About 20 years ago the late Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara professed himself delighted to be able to compose music in this era. No longer were composers bound to this or that predominating style. Rather, in an era where the consensus on what direction modern music was moving had been shattered into thousands of arrow points, composers now had a multitude of choices. A “toy chest,” was how he described it.

That willingness to embrace and do equal justice to disparate voices and styles are the keynotes of Camerata Pacifica and Dilijan Chamber Series, just two of the many dynamic chamber groups currently active in Southern California. The latter often revolves around Armenian composers and themes, but both organizations maintain a highly eclectic sensibility to programming that keeps the audience on its toes.

Camerata Pacifica’s program on Feb. 15 at The Huntington Library spanned broad stylistic expanses – music by Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms enfolded works by Steve Reich and Australian composer Carl Vine. But the Camerata Pacifica performers – on that night José Franch-Ballester (clarinet), Ani Aznavoorian (cello) and Warren Jones – themselves traversed a gamut of moods and colors.

Consider Warren Jones’ poised and immaculately sculpted playing of Mozart’s “Adagio in B minor, K. 540;” the score’s pathos delineated with beautifully daubed textures and a seamless singing legato. Yet at the beginning of the program he and Aznavoorian kicked up the dust in the rondo finale of Beethoven’s “Cello Sonata No. 2,” a work where contemplation and humor live side-by-side within its unusual (for its time) structure.

Aznavoorian then inhabited another realm of feeling as she pushed her virtuosity to its limits in Vine’s “Inner World,” an energetic and raucous soliloquy for cello and tape.

Franch-Ballester also played with pre-recordings of himself – 10 of them – in his performance of Reich’s “New York Counterpoint,” which moved and bounced with great flair and verve.

All three came together in the closing work, Brahms’ “Trio for Piano, Clarinet, and Cello, Op. 114,” the performance meltingly lyrical and nuanced.

Dilijan served up a program on Feb. 19 at Zipper Hall of contemporary and modern works in the first half, then works by Debussy and Ravel in the second.

If a theme to this program could be guessed, then “Ghosts of Debussy” would be a fair choice. His spirit certainly hovered in the pages of Ravel’s “String Quartet in F,” which closed the program. (Here in a breezy and lithe performance by violinists Varty Manouelian and Movses Pogossian, violist Carla Maria Rodrigues, and cellist Charles Tyler.) But his revenant was equally present in Henri Dutilleux’s “Trois Strophes sur le nom de Sacher” – in an exacting and powerful performance by Tyler – as well as in the spectral apparitions from Artur Avanesov’s “Feux follets” and Michel Petrossian’s “A Fiery Flame, A Flaming Fire,” a kaleidoscopic deconstruction of an Armenian folk melody.

Debussy himself made an appearance in his “Violin Sonata,” with Pogossian and pianist Daniel Sedgwick peering into the haunting question marks that streak this late work. These question marks were made all the more poignant by having posed amidst them the still swirling ashes of World War I. Was Debussy at a loss as to how music was supposed to go on? The shape of the world that would emerge in the still distant postwar era? Pogossian and Sedgwick, to their credit, preferred to let the composer’s eloquent and enigmatic question marks stand on their own.

  Nestor CASTIGLIONE