In no time at all, the name of Yannick Nézet-Séguin will be tripping off the tongue as though you had known it all your life. For this is the season when the young Canadian conductor will really come under scrutiny on the South Bank: with the London Philharmonic, and at the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, where he made his debut on Thursday.

Nézet-Séguin was there in the company of two composers, Sally Beamish and Hugh Wood, and they had all chosen their favourite late Haydn symphonies. The conductor himself selected the Symphony No 94, the Surprise. And he maximised the effect of that big bang — the huge forte chord that interrupts the slow movement’s timid little tune — by daring his players to a barely audible pianissimo beforehand.

And this wasn’t the biggest surprise. Right from the start, Nézet-Séguin created a sense of a strange wanderings through mists and miasmas, so that it was impossible to guess what would come next. This sense of smiling wonder at the audacious unpredictability of Haydn, even while working in the most familiar of forms, was characteristic of the entire evening’s music-making.

After a delightfully droll and lip-tickling performance of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto, played on a tricksy period instrument by David Blackadder, it was time for Hugh Wood’s choice. He knew he would get his money’s worth from the OAE with the Military Symphony. And, sure enough, there was the big man with the tiny triangle, the coppery cymbals, the rattle of fife and drum — all to tease and distract that first 1794 audience in a time of war.

And, finally, Sally Beamish’s choice of the Symphony No 104. She compared the delicious slide from D minor into D major at the start with sinking into a hot bath — though Nézet-Séguin continued to give the orchestra a rigorous work-out in the displaced accents of the third movement and the exuberant knees-up of the finale.

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