The first concert of the classical music season has a faintly transparent quality, marking an end of summer pursuits, a beginning of winter pleasures, the tradition of concert seasons echoing back through time and crowding the hall with audiences long gone.

This year, the honor of opening Honolulu's season fell to Chamber Music Hawaii's string ensemble, the Galliard Quartet. On Monday, the Galliard performed in a program spanning much of the string quartet's repertoire throughout history, from the 18th to 20th centuries, from popular (Mozart) to serious (Bartók) to whimsical fun (Francaix).

The evening's highlight proved to be the least known: Jean Francaix's "Trio," composed in 1933, when Francaix was only 21.

In general, 20th-century works tend to invite descriptions of style, technique and innovation, but not this one. Musically vivid portraits eclipsed all else, eliciting delighted chuckles at the end.

Each of the four brief movements captured a distinct mood, from the humorous perpetuum mobile of the first, through the rhythmically lilting second and a wistfully solitary, wine-infused, French-evening of a third, to the moody, capricious, Petrouchka-esque finale. Both piece and performance were terrific.

The Galliard Quartet — Claire Sakai Hazzard and Hung Wu (violins), Mark Butin (viola) and Karen Bechtel (cello), all members of the Honolulu Symphony — framed the Francaix piece with two blockbusters, Mozart's "Hoffmeister" Quartet in D Major, K.499, and the first of Bartok's esteemed six string quartets.

One aspect that makes performances of Mozart perennially fascinating is the variety of interpretations. Mozart is never just Mozart. It is the details that define performances, but every musician must decide, on the most basic level, whether Mozart was a composer of classical beauty or a passionate dramatist.

On the whole, the Galliard Quartet interpreted on the side of classical beauty, with Hazzard and Wu firmly committed, and Bechtel, and, to a lesser extent, Butin, leaning toward the dramatic side. With all four, focus was on precision, clarity, singing lines and balance: melodies flowed and filigree sparkled.

There were distractions — a startlingly noisy air conditioning system, recurring intonation slips, and occasionally tentative ensemble or fade-outs ending scratchily — but those were few and mostly the result of striving for expressive extremes.

That focus also served the quartet well in the Bartok, which, despite its marked dissonance, demands a strictly classical approach.

In her introduction, Bechtel aptly summed up the reigning style of Bartók and his contemporaries: "an avant garde-honored dissonance, the badge of merit for those fed up with a century of Romanticism."

Bartók's dissonance, however, has the peculiar quality of seeming very dissonant when one listens "vertically" (that is, to the harmonies formed on each beat), but much less so when heard "horizontally" (to the melodies unfolding linearly). Mentally following Bartók's often folk-like melodies softens the clashes between lines, making Bartók appealing even to those who shy away from 20th-century music.

A final note to those familiar with Chamber Music Hawaii's concerts: For most of this season, each program will be performed at the Doris Duke auditorium, then repeated the following week at Paliku Theatre at Windward Community College, the opposite order from that of the past couple years. Keep that in mind to avoid a mad last-minute dash over the Ko'olau.