David Hayes, who led a Chamber Orchestra concert on less than 48 hours’ notice, is now its music director

Last fall, Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia’s music director Dirk Brossé, who is Belgian, ran into travel visa problems and couldn’t make it to Philadelphia for the first concerts of the season. So the orchestra called David Hayes, who, on less than 48 hours’ notice, came down from New York and conducted the program.

“Everyone was really happy,” said Hayes of the reception to the pair of concerts. Soon after, he heard from the orchestra’s administration again.

“They said, ‘There are some things that might change, and would you at all be open to some larger role possibly?’”

That larger role starts now. Brossé has stepped down after 14 seasons as leader of the Kimmel Center’s smaller resident orchestra, and Hayes will conduct his first concerts as music director Oct. 4 and 6 in the Perelman Theater.

Hayes, 61, is based in New York, where he is music director of the New York Choral Society and director of orchestral and conducting studies at the Mannes School of Music.

And yet there’s hardly a conductor anywhere more substantively of Philadelphia than Hayes. He graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music, where he was the first student accepted by Otto-Werner Mueller, the revered conducting pedagogue. Hayes was a staff conductor and assistant to Wolfgang Sawallisch at the Philadelphia Orchestra and, for 23 years, music director of the Philadelphia Singers, the highly regarded professional chorus that dissolved in 2015.

His history with the Chamber Orchestra also runs deep, having conducted the group often over the years.

“When they approached me about it, I thought that I wasn’t particularly looking for another music directorship,” said Hayes.

Then he thought again.

“The things that I’ve done in my career: I had a professional chorus, high-level conservatory orchestra, I have a volunteer chorus in New York, all of those things. The one thing that was always missing from it was a professional orchestra. And it was a chance to not have to do what I’ve done for 30-plus years with the Curtis or Mannes — train an orchestra. It was a chance to just make music with an orchestra. And that really appealed to me. I don’t need to do anything except, ‘Let’s just make some good music.’”

“Dirk was at the end of his contract,” explained chamber orchestra executive director Anne Hagan. “When we talked about what we were going to do going forward, David had just performed and people were wildly excited. And then it just quickly turned into an offer.”

Hayes promises to be something different than his predecessors at the 60-year-old ensemble. His training is rooted not just in his work with Sawallisch, but also in the traditions of two old-world professors: Mueller at Curtis, and Charles Bruck at the Pierre Monteux School in Hancock, Me.

“In my training as it’s washed out over the years, I would think of myself as probably 70% Mueller and 30% Bruck at this point. But there are elements of both in my training and the way I think about things,” he says.

Bruck, a Monteux disciple, was a lot about “clarity — rhythmic clarity, clarity of gesture,” Hayes says, while Mueller, from a Germanic tradition, “came more from the idea of line and legato and phrasing and those kinds of priorities.”

Hayes remembers conducting a piece in orchestra lab at Curtis and Mueller stopping the music to ask whether the young student liked the sound.

“And I thought, ‘Well, I hadn’t actually considered the way it sounds.’ And he said, ‘So how do you want it to sound?’ And that has become a real focus in all of my work. How do you then find gestures that carry sound, gestures that convey sound so that you don’t have to talk to the orchestra? You can show the orchestra, which is the gold standard for everybody.”

Hayes says he’s not setting out to change the sound of the 33-member Chamber Orchestra, “but it will — it’ll change. It is a natural reaction that the players will have.”

The conductor has reviewed composers and works the orchestra has played in its six decades, and there will be changes there, too.

“It has very much been confined by sticking to high classical orchestration. And so one of the things that we started talking about is beginning to explore a bigger palette of orchestration.”

He’d like to program works by Jennifer Higdon, who is well known here, “but certain aspects of her music might be lesser known,” he says. Contemporary composers Adolphus Hailstork and Zhou Tian interest him, as does 19th-century French composer Louise Farrenc.

But there are also well-known composers who have specific works that have been overlooked by the Chamber Orchestra. Like Haydn.

“They’ve never played ‘The Bear,’ the C Major, No. 82. That is a great symphony. So there are holes in the repertory that … [could be] juxtaposed with composers that are more contemporary, that sometimes either consciously or unconsciously are reflecting against some of these composers.”

Over time, Hayes aims to sharpen the identity of the group. One of its major assets is its venue. The listener-to-orchestra proximity in the Perelman allows for an immediacy that’s hard to come by in larger halls.

But it’s through the choice of repertoire, says Hayes, that the group can set itself apart.

“One of the things that I have always felt is that the orchestra has been a little bit of a cipher. I have not felt a really strong kind of identity. There is a role in this musical ecosystem in Philadelphia for a world-class chamber orchestra. Absolutely, there is a critical role for it. But it has to inhabit its own space.”

David Hayes conducts the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia Oct. 4 at 7:30 p.m. and Oct. 6 at 2:30 p.m. in Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture, Hailstork’s Sagrada (Sonata da Chiesa No. 2), Torke’s December and, with soloist Michelle Cann, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5. At the Perelman Theater, Broad and Spruce Sts. Tickets are $29-$104. ensembleartsphilly.org, 215-893-1999.