Most conductors, quizzed about their childhoods, remember the first time they heard Mozart or Mahler. The high-profile young conductor Michael Christie— who is coming to town to conduct the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in two concerts this weekend—remembers the buzzing of the airplanes from the Clinton Street airport.

“My parents still live in the same house, just off of the Buffalo Airpark runway. We’re a quarter of a mile off the runway,” he says on the phone from Phoenix, where he is music director of the Phoenix Symphony.

Concert Preview

Michael Christie, conducting the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in “Vienna, City of Dreams,”music of Schubert and Johann Strauss

8 p.m. Saturday and 2:30 p. m. Sunday at Kleinhans Music Hall Info: 885-5000

At West Seneca East High School, Christie found himself torn between music—he played the trumpet—and a flying career. “I had really intended to become an airline pilot, or go into the Air Force,” he says.

In the end, he struck a compromise. He became a conductor, and he got his pilot’s license.

His career is soaring in more ways than one.

At 35, Christie is one of a handful of celebrated young conductors who are rocking the country— from the East Coast, where 42-year-old Alan Gilbert heads the New York Philharmonic, to the West Coast, where the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s music director is Gustavo Dudamel, 28.

Christie has held his post at the Phoenix Symphony since 2005, and his contract extends until 2015. Also since 2005, he has been music director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic. And for 10 years he has been music director of the Colorado Music Festival in Boulder.

Once, he conducted the New York Philharmonic, pinch-hitting for Riccardo Muti, who had the flu. He works frequently in Australia, where for four years he was music director of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. Australia was where he met and married his wife, Alexis. She is a physician but takes time off so she can travel with him and their 1-year-old daughter, Sinclair.

Such is Christie’s glamour that Symphony, the magazine of the American League of Orchestras, ran a long cover story on him earlier this year. The profile was headlined “Frequent Flyer.”

His father, Ken Christie, jokes that he never knows where his son is.

“Because he’s away almost all the time, my wife and I take the opportunity to see other parts of the country,” he says.

They were there at the New York Philharmonic gig and sometimes catch him in Brooklyn. “We go and pick up his brother in Albany and then head down to New York and stay over.”

A piano in the house

Though Symphony magazine says that Christie flies to his conducting jobs, he says on the phone that’s not quite true.

He generally flies not for business but for pleasure.

“It’s a great release — a very objective hobby in a very subjective career. I like flying at night, because it’s very peaceful and beautiful. I don’t fly in any nasty weather.

“There are things you weigh. It’s like any other hobby. My dad fishes a lot — he could tell you the same thing about navigating the Niagara River.”

Many musicians have musicians for parents. Christie’s father is a former accountant who now owns Classic Window and Door, a distributor of windows, doors and kitchen countertops.

“We always had a piano in the house,” Ken Christie says. “I grew up with the piano, and we all played for fun, we all took music lessons. We have four children, and early on, we said, ‘You all have to take a couple of years on some type of instrument, expose yourself to it.’”

Michael Christie, as a teenager, chose the trumpet. He studied with former BPO trumpet player David Kuehn and played with the Greater Buffalo Youth Orchestra. As a highschooler, he met Eije Oue, then the BPO’s associate conductor. Oue taught him score reading and conducting.

Christie’s trumpet playing was good enough that he was accepted at Oberlin College. There, he began to consider conducting.

“There’s a need for conductors to lead recital orchestras,” he says. “I conducted the Northern Ohio Youth Orchestra. Also, I directed a church choir for a couple of years. It was really a lot of fun.”

Fate stepped in when he won a prize for outstanding potential at the Sibelius Conducting Competition in Helsinki, Finland.

“I was amazed to get selected, much less to win a prize,” he marvels. “Suddenly these people are handing me business cards.”

‘You need an MBA’

Christie is the first to admit that a career as a music director is nothing like the way he would have imagined it back then.

“It’s almost like you need to graduate with an MBA,” he says. “The music’s only part of it.”

“I feel lucky to have been doing what I am doing. But the pressure is quite significant,” he adds. “It’s a pretty unforgiving career path. Sometimes you make a mistake, sometimes things just don’t click. Some things are just out of your control.”

He got a baptism by fire earlier this year, when problems in Phoenix brought a torrent of bad publicity.

The Arizona Republic summed up the situation in a June story: “It has been a tough year for the Phoenix Symphony, with unpopular contract renegotiations, including a 17 percent pay cut over the next three years, layoffs, several lawsuits over musician terminations and a significant downturn in contributed income,” the paper reported.

Happily, the lawsuits have been settled. “Cooler heads prevailed,” is how Christie puts it, in a tone of quiet relief.

“I believe very passionately in every single member of the orchestra,” he says. “I support them 100 percent, but I need everyone to do their job, too. Unfortunately sometimes people can get hotheaded.”

The turbulence seems to be behind him. The paper, in the same story it detailed his difficulties, congratulated Christie on his triumphs. “Attendance has been up: 12 sold-out concerts and 23 others drawing more than 90 percent capacity,” the story continued. “One reason is surely the excitement of the programming.”

Being persnickety

Christie has a knack for exploring challenging modern music. A St. Louis production he recently conducted of John Corigliano’s complicated opera “The Ghosts of Versailles” was well-received, and just last week, he and his forces in Phoenix tackled John Adams’ “Nixon in China.”

He says he is careful about what he puts before the public. Generously, he credits his background for that.

“Coming from a nonmusical family in Buffalo, I’m a realist when it comes to new music,” he says. “I have been pretty rigorous, thinking about what it would be like to sit in the audience hearing one of these pieces for the first time. Not everyone is tuneful like Mozart. You have to think, is the message of the composer really going to at least leave some impression on the audience? It’s my job to be persnickety about it.”

In Buffalo, Christie will be conducting a concert of Viennese music, part of the BPO’s two-weekend Viennese festival.