Consider, for a moment, what it takes to stand before a professional orchestra. The violinists to your left have given their childhoods to their instruments; the principal oboist has spent decades shaping a single reed into something that can move an audience to tears. Every person on the platform has passed through years of conservatoire training, brutal auditions, and the quiet, relentless discipline of daily practice. And then there is the conductor — the one figure who makes no sound at all, yet around whom the entire hierarchical mythology of classical music has been constructed.

Mandle Cheung, a 78-year-old businessman and founder of the Mandle Philharmonic in Canada, occupies that silent, charged space with an unusual candour about his own limitations. He does not call himself a maestro. He admits freely that he is an amateur. What he possesses, however, is a profound love of Mahler and the financial means to act upon it: he paid approximately C$500,000 — around £264,000 — to conduct the Toronto Symphony last year in Mahler's Second Symphony, and he is now bringing the same arrangement to London.

On 21 August at Alexandra Palace, Cheung will stand before the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, with soprano Elizabeth Watts, mezzo Jennifer Johnston, and the Brighton Festival Chorus assembled behind him, for a performance of that same sprawling, resurrection-haunted work. The RPO has declined to disclose what Cheung is paying for this privilege, though his representative has confirmed that a fee has been agreed. That reticence is, in its own way, eloquent. As the Hungarian violinist Carl Flesch once observed, there is no profession into which an impostor could more easily wander — and orchestras on both sides of the Atlantic are now discovering, under the pressure of chronically strained finances, how uncomfortably true that remains.