Charles Dutoit

The Philadelphia Orchestra embarks on the first of four summertime out-of-town excursions this week, giving every indication (at least for the moment) that life goes on amid bankruptcy. And business as usual also means dealing with cancellations: One of the Philadelphians' prime attractions at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival was to be beloved guest conductor Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, 77, who was reported to be ill last week and will be replaced by associate conductor Rossen Milanov and guest Hugh Wolff.

The pulsing, insistent triplet figure shared by the cellos, double basses, and timpani at the end of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex has a way of following you out of the hall, down the street, and hounding you. It's a quiet way of ending a horrific piece, yet the triplets won't let go - the three beats like drops of life leaving Oedipus and the bodies of his parents. It is the job of an orchestra, in addition to everything else, to take risks and lead public taste. That's easy to forget in an age when the act of curating programming has so closely elided with channeling the customer's wishes.

Musical nationality is a supremely slippery matter - one arising inevitably with the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts' celebration of all things Gallic, and especially with the Friday performance of Orchestre National de France. With a program of Debussy's La Mer , Ravel's Piano Concerto in G , and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring - all works from the orchestra's homeland - one might expect the real deal. But with the breakdown of local cultures in our increasingly globalized world, these performances had no particular authority.

No schadenfreude intended, but it's hard not to notice that the Philadelphia Orchestra's podium decision dismissed by some critics a few years ago as a caretaker move is turning out to be both prescient and wise. The orchestras of Boston and Chicago may have generated high levels of excitement in those cities and beyond by choosing James Levine and Riccardo Muti, respectively, and yet here in Philadelphia we have a chief conductor who is a living, growing artistic force. And who actually shows up for work.

PHILLY'S MUSICAL future arrives this weekend, as the diminutive, intense and charismatic Yannick Nezet-Seguin (Yah-NEEK Neh-ZAY Say-GAN) leaps onto the podium. He'll lead three concerts, his first since being named the Philadelphia Orchestra's music director-designate in June. After the elegant formality of Haydn's "Military" (Symphony No. 100) and Mahler's huge, rambling Fifth Symphony, his three concerts will undoubtedly end in an eruption of welcome. He'll return the favor by greeting audience members after each concert in the Kimmel Center plaza.

To the casual music lover, if he thinks about it at all, French music fell off a cliff after Debussy, who died in 1918, and Ravel, who was largely done by 1930. But French ideals of harmony as an aesthetic end in itself, and color as full citizen in determining a work's course of events, didn't evaporate in the mist with Debussy and Ravel. Henri Dutilleux extended and developed these notions. He was 12 when his parents gave him a score to a piece that pointed to the future of music, Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande , and after an early period of works he has since renounced, Dutilleux became one of the enduring and distinctive compositional voices of the 20th century.

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Conductors at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center apparently hold titanic powers in their hands. Eugene Ormandy, bothered by the overenthusiastic obbligato of a stream not far from the stage where he was leading his Philadelphia Orchestra, once ordered the waters dammed up for his Beethoven and Bartók. Charles Dutoit, who exited this venue Thursday night after 21 years as chief of all things orchestral, never exhibited the power to quell nature. But his tenure exceeded Ormandy's by years.

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Any fete for Charles Dutoit would necessarily involve a certain amount of frisson, and Thursday night, in capping the conductor's 21 summers leading the Philadelphia Orchestra's concerts here, it came in bubbly form. At a preconcert talk, there was champagne. For the audience at intermission, champagne. With musicians backstage after this last Dutoit concert as artistic chief of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center - real champagne. "The greatest conductor in the world," declared Marcia White, SPAC's president, as she brought Dutoit out for what she said was his 182d concert at this horse-racing resort town where the orchestra has spent part of every summer since 1966.

SARATOGA SPRINGS, N.Y. - Any fete for Charles Dutoit would necessarily involve a certain amount of frisson, and Thursday night, in capping the conductor's 21 summers leading the Philadelphia Orchestra's concerts here, it came in bubbly form. At a preconcert talk, there was champagne. For the audience at intermission, champagne. With musicians backstage after this last Dutoit concert as artistic chief of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center - real champagne. "The greatest conductor in the world," declared Marcia White, SPAC's president, as she brought Dutoit out for what she said was his 182d concert at this horse-racing resort town where the orchestra has spent part of every summer since 1966.

The news traveled fast. Minutes after the appointment of Yannick Nézet-Séguin to the Philadelphia Orchestra began appearing on websites in the United States and Canada on Sunday morning, reaction began bouncing among BlackBerrys. In the airport lounges of LAX, people returning from the Opera America conference in Los Angeles cursed the Philadelphians bitterly: The more time Nézet-Séguin spends here, the less time he'll be at the Metropolitan Opera (or so the reasoning goes).