After a full schedule of masterclasses — plus concerts featuring Mosher guest artist, clarinetist Anthony McGill, with Kimberly Clark and Kyle Walker, and a lovely chamber music collaboration between 2023 fellows and Academy faculty and guest artists — Week No. 2 of the Music Academy’s 2023 Summer Festival, will culminate in the always eagerly anticipated annual resurrection of the Festival Orchestra, 7:30 p.m., Saturday, June 24 in the Granada Theater, 1214 State St.

The freshly minted world class orchestra, led by French conductor Stéphane Denève (with mezzo-soprano and Lehrer Vocal Institute co-chair Sasha Cooke) will perform an appropriately all-French program given over to the works of Hector Belioz (1803-69), including his exquisite song cycle “Les Nuits D’Été, Songs on Poems by Théophile Gautier, Opus 7” (1834-56), and his purely orchestral masterpiece the “Symphonie fantastique, Épisode de la vie d’un artiste en cinq parties, Opus 14” (1830).

Maestro Denève — who has worked with Sir Georg Solti, Georges Prêtre, and Seiji Ozawa, and is now music director of the Saint Louis Symphony — will also be the subject of Saturday’s pre-concert Meet the Conductor event, in which the Q&A will be led by flute fellow Arin Sarkissian, 6-7 p.m. Saturday, in Sullivan Goss, An American Gallery, 11 E. Anapamu St.

Berlioz’s personal peculiarities, like those of any great artist, can, rather than illuminating his works, get in the way of our appreciation of them.

“It’s the singer, not the song,” sang the Rolling Stones, 50-plus years ago, and if we switch “artist” for “singer” and “art” for “song,” we come up with the standard approach to assessing the creator and his or her creations.

I take the opposite view: it is only the song that matters, and if we, out of misdirected enthusiasm for the song, plunge into the biography of the singer or songwriter looking for answers to the mystery, we usually find ourselves thinking rather less of the song than when we started.

“Les Nuits D’Été” is probably the greatest song cycle composed between Schubert’s “Winterreise” (1827) and Gustav Mahler‘s “Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen” (1885).

“Au Cimetière,” the most hauntingly beautiful of the six, would make a perfect soundtrack for any story by Berlioz’s near contemporary — and spiritual sibling — Edgar Allen Poe.

As for the “Symphonie fantastique,” it is a shock to discover that it was composed in 1830, so blithely does Berlioz dispense with the rules of form and harmony that would keep most other European composers in line for another fifty years.

You may want to count the coughing spells that break out during the third movement, but the second movement waltz is gorgeous and exhilarating, while the fourth movement march is crushing and irresistible at the same time.

Tickets to the Festival Orchestra start at $55 (ages 7-17 admitted free; $10 Community Access tickets as available), and can be purchased at the Granada Ticket office, 1214 State St., or by phone at 805-899-2222.

Tickets to all festival events are available in person from the Summer Festival Ticket Office, the Carsey Ticket Office (10 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays, June 5-Aug. 4); by phone at 805-969-8787; or online at www.musicacademy.org.