Chameleon turns in a fresh, playful program

The Chameleon Arts Ensemble of Boston played pieces from Ravel, Chen Yi, Manuel de Falla, and Judith Weir.

There are moments in music when you know the composer is as surprised as you are at what's just occurred. In Chen Yi's "Qi," a Chinese gong is struck and the note seems to reach out until it is answered, almost sympathetically, by the flute and the piano: three instruments fusing into one. In Bedrich Smetana's Piano Trio in G minor, after a lot of romantic bluster, the piano settles into a reverie, rippling out a series of arpeggios that sound as if they are played on bells. We sometimes forget that composers are playful creatures, as fascinated by sound as a child is by mud and streams.

Fortunately, the Chameleon Arts Ensemble, led by Deborah Boldin, is here to remind us. This team of young, spirited, and highly skilled musicians, now in its 11th year, performed at the Goethe-Institut on Sunday and, once again, opened the windows and let in some air on a department of classical music that is either heavy with tradition or vacuously avant-garde.

Boldin is continually looking for big but little-known works - new, recent, and old - and putting them together in intriguing, organic combinations. The cross-references are not just intellectual; you can feel them in your body. On Sunday, Ravel's strutting gypsy piece for violin and piano, "Tzigane," led naturally to Yi's propulsive "Qi" (pronounced "chee," this is Chinese for "life-force") for piano, flute, cello, and percussion. Gypsy elements returned in the final Smetana trio. In between came Manuel de Falla's "Siete Canciones Populares Espanolas" and a piece by the British composer Judith Weir, "Airs From Another Planet," in which Scots folk songs and dances are transmuted into ghostly fragments, with oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn now added to the piano, violin, and flute/piccolo.

It seems unfair to single out any performers when excellence was so uniform, but Rafael Popper-Keizer was moving in the quiet solos in the Smetana, Aaron Trant moved easily amid Asian and African percussive instruments, and pianist Christopher Guzman had Latin heat in the de Falla. Soprano Sabrina Learman was perhaps a bit bright-toned and rather strict in tempo for such earthy songs, but she had moments of nuance. The Yi and Weir were triumphs of teamwork. One left, simply, with one's hearing enlarged. Not a small gift for a Sunday afternoon.