Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Marking the composer’s 150^th birthday which occurs on March 7th, Louis Langrée led with airy elegance the orchestra and singers from the Ellen and James S. Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts in an enchanting fairy-tale double bill of Ma Mère l’Oye and L’enfant et les sortilèges.

The concert was held just up the block from Juilliard in Alice Tully Hall. Its location doubtless evoked for many bittersweet memories of the many performances Langrée led there during his twenty-one years as Music Director of the much-missed Mostly Mozart Festival. His modestly dynamic presence has also been absent from the Met since 2019, presumably because he’s now busy heading Paris’s Opéra-Comique.

Ravel’s “Mother Goose” ballet opened the program and titles projected above the stage helpfully guided us through the suite of fanciful dances. Langrée coaxed his young musicians to a colorfully lithe yet nuanced reading in which they shone with seemingly effortless ease.

After intermission, his singers confidently tackled with bracing confidence the one-act opera’s dazzling challenges: Jeanne Slater’s antically inventive semi-staging placed her eager cast of nineteen in front of the orchestra so they couldn’t rely on cues from Langrée. Yet the child’s surreal “home alone” adventures depicted in Colette’s libretto unfolded with pleasing abandon. From several rows of chairs on each side of the stage, each cast member stepped forward and with only a few accessories and pointed gestures instantly brought their delightful characters to life.

Theo Hayes’s mischievous Child brimmed with a winning mix of bratty impudence and astonished disbelief. Their big, bold mezzo filled the hall with glowing fervor but, chastened, reconciled movingly with their confounded Maman sympathetically portrayed by Naomi Steele. Amid a cast filled with composer-sanctioned doublings, Steele also portrayed the Chinese Cup and the Dragonfly. Her slightly covered mezzo, however, made less of an impact in Tully than Hayes’s.

Though they’re supposed to be performed by the same singer, Juilliard divided the roles of Fire, the Nightingale, and the Princess between two. Luna Seongeun Park’s agile soprano scintillated as first two while Song Hee Lee was a plangently melancholy Princess. Dasol Lee’s deep bass stood out as the Armchair and stern Tree and the witty pair of Kate Morton and Dongwei Shen mewed sensuously as the White and Black Cats, a more openly erotic pair than Rossini’s feline duo.

All of the singers negotiated Collette’s words with admirable clarity and the ravishing choral interjections ably demonstrated the meticulous preparation by Met legend Donald Palumbo and Bénédicte Jourdois.

Though the Met hasn’t performed Enfant since it last presented its delightful triple bill Parade from John Dexter and David Hockney in 2002, Ravel’s opera has occasionally been revived in concert around town. But one hopes that Juilliard will invite Slater to present it again in a fully staged production ideally paired with Ravel’s other opera, L’Heure Espagnole, which turns up far less frequently.