East Coast Chamber Orchestra performs at USM’S Hannaford Hall as part of the Portland Chamber Music Festival. Photo courtesy of the Portland Chamber Music Festival

Though they schedule events year-round, the folks organizing the Portland Chamber Music Festival save their grandest moments for August. In a series of concerts held at Hannaford Hall on the University of Southern Maine campus, major players and composers from around the world are annually brought to the stage.

On Thursday night, for a program titled “Universal Resonance,” musicians from the East Coast Chamber Orchestra and others gathered for a rich program that, with a gripping intensity, traversed centuries and styles.

The 90-minute concert certainly was strikingly resonant. With over a dozen musicians onstage much of the time, there was a collective exuberance expressed in all but the most lyrical of passages. Far from the stereotypically subdued ambiance often associated with chamber music, this fervently executed program was much more a celebration of the power within smaller musical forms.

The program began with a playful piece for three violinists by Friedrich Hermann. The “Capriccio No. 1 in D Minor, Op.2” had Tai Murray, J Freivogel and Nick Kendall working hard, like Olympic team competitors, to effect the twists and turns, starts and stops of this challenging piece that ended with broad smiles from both the players and audience.

The 13-member orchestra then took the stage for a work by Bach that had been swapped with a Geminiani work originally on the program. The latter will instead be performed at the coming Saturday night concert.

J. S. Bach’s “Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D Minor,” as arranged for chamber orchestra by Michi Wiancko, was a barn burner with assertive passages of thick, almost mad, intensity. One can argue that such expanded versions of smaller pieces lose something along the way. But the power within Bach’s much heralded composition was still there, if not all the delicacy.

Closing out the first part of the program was the Maine premiere of a work by a composer well known in jazz circles. Vijay Iyer briefly introduced his “Handmade Universe for Piano and Strings” as a work inspired by a contemplation of the pressure points of a hand and how they could be considered in gaining a broader understanding of music. With Shai Wosner at the piano (his back to the audience), the 25-minute work combined elements of minimalism with an, at times, noirish harmonic sensibility. Portent was suggested as its complexity accumulated to achieve a state, often found in the composer’s improvised work, that is both challenging and listener-friendly.

The evening ended with a performance of Mendelssohn’s “String Octet in E-flat Major, Op.20.” The composer was only 16 when he put together this popular piece. Its blend of youthful enthusiasm and comforting, gentle harmonies, as crisply performed by Anthony Marwood, Kristin Lee, Li-Mei Liang, Susie Park, Jessica Thompson, Melissa Reardon, Rachel Henderson Freivogel and Kenneth Olsen, offered a masterful close to an engaging night of music.

Steve Feeney is a freelance writer who lives in Portland.