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EMMANUEL MUSIC inaugurated its five-year plan for doing all of Robert Schumann’s piano, vocal, and chamber works with a program of piano, vocal, and chamber masterpieces. Emmanuel Church itself is not the best venue for chamber music: it’s too cavernous, and the murky acoustics blur intimate details. This acoustic was especially hard on pianist Randall Hodgkinson, a fine and solid musician who was probably not the best fit for the mercurial Carnaval, a dazzling series of variations full of contrasts and contrasting characters, especially between the two sides of Schumann’s own character whom he named Eusebius (the contemplative, Apollonian side) and Florestan (the uninhibited, Dionysian side). Hodgkinson was almost all "Eusebius" (the quiet variation he played most beautifully), and his heavy pedaling further muddied the textures.

Emmanuel Music’s Craig Smith knows how to work this room, and his accompaniment to tenor William Hite’s elegant performance of Schumann’s 6 Gedichte Opus 36 — six poems about love and the Vaterland by Robert Reinick — had both clarity and warmth. Hite has become one of Boston’s handful of cherished lieder singers, and especially in the greatest song in the set, the final "Liebesbotschaft" ("Message of Love"), with its long arch of a melody, he achieved a kind of understated sublimity.

The concert ended with the Lydian String Quartet playing the greatest of Schumann’s three string quartets, the third, in A major. The Lydians caught Schumann’s sense of longing, his agitation, his contemplative inwardness, and, in the finale, his affirmation of the world in song and dance. The recent arrival of cellist Joshua Gordon has given the Quartet a new aural coherence. The playing is always on the edge — yet that edge isn’t sharp but delicately rounded. There’s a lightness and nimbleness that’s capable of gravity and passion without forcing the music or weighing it down.

Next concert: October 24, with David Kravitz singing lieder and Triple Helix playing a Clara Schumann trio.

I’VE ADMIRED David Feltner as a violist, and I’ve heard good things about the group he founded, the Chamber Orchestra of Boston. I finally got to hear it, and the concert was a knockout. Feltner certainly couldn’t go wrong with his guest soloist, pianist Judith Gordon, who played Bach’s heavenly and joyous Concerto in F minor BWV 1056, with its ravishing hymn-like slow movement, in which the more pianistic filigree she added, the more she revealed the eloquence of the ongoing melodic line. Her exquisite quiet playing made me yearn for more Bach on the piano (rather than on the usual harpsichord). She then played the Boston premiere of Polish composer Henryk Górecki’s 1980 Concerto for Harpsichord or Piano. "Jerry Lee Lewis meets Shostakovich," Gordon has been quoted as saying. In the first movement, pounding chordal repetitions on the keyboard (minimalism meets boogie-woogie) are set against slow-moving strings that sound like huge organ tones. The juggernaut second movement is like a speeding train, with piano and orchestra alternating. It’s even more of a workout for the soloist. This is an exciting piece — and short! And the audience was — rightly — wowed.

Feltner ended with the 24-year-old Benjamin Britten’s tribute to and portrait of his teacher: Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge, 10 colorful variations (March, Romance, Italian Aria, Viennese Waltz) that also served to remind us what we’d heard earlier in the evening (the Bourrée Classique recalling the Bach, the Moto Perpetuo bringing back Górecki’s relentless repetitions). The superb string orchestra (concertmaster Danielle Maddon has the same position with the Emmanuel Orchestra) was up to all the challenges, and Feltner led everything with rhythmic snap and a sense of the individuality and shapeliness of each piece. This outfit is a welcome addition to the list of Boston’s flourishing chamber orchestras.