"I've been coming here every year for 20-odd years, although it's been two years since I was last here,'' he said this week.
Braithwaite follows in the footsteps of his New Zealand-born conductor father, Warwick Braithwaite, who worked in Dunedin before moving to England in 1916, when he was 19.
"I lacked initiative, I guess,'' he says with a laugh.
"The first time I came to Dunedin was after my father had died. I walked around all these familiar streets with a guide who was no longer with us. It was very deja vu, in a way.''
Grandfather Joseph fathered 22 children. "My father was number 20,'' Braithwaite (68) says.
"Apparently, one of the sights of Dunedin was the Braithwaite family filing into their row in the Regent Theatre.''
The family name lives on in the Braithwaite Scholarship, which is awarded every year to the head boy in the St Paul's Cathedral Choir.
Braithwaite returned to Dunedin this week with pianist Michael Houstoun for the first instalment in the Southern Sinfonia 2008 concert series.
"I'm really looking forward to it. We last worked together many, many years ago. The early '90s, I think. He's a great pianist."
Saint-Saëns broke away from the Wagnerian tradition with his novel and sunny Fifth Piano Concerto, also known as The Egyptian, which he completed in Cairo in 1896.
"It's a wonderful programme. I'd never even heard the piano concerto before and it's charming.''
Braithwaite was born in London and studied at the Royal Academy of Music.
He has conducted more than 70 operas with companies around the world, including New Zealand Opera, Opera Australia, Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Sadlers Wells Opera, Norwegian Radio Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Welsh National Opera and Hamburg State Opera.
He now lives in Adelaide and remains a highly sought-after conductor around the world.
"I work wherever an aeroplane stops. I go to work on an aeroplane,'' he says, with a weary smile.
The Southern Sinfonia performs Saint-Saëns' Fifth Piano Concerto with Nicholas Braithwaite and Michael Houstoun at 8pm on Saturday in the Dunedin Town Hall.
