Feature Review: As cellist Yo-Yo Ma performs Lalo and Saint-Saëns, with Fauré for good measure, at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, directed by Charles Dutoit,  we survey the orchestra’s continuing French focus into the months ahead.  

By Nancy Malitz

Although it was not billed as such, the March 19-21 concerts of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma provided yet more prelude to the CSO’s French-focus festival “Reveries and Passions,” coming throughout all of May and into June at Symphony Center.

In truth, the CSO’s festivals have a way of bubbling over the rim — not great for marketing to those who contemplate drinking it all in. When does this Gallic state-of-mind end? When did it start?

Better to ignore these questions and bask instead in the meandering, progressive celebration of French music that is already underway, from the Baroque to Pierre Boulez, who turns 90 on March 26.  [For details about what’s still ahead, see below.]

Now Ma and conductor Charles Dutoit have taken their turn, the first a Paris-born Chinese American, the second a Lausanne-born Swiss, although they hardly need citizenship papers as proof of their right to rule in this repertoire.

Charles Dutoit led two weeks of concerts devoted to Ravel, Debussy, D’Indy, Saint-Saëns, Franck and Lalo. And Ma, who has a hand in the shaping of CSO initiatives in his role as creative consultant, will be back on May 17 for a chamber music event featuring the roiling exoticism of Ravel’s “Chansons madécasses” (1925-26) and the breathtaking transfiguration of Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” written in 1941 while he was a prisoner of war in a Nazi stalag.

Meanwhile it was a pleasure hear Ma, who turns 60 this year, in such good form as he presented not one but three French works (encore included) with the CSO in his March visit. Édouard Lalo’s infectiously buoyant and lyrical Cello Concerto — not heard at CSO subscription concerts since 2000, when Ma did it last — enjoyed pride of place on the program.

The Lalo is an odd case, beloved by emerging cellists, who often learn it as one of their first big concertos upon earning virtuoso stripes, and nevertheless rare on concert programs. What a delight it was to be reminded of the winner this 1877 showpiece really is.

Big-hearted and rhapsodic in the opening forays and throughout, with the cello front and center, it is also given to witty and irresistibly teasing passages with a Latin lilt for the orchestra and cello together. Dutoit and the musicians of the orchestra had no trouble managing the dynamic levels, which can be tricky, with so much of the concerto soaring forth from the cello’s middle register.

Ma was superbly, elegantly framed, and he was obviously loving it.  It was a rare circumstance that the house was not filled to the rafters, as it usually is when Ma is in town. But if the program of somewhat unfamiliar French novelties kept some fans away, the crowd in the house was loudly demonstrative — and promptly rewarded with Fauré’s “Elegy” for cello and orchestra. Its melody is surely in the cello’s Top Forty, and it brought down the house again.

Earlier on the program Ma revived another work he had not done in Chicago since 2000 — Saint-Saëns’ “La muse et le poète.” Here, Ma joined with CSO concertmaster Robert Chen in a sadly wistful repartee of delicacy and nuance. The inspiration for Saint-Saëns’ dialogue without words was the poetry of Alfred de Musset, who described a poet thorny, brooding and burned by love, confronted by a muse who repeatedly attempts to draw him out.

Almost too intimate for Orchestra Hall in the coughing season, the work did not consistently sustain that exquisite thread of suspense that was doubtless intended, but there were passages that were undeniably spell-binding.

The same could be said of the symphonic fragments from Debussy’s “The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian,” originally composed for a staged theater work with dance and chorus that lasted more than five hours. The work is now known almost exclusively as a symphonic arrangement by André Caplet, who led the original performances. This excerpt contains the spare outlines of the story about the martyr who miraculously survived being tied to a tree and made a target for Emperor Diocletian’s archers, only to be beaten to death.

It is impossible to imagine a more sympathetic interpreter of this ravishingly beautiful esoterica than Dutoit, who was also a confidently suave and ingratiating leader for the program’s opener, the heady succession of dances that constituted Ravel’s “Valses nobles et sentimentales.”

Will these concerts whet the appetite for more French music to come? One hopes as much, because they are a mere preamble to an even bigger French thrust in May, not to forget some April bon bons.

Here’s what’s ahead on the CSO’s Gallic calendar: Allons-y!

• March 23: MusicNOW at the Harris. Tickets are $26; $10 for students; with free pizza and postconcert electronica.  Includes “Dérive 2” by Pierre Boulez. This is musical material that has fascinated the lion of the French avant-garde since the 1970s. Here, it’s morphed into a 50-minute work for 11 instruments. A world premiere by Anna Clyne and a revival by Mason Bates — both CSO composers in residence — round out the program.
• April 20: Ravel’s Suite No. 2 from “Daphnis and Chloe” is featured on a program by the CSO-sponsored Civic Orchestra, an advanced pre-professional ensemble led by Cliff Colnot. Tickets are free; reservations recommended.
• April 30-May 2: Baroque and classical specialist Harry Bicket conducts the CSO in Rameau’s Dance Suite from his 1745 opera “Platée” and Poulenc’s “Concert champêtre,” written in 1927–28 for the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska.
• May 3: French pianist Cédric Tiberghien makes his Symphony Center recital debut with a 20th century Gallic program including Ravel’s “Gaspard de la nuit,” and three works by Debussy — “Masques,” “D’un cahier d’esquisses” and “L’isle joyeuse.”
• May 7, 8, 9, 15: Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the CSO in Debussy’s  “La damoiselle élue” and two works by Ravel –“Mother Goose Suite” and his fantasy opera “L’enfant et les sortilèges.” .
• May 10: French pianist Alexandre Tharaud makes his Symphony Center recital debut with Baroque works by Couperin and Rameau, Ravel’s “Miroirs” and two rarities by Éric Satie – “Avant-dernières pensées” and “Gnossiennes.”
• May 14, 16, 19: Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the CSO in a concert version of Debussy’s opera “Pelléas et Mélisande,” narrated by Dianne Wiest.
• May 15: French jazz celebration: Trumpeter Ibrahim Maalouf, who explores the boundaries of jazz with pop, soul, hip-hop and French chansons while drawing innovatively on Arabic music. With pianist Jacky Terrasson and American guests. Opening will be pianist Jean-Michel Pilc.
• May 17: Yo-Yo Ma, CSO musicians and assorted guests perfom chamber works — Ravel’s “Chansons madécasses” and his Sonata for Violin and Cello, Messiaen’s  “Quartet for the End of Time” and a world premiere by American composer Matthew Aucoin.
• May 20:  Debussy’s greatest masterwork for orchestra, “La mer,” is featured on a program by the CSO-sponsored Civic Orchestra, led by guest conductor Cristian Măcelaru. Tickets are free; reservations recommended.
• May 21, 22, 23: Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the CSO in Messiaen’s “Turangalîla-symphonie,” with French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, and Debussy’s “Syrinx.” Thibaudet also performs Ravel’s Concerto in G major.
• May 24: Chamber music at the Art Institute. A quartet of CSO musicians perform the quartets of Debussy and Fauré — violinists So Young Bae and Sylvia Kilcullen, violist Weijing Wang and cellist Daniel Katz.
• May 28, 30: Ludovic Morlot conducts the CSO in Berlioz’s “Les francs-juges” Overture in a program that also features the world premiere of “The Seamstress,” by composer in residence Anna Clyne
• June 4, 6:  Morlot returns for a second week to conduct the CSO in Gershwin’s jazzy “An American in Paris,” Stravinsky’s cocky and mocking “Jeu de cartes,” Ravel’s dramatically shattering “La valse” and his jazz-inflected Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, with Russian pianist Denis Kozhukhin.
• June 5, 7:  The CSO’s multimedia Beyond the Score project focuses on the paradoxical Maurice Ravel by adding actors, visual projections and other theatrical elements to a concert performance of the composer’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand and “La valse.”
• June 27: The CSO presents’ Berlioz’ “Symphonie fantastique” in an outdoor concert, friendly to picknickers, at the Morton Arboretum, led by James Feddeck, a winner of the Sir Georg Solti conducting award. The location is 25 miles west of Chicago, in Lisle, on Illinois Route 53.