By Daniel Buckwalter

Valentine’s Day was on a Saturday this year, and it made for a long weekend, if for no other reason than every arts group wanted to jump into the holiday spirit with their theme of love and romance.

Chamber Music Amici saved the best for last.

The resident chamber music company at the Wildish Community Theater in Springfield dazzled a good-size audience on Feb. 16 with the trio of pianist and artistic director Eunhye Grace Choi, her husband, clarinetist Wonkak Kim, and violist Lillie Manis playing selections from Max Bruch’s Eight Pieces.

Choi and Kim also teamed up for a delightful performance of Robert Schuman’s three-movement Fantasiestücke for Clarinet and Piano. The two, as you might expect, were finely in tune with each other, and it was a pleasure to absorb their work.

The highlight, though, was the heart-wrenching vocal work of mezzo-soprano Ágnes Vojtkó, who sang of love lost, of memory fading, and even with aching beauty music observing, I believe, the season of Lent and Easter, the holiest of the Christian holidays.

Vocal work at a Chamber Music Amici concert is rare, and this was a treat. Vojtkó opened the concert singing three pieces for voice by Frank Bridge. The first two were Far, far from each other (text by Matthew Arnold) and Where is it that our soul doth go? (text by Heinrich Heine).

The most meaningful piece for me was the third, Music, when soft voices die (poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley). It was enough to still the mind:

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory,
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;
And so my thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

For any and all of us who have lost loved ones — sometimes far too soon — this poem, and Vojtkó’s rendering, resonated. I wish I had known of this music much sooner.

But Vojtkó wasn’t done. She also sang two selections from Johannes Brahms: Assauged Longing (text by Friedrich Rückert); and A Sacred Cradle Song (text by Emmanuel Geibel).

I imagined a mother — perhaps the Mother Mary — singing of her yearning for peace, peace for her child in especially turbulent times. Vojtkó gave the music — Silence the treetops! / My child is sleeping —the delicacy and tenderness it deserved.

It was a magical evening of music, and I thank Chamber Music Amici for the thoughtful program.