The recording industry deems a record gold if it sells 500,000 copies and platinum if it sells 1 million. So what do you call a free classical download that was accessed 1.4 million times over a brief period? Shocking, that's what. Yet that's what happened when live recordings of Gianandrea Noseda's conducting of Beethoven's complete symphonies with the BBC Philharmonic were made available for free over the Internet for three weeks in 2005.

"It has been a shock; I didn't expect such a result," says Noseda. "[It was] a boom, an explosion not only for myself, but for BBC Radio, England and the world. I am very positive about the future of music in recordings and downloads. There is a lot of need to listen to good music."

Especially when it is being conducted by this talented Italian conductor. Noseda (No-SAY-da) impressed the PSO mightily when he debuted in 2005, enough to bring him into the conversation churning about who should lead the orchestra. While Manfred Honeck claimed that prize, the PSO has made it a priority to retain conducting appearances with the 43-year-old Noseda, including two subscription programs this season.

It's a sentiment the Milan-born conductor returns. "From the European point of view, it is one of the greatest orchestras in America," says Noseda. "I think Pittsburgh can really deliver." So can Noseda. Right to home computers and MP3 players around the world. But for all the success he has had with the Beethoven and other canonical Italian fare, he perhaps is most proud when he brings more obscure music to light. For instance, in his PSO debut he offered his countryman Respighi's relatively unknown "Metamorphoseon Modi XII" with the composer's famous "Pines of Rome."

"I think sometimes we perform only 30-40 pieces, the most famous ones," says Noseda. "I am really a believer in the fact that there are hidden jewels in the production of these composers." "Metamorphoseon" was one, and he hopes that the composer's "Burlesque" will do the same. "It is very important to give a wider landscape about a composer. When you open a door to new pieces, you will consider a known one in a different way."

Noseda also will conduct an obscure work by an lesser-known composer, Bruno Maderna's "Music of Gaiety," in his second week. In it, Maderna, a champion of 20th-century avant garde, orchestrates pieces from the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, a manuscript of keyboard works from the 16th and 17th centuries. "I think it is a great showpiece for orchestra," says Noseda.

The conductor also is adept at describing the context of the standard repertoire, making pieces fresh for an orchestra. When he rehearsed the PSO, several musicians commented on how his description of Italian children's songs in Respighi's "Pines of Rome" helped them understand the work more. He also has insight into the composer's "Festivals of Rome," which he will conduct in his second week in Pittsburgh:

The third movement of "Roman Festivals" takes place "during October, when you take the grapes and make the wine," he explains. "There are not songs connected to that. There is just the atmosphere so you can explain the particular smell you have in Rome around this period because all the grapes are just squeezed. When people work on the hills surrounding Rome, all over you have this kind of smell. It surrounds you, embracing you."

Originally a piano and composing student, Noseda considers himself a conducting late bloomer.

"Conducting came out by chance," he says. I started to study conducting quite late -- at 27," says Noseda, who studied at the Milan Conservatory. "I was curious to learn scores, not from the conducting point of view but from the composer point of view, which is slightly different."

Directing soon became "the light for me to express my way," and he made his professional debut in 1994 with the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano Giuseppe Verdi. Three years later, he became the first foreign principal guest conductor at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg.

It was to the general director and artistic director of that theater, Valery Gergiev, that Noseda attributes his final polish as a conductor. Gergiev taught him how to "achieve your big idea of sound" from an orchestra. It requires "sometimes asking in a different way, to have a strategy -- the psychology. For instance, sometimes to emphasize the line of the woodwinds you don't ask them to play louder, but you ask the contrabassi to play louder and immediately the woodwinds react."

Now Noseda is enjoying a successful run as chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic and a contract with Chandos records and has also built a strong operatic career ("I try to be very careful with that. The opera world takes a lot of time," he says). He may still be growing in stature as a conductor, but he's already big on the Net -- shockingly platinum big.