It Takes Mozart to Make Group Sound Its Best

Genius will out. The opening program of Southwest Chamber Music’s summer festival at the Huntington Library ambled along pleasantly enough Sunday evening, in the second of two weekend performances. An odd Baroque bit, a neo-Baroque premiere, and a little-known ballet score by Darius Milhaud made gentle and occasionally amusing but mainly fleeting impressions.

Then came Mozart, and what had been a passive experience suddenly became active indeed. The ever refreshing “Dissonant” Quartet, K. 465, can engage the heart, mind and ear on many levels and did so again here in a joyous, intelligent performance by violinists Agnes Gottschewski and Christine Frank, violist Jan Karlin and cellist Maggie Edmondson. They may have shorted the dark side of the piece in mystery and vehemence, but otherwise theirs was a richly inhabited, lovingly collegial reading.

That great light, however, left the rest of the material sounding even paler in retrospect. It is hard to imagine the almost tuneful meanderings of Milhaud’s “The Dreams of Jacob” expressed in meaningful choreography, untroubled as they are by any of the wonder or terror of the Old Testament account. Jeff von der Schmidt presided over a genial performance, headed by Stuart Horn’s sweetly woody oboe playing, with soft-grained support from Frank, Karlin, Edmondson and bassist Tom Peters.

One could imagine, say, a Balanchine disciple doing something gracefully pert with the late Robert Linn’s kinetic “Interventions.” Basically an attractive string trio transcription of four Bach inventions, with an added part for oboe, the piece gratefully gave multifaceted work to Horn, Frank, Karlin and Edmondson.

Composed for two unspecified melody instruments, the third concert, or sonata, of Francois Couperin’s “Les Gouts Reunise” has been revived in many instrumental guises. Edmondson and Peters proved nimble and stylish enough for it, but fuzzy in tone and pitch.