If the air around Carnegie Hall has extra electricity this weekend, there’s good reason. For classical music watchers, there is a sense of anticipation about conductor David Robertson and the Saint Louis Symphony’s appearances on Friday and Saturday nights. It’s not just because Mr. Roberston has a flair for stimulating programming and compelling results. It’s also because he’s well-positioned to take up the baton in New York.

At a time when there is a paucity of conductors who can balance artistic concerns and the creation of a public persona, Mr. Robertson, 48, is a standout among his generation. A frequent guest conductor of the New York Philharmonic, he is considered by some to be a contender to succeed Lorin Maazel as the orchestra’s music director. Mr. Robertson, a California native, and his wife, pianist Orli Shaham, are based in New York. Mr. Robertson’s two teenage sons attend Horace Mann School, and the family, along with Milo, a dachshund puppy, travels back to St. Louis frequently.

But no matter how interesting his long-term career may be, the near-term future is exciting, too. This weekend, the Saint Louis Symphony’s offerings will include a work that typifies Mr. Robertson’s commitment to the present, “Sudden Time” by George Benjamin, who is one of the brighter lights in the British new music firmament.

And performing the work is partly personal: “We go back a long time,” Mr. Robertson said.

In the 1990s, Mr. Robertson programmed Mr. Benjamin’s music when Mr. Benjamin led Paris’s famed Ensemble Intercontemporain. Mr. Robertson explained that Mr. Benjamin was inspired to write “Sudden Time” after a dream about a thunderclap. The sound seemed to stretch as if in a spiral. The rhythm is extremely fluid, contributing to a sense of “expansion of psychological perception of time,” Mr. Robertson said.

There’s something especially engaging about listening to the conductor’s description of “Sudden Time,” the title of which comes from a poem by Wallace Stevens (“It was like sudden time in a world without time”). That something makes evident why his pre-concert talks — in which he has been known to undertake sophisticated comparisons between music and the visual arts — are so popular. In a Carnegie Hall appearance last year with the Saint Louis Symphony, of which he is now in his second season as music director, Mr. Robertson linked works of musical Impressionism to paintings by Monet. He promises a similar program based on Messaien’s imposing Turangalila Symphony next season.

Mr. Robertson strives to program new music in a “nonthreatening way,” either by coupling a new piece with works that help elucidate it or by moving out of the concert hall entirely. “Expectations are different,” he said “In a nontraditional venue, people might be more likely to think that a prepared piano or quarter-tones are cool.”

The conductor’s program for his Carnegie Hall performances demonstrates his coupling of new and elucidating works. Tonight’s concert will pair the New York premiere of “Sudden Time” with Bartok’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Pierre-Laurent Aimard as soloist and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2.

Then on Saturday night, the bill features John Adams’s 40-minute “Harmonielehre.” The title relates to the eponymous treatise on harmony by Arnold Schoenberg, which, ironically, was written around the time Schoenberg’s music abandoned traditional harmony for atonality. Mr. Robertson sees a parallel to Mr. Adams in that his “Harmonielehre” came at a time when he searched for new avenues of expression after devoting much of his early career to musical minimalism. Steeped in late 19th-century harmony, “Harmonielehre” is “constantly moving about in some philosophical realm and plays beautifully with the Adagio from Mahler’s Tenth Symphony,” which is also on the program.

Originally, the concert was to be highlighted by the soprano Dawn Upshaw singing Britten’s “Les Illuminations.” She has withdrawn for health reasons. The replacement is no less welcome: Mezzo-Soprano Susan Graham will sing Ravel’s Shéhérazade. Also on the program is Mahler’s Adagio from Symphony No. 10 in F-sharp Minor.

Ms. Upshaw’s withdrawl was not the only change to this program. Mr. Adams’s “Doctor Atomic Symphony” was to have its world premiere performances — first in Saint Louis and then in Carnegie. But it remains unfinished.

The work — commissioned by the Saint Louis Symphony, Carnegie Hall, and the BBC — is based on his opera “Doctor Atomic,” and as to the fact that it wasn’t complete in time for its scheduled performances, Mr. Robertson professes to be entirely sympathetic.

“It’s the first time ever he has not completed to deadline. But he came to realize that it would be a really new creation, not just a cut-and-paste,” the conductor said. “The power of the opera ‘Doctor Atomic‚’ is extraordinary, and part of the fascination of the new work is how he will translate it into a purely orchestral piece.”

If you miss these performances, Mr. Robertson will return to the Metropolitan Opera next season (after an absence of several years) to conduct Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio.”

And his familial ties to New York will come into play there, too. “When I do opera, I don’t like to just walk in at the last minute, but want to be part of the production. I have two teenage sons in school in New York City and am prepared to devote a large amount of time to the project.”