Philadelphia Orchestra conductor takes the podium for her first time after elevation to new post

The Philadelphia Orchestra has another major artistic voice in the room these days, and that’s a good thing. Nathalie Stutzmann, last month named the orchestra’s next principal guest conductor, doesn’t start the job officially until fall.

She’s already on the scene, though. In a program of two Beethoven favorites, Stutzmann emerges as the focus of this week’s Digital Stage program. There’s a tabula rasa aspect to this repertoire (no soloist, no premiere) that pulls back the curtain on what kind of musical mind is now at work here.

The 45-minute-ish show comes with a lot of interview talk about the music and the orchestra’s “chemistry” with Stutzmann. Exactly what the rapport is between conductor and ensemble can’t be fully answered by a digital production, where audio and video engineering obscures exactly what’s happening and why.

What is clear, though, is that Stutzmann hears these pieces fresh, free of the interpretive varnish that has yellowed corners of this crystalline music. In Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1, where, in other hands, culminating moments sometimes slow down as if struggling up a hill, Stutzmann pushes straight ahead. There is a through-line in every phrase she encounters. The main tempo she chooses for the movement doesn’t sprint, but glides — majestically so.

The conductor promotes ensemble crispness and polish, too. Stutzmann inhabits the podium equivalent of judicial modesty. The personal imprint she brings to the symphony’s second movement is about careful management of small details, but they add up. Shaded articulation, length of notes, varied colors: Stutzmann — also a highly regarded contralto — seems to be always listening with a singer’s ear.

The Digital Stage production comes with a performance of Beethoven’s Overture to the Creatures of Prometheus (plus a surprise encore of Elgar). Orchestra and conductor are solid in the main section of the Beethoven, though it’s the slow introduction that I found most moving. The big, spaced strokes of sound produced an echo, reminding us that there’s still a concert hall there that someday might be filled again.

This week’s Philadelphia Orchestra program of works by Beethoven streams Thursday at 8 p.m. and is available through Feb. 4 at 11 p.m. at philorch.org. Tickets are $17.