By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Alan Gilbert leading the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic during a rehearsal last month. “He can be a little bit impatient, but that’s because he wants so much,” one orchestra member said.

ALAN GILBERT stood before the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic last month in one of the most difficult moments he has faced as the orchestra’s chief conductor. An hour before, the players learned that a well-liked former member had committed suicide.

“It feels strange to rehearse,” Mr. Gilbert quietly told them as they sat on the stage without instruments, looking stricken. Some held each other. Several sobbed. “On the other hand, not to rehearse, not to do what we do as musicians, is even stranger,” Mr. Gilbert added. “It’s a shame that it takes sometimes a terrible thing like this to remind us that we are a family.”

Responding to the tragedy was the latest passage for Mr. Gilbert, 40, at the orchestra he has led for eight years. He literally found family and home there, marrying a section cellist, Kajsa William-Olsson, fathering two children and buying and renovating a house. Musically, he learned swaths of repertory and the art of running an orchestra.

Mr. Gilbert’s next assignment brings him home to his original clan, the New York Philharmonic, where his mother is a violinist and his father a retired violinist. He starts there as music director in 2009, one of the few Americans to take the post and the first native New Yorker. In his next performance in his hometown, he will conduct the New York Philharmonic for two weeks in March.

Mr. Gilbert is a busy guest conductor. But the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic is the only major orchestra he has directed, and a look at his tenure gives clues to how he will approach his new job, a high-profile cultural position in a world capital of classical music.

Even so, the orchestra in New York is a different kettle of musical fish. Despite the warmth that exists there between Mr. Gilbert and its members, the skills he acquired in Sweden won’t always apply.

He took over the Stockholm orchestra in 2000, a relatively untested 32-year-old put in charge of a storied orchestra that had slipped in quality. “We thought a young, eager guy could build something here,” said Mats Engstrom, the artistic administrator and a former member of the horn section. “I thought he was so gifted.”

The auspices were good. Sweden, a country of only nine million people but three fine orchestras, has long been an incubator for major American conducting careers. Alumni of the three orchestras — the Goteborg Symphony, the Swedish Radio Symphony and the Philharmonic — include Esa-Pekka Salonen (now at the Los Angeles Philharmonic), Herbert Blomstedt (formerly at the San Francisco Symphony), Manfred Honeck (on deck at the Pittsburgh Symphony), Paavo Jarvi (at the Cincinnati Symphony) and his father, Neeme Jarvi (at the New Jersey Symphony).

Orchestra staff members, local officials and music critics say that the bet on Mr. Gilbert has paid off.

Attendance has risen from 75 percent of capacity to a healthy 82 percent. Mr. Gilbert has lobbied politicians and helped the executive director, Stefan Forsberg, gain extra financing from the regional government, to the chagrin of the orchestra’s rivals. Mr. Gilbert has helped bring in prominent soloists like Lang Lang, Emanuel Ax and Renée Fleming. From the start, he programmed Swedish music with enthusiasm, winning over critics and audiences.

Above all, he has raised the quality of the orchestra, introducing a chamber music aesthetic, rhythmic precision and a warmer sound, members say. “It’s more locked together in the sound space,” said Mikael Sjogren, a violist. “It’s real intensity from the first bar to the last bar.”

Mr. Gilbert, a violinist, remains popular with the musicians, socializing and playing in chamber programs with them. A man who projects humility, he seems to have successfully navigated the sometimes incompatible roles of friend and maestro. Tellingly, his relationship with Ms. William-Olsson apparently made no waves.

But the relationship with the orchestra as a whole seems to have run its natural course. The players have voted to approve a new chief conductor, Sakari Oramo. It is time for a change, several said.

“Eight years with Alan was enough,” said Carl Johan Westfelt, a violinist and union official, who stressed that relations with Mr. Gilbert remained warm. Mr. Gilbert said he, too, had made it clear that he wanted to leave after this season. “We all felt it was a good run, and it was right,” he said.

Outside the orchestra, Mr. Gilbert has maintained a relatively low profile, although activist conductors in the mold of a Daniel Barenboim in Berlin are not a Swedish tradition. Indeed, except for the cover of one issue of the orchestra magazine and a small image on a poster outside the hall, Mr. Gilbert’s face is not seen much. Orchestra officials say they promote the ensemble and the Concert House, a beautiful neo-Classical blue box from 1926 facing an outdoor market.

Mr. Gilbert said he had purposely started his tenure in a low key, in keeping with Sweden’s consensus-driven nature. “There’s something very Scandinavian about not putting the individual forward,” he said. “It’s about the team.”

But he asserted himself in quiet ways. He insisted on having a vote in auditioning new members and helped force out the previous artistic and executive director, who was seen by others in the organization as wrong for the job. “Artistically, we needed a more sharply defined direction,” he said.

Several musicians took note of an occasional glare over their mistakes. There is grumbling over his insistence on intense rehearsing, even on the day of a concert.

“He can be a little bit impatient, but that’s because he wants so much,” said Ove Ranmo, a violinist.