Since 1993 Itzhak Perlman and his wife, Toby, have coached a parade of superb young chamber players in what began as a summer music school and now runs through the year. The public face of the Perlman Music Program is a series of concerts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In the installment on Saturday evening Mr. Perlman played first violin in Mendelssohn’s String Quintet in B flat (Op. 87) and Brahms’s Piano Quintet in F minor (Op. 34). Between those works, the LK String Quartet, a group formed at Mr. Perlman’s summer school in 2002, gave a rugged account of Bartok’s Quartet No. 3.

The most immediately striking element of the Mendelssohn performance was not the music making, polished as it was, but the ensemble’s body language. Even taking into account that gestures are easily (and too often) falsified, especially among young musicians, these players attentively watched for cues from Mr. Perlman and one another and seemed genuinely engaged in the give and take. The performance illuminated the richness of Mendelssohn’s melodic imagination and had the fluidity and zest you expect from musicians who react to one another rather than merely play their lines.

The LK String Quartet’s light-textured, transparent reading of the Bartok was unusual, but it wasn’t as if these players turned the music into Lehar. Passages that demanded a harsh edge received it, and in its best moments the performance was fiery and propulsive, with striking unanimity in the quickly shifting dynamics of the final pages.

The Brahms performance shared many of the attributes of the Mendelssohn, with Orion Weiss’s appealing account of the piano line, the sweet-toned tandem violin playing of Mr. Perlman and Sharon Roffman and the richly textured sounds of Jessica Oudin’s viola and Yves Dharamraj’s cello all contributing amply to the sense of Brahmsian warmth.

The other performers were Michelle Ross, violinist; Megan Griffin, violist; and Jia Kim, cellist, in the Mendelssohn, and Sean Lee and Kristin Lee, violinists; Laura Seay, violist; and Jordan Han, cellist, in the Bartok.

Itzhak Perlman and musicians from the Perlman Music Program will perform at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 3; (212) 570-3949, metmuseum.org.