True to this year’s concert series theme — “Can Classical Music be Funny?” — the program includes some outright comedy, from Bernstein’s high-toned “What a terrible awful movie!” to Gershwin’s Broadway witty “Blah, blah, blah.” More subtle strains of humor can also be found in Rossini’s gondola race-commentary and in Musetta’s teasing waltz.

The mixed program of solos and duets is also a feast of languages — seven in all — from the Slavic Russian and Czech tongues to the more commonly heard Romance languages. For the listener, that means a broader sonic palette of subtle cultural clues that mark a nation’s music.

Finally, it should not be surprising that most of the pieces performed tonight are about love won or lost. Has there ever been a better reason for singing?

Gioacchino Rossini: La Regata Veneziana

This duet depicts a Venetian gondola race in the words of two onlookers who cheer on their favorite beau. It was one of the many vocal chamber works Rossini wrote after his early retirement from opera composition. Designed for the entertainment of guests at his regular musical soirees in his home, these short works are often compositionally astute and always highly entertaining.

Antonin Dvorák: Holub na javore

Drawn from Dvorák’s Moravian Duets and sung in Moravian-accented Czech, this piece is characteristic of these folk-like melodies in their simple yet beautifully finessed treatment. Also typical is the enormous variety of rhythmic pulse, which commands the listener’s rapt attention.

Camille Saint-Saëns: El Desdichado

Saint-Saëns here applies his suave French style to this Castillian Spanish text, which he sets to a bolero dance rhythm. The rhythmic punctuation accents the passionate angst of a disappointed lover.

Hubbard Miller: Four Songs

A man both complicated and simple, Hubbard Miller grew up on a ranch in Eastern Oregon, becoming a first-rate cowhand while coming to terms with an immense talent for music. With a musical voice both fresh and unique, he embraced a multitude of styles. Most of his songs set human experience against a backdrop of the larger cycles of life on earth. “Let the world spin” (from the text of Spinning Song) sums up Hub’s deep commitment to nature, a bond unbroken in his lifetime.

Clément Philibert Delibes: Serenade from “Le Roi L’a Dit”

This bon-bon airily portrays the returning pleasures of Spring, coyly suggesting that it’s time to make like the birds and the bees. Sure, it’s kitschy, but it’s fun.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Rasvet (Dawn)

Tchaikovsky songs and vocal chamber music are unjustly ignored, presumably due both to the lingual challenges and the former Cold War mentality that discouraged singing in the language of our “enemy.” This glorious duet, which depicts the delicate transformation of night into morning, shows the luxurious experience that awaits the adventurous listener.

Felix Mendelssohn: Herbstlied

Mendelssohn wrote a large collection of vocal duets, which were suitable for home entertainment or singing by children’s chorus. This typically fine example is a miniature that compresses a world of experience into two minutes of rapid-fire discovery.

Christoph Willibard Gluck: Scene from Orfeo ed Euridice

Gluck’s justly famous opera is rarely heard in its original Italian version, which was composed for and premiered by the Italian castrato Gaetano Guadagni in the role of Orfeo. Alto-voiced Guadagni was well known for his acting — he had studied with Britain’s revered thespian David Garrick — and was thus a perfect choice to advocate for Gluck’s more reformist operatic style, which favored a more direct expressive style, serving the story rather than the celebrated singers who performed it. The action in this opera is driven by the well known story of Orfeo, who travels to the underworld to retrieve his beloved Euridice under the condition that he must not look at her, nor reveal this condition of her liberation. Naturally, she takes offense and insists on talking it through before they go anywhere. The result makes for high tragedy — before Amore comes along and sets things right for an all-singing, all-dancing finale.

Giacomo Puccini: Musetta’s Waltz

Descended from a long line of musicians, Giacomo Puccini began his musical studies at a very early age. He was a pupil of Ponchielli at the Milan Conservatory, where he began composing operas, an endeavor that would encompass nearly all of his composing life. In fact, he was the last Italian composer to concentrate almost entirely on opera and to achieve an enduring international success in so doing. In La Bohème (1896 - the title means Bohemian Life), he succeeded in placing memorable, well-characterized song melodies within a seamless texture. It is in the Verismo style of the late 19th Century, where the characters are everyday people struggling with common people’s problems. This is a story of a group of poor artists living in Paris’ Latin Quarter. In this aria, Musetta is using her wiles to attract the attention of her former lover, Marcello, who is unsuccessful in his attempts to ignore her.

Leonard Bernstein: What a Terrible Awful Movie!!

Leonard Bernstein, born Louis Bernstein, gifted conductor and composer, was equally successful in writing symphonic music of profound content and strikingly effective Broadway shows. In its flamboyant juxtaposition of moods, the one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti is more like a Mahler symphony than a musical comedy. As Humphrey Burton says in his biography, Bernstein, “[Trouble in Tahiti] sustains a poignant lyricism, throughout its savage Strindbergian portrait of marriage on the rocks. The show-stopping number ‘What a terrible awful movie!’ is a comedy burlesque which pokes brilliant fun at American colonialism and Hollywood escapism.” The satirical lyrics, intoned by a small vocal ensemble functioning as a Greek Chorus, place Tahiti beyond the world of the popular song forms that Bernstein once described as the heart of his score.

George Gershwin: Blah, Blah, Blah; Someone to Watch Over Me; I Got Rhythm

George Gershwin, born Jacob Gershvin, had an extraordinary career that began when he was 16, playing the piano in music stores to demonstrate popular songs. As far as worldly success was concerned, there was no period of struggle in Gershwin’s life; one of his earliest songs, Swanee, written when he was only 19 years old, became enormously popular, selling more than a million copies, and 2,250,000 phonograph recordings. He studied harmony and counterpoint with such prominent American composers as Henry Cowell and Wallingford Riegger. Possessing phenomenal energy, he produced musical comedies in quick succession, using fashionable jazz formulas in original and ingenious ways. As Schoenberg said when asked by Gershwin for composition lessons, “I would only make you a bad Schoenberg, and you’re such a good Gershwin already.” His brother and most frequent collaborator, Ira Gershwin, wrote the lyrics to the three tunes presented here.