The Musical Masterworks chamber music series hits the ground running Saturday and Sunday with one of the more tempting offerings of the new classical music season.

The concerts will feature the return of violinist Tessa Lark for her third consecutive season. In her debut here, the Kentucky native was enlisted as a last-minute substitute, though she was hardly a reach, since she arrived with major buzz.

In 2012, Lark was the first American violinist since 1960 to win the Naumburg Award, among the most prestigious performing arts awards in the world. This year, she won a $50,000 Annenburg Fellowship to go forth and just play.

In her Old Lyme debut, Lark joined cellist and series artistic director Edward Arron and pianist Jeewon Park in an unforgettable Schubert piano trio. "To hear a 22-year-old play the Schubert E Flat trio like that was an amazing experience," Arron says.

She will join Arron and Park to reprise that ensemble, this time performing the Schumann Piano Trio in D Minor, a rich and direct work. Arron speaks of its slow movement of "desolate loneliness" and its stirring final movement as "one of my favorite journeys in music."

Lark and Arron will team to perform the 1914 Duo for Violin and Cello by Zoltan Kodàly, a friend and confidant of fellow Hungarian Béla Bartók.

"I love Tessa's interpretation of folk music, especially Appalachian folk music," Arron says. "I feel that the Kodaly is cut from very much the same cloth."

And they're playing a trio by some guy named Mozart, too.

- MILTON MOORE

Musical Masterworks, 5 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday,

First Congregational Church, 2 Ferry Road, Old Lyme; $35, $5 for students; (860) 434-2252, musicalmasterworks.org.