Chamber Music in the Playhouse Lobby serves Sacher torte with a soupçon of vichyssoise, March 23.

Viennese and French chamber works by Mozart, Milhaud, Ravel and Berg are performed in mix-and-match combinations by seven musicians, five of whom make a series debut for the concert.

Playhouse Lobby favorites Barbara Deppe and Jim Quitslund are joined by clarinetist for Rainier Chamber Winds Gregg Miller; violinist Justine Jeanotte, recently appointed Bainbridge Orchestra’s concert master; violist Dorothy Foster, island piano teacher Mary Foster Grant; and Alexander Burmer, a 17-year-old student of Claire Marshall.

Both the Viennese and the French compositions are striking in different ways, the performers agree.

“The concept of the program was to flow a contrast between the lighter music from France and the Viennese,” said Miller, who is Port Townsend’s Centrum program manager for jazz and classical music.

Miller calls “Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano,” Opus 5 (Vienna, 1913) by Alan Berg musically “compressed.”

“They are interesting because they are very short – several are under a minute,” Miller said, “but they are very dense. He was very remarkably specific about notating changes in tempo and dynamics. Changes that might take place over 30 seconds or a minute take place in a few notes.”

In contrast, Darius Milhaud’s “Suite for Violin, Clarinet and Piano” (Paris, 1936) is a romp that chamber series coordinator Jim Quitslund calls “half living room or concert hall, and half bistro.”

The music, written for a play by Jean Anouilh, “Le Voyageur sans Bagages” (The Traveler Without Luggage, 1937), features a young man shell-shocked into amnesia during World War I.

“A young chap…enters the post-war period without a past,” Quitslund said. “The ‘New Man,’ so to speak. I’d have loved to know him – happy-go-lucky, nonchalant. Today, as the engines of devastation rev up, I feel especially drawn to those ideals.”

For violinist Jeanotte, who moved to the island in 2000, the 10 hours of rehearsal, spread out over about three weeks, have been a chance to become better acquainted with her fellow chamber players, most of whom she met through Bainbridge Orchestra.

“The Milhaud has been a great piece for me,” Jeanotte said, “because I hadn’t had the chance to play a lot of chamber music.”

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The Chamber Music in the Playhouse Lobby series presents a concert of Viennese and French music at 4 p.m. March 23. Tickets are $12, available at the Playhouse box office or charge by phone 842-8569.