While not unusual, it's always exciting when a lesser-known artist catapults into the spotlight as a last-minute replacement for an scheduled soloist.

That was the case here on Saturday when violinist Augustin Hade- lich stepped in for Nikolaj Znaider after the more established violinist canceled his appearance due to illness.

The cancellation brought Hadelich his debut with the New York Philharmonic on the opening weekend of the venerable orchestra's eighth annual summer residency at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival. With Alan Gilbert conducting, Hadelich turned in a brilliant performance of Felix Mendelssohn's beloved Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64.

Headlining the "German Masters" program, the 26-year-old - born in Italy to German parents - wowed the capacity audience at the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater with his self- assured, technically fluent and musically sensitive approach. And when he breezily performed Niccolò Paganini's Caprice No. 17 as an encore, he easily confirmed his place on the shortlist of today's top violin virtuosos - all the more meaningful given that a decade ago, after he survived a fire that burned 75 percent of his body, doctors told him he would never play again.

Upon a customary, rousing reading of the national anthem on Friday, the Philharmonic's opening night featured another young talent, pianist Jonathan Biss, in Beethoven's Concerto No. 4 in C Major, Op. 58. Not quite 30 years old, Biss - who holds a particular affinity for early Romantic composers - demonstrated a comfortable, previously established rapport with the orchestra and effortless virtuosity in the work's partially improvised cadenzas. What really sets Biss' playing apart, however, are his always deft and deeply felt keystrokes that bespeak remarkably acute, intensely sympathetic interpretive insights.

Besides the two start soloists, Gilbert - the first native New Yorker to hold the post of music director of the New York Philharmonic (since September) - proved himself an audacious conceptual narrator of sweeping symphonic works.

On Friday, in Jean Sibelius' majestic, four-movement Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43, Gilbert laid bare its incandescent layers, expertly navigating vertical realities of poetic quietude and unabashedly extroverted themes.

Although ambient sounds around the outdoor amphitheater drowned out the dirgelike bassoon passage at the beginning of the second movement, Gilbert nimbly drew out the subsequent, more vigorous motifs that culminated in a triumphant conclusion.

Following Sibelius' substantive symphony, the Philharmonic indulged its opening-night audience with an energetic reading of Beethoven's impassioned "Overture to Egmont" as encore.

And in Saturday's richly varied program of German works, Gilbert skillfully led the superb orchestra through Mozart's lightness of being, Franz Schubert's lyricism and Richard Wagner's psychological complexity.

In particular, Wagner's dramatic "Prelude and Liebestod," from his opera "Tristan und Isolde," was delivered with precision and profound sentiment.

In Gilbert's hands, themes of unrequited love and longing and eventual fulfillment were balanced within an overarching expression of redemption through death. Capturing the work's explosive harmonic tensions and suspensions, the Philharmonic ventured through rising dissonances and fervent abandon to a place of calm and comfort.

Of special note were principal harpist Nancy Allen's elegant, shimmering passages that led toward the work's slow resolution to emotional and musical consonance.

The New York Philharmonic's six- concert series in Vail ends Friday. Information: vailmusicfestival.org