Nézet-Séguin's fresh beginning

The drumroll that greeted the announcement Wednesday of Yannick Nézet-Séguin's first full Philadelphia Orchestra concert season came with surprises that perhaps even music pundits didn't see coming.

With highlights including an Oct. 18 season opener with opera star Renée Fleming; the Verdi Requiem with Marina Poplavskaya and Rolando Villazón; a fully staged The Rite of Spring in collaboration with the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival; and Bach's great and infrequently heard St. Matthew Passion, the 36-year-old incoming music director also let it drop (in an interview before the announcement) that the orchestra will record for the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon label.

And as early as this June, he said in a late-afternoon rollout at the Kimmel Center, he will conduct a short season of concerts at the Academy of Music - the orchestra's first series there since leaving for the Kimmel Center 10 years ago.

"I'm very optimistic that we will be back where we belong, both in the city and in the international eye," he said in the interview. "We're planning future tours. And you've witnessed in the concert hall . . . that the spirit is unbelievably high."

The overall theme, both of the 2012-13 season and the June 21-23 concerts at the Academy, will be the career of Leopold Stokowski, the British conductor who arrived at the helm of the Philadelphia Orchestra a century ago and turned a provincial ensemble into a world-class one. Many of the programs - including the nine subscription weeks Nézet-Séguin will conduct - will be Stokowski-esque, including the staging of The Rite of Spring Feb. 21, 23, and 24, 2013, in collaboration with the cutting-edge Ridge Theater Company, best known for the film Decasia.

The early-summer season at the Academy will include a two June 23 programs, one family concert taken entirely from the 1940 Walt Disney film Fantasia in which Stokowski conducted the Philadelphia Orchestra, and an "audience choice" in which requests will be fielded through social media, Internet, and other sources.

"I know that many disparaged the Academy for its acoustics, yet others remember the hall fondly, and I'm looking forward to the opportunity to hear the orchestra for myself in the place that was their home for so long," he said in an e-mail earlier this week. "We must remember that the orchestra's wonderful Philadelphia sound was born in and blossomed as a result of that very hall."