It felt like summer on a cold winter night

With the temperature dropping well below freezing, there was nothing particularly summery about Benaroya Hall Thursday evening.

But chamber-music fans who climbed the stairs to the Nordstrom Recital Hall discovered that summer reigned inside — where a lineup of favored musicians from the Seattle Chamber Music Society's annual summer festivals generated some heat in the middle of winter.

The ambience isn't quite the same. Milling around in a dense crowd in the small lobby is a poor substitute for strolling the spacious lawns at the Lakeside School, where the summer crowds dine outdoors and then waft outside at intermission for coffee or lemonade. Although the Nordstrom Recital Hall accommodates more listeners (Thursday night's concert was very well attended), the musicians seem a bit more distant from the audience, and the sound is a little less encompassing.

Thursday's opening night program was the first in a weekend of concert activity that holds considerable promise (today's all-piano program, with Bach's "Goldberg" Variations and Rachmaninoff's "Symphonic Dances," is a particular enticement to keyboard fans). Returning to the stage were 10 artists who have made regular appearances in the summer festivals at the Lakeside and Overlake Schools.

Pianists Jeremy Denk and Anna Polonsky played Mozart's Andante and Five Variations for Piano, Four Hands, in a charming style made humorous by Denk's frequent quizzical glances at his partner. The Joaquin Turina Trio that followed brought together the excellent Amos Yang (now assistant principal cellist of the San Francisco Symphony) with violinist Carmit Zori and Polonsky in a sunny performance that made the most of the score.

The reading of Mendelssohn's D Major String Quartet (Erin Keefe, Scott Yoo, Che-Yen Chen and Toby Saks) was only intermittently inspired; but the finely judged Brahms Piano Trio in C Major (Soovin Kim, Bion Tsang and Denk) brought the audience to its feet for a well-deserved ovation.

Melinda Bargreen: mbargreen@seattletimes.com