CLASSICAL music, as it grew progressively more complex through the romantic period onwards, evolved into a mind game where the composer always had the psychological lead.

Musical scores came to be written as if dogma, down to the last pedantic detail; performers, even brilliant ones, became mere instruments to the composer's vision.

That may be a bleak view of the concert hall. But Kristjan Jarvi, the energetic Estonian-born conductor, is disdainful of the pseudo-intellectualism of some contemporary music and the "academic blackmail" to which it subjects performers.

The pianist and conductor is doing his bit to address the perceived imbalance between composer and musician. It's not so much a contest of wills as a spectator sport in which music as well as audiences should benefit.

"It is really important to make the performers feel that they have freedom, that they can express music rather than just play the notes," Jarvi says on the phone from Hanover, Germany.

"The only reason I believe that classical music concerts have become stale is that that kind of freedom and ingenuity is lacking."

Jarvi - who is married to an Australian musician, Hayley - is about to visit these shores for a symphony orchestra tour. The program with the Adelaide, West Australian and Sydney orchestras includes music by the tango king, Astor Piazzolla.

He says concert music - the classical repertoire, performed by conservatorium-trained musicians - can be rejuvenated by returning to its origins. Before classical music became recherche, it drew heavily on two related performance styles: folk music and improvisation.

"The tradition of classical music - the tradition in Bach's time and Vivaldi's time and Haydn's time - was for musicians to be improvisers, to be in fact more like today's jazz and rock musicians," Jarvi says. "I see that as the art of living music, where performers are completely uninhibited by this academic blackmail, basically. It has put a lot of people into their place. We have to really look at traditional music-making and bring that back."

Jarvi is from a musically distinguished family. His father, Neeme, and brother Paavo are conductors in the more traditional mould of concert-hall maestro. But the family's musical tastes were broad. Kristjan recalls his childhood in the former Soviet republic of Estonia, when his father used to return from concert tours abroad with records by the likes of Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra and ABBA.

The family immigrated to the US in 1980, when Kristjan was eight, and new musical worlds opened up. He attended the Manhattan School of Music and came into contact with the great musical melting pot of America: Hispanic and African-American music, jazz, blues, hip-hop.

Although he studied classical piano, he has since learned to improvise, to "loosen up". He admires Australian jazz trumpeter James Morrison, with whom he has performed at Vienna's Musikverein, and counts Austrian-born keyboardist Joe Zawinul - founder of the jazz group Weather Report, who died last year - as his mentor. More than an exemplary jazz musician, Jarvi says, Zawinul belonged to the Viennese lineage of Brahms and Liszt.

"Zawinul could play Brahms like nobody else and he believed it was great music because it grooved," Jarvi says. "He really helped me reconnect with the music from within. I am eternally grateful to him because of that."

Musicians in Jarvi's group Absolute Ensemble, founded in 1993, are asked to improvise and arrange music, as well as perform from a printed score.

"I don't have anything against musicians who don't improvise," Jarvi says. But he likes musicians who can play a Beethoven symphony "like it is being performed for the very first time: basically, improvised off the page. That is what will get people standing in the concert hall."

Folk or popular music can also replenish classical music's lifeblood. Jarvi is giving concerts in Germany, for example, with orchestra, jazz saxophone and Turkish percussion, in a program called From Orient. The soloists are renowned Turkish percussionist Burhan Ocal and composer-saxophonist Daniel Schnyder.

His Australian concerts feature music by Argentineans Piazzolla (with Carel Kraayenhof as the bandoneon soloist) and Alberto Ginastera, and Mexican Silvestre Revueltas.

"Whether it's Sibelius, the Nordic composers or Piazzolla and Ginastera, I really love the national flavour when it comes out in the music of serious orchestral composers," Jarvi says. "I believe that's one of the strongest attributes of music, to bring in a flavour (that) isn't necessarily what we traditionally know as central European, Germanic classical music."

Jarvi has made it a mission to reconnect audiences with classical music. His strategy is not to push orchestras into embarrassing crossover concerts but to give performances that are genuinely engaging.

"Isn't it the truth that classical music has never been more detached from the mainstream than it is now?" he asks.

"There is certainly a change coming about, at least from my side of the spectrum. I see that through my work with different orchestras and my Absolute Ensemble.

"And it's not this kind of stuff (that) is dumbing down into pop, where (audiences) are just going to hear some nice tunes. Audiences are never actually like that, they are never that stupid. Audiences are super discriminating, (that's) what I've learned. You have to challenge them, but at the same time give them something new and of the utmost quality. It can't be cheap in any way."