Commentary: Who was Mel Bonis? Civitas Ensemble shared its discovery with an intimate crowd on stage with the players.

By Nancy Malitz

How pleasantly disorienting, to sit in the choir loft rimming the Orchestra Hall stage and gaze down on the Civitas Ensemble concert featuring a small handful of Chicago Symphony musicians and pianist Winston Choi. At Civitas’ unusual event, it was the auditorium itself that formed the backdrop, a velvet sea of 2,500 unoccupied red seats. The audience was either above stage in the choir loft, or on the stage itself, flanking the players. The sound was warm and vibrant, the experience remarkably intimate.

But that’s the Civitas Ensemble, consistently defying expectations in fearlessly unique chamber music events. CSO assistant concertmaster Yuan-Qing Yu, CSO assistant principal cellist Kenneth Olsen and the Chicago-based collaborative pianist Choi have long specialized in the presentation of new works and forgotten gems, frequently in unusual spaces, often in collaboration with additional guests. On this occasion, the three Civitas regulars were joined by two more Chicago Symphony musicians – violist Danny Lai, who was brought into the CSO by music director emeritus Riccardo Muti, and violinist Gabriela Lara, the first new CSO player to be added by music director-designate Klaus Mäkelä.

The three Civitas members plus Lai opened the program with a piano quartet by the pathbreaking 19th-century French composer “Mel” Bonis, whose music you really need to know:

Mélanie Hélène Bonis, who composed with undeniable authority and grace, was born well ahead of her time in Paris, in 1858. She would have been in her mid-forties when she created the 1905 piano quartet that formed the first half of the Civitas concert. This historically important, all-but-forgotten gem is Bonis’ Op. 69 Piano Quartet No. 1 in B-flat major (for violin, viola, cello and piano), penned about 18 years after Dvořák wrote the Op. 81 Piano Quintet in A major that Civitas also performed at their soiree in an apt and revealing pairing.

The “world premiere” of Bonis’ quartet, we are told, took place in her own living room, with then-emerging conductor Pierre Monteux on viola. It was the celebrated composer César Franck who had made special arrangements for Bonis to be admitted at age 18 to the then all-male Paris Conservatory in 1876.

Although Mélanie Hélène did not pursue a professional career, which would have been extremely rare for a woman of that era, she was well respected by the leading musicians of the day, and she was prolific, with more than 300 works to her credit. (Some samples here.)  Something of a free spirit whose parents yanked her from school when she fell in love with a poet, Bonis was forced into an arranged marriage in 1883 with a much older widower.

In all, Mel Bonis raised her husband’s five children and bore three of her own with him. But she would return to composing in earnest in the 1890s. She knew Debussy, and her music was admired by Saint-Saëns, although he did have to be convinced that a man didn’t write it.

Bonis’ Piano Quartet in B-flat is an impressive discovery, sophisticated and technically challenging, with impressionistic touches suggestive of a composer who well knew Debussy’s Arabesques for piano and his “Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune,” if not yet his evocation of the sea, “La Mer,” which would have been occupying Debussy’s thoughts in the months leading up to 1905.

Civitas’ lively and robust, yet often charming performance March 4 was thus a revelation, leaving one to ponder the possibility of hearing other little-known Bonis works in the solo piano and chamber music realm. Is a recording of this particular work in Civitas’ sights? One can hope.

The program’s second half was devoted to Dvořák’s beloved Piano Quintet in A major, Op. 81, for which the Civitas trio was joined by newcomer violinist Lara, Venezuela-born and El Sistema-trained, and by violist Lai, who has been with the CSO since 2014. (Both came up through the Civic Orchestra, the CSO’s pre-professional training arm.)

What a strong ensemble these five players proved to be; the memory lingers of cellist Olsen’s patrician solo in the first movement, a noble stage-setting moment, followed by the group’s increasingly lively transformations and trade-offs. The slow movement, a beloved “Dumka” in the east-European style, shifted among passages of indulgent brooding and frenzied village dance. Yuan-Qing Yu was an excellent leader throughout, pianist Choi the equally persuasive, fluent and vital anchor. Contrasts were almost dizzying, the overall sound big, balanced and blended, with deft changes between major and minor, exuberance and petulance.

What’s next for this ambitious 12-year-old ensemble? Even one accustomed to Civitas’ surprises will find their upcoming project to be of special note: On May 7, at Nichols Concert Hall in Evanston, the group will give the world premiere of a new work, “In Sympathy,” by Chicago composer Mischa Zupko, who became the Fermilab’s official composer-in-residence in 2024. Fermilab, located in Batavia, is the country’s particle physics and accelerator laboratory, focused on exploring various mysteries of space, matter, time and energy. Zupko’s work will call for saxophone, violin, cello and piano – yet another inflection of Civitas’ adaptable makeup.