Chamber Players perform with zest, charm

The program mostly featured light music, scored for uncommon combinations of instruments. Light music is by no means easier to play than the most serious works; often the technical demands of light music are steeper. Dvorak framed the program: the Serenade at the end, a set of Bagatelles for two violins, cello, and harmonium at the beginning. The Serenade is the more substantial piece, but Dvorak lavished on the Bagatelles the kind of captivating tunes and rhythms that another composer would have hoarded for a more prominent occasion. Violinists Malcolm Lowe and Haldan Martinson joined Eskin for these, with Vytas Baksys filling in the harmonies at the harmonium. The Serenade calls for 10 winds and two strings, an even dozen players which the group fielded; it also calls for zest, charm, and generosity of feeling, and those were available, too.

In the middle came works by Bohuslav Martinu and the late Robert Starer. Martinu's "Kitchen Revue" comes from a ballet score about the challenged romance between Pot and Lid. The music is a cheeky, cosmopolitan European take on popular dance crazes from the New World, like the tango and the Charleston. The Chamber Players offered Starer's "Concerto a tre," for clarinet, trumpet, and trombone, in the composer's chamber-music adaptation with piano instead of orchestra. The piece is brisk and craftsmanlike; the clarinet gambols around the more straightforward trumpet and trombone. The engaging players were Charles Schlueter, trumpet, and Ronald Barron, trombone, with Baksys hopscotching all over the keyboard.

The group's next concert is a high-profile Symphony Hall event Nov. 14, featuring Mozart's Quintet for piano and winds and Schubert's "Trout" Quintet. At the piano will be the BSO's new music director, James Levine.