Damien Top and Linda Hall at Symphony Space The weather on Saturday was seething and unsettled. Tornadoes even touched down in Queens and Brooklyn. Jennifer Taylor for The New York Times Damien Top and Linda Hall, in a recital as part of the New York Chamber Music Festival at Symphony Space. If you sought respite from the rain and swirling wind, you could have done worse than to enter Symphony Space that evening. The music there was by Jules Massenet, who loved the peacefulness of country life and whose sweet, sometimes melancholy tranquillity is only rarely touched by true discord. Even the vehement moments of his works are refined. Part of the richly varied New York Chamber Music Festival, the recital Saturday of Massenet's songs, featuring the French tenor Damien Top and the American pianist Linda Hall, celebrated the 100th anniversary of his death, on Aug. 13, 1912. At that time Massenet reigned as perhaps the most successful French opera composer of his time, the author of blockbusters like "Manon," "Werther" and "Thaïs." While those works are still part of the active repertory, Massenet's popularity has faded since its height, along with much of the rest of 19th-century French opera. There is something about that period's pristine lyricism and guileless sincerity that feels very distant from our time. Best known for his theatrical work, Massenet also wrote more than 200 songs, which fed the great appetite of salon culture in fin-de-siècle France, but which are now rarely performed. Some were published as individual works and some as collections, including the "Poèmes": the cycles, often with texts by the poet Armand Silvestre, that helped make Massenet's reputation. "Poème d'Avril" (1866), written when Massenet was in his early 20s, epitomized the style that would define his songwriting career. The piano provides a subtle carpet, often in rushing arpeggios, that accentuates a vocal line as gently steady as Silvestre's verse. Massenet provides the opportunity both for simple, elegant lyricism and for dramatic declamation, channeling the tradition of the French "mélodrame," a potent alternation of singing and underscored speech that he used to great effect in "Manon." "Poème d'Octobre" (1876) and "Poème d'un Soir" (1895) offer more of the stylish same, but in "Expressions Lyriques" (1913) the harmonies get a bit stranger and the piano parts less predictable. In "Nocturne" the piano line creeps austerely around the singer's tale of a midnight forest walk. The songs give off a lovely perfume, but they are not distinctive enough to stand wholly on their own. Unfortunately they lacked an ideal interpreter on Saturday evening. Mr. Top, a specialist in the French repertory as a singer, musicologist and teacher, sounded dry and strained throughout the recital, projecting some of the songs" charm but almost none of their ease and flow. The more impressive musical performance was by Ms. Hall. Her extraordinarily liquid, sensitive playing - engrossing even in Massenet's endlessly burbling arpeggios - was the real reason to use Symphony Space as shelter from the storm. The New York Chamber Music Festival continues through Saturday at Symphony Space, 2537 Broadway, at 95th Street; (212) 864-5400, symphonyspace.org.