives. Whereas on tour, the concert is really the centre, the main reason why they are there. It brings them together in a way that it never does at home.

What about the conductor's relationship with the players - does touring intensify that, as well? "It doesn't become more intensive, but there's obviously more of it. We spend more time together." It's also, obviously, quite a treat for audiences worldwide to hear this wonderful orchestra, live, outside its own home. But does the famously ebullient Chicago "sound" travel with the orchestra, or does the orchestra sound different in different halls? Well, obviously the acoustics of the various halls have an impact. But certain qualities - "certain key characteristics" - are, he says, the same.

THOSE qualities will doubtless be shown off to their fullest at the National Concert Hall on Monday night, when the programme combines Schoenberg's mysterious, magical Five Orchestral Pieces with Bruckner's massive Eighth Symphony. Two pieces from opposite ends of the musical spectrum, surely, the Schoenberg with its emphasis on the miniature, the vast sweep of the Bruckner? "Yes, but you know there is a lot of detail minute detail in Bruckner's constructions that is very important. And Schoenberg, in some ways, followed the tradition through from Wagner and Bruckner, Mahler and Strauss; and I find that, although they express it in different ways, they have a lot in common."

One of the things these particular two pieces have in common is that when they were first performed they received, in the main, bum reviews. One disgruntled hack wrote of the Five Orchestral Pieces, "If music at all, it is music of the future and, we hope, of a distant one", while people tended to drift tactfully out of the hall during the hour and a half Bruckner marathon. Herbert Von KaraJan, whose recordings of the symphonies are among the most highly regarded on disc, recalled his father telling him that he had attended an early performance of the Eighth Symphony, by the end of which there were only 30 people left in the audience.

Nowadays, of course, even Schoenberg's most uncompromisingly atonal works are happily ensconced in the repertoire and Bruckner's sprawling symphonies have, particularly over the last decade, become positively trendy - an odd choice, on the face of it, for audiences steeped in the instant, zap it if you don't like it culture of the late 20th century? "Well, you know, the Bnickner Eight that we play in Dublin is a Colossus," says Daniel Barenboim. "For me the most fascinating aspect of it is that on the one hand it has a very classical form, very classical almost harogue, I would say - while the musical idiom, the language, is absolutely 19th century, there's lots of chromaticism and all that, it's very much influenced by Wagner. And for me the psychological climate of the whole thing is something almost of the Middle Ages, its hugeness and its austerity." And in its religious overtones, perhaps "Could be. Could be that too. But it's the combination of the three centuries from an aesthetic point of view which make it so fascinating. But of course that's a completely personal point of view - that's what I feel about it.

DOES he also feel that Bruckner's symphonies present a peak of sorts which aspiring conductors must eventually climb, but which must be avoided in the early years of a career for fear of falling? He is in no doubt about this either. "No. You need a lot of experience to be able to climb this mountain - but then, you know you only get the experience by doing them. I would always advise young conductors to start occupying themselves with these pieces very early on - maybe not conduct them too often, and not in too exposed places but I think it is just as great a mistake not to touch these pieces until a certain age because of a fear of not having the maturity for them. The maturity you only get by doing them." Audiences, he adds, need not fear Bruckner either, even if they don't know the symphonies as well as those of Beethoven or Brahms. "Obviously you get more out of it if you have a familiarity with it - like with everything. But I think Bruckner is very accessible."

IN RECENT years Daniel Barenboim has been showered with praise for his opera performances, notably his interpretation of the Mozart/DaPonte comedies. Has his work in opera reached back to influence his reading of the symphonic repertoire?

"Yes; but everything that one does in life in a way brings something new into what you've already done," he says. "Opera, perhaps, brings an added dramatic dimension - also in opera you have the contact between sound and words which is so important. That, of course, is an additional expressive element."

At the moment, it seems, audiences can't get enough of opera; record sales are healthy and box office figures rising. The opposite, alas, is the case with symphony concerts. Why? "I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation - television and videos and all this. More and more we're used to taking things in through the eyes rather than through the ears, and opera is more of a spectacle. I think that's part of it."

And is there a solution? "More music education," he says, with the sudden passion of a man climbing on to a well oiled hobby horse. "As a child you go to school, you learn about Byron and Shakespeare in England and Dostoyevsky in Moscow, and you learn other subjects, biology and geography and God knows what. And then you start going to concerts in your twenties because it's the social thing to do. But if you haven't been exposed to music, it must be extremely boring. So of course there is no interest. It's not enough to popularise music for the adult masses there's millions of those. The really important thing is to catch young people, to make them feel that they want music. And that they need it."