His final cycle of concerts as Philadelphia Orchestra music director includes the Mahler Symphony No. 8 ("Symphony of a Thousand") starting on Wednesday: With three choruses and full orchestra totaling 450 performers, the Mahler symphony is always an event - and one that brought the Philadelphia Orchestra to national attention with a landmark 1916 performance.

That event status is heightened by a lineup of starry vocal soloists headed by Wagnerian soprano Christine Brewer. Performances will be recorded with an eye to commercial release, and Saturday's will be simulcast over Internet 2 at Drexel University.

Eschenbach comes to the event from having conducted the symphony recently with 800 performers in a Paris sports stadium. He also faces the orchestra's Asian tour in the coming weeks, seeming undaunted by a five-year tenure beset by dissatisfaction from some quarters of the orchestra and mixed reviews.

Relaxed (if rather guarded) on Wednesday afternoon, Eschenbach rhapsodized anew about the orchestra's music-making, without any hint of the angry side he showed last year - justifiably - after his replacement at the Orchestre de Paris (his other job) was announced before Eschenbach's 2010 departure was widely known. In fact, Eschenbach has been in talks with Washington's National Symphony Orchestra, which is looking for a music director, with added discussions that could have him in a larger artistic role at the Kennedy Center.

"It could be that I don't go in this direction at all," he said of the National Symphony Orchestra post.

The Kennedy Center connection, though, is "something that could interest me. The whole thing becomes a political job," he said, in reference to the Kennedy Center's vulnerability to the prevailing winds of Washington.

Eschenbach had vowed last year not to take any music director or chief conductor positions in the future. And why should he, when future plans include Wagner's Ring cycle in China in 2010 and a Robert Wilson-directed staging of the Mahler song cycle Das Lied von der Erde in 2011? At age 68, prime time for a conductor, he has return engagements with orchestras he once headed, among them the NDR Orchestra in Hamburg and, in its summer season at Ravinia, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Philadelphia will also figure into his guest-conducting schedule - he has a long-scheduled 2009 tour with the orchestra and is committed to future engagements - in what appears to be a turnaround: When Eschenbach declined to renew his contract in the fall of 2006, he was told that 80 percent of the orchestra's members didn't agree with his interpretations. Thereafter, the caliber of the music-making seemed to leap up a notch.

"Maybe the musicians wanted to show that they were of a different opinion from what I was told," Eschenbach said.

That's one instance of how he has come to terms with a troubled tenure. Eschenbach said he never regretted coming to Philadelphia, and wouldn't have done anything differently here, artistically speaking, even though his choices of modern music and solo artists were controversial.

In repertoire, his tastes are European. In the Mahler Eighth, he particularly loves Part 2 with its heady Goethe text, which escapes most Americans. He programmed modernists like Matthias Pintscher and Wolfgang Rihm, and older works popular in Europe but not here, such as Alexander Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony. After performances of that last one, Eschenbach - who basically espouses the idea that there are no bad audiences, only bad concerts - looked visibly upset at the tepid response. Now, he believes the piece's reflective conclusion was the reason: "Certainly, many people got it."

Eschenbach's family of young and youngish guest artists have included such successes as violinist Julia Fischer and conductor John Axelrod. Others, like soprano Marisol Montalvo, could be brilliant one night and not the next, while pianist Tzimon Barto saw his tentative popularity nosedive prior to being arrested for drug possession earlier this year.

Eschenbach admits that not all risks worked out: Montalvo's attempt, in the Mahler Symphony No. 4, to affect a child's voice resulted in projection problems. But tame artists, he says, don't interest him.

"The choice of these people is always combined with an appreciation of their special free spirit," he said.

His own approach diverged from decades of past practice in Philadelphia. From Eugene Ormandy in the 1930s to Wolfgang Sawallisch in the 1990s, the Philadelphia Orchestra generally has been a place of centrist, objectivist music- making. Eschenbach's flexible tempos, stemming from an alternative school of German conducting exemplified by Wilhelm Furtwängler, have been repeatedly questioned. Musicians complained about his spontaneity during performances.

"People accuse me of doing things differently than in rehearsal. But it's on top of the rehearsal work that spontaneous things come. It's the icing on the cake - which I find very, very important," he said. "Maybe they [the Philadelphia Orchestra players] were not used to spontaneity . . . but now, I think it has changed a lot. The musicians show their emotions in playing. And I appreciate that very much. Of the Big Five [orchestras in America] it's the most open orchestra now."

Though Philadelphia is by no means the only American disappointment he's had (he badly wanted the music directorship of the Cleveland Orchestra), he talks of having taken an apartment in New York since the United States still figures heavily into his plans.

That's slightly puzzling. One of Eschenbach's best orchestral relationships of recent years was the NDR Orchestra in Hamburg, which he gave up after accepting Philadelphia. Guest-conducting engagements with the Vienna Philharmonic have been among his finest recent concerts. German musicians and audiences would seem to better appreciate Eschenbach.

Yet his continued commitment to the United States parallels that of the great Dmitri Mitropoulos (a similarly individualistic musician). Though the latter's 1950s tenure with the New York Philharmonic was more troubled than Eschenbach's in Philadelphia, Mitropoulos remained committed to the city where he had experienced rejection, partly from idealism: Though desired in Europe, he felt needed in America, even if he wasn't always appreciated.

Eschenbach says he'd never encountered orchestral politics as he did in Philadelphia. His decision to take the job without having conducted the orchestra in four-plus years is one he would never make again. But would he have stayed longer if circumstances had been different?

"Yes."

What would those circumstances be?

"No comment."

One source of allure that's undimmed, for him, is the music. "Every time I come back it's a joy," he said. "I came this morning for Bruckner Sixth. The whole thing is tricky . . . and the orchestra hadn't played it in years. But the orchestra got everything. They are amazing! And always were."