If there is such a thing as a typical French composer, it might be Ernest Chausson, whose “Poem of Love and of the Sea” was sung by Felicity Lott at Tuesday’s concert of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. In Chausson’s songs there is the ambiguity of souls in need of privacy and solitude and yet filled with the need to be felt by others. Passion subdued by reticence was as necessary to Couperin in the 18th century as to Poulenc in the 20th.

This “Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer” — two song sequences separated by an orchestral interlude — occupied Chausson for more than 10 years. Finished in 1893, the piece is French in another way, representing a national culture’s hideous fascination with Wagner, a near-obsession that ended in the only completely successful Wagneresque opera ever written, Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande.”

“The Flower of the Waters” at the start of Chausson’s piece comes off as a Wagnerian operatic soliloquy. “The Death of Love” concludes with a segment called “The Time of Lilacs,” a song within a song and one of the composer’s most touching moments. It is interesting how Chausson’s endings tend to swell rapturously but then die quietly away, as if the music were embarrassed at having worn its heart so openly.

At 60 Ms. Lott remains a lovely presence. She sells this music using the same ambiguities of strong feeling and restraint that were used to create it. Her soprano has lost power with the years, but what remains is well managed.

Tania León’s new piece “Ácana” bears the name of a tree abundant in her native Cuba. It is a complex, almost mazelike accumulation of layers: busy, dangerously eccentric in its rhythmic life, full of birdcalls and other evidence of wildlife, and melting together the many ethnicities that make up Caribbean culture. The music does not seem to move from Point A to Point B but rather stands in one place, as in the middle of a forest, gradually absorbing the sounds around it.

Orpheus played a lineup of difficult music with more mutuality of mood and ensemble than I can ever remember. Copland’s “Three Latin American Sketches,” acidic in tone and with sharp, uneven edges, was a model of confidence. Chausson’s orchestra parts were lovely. A littler looser but appropriately energetic was Bizet’s Symphony in C at the end. Orpheus advertises itself as having no conductor, but given the athletic body language emanating from different parts of the orchestra, it really has four or five.