Bramwell Tovey leaps up from his chair and pounces on the black grand piano just a few feet away. He plays a series of chords as he talks, straddling the piano bench and the conversation with the ease of an experienced conductor.

“The push and pull of traditional harmony is something that intrigues me,” he says. “So I think what I’ve done is to use that vocabulary of traditional harmony, and yet I’ve got a fairly atonal, ambivalent theme.”

Tovey, music director of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, bounds back to his seat in the green room of Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall. Forgive him for sounding pretentious (his own word). It’s just that the round, gregarious conductor is talking about a trumpet concerto — Songs of the Paradise Saloon — that he composed specifically for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and its principal trumpet, Andrew McCandless.

Slouched on the couch beside him, sunglasses perched atop his head, McCandless offers a player’s view of what makes Tovey’s piece, which plays tonight and tomorrow, different than other trumpet concertos.

“The opening section starts low,” says McCandless, imitating one of the six different trumpets he plays throughout the piece. “It’s probably not going to make you think of spring and flowers. It’s aggressive.”

That aggression, directed against previous trumpet concertos and the Western tradition of harmony, is what took Tovey almost four years to harness. He started working using the saloon scene from his upcoming opera, The Inventor. As the work progressed, he was careful to make sure his concerto stood out from the pack.

“There are a lot of trumpet concertos out there that look as though they’ve got a quote of the old testament out front,” he says, pausing to hum a fanfare. Tovey, a Grammy award-winning conductor, wasn’t interested.

“You have to have something to say. Otherwise it’s like an actor proclaiming Hamlet’s soliloquy without having any understanding of what the play is about in context.”

This discussion of context is striking as Tovey and McCandless try to explain a piece that, so far, only they have ever heard. But they continue excitedly, trying to explain using more piano chords, a water bottle and lots and lots of humming.

Tovey is an unabashed intellectual. He dangles names of composers and philosophers throughout his discussion of polytonal musical construction. But he’s also irrepressibly funny.

For McCandless, a Kentuckian who first picked up a trumpet because it was the closest instrument to him in grade four music class, the piece only works because of Tovey’s playfulness.

“He writes pieces that are very listenable,” he says. “I’ve got eight friends from my rock-climbing gym who are coming. They will love the piece, because it’ll make sense to them.”

Tovey momentarily winces at the word “listenable” because of the connotations it seems to have in the business of orchestral composition.

“I think for some people listenable has become pejorative,” he says. “But it shouldn’t be.”

Tovey agrees with McCandless that a piece of music should tell a story. In this case, it’s one a lot of people know well: a night at a pub.

“It’s like a beer mat that needs replacing at the end of an evening,” he says of the concerto. “That’s the smell of the Paradise Saloon. And the dialogue that the trumpet has is like conversations that people have in a pub.”

That, both McCandless and Tovey agree, is what separates a good trumpet concerto from other compositions.

“A piece about a pub is the perfect piece for a trumpet player,” says Tovey. “I mean, it’s different than if I was writing a piece for the viola. For the trumpet player it’s Songs from a Pub, for the viola player it’s Songs from a Vegetarian Restaurant.”