Two operas, scaled for a chamber

Paul O'Dette (left) and Stephen Stubbs, artistic directors of the BEMF and members of its Chamber Ensemble.

The Boston Early Music Festival attracts crowds from near and far for its biennial productions of Baroque opera. But offering one big, splashy presentation every other year has made BEMF seem like more of an occasional visitor to the opera world rather than a serious player. To firm up its opera credentials both at home and on the national scene, the organization has hired Gilbert Blin as an in-house stage director and it has launched a new series of chamber operas to be performed annually in Jordan Hall.

This new series lifted off on Saturday evening, with a double-bill featuring John Blow's "Venus and Adonis" and Charpentier's "Acteon." The idea of BEMF putting its artistic resources and institutional expertise behind smaller, gem-like chamber operas is, in short, a no-brainer. Judging from the evidence of Saturday's vivid performances of these two seldom-heard works, this new annual series should be a highly welcome addition to the local concert calendar.

Blow's recounting of the Greek myth, composed in the 1680s "for the entertainment" of Charles II, has long been rendered nearly invisible by the far more popular English work from that era, Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas." But Saturday's performance made a strong case for this work as a kind of mini-grand opera, notable not for any individual arias but for its fluid and graceful unfolding of a tale whose tragic ending is reflected on with ravishing beauty in the closing chorus "Mourn for thy Servant."

Charpentier's "Pastorale en musique" also ends with a stunner sung by a chorus of hunters before the fallen body of Acteon, who was transformed into a stag and then ravaged by his own hounds as punishment for encountering the goddess Diana bathing in a spring. It too has a dramatic expansiveness that belies its modest length, and a score in which every musical gesture speaks, often holding a mirror to the internal states of its protagonists or their outward journeys, as with the spare yet remarkable writing that accompanies Acteon's transformation into a stag.

On Saturday night, both the solo and ensemble singing were at a uniformly high level even if there were no particular standouts among the principals: Amanda Forsythe, Tyler Duncan, Mireille Lebel, Aaron Sheehan, Teresa Wakim, and Pamela Dellal. The children in the BEMF Youth Ensemble were asked to do much more than most kids in opera productions, and they did it very well. After both works, the loudest cheers understandably went to the superb BEMF Chamber Ensemble, led by violinist Robert Mealy, with Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs, the organization's artistic directors, anchoring the ensemble on lutes, theorbo, and Baroque guitar. The group numbered 11 instrumentalists yet they rendered this score with the delicacy of, well, chamber music.

Blin's fluid staging, with extensive choreography by Lucy Graham and costuming by Anna Watkins including dramatic animal masks, seemed true to BEMF's love of period-style spectacle yet at the same time appropriately scaled to the elegant intimacy of these works and of Jordan Hall itself. No other local performances are currently scheduled, but one can easily envision this double-bill taking to the road.

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.