Boston Chamber delivers a moving 'Trout'

The BCMS lineup was strong, the kind of mixture of resident players and guests that keeps the interplay among performers fresh and audiences interested. Founding cellist Ronald Thomas and pianist Mihae Lee represented the home team, and the guests were violinist Lucy Chapman Stoltzman, violist Jonathan Vinocour, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra's ever-alert Edwin Barker on the double bass part, as he so often is when the ''Trout" swims into view.

This is one piece it's almost impossible to get tired of; the performance was interactive and spontaneous, and the tempo for the third movement was really fast. Schubert's variations on his own irresistible song about the carefree fish and the cold-blooded fisherman that make up the fourth movement were as always a highlight, and the smile on Stoltzman's face was contagious.

The program opened with another smiling work, Mozart's Flute Quartet in A Major featuring BCMS (and BSO) flutist Fenwick Smith along with Vinocour, Thomas, and violinist Harumi Rhodes. Smith's playing was agile, elegant, clear-toned, and spirited, and it was fun to hear the others step up to match him when their see-if-you-can-top-this solos came round in the first-movement variations.

Mezzo-soprano Marry Nessinger, another guest, sang Respighi's luscious setting of a romantically tragic poem by Shelley, ''Il Tramonto" (''The Sunset") for singer and strings followed by Shostakovich's ''Seven Romances on Poems by A. Blok" for singer and piano trio. Nessinger brings a dignified presence to the stage, and she is a serious and dedicated artist. But she lets the mechanics of singing get in her way instead of helping her to deliver the message. Her wide-ranging voice is strong, but she sings in extremes, alternating between a vibrant, almost out-of-control forte, and a pianissimo so lacking in vibrancy and color it sounds almost like a whine. She offers almost nothing between these extremes, and it is in the constant, purposeful movement back and forth across the spectrum between extremes that meaningful expression arises. No Italian singer ever inched through ''IL Tramonto" like this.

And Shostakovich wrote his cycle for an incomparably vivid, go-for-broke soprano (Galina Vishnevskaya). Most of the time Nessinger was conscientious and sincere but pallid. The songs are not, and neither are the poems. Shostakovich scored the songs for all possible combinations -- only in the last song do all the performers collaborate. The bold, imaginative playing of Stoltzman, Lee, and Thomas fatally exposed what the singer was missing.