Charles Dutoit

NORMALLY CONSERVATIVE Indonesians, some of whom blanch at the sight of a bare shoulder, are grappling with their first-ever celebrity sex-tape scandal, casting aside social taboos as they swarm around office computers and mobile phones to watch clips allegedly showing a much-loved pop star with two girlfriends. Not at once, thank goodness. The country's collective head would explode. The sex scandal topped newscasts for a week and dominated chatter on Facebook and Twitter, competing with such deep thoughts as "Just finished laundry, yay!"

Has the Philadelphia Orchestra ever had a fun music director? The closest contender was Simon Rattle - until the spirited Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who seems to be having a grand time hopping around the globe, and is now promising to alight, with a hoped-for degree of permanence, upon the Philadelphia Orchestra. Levity has never been a priority in the serious world of classical music. We're talking about a musical CEO here ? and huge responsibilities to deliver worldclass Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler.

Recklessly ambitious and dangerously expansive, Mahler's Symphony No. 3 is a paean to nature that's composed with so much pagan relish and Germanic detail that you might as well be visiting a massive natural history museum: You can do it all in one day, but you may end up exhausted and overstimulated. But not at the Philadelphia Orchestra's Thursday performance, in the final program of its Kimmel Center season. Often, Mahler-steeped conductors try to make this symphony say everything it possibly can, aided by tempos so slow the piece can last two hours.

Richard Strauss tone poems are so tightly written, and with such masterly slick surfaces, that they can fly by with a sense of the predictable, one performance much like the other. Probing and tinkering only make the music dither - at least in Don Juan , the opening piece in the Philadelphia Orchestra's mostly Strauss program Friday. Were we mainly at the Kimmel Center for the tactile value of Strauss sonority rendered with optimum Philadelphian glamor? Why not? Actually, there was much more than that to chief conductor Charles Dutoit's treatment of the music, which was notable for what he didn't do. Performances Strauss conducted himself near the end of his life (preserved in Nazi-era hi-fi)

Any critic who rolls his eyes about confronting yet another Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 needs to experience the piece at the artistic confluence of Charles Dutoit, pianist Nikolai Lugansky, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. A great interpretation justifies its own existence. Not that there was anything mannered or eccentric about Lugansky's performance Friday afternoon. His characteristics - a limpid sound, a large presence, and a tendency to push his playing to the outer edge of fleetness - were natural foils to some of the orchestra's tendencies.

Any critic who rolls his eyes about confronting yet another Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 needs to experience the piece at the artistic confluence of Charles Dutoit, pianist Nikolai Lugansky, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. A great interpretation justifies its own existence. Not that there was anything mannered or eccentric about Lugansky's performance Friday afternoon. His characteristics - a limpid sound, a large presence, and a tendency to push his playing to the outer edge of fleetness - were natural foils to some of the orchestra's tendencies.

The Philadelphia Orchestra's Asian tour promises an intimate visit with knowing, loyal fans in Japan, the potential for new friends in South Korea, and high visibility in China. But this time, it also comes as a three-week reminder of everything that's at stake for the institution. Will the new Philadelphia Orchestra still embrace all of Asia, Europe, and South America - not to mention Ann Arbor and Tucson - as its rightful audience, or settle for a more regional presence? Can it recapture its ranking as one of the world's top orchestral ensembles?

The Philadelphia Orchestra's spring tour of Asia is making itself felt in the coming Kimmel Center concert weeks, as chief conductor Charles Dutoit blows dust off repertoire that's going on the road, with Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Debussy's La Mer making welcome returns on Friday. Performances were a significant step away from a caliber appropriate to Tokyo's Suntory Hall (or, for that matter, Carnegie Hall, where the program is repeated on Tuesday), though Dutoit's authority with this music was apparent in any number of respects.

You know Mendelssohn's Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream like the back of your hand thanks to a second-grade teacher who first set the fairy score aglow in your imagination. But did you ever hear the abrupt gesture a few minutes into the score as the donkey bray it was meant to evoke? On a purely abstract level, Smetana's M? Vlast is wondrous music. But it doesn't fully reveal itself unless you already know about ??rka's revenge on the male race, and that the impertinent bassoon part near the end is the snore of the men she lulls to sleep.

Though Philadelphia Orchestra chief conductor Charles Dutoit has a reputation for abrupt resignations, his departure from the orchestra's Saratoga season, announced yesterday, appears to be amicable. Though Dutoit, 73, was not available for comment, chief executives on both sides - the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Saratoga Performing Arts Center - talked in terms of celebrating his 20-year legacy of late-summer concerts in an artistic-director tenure that will end at the close of the 2010 season.