"Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet."

The words of Jean Jacques Rousseau could be the rallying cry of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra during its search for a new music director. At this point, the post is destined to go unfulfilled for at least two seasons since programming and bookings are done so far ahead.

"It's much more important to get it right than to do it quickly," said Larry Tamburri, the symphony's CEO, in the only public comment he's given on the subject.

The unusual length of the search to succeed Mariss Jansons stems in large part from PSO leaders taking a year to replace Gideon Toeplitz as managing director (with Tamburri). This, coupled with poor "auditioning" of several prominent candidates, David Zinman among them, and the loss of some candidates to other symphonies, such as David Robertson to St. Louis, has returned the search to square one.

With potential candidates streaming into the vacuum next season -- including Marin Alsop, Martin Haselbock, Peter Oundjian and Mark Wigglesworth -- it may take a year even to name a designate. Pinchas Zukerman comes often next year as a pseudo music director and Hans Graf will lead the PSO on an important European tour in 2005, but both appear to be far down the list. Candidates such as Donald Runnicles, Alan Gilbert, Leonard Slatkin and Antonio Pappano may now be in the running, though they need to get in front of the orchestra.

James Conlon performed well recently and is appreciated by many in the PSO as a solid, if not spectacular candidate. But there's a dark horse lurking. Though relatively unknown locally, Yan Pascal Tortelier, son of the eminent cellist Paul Tortelier, blew away many in the orchestra this past February. As a result he's been asked back to conduct in its James Galway Festival.

Could this Frenchman and former principal conductor of the BBC Philharmonic sneak into the post on musicality, even as management looks for a conductor to bridge the gap to the community? The PSO won't answer that question at least until after he returns in June.

As is stands now, it won't be a shock if the orchestra goes the route of an interim music director -- something that rarely occurs in top American orchestras and has never happened at the PSO. A likely interim might be Andrew Davis, who is available and did an above-average job in fall. While he didn't impress everyone, he had creative moments. He has two weeks next season to work his magic with the orchestra.

Conductors Charles Dutoit, who is taking the PSO to Carnegie Hall in the fall, and Christoph von Dohnanyi, an orchestra favorite, might also take this route, but playing the role of "temporary solution" is a tough sell for a big ego.

In the meantime, orchestra lovers should remind themselves that patience is a virtue.