A bracing outing with Denève and the French

The forthcoming French invasion by the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts was unintentionally heralded Thursday by a Gallically slanted concert containing so much unfamiliar genius, even a seasoned Francophile couldn't know all of what was to come.

The Philadelphia Orchestra, thanks to guest conductor Stéphane Denève, played a concert that made Debussy's beloved Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (the program's one standard-repertoire item) its least notable element. Gritty harmonies, restlessly morphing gestures, and all-around creative volatility were more the order of the day with Roussel's 1930 Symphony No. 3 and Dutilleux's 1964 Métaboles. All of that, plus Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 9 featuring British pianist Imogen Cooper, made the concert bracing, enlightening, but never alienating.

Having recently completed Naxos-label recordings of Roussel's four symphonies, Denève is established as a major exponent of this French counterpart to Prokofiev, with his liberated harmonies, wide palette of orchestral color, and few typical notions of lyricism.

Conductors often take the locomotive rhythms of Roussel's first movement as a cue for making much of the rest of the symphony about momentum - fine for the distinctively excitable charisma of Charles Munch (who introduced the symphony to the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1957). The more cool-tempered Denève explored the symphony's many pockets of sound while also courting a possible loss of needed cohesiveness, especially in the second movement. But who can argue with the riches he illuminated?

With all due respect to the Royal Scottish Orchestra on Denève's recordings, the Philadelphians gave the conductor more than just extra sonic glamour. If nothing else, Juliette Kang's incredibly poetic violin solo in the final movement illustrated how a great orchestra can elevate a well-conceived interpretation to a different level - particularly valuable with music that should be heard more often.

Métaboles is Dutilleux's youthful orchestral calling card - youthful in relation to the now-95-year-old composer's lifespan - and lacks the unending layers of atonal latticework in his later orchestral pieces. Still, this is a fully realized statement of Dutilleux's compositional personality, one that may eclipse Pierre Boulez and Olivier Messiaen as France's greatest contribution to the late 20th century. Denève didn't play the piece just for effect but found serpentine elements of continuity that others miss.

In the Mozart concerto, the sparkle that's usually behind Cooper's precision didn't carry so well to the Kimmel Center's first tier. Otherwise, the performance was beautifully crafted, right down to fine details of interplay that revealed a lifetime's worth of experience embodied in the concerto's eventful three movements. For that matter, Cooper's mesmerizing treatment of the second-movement cadenza alone seemed to encompass a lifetime's experience. Premeditated artistic calculation joined with a sense of living emotional presence to create what one might call custom-made moments that can only be felt in the here and now. After that, who needs surface excitement?

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