This is going to be fun.

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra invited conductor Manfred Honeck -- its new chief starting in September -- to the Heinz Hall stage last night for the last time as a guest conductor. In a few months, he will achieve full music director status, a tenure many, including myself, has enormous promise.

With that permanence on the horizon, one might have expected a little buyer's remorse, but I certainly didn't feel that way after a program of two works steadfastly in Honeck's wheelhouse, Verdi's Overture to "La Forza del Destino" and Strauss' "Ein Heldenleben" and one premiere, Alan Fletcher's Clarinet Concerto. Judging from its response, the audience didn't either. It tried to give the Austrian conductor a full welcome when he first appeared, but he skirted it by jumping on the podium quickly. Patrons got the last word, however, in hearty applause, ovation and even flat-out cheers at the night's end (take that, Pittsburgh Penguins).

In the concert, Honeck already displayed some engaging mannerisms, such as waving the baton above his head so quickly and close it would seem to almost shave his hair or crouching down to keep the PSO quiet. But it was his interpretation and energy that was most winning. It's already clear in a few concerts that this is a conductor who will always come with a strong and musical interpretation born of his intense study of the score. It may not always be a reading we agree on, but the music he conducts will always have one, and that is anything but common these days on the podium.

The concert did have some evidence of a music director and orchestra getting to know each other. The PSO didn't quite know how to read his fading cutoff to end the Strauss, and the Verdi Overture began with some hesitation and ensemble issues.

But the big picture found ample agreement between musicians and Honeck. The Overture had a catlike quality to it, quietly lurking until it pounced. Honeck accentuated the drama and pushed the dynamics to make for a positively electric performance. "Ein Heldenleben (A Hero's Life)" developed into a masterful depiction of events. Excellent solos abounded to tell the slightly tongue-in-cheek autobiographical tone poem in which Strauss relates his struggles with, ahem, critics and the renewing power of his relationship to wife Pauline. Concertmaster Andres Cardenes was brilliant in his depiction of the latter -- on the violin, of course. Honeck's tender crafting of the musical dialogue between the husband and wife and her redeeming return at the end of the work argued for a sincerity here, despite the nihilistic tendencies of the composer.

Fletcher is known in Pittsburgh as the former, and quite successful, head of the Carnegie Mellon University School of Music. He now leads the Aspen School of Music, but he has an impressive "other life" as a composer. His latest work was commissioned by the PSO and written for its estimable principal clarinetist Michael Rusinek.

Rusinek asked that Fletcher write the clarinet concerto Samuel Barber never wrote -- a challenge that many composers might refuse outright. But Fletcher crafted a largely tonal work in which the clarinet is buried at first but then emerges in a simply exquisite second movement. Rusinek took to the lyrical nature of the work as if this were a concerto long in the repertory and played it with his usual uncanny mixture of mahogany timbre, agile phrasing and bloom to the higher register. He again showed that he is among the world's best. This is certainly an intriguing work that I'd like to hear again.

The program repeats at 8 tonight and 2:30 p.m. tomorrow.