The new season brings rising conductors to the fore.

Budgets are tight, subscriptions are down, and the economic climate has taken its toll on classical music. But nevertheless audiences on both coasts of the U.S. are anticipating the start of new seasons featuring the debuts of artistic directors at the New York Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Philharmonic this fall, as well as appearances by several rising conductors.

In New York, Alan Gilbert, the son of musicians (his mother still plays for the Philharmonic), promises to bring a new sense of urgency to the programming, after the dutiful if occasionally inspired tenure of Loren Maazel (and even granted the Philharmonic's remarkable display of cultural diplomacy with its trip to North Korea). Gilbert has already conducted the New York Philharmonic on several occasions, including revelatory performances of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and a program that featured both Mozart's symphony No. 40 in C major (the "Jupiter") and Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A major.

On the surface these seem like audience-pleasing no-brainer choices, but in the performance they revealed, in the Berlioz, a work that offered new subtleties of Romantic expression, and in the juxtaposition of the Mozart and Beethoven, a telling look at how Mozart prefigured Beethoven's growth and how Beethoven drew from Mozart. A friend was at both these concerts, in Vail, Colo., and says they had a brio and heat that flickered across the audience like brushfire on a tinder-dry night.

For his regular-season programs, Gilbert is likely to organize concerts that contain works that will comment on each other, and will mix contemporary works that stodgy ears may consider difficult with works that today’s audiences might think of of as too clichéd a choice, in the hope of eliciting from all kinds of audiences an enjoyment for all kinds of works. Coming programs include a concert featuring Mozart’s “Prague” symphony and the U.S. premiere of Matthias Pintscher’s Towards Osiris, which was inspired by Holt’s The Planets among others. Yes, a mix of the old and the new – but we can expect that under Gilbert, it’s likely to be more than simply a dash of this and a dollop of that and call it a program. We may learn new things about the Mozart, and come to understand even more the work of a new composer.

That’s a welcome trend among conductors, since many people who attend concerts relish the chance actually to learn something. Today’s audiences are not made up of connoisseurs. So a new breed of conductors such as pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, for instance, can help audiences understand the connections between composers, such as Haydn and Ligeti, before conducting and performing their works.

In Los Angeles, Gustavo Dudamel, product of Venezuela's famed El Sistema (its teaching network of youth orchestras), will stir up the classical-music scene there as much for his youth (he's 28) as for his pedagogical skills and mastery of Mahler, Beethoven and the other giants of the symphonic repertoire. (He will also continue as Music Director of the Gothenburg Symphony and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela.)

Dudamel also plans to highlight lesser-known composers (including the many under-represented Latin American ones) and to engage the community through a wide-ranging effort to educate children, in the hope of introducing new audiences to the kind of music that enabled his career. Dudamel is a natural and charismatic teacher himself, and perhaps he will have the kind of audience connection in Los Angeles that Leonard Bernstein brought to the podium throughout the world.

New York will also get another chance to hear a third rising conductor, when Yannick Nézet-Séguin makes his debut at the Metropolitan Opera this fall. Nézet-Séguin has conducted in many places over the past couple of years (including New York’s Mostly Mozart festival this summer) and serves as principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and artistic director and principal conductor of the Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal. The Met's general manager Peter Gelb has snapped him up for a new production of Carmen, and has offered him four more productions through the 2013-2014 season. Gelb has said that he is on the lookout for first-rate conductors, since they're in short supply.

Maybe not for long. For now, audiences can look forward to seeing what exciting new conductors will bring to their cities’ musical landscape.

No matter the state of the economy, at least part of the classical world is in recovery.