In addition to enduring the usual stresses of a tour, the Orchestre National de France Tuesday night came up against unusually inhospitable conditions at Kimmel Center.

Conductor Kurt Masur walked onstage after intermission, stepped onto the podium, paused, and walked off. He returned with stagehands and demonstrated that the podium was wobbly. A man in the audience handed up a program, which was tucked under one side. Masur gave it a try. Still wobbly. Stagehands took away the podium, which a Kimmel Center spokeswoman said the orchestra had brought with it, and Masur conducted standing feet flat on stage, no elevation.

Masur, 80, one feels certain, has a rapport with this ensemble so firm he could have led an assured performance of Dvorák's Symphony No. 9 from anywhere in the hall, and he barely seemed to notice when microphones tethered to each other above stage came loose, dropped a wire into the horn section, and swung back and forth.

The visit, which closed the Kimmel Center's touring orchestra series for the season, came on the heels of Christoph Eschenbach's performance of the same work Sunday with the Curtis Institute of Music orchestra. It might not be possible to find two more different conceptions of a conductor's job.

Where Eschenbach constantly pushed and pulled phrases, Masur laid down a firm inner beat. It's too simplistic to say that Eschenbach flexes tempos and Masur doesn't. Masur flexed tempos, too, but judiciously, so that when he veered from a regular beat it had impact.

Masur favors following a phrase's momentum to the end, rather than stopping along the way to create multiple arrival points. He also, with economical gestures, sustained notes to full value, emphasizing this orchestra's dark sound. The strings don't have the depth of some other orchestras we know, but in the woodwinds one could hear a more naturalistic (and no less gorgeous) sense of tone than we're used to hearing in this country.

Listeners who left before the end of applause missed a haunting encore - Dvorák Slavonic Dance No. 2 in E minor (Opus 72).

Beethoven dominated the first half of the program, with a momentum-building Leonore Overture No. 3 (Opus 72a), and French pianist David Fray, 26, as soloist in the Piano Concerto No. 2. While it was hard to tell which was prettier, his tone or his long locks, in the end I'm sure it was his sound. Fray has down cold impressive feats of introspection, poetry, and playing soft beyond belief. He leaned so severely over the keyboard that his lanky frame resembled an inverted question mark. If there was dramatic tension in his interpretation, it was too subtle for me. But the encore, the "Sarabande" from Bach's Partita No. 6, was seriously beautiful, a window into a more substantive artistic personality.