Old Lyme — Musical Masterworks Music Director Edward Arron applies the same thoughtfulness to his programming as he does to his playing. So he could only shrug and smile Saturday evening as snow and sleet pelted the windows while he introduced his “autumnal program.”

“Autumnal” is the adjective most often applied to Brahms’ late-life clarinet works, and a lovely reading of Brahms’ dark-hued Clarinet Trio anchored the opening program of the 21st season for the chamber music series here. But inside the First Congregational Church of Old Lyme, four fine musicians created their own atmospheric conditions, from stormy to steamy to sunny, with music spanning nearly 200 years.

Saturday’s concert, which will be repeated at 3 p.m. Sunday, opened at the beginning: Haydn.

Arron is making a habit of starting each season with the music of the father of the concert repertoire, and cellist Arron joined pianist Gilles Vonsattel and violinist Aaron Boyd for a tack-sharp performance of Haydn’s Piano Trio No. 27 in C Major.

Built around perhaps the most virtuosic piano part of any of Haydn’s 43 trios, its opening allegro had Vonsattel smiling to himself as he wove its arpeggiated figures. Most of the works’ twists and surprises were in his able hands, such as when his left hand sneaked up to start a fugue in what seemed a recapitulation for the first movement. The ensemble had the audience spellbound in the slow movement’s final pages, as the uneasy central section emerges again into the light of the lovely main theme and lingered there to luxuriate in it.

What followed was the most memorable of the evening’s fare: Peter Schickele’s 1982 Quartet for Clarinet, Piano, Violin and Cello. It’s a safe bet that no one in the audience had heard this obscure work in concert before, and the performance Saturday could only leave them wondering why. Schickele is best known for his comic P.D.Q. Bach compositions, his classical music sendups of the greats, but this work was pure Americana, full of the open harmonies of Copland and Barber and the droning early iteration of Minimalism.

Clarinetist Todd Palmer joined the three musicians to create a sound world-achingly pure and austere. In the acoustic splendor of this unique hall, the effects of muted violin and cello and piano singing softly in unison was music at its best. The gentle opening movement was interrupted by a quick, frenetic second movement, tinted with jazz and blue notes, before the elegiac adagio. This slow movement, with Vonsattel setting a gentle, static pulse in the piano, featured gorgeous phrasing by Palmer, who has been a staple of Masterworks since its earliest days.

The second half opened with violinist Boyd channeling Fritz Kreisler, to perform two of his salon pieces in a style considered gauche for a generation. Boyd delighted the audience with a pair of gypsy-inspired Kreisler works, “La Gitana” and “Gypsy Caprice” for Violin and Piano, often negotiating wide intervals not with a leap, but with a slide … like a gypsy, or Kreisler himself. Following Haydn’s Age of Reason Classicism and Schickele’s open-prairie Americana, this was juicy stuff indeed. Before he began, Boyd admitted, “I feel a little bad playing it in this church.”

Then autumn arrived in the snowstorm. Brahms’ four chamber works for clarinet share the same contented calm, and it’s easy to see why cellist Arron loves the Trio in A Minor so much. Throughout the work, the rich timbres of cello and low-range clarinet conversed in an unhurried, reflective dialogue, Arron’s full-bodied cello phrasing met with Palmer’s liquid phrasing.

The large audience Saturday made the right choice; autumn is a state of mind.

m.moore@theday.com