DUBLIN, Ireland -- When it comes to selling Pittsburgh to international corporations, it's good policy to ride the success of the local team. No, not the Steelers -- the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

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While the Black and Gold's status is stratospheric in the United States, it holds considerably less cachet in the rest of the world, where soccer even claims the name football. That's one reason the Allegheny Conference on Community Development and its affiliate, the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance, count on the orchestra's marketability when promoting Pittsburgh overseas.

"The Pittsburgh Symphony has an unbelievably stellar reputation no matter where you are in the world," said Michael Langley, CEO of the Allegheny Conference, in Dublin on Monday. "To leverage that kind of positive attribute of the Pittsburgh region is priceless, in our estimation."

Even with the complex logistics of touring internationally, the PSO welcomes the added role of helping to market Western Pennsylvania.

"We are very proud of our orchestra and of the consistent rave reviews it receives from European audiences, but we are just as proud to be performing with the additional purpose of promoting the Pittsburgh region," said Larry Tamburri, orchestra president.

It's not just the Pittsburgh Symphony that assumes this role.

"It's quite common that a traveling orchestra will have corporate sponsors or bring a group of supporters who use the tour as an opportunity to promote cultural exchange between cities," said Julia Kirchhausen, spokeswoman for the American Symphony Orchestra League.

The PSO's European tour is sponsored by Mellon Financial Corp.

Classical music's global popularity, as well as its traditional association with excellence and high culture, make for an attractive combination for any city trying to promote itself. To most Europeans, the orchestra's presence is a more tangible sign of the success and status of Pittsburgh than any survey -- even one as boosterish as a recent list by the business publication Expansion Management, which placed Pittsburgh in the nation's top 10 U.S. metropolitan areas for companies considering relocating or expanding.

Using a PSO tour to promote the city is nothing new. In 1999, Mayor Tom Murphy tagged along on a West Coast trip, trying to woo companies from San Diego to Seattle.

For the Allegheny Conference and the PRA, traveling trade fairs are relatively common. Last year, officials logged three trade missions: The PRA's Roger Cranville said trips to Denmark and Germany together cost the PRA $14,700; the U.K. mission cost the Allegheny Conference $9,563. (Costs for the current trip have not been tallied, said Rachel Gogos, spokeswoman for the Allegheny Conference.)

In Denmark, the delegation met with 33 companies, two of which had been to Pittsburgh. Two others were expected to visit in 2006. Allegheny County Chief Executive Dan Onorato was on that trip, with the conference paying for his flight and some meals.

Pittsburgh has no companies based here from Denmark, but German companies have the single biggest foreign presence in the region.

Delegates representing six Pittsburgh companies went to the U.K. last July for three days. Twenty-five companies attended a half-day seminar hosted by the PRA.

"We ended up with four new investments in the Pittsburgh region as a result," Mr. Langley said. "In only one year we landed four deals out of that trip, and that is the type of return we really look forward to on this trip."

Coupled with the PSO's renown through acclaimed recordings and travels in Europe, Asia and South America, the current tour stands both as an artistic and business opportunity. It doesn't hurt that rave reviews for recent European tours under former music director Mariss Jansons raised the orchestra's profile. When European music lovers hear "Pittsburgh," it's the orchestra's excellence that first comes to mind, even before the name of that American football team.

And that, in a nutshell, is why economic promoters love the orchestra.

"It is ideal," said Richard Simmons, chairman of the orchestra's board and former head of Allegheny Ludlum Corp. "The symphony in Pittsburgh is internationally acknowledged. Mike Langley and his team can piggyback on it."

Mr. Simmons, preparing to speak at a private reception in a Dublin hotel for Irish businessmen, said the promotional aspects of the tour cut both ways. "This is all about, are there meaningful things beneficial to both cities? If they improve the economy of Pittsburgh, that's the bottom line."

After the reception, the Pittsburgh representatives -- including Medrad CEO John Friel, who heads the Pittsburgh Regional Alliance; Allegheny Conference senior director Suzi Pegg; and former PSO board chair Thomas Todd -- met again with the Irish contingent in a roundtable discussion.

Mr. Langley said the current tour is especially valuable because the orchestra is performing in locations that are considered business hot spots in Europe.

"The largest contingent of global businesses already located in the Pittsburgh region are from the U.K. and Germany," he said. "In fact, totally, our international complement of either headquarters or major operations in Pittsburgh numbers about 850 international businesses, and about a third of those are from Germany and the U.K. Germany alone has almost 200 business entities in the Pittsburgh region, with another 100 or more from Britain."

Mr. Langley and his Pittsburgh associates have meetings planned for almost every day of the rest of the orchestra's tour. "When we knew we had an opportunity to link arms with our partners in U.K. and Germany on this trip, it was quite an attractive opportunity. We are going to have a full house at all of our receptions."

After talking up Pittsburgh and associating it with the excellence of the PSO -- which includes getting the foreign business people tickets to concerts -- the next step is to get them to Pittsburgh.

"There is always the big surprise to businesses who have thought of Pittsburgh as a traditional industrial city," said Mr. Langley. "When they really start looking under the hood, they find out what a world-class region it is, and the symphony is just symptomatic of the tremendous assets we have."