Eduard Lalo has always occupied a rather awkward place in 19th-century French music. He is almost a “two hit wonder” with his Symphonie espagnole (in effect a five-movement suite for violin and orchestra), his only regular work encountered in concert programs, and the Cello Concerto, not quite within the repertoire for that instrument.

It’s difficult to grasp now how thoroughly opera dominated French music throughout the first 70 or so years of the 19th century, when composers like Auber and Meyerbeer held sway. The French public demanded glamour and spectacle and it wasn’t until the 1880s when both Franck and Saint-Saëns produced their respective symphonies in rapid succession that the tide began to turn in favour of symphonic scores. (Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique was always regarded as too outré to be taken seriously as a conventional symphony and Bizet’s Symphony in C was heard more as a neo-classical outlier.) 

Ironically, Lalo always wanted to be thought of as an operatic composer but his opera Le Roi d’Ys was never performed in his life...