Born in Valencia, the 40-something conductor Gustavo Gimeno is cruising to the heights of his profession. In demand as a guest artist in top international concert halls and opera houses, he has served as music director with the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg since 2015, adding the Toronto Symphony Orchestra to his portfolio in 2020, with the Teatro Real in Madrid to follow in 2025. Coming off his first tour with the Canadians, Gimeno brings them home to the hall where the institution’s founding players gave their first concert almost exactly 100 years ago. Of the program heard on the road only the second symphony of the internationally decorated, European-based Canadian composer Samy Moussa remains (at 20 minutes, it’s no pro forma contemporary curtain raiser). The 20-year-old fiddle phenomenon María Dueñas, who played Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole out of town, opts this time for the Bruch Violin Concerto, another surefire crowd-pleaser. And in place of excerpts from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, Gimeno lets loose with Tchaikovsky’s gloomily impassioned Symphony No. 5, the pièce de résistance of the Torontonians’ inaugural program more than a lifetime ago. —Matthew Gurewitsch