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THE BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA earned a reputation as a "French" orchestra in the days of Pierre Monteux and Charles Munch, and even Seiji Ozawa seemed more comfortable with the Gallic repertoire than with the Austro-German mainstream. All the same, of the three pieces that made up last week’s program, Camille Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 5 hadn’t been performed by the BSO since 1936, and Olivier Messiaen’s Les offrandes oubliées only once since then. Saint-Saëns, Messiaen, and Claude Franck (whose Symphony in D minor, a BSO staple, concluded the evening) were organists, and it shows in their tonality and harmony. It’s a different language from that of Berlioz or Bizet, Debussy or Ravel, and it can be difficult for American orchestras.

Under Ludovic Morlot, in his first season as assistant conductor and making his first appearance on the podium, the BSO wasn’t idiomatic. The Messiaen, a 1931 work in three parts marked "The Cross," "The Sin," and "The Eucharist," suggests French Bruckner, with a pounding "Sin" section (Messiaen was studying Le sacre du printemps at the time) and a mystical, hardly jubilant "Eucharist." The performance was intense and dramatic, more Franco-American than French.

Saint-Saëns composed his piano concerto in Cairo in 1896, but it gets its nickname, "Egyptian," from the second movement’s Arabic modal intervals and muezzin calling. Soloist Stephen Hough sauntered through the first movement like an English boulevardier, conveying its easy lyricism but not the dance pulse of the plainchant-like opening phrases. And though he moved comfortably between Islamic prayer and French music hall (at one point the music seems poised to break into "Au clair de la lune") in the second movement and was unfazed by the prestidigitational challenges of the third, his plain-spun tone had no organ richness, and neither he nor Morlot did much to clarify the concerto’s elusive structure.

The Franck simply lacked finesse, Gallo Hearty Burgundy substituting for the French original. I don’t remember the orchestra’s ever being as flat-out loud as it has been this season. Anchored by Ann Hobson Pilot’s harp, the second of the three movements had nice weight and point. But like Saint-Saëns’s concerto, this symphony evolves rather than developing in what we think of as the usual Bach-Beethoven-Brahms way, and it requires a steady, even intellectual (think Thomas Beecham) hand on the transitions. Morlot was all earnest enthusiasm, dynamic, callow, an American in Paris.

BOSTON LYRIC OPERA productions can seem overconceptualized and undersung, particularly in contrast with the straightforward productions Teatro Lirico d’Europa has been bringing to town, but the BLO Eugene Onegin that’s up now at the Shubert Theatre (remaining performances are April 8, 10, and 12) trumps the enjoyable Carmen that TLE brought two weeks back. Not that it’s without concepts. A stand of a dozen birch trees (a Russian symbol of fidelity) outside Madame Larina’s house persists through Tatyana’s letter scene, her name-day party, the duel between Onegin and Lensky, and even Prince Gremin’s ballroom and drawing room. The opening scene’s prevailing white (including both girls’ dresses) goes through pink and red to arrive at a drawing room whose furniture — the same sleigh bed, table, and chair that were in Tatyana’s bedroom — and lifesize painting of Tatyana are all draped in funereal black, as if to mark her journey from innocence to widowhood. The slow procession that opens the third act is jarring: the polonaise the orchestra is playing should transport us to Gremin’s ballroom, but looking at what seemed a funeral cortège (for Lensky?), I wondered whether I hadn’t been transported to a Boris Eifman production instead, and I still have no idea why depictions of an onion-dome church (St. Petersburg’s Church of the Resurrection?) and clock spire (Sts. Peter and Paul?) are hanging in the night sky.

Rather than mystifying, however, most of stage director James Robinson’s ideas open up Pushkin’s poem, like bringing on a fantasy Onegin to caress Tatyana while she’s writing the letter. (John Cranko had a similar idea for his ballet Onegin.) And he’s abetted by an excellent cast, good actors all, no transcendent voices but no mediocre ones either. Maria Kanyova’s Tatyana is no romantic/tragic heroine but a neurotic bookworm who resents younger sister Olga’s gaiety and doesn’t offer Onegin much more than self-pity and the conviction that her prince has come. In his white suit, black waistcoat, and nautical cap, Mel Ulrich’s Onegin is just exotic enough to spark Tatyana’s interest without soliciting it; he treats her with respect both before and after receiving the letter, and at her party he means to tease Lensky, not insult him. Swinging her shoulders and bouncing up and down, Elizabeth Batton’s Olga belies Onegin’s "Van Dyck madonna" description; you can see why she might want more sparkle from life than Garrett Sorenson’s pedestrian poet (another thoughtful interpretation) seems likely to provide. John Cheek as Gremin gave his aria weight and pathos; Dorothy Byrne as Madame Larina and Josepha Gayer as Tatyana’s nurse didn’t overplay the light comedy. The Russian diction was generally good, though Sorenson could have more "oil" in his "Olga." The orchestra under BSO music director Stephen Lord started square (just compare Semyon Bychkov’s Philips recording) and was too often too loud but otherwise held up its end.

And that ending, Tatyana and Onegin as well as the furniture in black, is a chiller — but it’s not just the concept. Tatyana wrote in her letter that she could never be another’s; now she says she is. She also wrote that she was entrusting herself to Onegin’s honor, a trust he’s about to forfeit. Not tragedy but irony — in Pushkin, in the opera, and well delineated in this BLO production. Art that pays attention to the past will always have a future.