LEWISTON — Cellist Allison Eldredge will join the Midcoast Symphony Orchestra Saturday and Sunday, March 10 and 11, at the Franco-American Heritage Center for a performance of Victor Herbert’s Second Cello Concerto.

Guest conductor Karla Kelley will also lead the orchestra in pieces by Tchaikovsky and Carl Maria von Weber.

Herbert is best known for his operettas. “Naughty Marietta” and “Babes in Toyland” may be the most familiar today, but in his time he was a central figure in the classical music life of this country.

The cello concerto Eldredge will perform is the single instrumental work of Herbert’s that has enjoyed attention since first performed, and it is said to have inspired Dvorak to write his durable B minor concerto — a piece Eldredge played previously with the Midcoast Symphony Orchestra.

Eldredge has performed as a soloist with the Chicago Symphony, London’s Academy of St. Martin-in-the-fields, the New York Philharmonic and many other world-class orchestras. She has performed under the baton of such luminaries as Zubin Mehta, Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop and Joseph Silverstein.

Eldredge is artistic director of the Killington Music Festival in Vermont. She is also a member of the Boston Trio and serves on the faculty of Harvard University and the New England Conservatory Preparatory School.

A music critic in Amsterdam once said of Eldredge: “She belongs to ‘the creme de la creme’ of cello talents. Her playing can be summarized in two words: pure passion.”

The orchestra will also perform Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 3 in G Major, which is essentially a symphony, though the quality and shape of the movements would be unusual in a symphony “proper.” The beautifully orchestrated music runs the emotional scale from joyous to melancholic to triumphant. When the piece premiered in 1885, it was an immediate and enormous success.

The concert will begin with von Weber’s Overture to Der Freischutz. The opera is popular in Europe, though lesser-known in the United States. The story’s complex plot involving hunters, pacts with the devil, tragic lovers and magic bullets plays out in the themes of the overture.

The March 10 concert will begin at 7:30 p.m. at the Franco center. It will be repeated at 2:30 p.m. Sunday, March 11, at the Orion Performing Arts Center at Mt. Ararat Middle School in Topsham. Tickets are $17/anyone 18 and younger admitted free. For information or tickets, call 846-5378 or visit www.midcoastsymphony.org. Tickets also available at the door, Now You’re Cooking in Bath and The Gulf of Maine bookstore in Brunswick.

Cellist Allison Eldredge will perform as soloist with the Midcoast Symphony Orchestra in Lewiston and Topsham on March 10-11, respectively.