At its most important, the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival is about discovery, in hearing something worthwhile that its musicians have brought out of the libraries or fresh off the stocks for its loyal audience of nearly two decades.

In the first installment Friday of its third week of concerts, the musicians returned in a largely French program to the work of Jacques Ibert, whose Deux Mouvements of 1922 the group performed and recorded 10 years ago. That work, for two flutes, clarinet and bassoon, got an encore performance Friday night at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Hall, but it was another composition by Ibert that really raised the temperature in the room.

The Trio for violin, cello and harp, written by Ibert in the dark year of 1944 for his harpist daughter, is an exemplary piece in whose second movement the ghost of Gabriel Fauré looms large, but which overall is a quintessentially French, marvelously colorful exploration of the timbres and capabilities of its three instruments. Harpist Kay Kemper was joined by violinist Mei-Mei Luo and cellist Christopher Glansdorp for this three-movement piece, which differs from the earlier Ibert work and much other of its ilk in its red-bloodedness, fire and drive.

The opening movement, marked Allegro tranquillo, was anything but laid-back in this performance; the first chordal snap in the harp was followed by a fierce athleticism from Luo and Glansdorp for the sinuous opening theme, giving the movement a headlong feel that the three players were happy to feed with plenty of fuel. Kemper provided strong rhythmic backing for her string partners, and offered impressive power in the fountains of glissandi that burst out in the middle of the movement.

Glansdorp demonstrated beautiful tone quality in the lovely second movement, a Fauré-style chanson from its harp ostinato to its melancholy harmonies and long-limbed melody, and Luo answered him in the same open-hearted fashion. The brusque energy of the opening was evident again in the closing Scherzando con moto, in which a chattering five-note motif was prominent and was effectively contrasted with a gentler secondary theme in the harp. The three musicians worked admirably well together, and their high-octane reading of this fine Trio made it stand out.

The Ibert Deux Mouvements that followed featured the same musicians that assembled for it a decade ago: flutists Karen Dixon and Beth Larsen, clarinetist Michael Forte and bassoonist Michael Ellert. This is a slighter piece than the Trio, and gains its attractiveness in its sly humor, exemplified by the two smirking-bassoon codas. This was an expert performance, distinguished by the fat, rich flute tone of Dixon and Larsen and its ensemble control, such as the skillful group diminuendo in the first of the movements.

Larsen and Dixon opened the second half with an old-fashioned Romantic-era display piece, a fantasy on themes from Verdi’s opera Rigoletto by the flutist-composer team of brothers Karl and Franz Doppler. It was designed to show off flute virtuosos, and in Larsen and Dixon it had two excellent players who gave us a good idea of why this kind of piece was so popular in its day.

Although this piece featured, briefly, La donna è mobile and Bella figlia dell’amore, much of it was built on the Act I aria for Gilda, Caro nome. The Dopplers surrounded these tunes with plenty of rapid chromatic scales in duet, or let one flute play difficult accompaniment figures while the other sang sweetly above it. There was no hint of any squeaks, honks or flubs in any of this, just two veteran players spinning out yards of silky smooth scales and dazzling filigree. Pianist Michael Yannette accompanied skillfully, and stayed well in the background.

Yannette, Forte and Ellert opened the concert with the other German work on the program, Mendelssohn’s early Concertpiece No. 2 for clarinet, bassoon and piano, written in 1832 but with the misleadingly high posthumous opus number of 114. The bassoon part of this work was originally composed for the now obsolete basset horn, and Forte hinted in remarks before the piece that real basset horns might show up on the festival’s concerts in its upcoming 20^th anniversary season.

This is a modest but very attractive work, a chamber concerto for the two wind instruments that’s light on its feet. Both Ellert and Forte played with charm and suavity, with Ellert tackling a slightly more difficult part in that the second of the three movements required him to play the wide-ranging arpeggios supporting the clarinet tune, an Italian opera aria in everything but name. Both musicians were nicely in synch for the bubbling third movement, and they had good support from Yannette.

Like the second concert in the festival, the third ended with a major work from the string quartet repertoire, this time the String Quartet in F of Maurice Ravel. This sublime masterpiece contains not just wonderful music but also an object lesson in Ravel’s genius at orchestration; few composers before or since have been able to draw so much color and sound from only four instruments.

Violinists Dina Kostic and Rebecca Didderich (more familiar as a violist), violist Rene Reder and cellist Susan Bergeron joined forces for the Ravel, and did a more than respectable job. They were at their best in the most straightforward parts of the quartet, such as the tricky five-beat fourth movement, which sounded carefully and thoroughly rehearsed, and in the second movement, with its frequent time shifts and pizzicato punctuation.

And while this was a good presentation of the quartet in that it allowed listeners to appreciate the warmth of Ravel’s melodic writing and the richness of his sonic fabric, something subtle about the music seemed to elude this foursome. The closing bars of the third movement, for example, were deliberate where they might have been mysterious and dramatic, and the delicate, frequent harmonic changes in the first movement could have been played with a greater sense of surprise and mood.

What’s needed here is a little more of what makes Ravel, well, Ravel: An illusion of spontaneity and naked emotion carried out by means of an almost fearful precision.

The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival repeats this program at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre, Delray Beach, and at 8 p.m. Monday at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Tickets are $22. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org.

When Michael Zager founded the commercial music program at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton in 2002, it's unlikely that some students knew about the level of commercial success he'd achieved in the music industry.

Perhaps they know now. The 67-year-old professor and eminent scholar has had a 50-year career as a keyboardist, composer, producer, arranger and educator that includes 13 gold or platinum records and three instructional books.

The Passaic, N.J., native has also worked with jazz artists Herb Alpert, Joe Williams and Arturo Sandoval as well as R&B acts The Spinners, Luther Vandross and Peabo Bryson, written chart-topping hits, and discovered future six-time Grammy Award-winning singer Whitney Houston when she was only 14 years old.

“I was producing a record for her mother, Cissy Houston,” says Zager, who lives in Delray Beach with his wife (and has sons as old as some of his hit songs at ages 40, 37 and 33). “One of her background singers couldn't make the recording session. When I asked Cissy who she wanted to sub, she said her 14-year-old daughter, and I thought she was crazy. But Whitney came into the studio and seemed like she'd already been in the business for 40 years. I'd never heard anything like her, and had her sing on some of my own albums afterward.”

Some of Zager's original scores and recordings (with Houston, The Spinners, and his own self-titled band) are on display at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland. The professor's life experiences, as well as his multi-faceted musical education, helped to form the curriculum of his commercial music program.

“The goal is to produce graduates who are prepared for virtually every facet of the music industry as professionals,” Zager says. “We not only train them in the classroom, but we also have a professional record label, Hoot/Wisdom Recordings, so whatever they learn in class must be applied to a digital, globally distributed label. We have a creative track for students who want to be composers, arrangers and producers; a technology track for those who want to be engineers, and a business track for those who want to be executives. We also have two masters programs, one with a concentration on commercial music and the other focusing on music business administration."

“I got my master’s in commercial music at FAU in 2006,” says 46-year-old Israel Charles, a Fort Lauderdale-based composer, producer, drummer and educator. “Now I teach music technology and production at the performing arts wing of Dillard High School. It was great learning music production from Prof, and being able to make it my career. He talked to me at an educational conference in 2003, attracted me to his program, and was a great professor. I'd bring in mixes of songs that I thought were hot and ready to go, and he'd tell me what was missing and send me right back to the drawing board. He'd always find one or two elements that were needed, and he was always correct! Now I get the chance to show kids that knowledge in return, which is an awesome job.”

Zager was surprised to be hired full-time by FAU in the first place. A 1964 University of Miami graduate, he'd gone on to study at New York City institutions like Juilliard, the Manhattan School of Music and Mannes College of Music, a division of New School University. When he applied for a part-time position at FAU, administrators clearly knew about his history.

“I wasn't even a music major at Miami,” Zager says. “I loved warm weather; my grandparents were here then, and I studied to work in television, something that my oldest son ended up doing. He's a producer at Paramount. But I never wanted to go back to the cold weather.”

“I'd started teaching two courses in 1997 as an adjunct professor at the Mannes College of Music,” he continues, “back when I was a full-time composer and producer. But I wanted to move back down here and teach, and it was an accident that I got this full-time position. I really just came down here for an interview to teach a course as an adjunct professor.

“The vice president asked if I wanted to apply for my current position and it worked out, even though I'd never been a full-time academic. It was like ‘The Godfather’ in that they made me an offer I couldn't refuse. And it was the best decision I ever made to this point in my career.”

He'd certainly made some other good ones. Zager may not have planned to be in the music industry, but his career started rolling in 1968 as a member of the band Ten Wheel Drive -- horn-heavy contemporaries of Blood, Sweat & Tears and precursors to Chicago and Tower of Power. The keyboardist co-founded the group with guitarist Aram Schefrin, who now resides in Wellington. After a 1969 appearance at the Atlanta Pop Festival, the band was signed to Polydor Records, and released four albums by 1974 on either the Polydor or Capitol label.

“I was a jazz nut, and we were one of the early jazz-rock horn bands,” Zager says. “We got a record deal and became quite successful. But our management turned down Woodstock, or we might have been more successful. Although who knew then that Woodstock would be Woodstock? Once we saw what it turned into, that was our lowest point.”

Zager started composing for TV, radio, and films afterward, and built an impressive résumé that includes everything from IBM, Budweiser and Buick to Ally McBeal and the films The Eyes of Laura Mars and Summer of Sam. But the mid-1970s also produced a new musical trend called disco, something that Zager embraced wholeheartedly.

“I didn't know anything about disco,” he says. “My musical partner, Jerry Love, was the head of A&R at A&M Records in New York City at the time. When he left, we formed our production and publishing company in 1975, Love-Zager Productions, where he handles the business end and I handle the creative side. He started hanging out at Studio 54, and he said, ‘This disco thing is going to blow up, so let's make some dance records.’ I started listening to it and really liked it, right as it exploded. We ended up having hit after hit.”

The biggest was Let's All Chant by the Michael Zager Band, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard disco chart in 1978.

“I get more checks now for that song,” he says. “I sold more than five million copies of that record, and it's bigger than ever, especially outside of the United States. That's the case with most of my records. But I had a hit here with The Spinners called ‘Working My Way Back to You,’ and one with Peabo Bryson called ‘Do It With Feeling,’ which went to the top of the R&B charts.”

Disco may be a four-letter word to some music fans, but Zager is unabashedly unapologetic about the genre.

“Disco is bigger than ever now, but they just call it dance music or electronica,” he says. “What do you think Lady Gaga is? There's no difference, other than they're using synthesizers instead of orchestras. They use more tricks in the studios now. Look at the talent from that era. There were some of the greatest singers and musicians in the world recording disco.”

Most figures as successful as Zager don’t go back to school after topping the charts, but he checked his ego at the door of Mannes College between 1984 and 1988.

“I wanted to start film scoring and do big orchestrations, but I got scared that I didn't know enough,” he says. “So I went back to school and majored in composition. And this was after I'd been at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, plus studied with Stephen Sondheim for several years.”

Zager’s students praise the professor for showing them the intricacies of the music biz.

“When you walk into Prof's office, you see gold and platinum records on the wall,” says Charles, “so the hardware speaks for itself. As a songwriter and producer, that's the same impact that you want to make on the music industry. He has so much practical experience to go with his knowledge that you just keep quiet, listen, and try to soak it all in. He let me produce my own 10-song CD as my thesis, since I wanted to do something hands-on rather than written.

“I got an area singer I was working with, Rachel Brown, to contribute vocals. After I graduated, I formed my own label. And one of those songs, ‘Let's Fall in Love Again,’ ended up going to No. 1 on the ‘Billboard’ hot R&B single sales chart.”

Zager is at work on a fourth educational book, plus producing a singer named Karina Skye. He even released his own independent smooth jazz CD called South Beach Wind a few years back. While some in the industry avoid South Florida because of its tourist-driven music scene, Zager shakes his head at his good fortune.

“I wasn't even familiar with FAU before Jerry Love told me about it,” he says. “It was one of those things that happens once in a lifetime. I love being here. My job as an eminent scholar is to stay very active professionally, so it's very fulfilling, especially when I see my students get out into the world and do well. It's a dream job.”

In the days when Louis XIV was an actual presence and not merely the name of a favorite rococo interior design fashion, the faithful gathered in churches for communion with the Almighty but also for music, for the sound of a pure, unclouded voice ascending into the severe angles of a sacred space.

That very same experience, without the king, was that of an audience Saturday night at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale, as two sopranos and an organist presented an hour of early 18^th-century devotional music by two major French composers. This concert (called The Court of the Sun King: Music From Versailles), one in a series of summer events from Miami’s Seraphic Fire chorus, offered intensity and beauty in equal measure.

Sopranos Kathryn Mueller and Rebecca Duren, accompanied by Seraphic Fire founder Patrick Dupré Quigley at the petit orgue, performed four motets by Louis-Nicolas Clérambault and the three Leçons de Ténèbre of François Couperin. This is unadorned music despite its ornaments, a kind of Baroque style that has greater affinity with the plain sources of the Catholic liturgy than it does the powdered wigs of Versailles.

Mueller and Duren, both members of Seraphic Fire, have similar voices that are admirably suited for Baroque music. There is a clear, open quality to both of these singers’ instruments that is particularly impressive in the upper registers, where nary a vibrato wobble or sign of strain was heard. Mueller’s voice is slightly larger, rounder and more powerful than Duren’s, but both women sang beautifully, and demonstrated first-rate diction and high musical intelligence as well.

The program was sung without intermission, and began with the four Clérambault motets, the first in honor of the king (which by 1733, when these motets were published, was Louis XV), and the other three for the Virgin, Christmas, and Holy Tuesday. Clérambault’s style is very much of its time, though he also writes with some attractive variety, and his basic harmonic layout is less relentless than that of Couperin, which might have something to do with his being the younger man.

Duren’s ability to sing with a smoothness of line was readily apparent in the Motet de la Sainte Vierge (one of several Clérambault composed), and Mueller’s ease in the higher reaches of her voice was much in evidence during the Motet pour le jour de Noël. Both sopranos could be heard trading between higher and lower parts when singing together, with scarcely a noticeable difference, and during the Motet pour le Mardy de la Quinquagezime, they blended with exemplary loveliness at the words beginning Domine est salus.

Quigley, as always, made an expert accompanist, supporting and following his singers, and during the Christmas motet showing his usual engagement with the music by bobbing along in rhythm to the joyous text and music.

The three Tenebrae lessons of Couperin, written for Holy Wednesday in 1714, are with his books of keyboard Ordres his most celebrated works, and they are good examples of the vividness of Couperin’s musical language. Each of the initial melismatic settings of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet set a fresh color for the verses to follow, and the singers and Quigley were careful to bring it out.

This is demanding listening, with its spare performing forces and deeply pious focus adding to the challenge of its particular aural archaisms, but it repaid the effort with a shared concentration that was most noticeable during the interior pauses and the breaks between the separate lessons. Again, the crystalline clarity of the women’s voices was paramount, with Mueller showing this effectively in the long held note on the words ejus gementes in the Daleth section of the first lesson.

Duren’s purity of tone and trilling skill gave polish and nobility to the second lesson, and in the third, the climbing, sweetly clashing notes of both singers added a yearning quality that was quite attractive. At the end, too, Mueller and Duren had to leap into the upper reaches for a key passage, and both handled it with plenty of muscle to spare.

This was in some ways music only for the connoisseur, but the large audience at All Saints was deeply attentive throughout and amply appreciative at the close. Seraphic Fire and other area musical organizations have had a good run in the past year or so with explorations of the Baroque repertoire, and this visit to the world of French monarchism at its height marks another fine event in that series.

This program will be repeated this afternoon at Miami Beach Community Church in Miami Beach. The concert begins at 4 p.m. Tickets are $30 and are available at the door, through www.seraphicfire.org, or by calling (888) 544-FIRE (3473).

The 10^th string quartet of Beethoven, depending on which scholarly camp you favor, is either a genial mid-career throwback to the peak of the Haydn classical style or the earliest example of the innovatory, astonishing manner of the late-period quartets.

Either way, it’s a remarkable piece of music from a remarkable year (1809), and it was the high point Friday night of the second series of concerts in the current Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival.

Known familiarly by its Harp sobriquet, the quartet (in E-flat, Op. 74), is a brilliantly structured piece that in its outer movements employs a free-fantasy approach that emphasizes drama and sonic effect, and in its inner movements trades a placid slow movement for a searing exercise in sustained, intense emotion, and swaps a minuet for a ferocious minor-major stomp-and-fugue that echoes the Fifth Symphony and presages the Ninth.

And it was well-served by its four players: Violinists Mei-Mei Luo and Dina Kostic, violist Rene Reder, and cellist Susan Bergeron. Throughout the work the four women played with deep commitment and engagement, and displayed fine technique and musicianship. Standout moments came with Bergeron’s first volley in the battle of the third-movement fugue, which she played with great speed while giving each note its full value, and with the second movement as a whole, which had an unbroken dramatic line that lost none of its focus even during the break in the middle.

The final theme and variations was somewhat shakier, with an underplayed viola variation and some initial fuzziness about each section before recovering in the two-against-three passage toward the end. The opening movement, too, had some moments of not-quite-togetherness, but the game changed for this foursome in the final moments of the opening, as Luo began her diminished-chord fiddling and the rest of the quartet sang out the central motifs with warmth and beauty. That’s where this performance jelled, and I think by Monday evening, with two more concerts under their belt, these musicians will be able to give this great work an exceptional reading.

The Beethoven was easily the best music on the program at Palm Beach Atlantic’s Persson Hall, which opened with another string quartet, the Oración del Torero, Op. 34, of Joaquín Turina. This is probably Turina’s best-known piece, and the string players – Kostic, Rebecca Didderich, Reder and cellist Christopher Glansdorp – performed it with panache and high style. Intonation, however, was problematic, with most of the unison octave passages not in tune, and that makes a difference in a piece as transparent, aromatic, and melody-oriented as this one. Glansdorp played beautifully, even when just buttressing the music with fat pizzicati, and the four musicians handled the whispered, atmospheric ending very nicely.

The Turina was followed by the sextet for piano and wind quintet of Francis Poulenc, one of the high points of French 20^th-century chamber music writing. Pianist Lisa Leonard was joined by flutist Karen Dixon, oboist Sherie Aguirre, clarinetist Michael Forte, hornist Ellen Tomasiewicz and bassoonist Michael Ellert for this piece, which the festival is revisiting after scheduling it some 16 years ago.

This is a piece for expert players, and the six musicians had no real difficulty playing in good French style or understanding Poulenc’s kitschy aesthetic, nor were the technical challenges beyond their reach. Tomasiewicz missed a couple notes here and there, but this is a murderous horn part, and what sticks in the memory more is her fine playing of the soaring high passages, especially in the finale.

But overall, this was a much too aggressive performance, as if the volume had been cranked up to 11 and left there. There was a powerful crispness to the music, particularly on Leonard’s part, who played with great strength and clarity, but what was missing was a sense of proportion and variety. Poulenc is a composer of many shifting moods, and it would have been better had the impressive bignesses of each movement also offered real contrast, not only in the presentation of the different themes, but in basic dynamics, which would have helped the music regain its subtlety.

The other work on the program was a contemporary piece, the Arioso for trumpet and wind quintet of Jerzy Sapieyevski, a Polish-born American composer who has taught at American University for years, and who wrote the work in 1986 at the request of the International Trumpet Guild. Trumpeter Marc Reese, whose standup-comedian style pre-performance remarks were quite funny, was the soloist.

This is a generally miserable piece of music, I’m sorry to say, at the level for the most part of a bad movie score. The piece dates from a period of classical composition when composers were beginning to feel unafraid to write tunes again, and Sapieyevski has a good feel for a catchy melody. But these pop-flavored tunes are too obvious, and the composer compounds the sin by leaving the accompanying quintet playing cheesy block chord changes most of the time.

Reese plays quite well, and he tossed off the scale rocket at the end of the watery-disco main section with sparkle each time it occurred. But he really needs to have something much better to play, like the Saint-Saëns Septet he performed with the festival a few years back. That’s a piece worth reviving, and one hopes the festival musicians won’t be offering the Arioso the same courtesy in years to come.

The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival repeats this program at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre, Delray Beach, and at 8 p.m. Monday at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Tickets are $22. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org.

Pieces of music come and go, sometimes just once before disappearing, sometimes aired out only every once in a while like an unfashionable sweater found in the depths of Grandfather’s closet.

But many of these works are pieces of real merit, and it’s up to performing organizations to start turning old and new rarities into repertory. The musicians of the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival began that process in earnest Friday night at Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Persson Hall with the first program of their current 19^th season of summer concerts.

Friday’s program (which repeats Sunday and Monday) was a challenging, demanding assemblage that included brand-new music and two older pieces that the group has recorded on its series of six discs for Boca Raton’s Klavier Records. What the audience heard was the formation of the festival’s own canon, its own discoveries, and if the wider musical world pays more attention to pieces such as the Suite for oboe, clarinet and viola of Randall Thompson, or the Nonet of Bohuslav Martinů, it will have this durable South Florida event to thank.

The same goes for Gee’s Bend Pieces, which had its world premiere in January at Lynn University during a weeklong new music happening featuring its composer, Kenneth Frazelle. It’s a trio for marimba, piano and trumpet, and pianist Lisa Leonard, who asked Frazelle to write the piece, helped make a strong case for it Friday night when she brought it back for this week of festival programs. Whereas the debut performance by a talented Lynn student ensemble had an almost raucous energy, this reading of the four-movement work had more shape, with Leonard, trumpeter Marc Reese and percussionist Michael Launius making the most of Frazelle’s prominent motifs and abundance of instrumental color.

This is a well-crafted, big-boned, forceful composition, strongly tonal and brashly harmonized, that is meant to evoke the celebrated African-American folk-quilting community of Gee’s Bend, Ala. Its two outer movements are powerfully rhythmic, particularly the finale (Dances), which goes through several different styles including a section that has the flavor of early jazz.

The second movement, Hymn Fade, makes a moving impression, as amid an almost constant blur of marimba tremolando chords a simple hymn tune in the piano makes its appearance, a melody that is then seconded by the trumpet. It is a lovely, ecstatic movement, and it serves as the emotional heart of this fine new piece of very American music. Aside from a minor flub in the first measures, Reese played with command and beauty, and Launius was excellence personified, building up huge heads of rolling-chord steam and dashing off the climbing scales of the fourth movement with admirable precision.

And Leonard remains one of the best pianists to be heard in this region, a player of consistently high quality whose musical intent can be understood immediately as she plays; she knows what message she wants to get across, and conveys it with absolute clarity.

Gee’s Bend Pieces followed the Thompson Suite, written in 1940 by the Harvard academic best-known for his Alleluia, a short choral work beloved by school and professional singing groups. The five-movement suite – played by oboist Sherie Aguirre, violist Rene Reder and clarinetist Michael Forte – is a little masterpiece of homespun Americana, cannily written for an unusual but pleasing combination of instruments whose mid-range warmth should recommend it to other writers. The most affecting of the movements here was the fourth, a Lento religioso that suggested in its minor-tonality modal way an ancient hymnody of severe devotion, the gorgeousness of its primary melody notwithstanding.

Aguirre played with a large, fat sound that lost none of its roundness even in the highest registers, for which Forte’s somewhat softer, breathier sound made a good match. Reder provided expert harmonic support for her two partners, and in the solo passages of the second movement, played with a grave kind of elegance that was most appealing.

The Thompson was one of two works on the program that the festival musicians have performed in past seasons and then recorded, the other being the Martinů Nonet, which is for string trio, wind quintet and bass. Written in 1959, this three-movement work is classic Martinů in its lightheartedness, quirky harmonies, and catchy rhythms, and like the Thompson deserves to be regularly programmed on chamber music concerts.

The nine musicians blended with skill; there was no sense here of mismatch, of too many winds to too few strings, or of two different sound qualities colliding. Rather, it had a rough-and-ready unity that served the music well. Hornist Ellen Tomasiewicz was particularly good, bringing an impressively big sonic presence to the first and second movements.

The concert opened with an early work of Schubert, the String Trio in B-flat, D. 581. Here, too, is a neglected but worthy work, in which the 20-year-old composer writes in the spirit of Haydn, but with a melodic distinction all his own. Violinist Mei-Mei Luo, violist Rebecca Didderich and cellist Christopher Glansdorp gave a fine account of it, collaborating well and effectively bringing out the work’s variety.

Luo’s intonation in the first movement was somewhat imprecise, especially because of the wry, accidental-heavy nature of the opening theme, which sneaks around the notes of the tonic scale and has to be right on the money in order to make musical sense. Things were much better in this regard in the charming second movement and the lyrical third; Didderich’s solo work in the minor-key section of the second and the trio of the third was excellent.

The second half began with Luo and cellist Susan Bergeron in Passacaglia, a theme-and-variations duet showpiece by Norwegian composer and conductor Johan Halvorsen (1864-1935), based on a passacaglia from a keyboard work by Handel. This is an exciting, sparkling piece that shows what a composer with imagination and resource can do with some very basic material.

Here again there were intonation problems at the beginning from Luo, but she recovered and was able to show off her considerable digital prowess in these variations, notably at one point where she played a high-floating variation entirely in harmonics. Bergeron was terrific throughout, rapidly scaling some broken diminished chords in one passage and yet able to make them speak as harmonies, and matching Luo run for run as they tossed off this light but entertaining morsel.

The Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival repeats this program at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Crest Theatre, Delray Beach, and at 8 p.m. Monday at the Eissey Campus Theatre at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. Tickets are $22. Call 800-330-6874 or visit www.pbcmf.org.