America’s Dream Chamber Artists is a group of young professionals attempting to bring the joys of classical music to a younger audience. The organization is to be lavishly praised for this important mission, and judging by Sunday evening’s concert at Weill Recital Hall, the marketing department seems to have achieved its goal. The hall was filled to capacity with row upon row of middle-school students from around the country.

The crowd was very well behaved, but tested rather harshly by the group’s methods.Trying to break down the fourth wall, the musicians adopted a casual style of dress and introduced themselves only by their first names. This was fine, but the idea that they should do quite a bit of talking seemed a bit misguided.

The group’s artistic director and cellist, Arash Amini, began the evening by delivering a speech culminating in a plea for funding. This type of address is certainly not the ticket for involving people of this age group (or any age group, for that matter). The rather self-congratulatory pamphlet that was handed to the audience members in lieu of program notes abdicated the responsibility of delivering a few illustrative remarks about the music. And the performers were woefully unprepared to provide any significant illumination.

Furthermore, there was only one stagehand on duty – as we were reminded, the organization is struggling with its finances. It took this fellow a long time to dismantle the platform positioning of the first work, Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, and replace it with the set-up for the Mozart Clarinet Quintet.The poor chap did not even have a hand truck, and so had to carry the harp offstage, a prodigious feat of strength that took several minutes. Meanwhile, the young crowd was left to keep quiet without diversion. Only one audience member dissolved into tears and ran from the hall, chaperone following suspiciously behind.

Ah yes, the music.The performances were all competent ones, featuring some of the best and the brightest of the local 20-something set. The Debussy piece that opened the program was remarkable for its sonorities; the flute of Eveline Kuhn and the viola of Dov Scheindlin often locked in amorous embrace. There was a lack of the underlying tension that makes this work great and groundbreaking, but for sheer momentary sonic effect, this rendition was first-rate.

The Mozart featured Alan Kay of the Orpheus Chamber Ensemble as a guest artist. Mr. Kay, backed by the strong quartet of violinists Timothy Fain and Cyrus Beroukhim, violist Maurycy Banaszek, and Mr. Amini, gave a reasonably good technical performance of this most sublime of all chamber works. But the quintet never really gelled as a unit.

Stylistically, there were pitfalls. Mr. Fain, as first violinist, adopted the stance of the aesthete, performing his solos in a Pre-Raphaelite manner that bordered on the foppish (several of the students seated in front of me seized on this affectation for some highly sporting pantomime). This would have been a legitimate alternative to standard Mozartean performance practice, except that the other four in the group wanted no part of it, intoning in a rather straightforward manner. When Mr. Fain stated a theme and Mr. Kay immediately reprised it, the results were unsettling. The other strings seemed timid and unassertive. The notes were there, but the music was not faithfully reproduced.

Also, the group employed some sort of alternate version of the piece that contained much ornamentation, particularly in the clarinet part. It would have been interesting to know whose reconstruction this was, but, alas, with no program notes, its genesis remained a mystery.

America’s Dream is committed to present a work of contemporary music on every program, and on this night it offered the slow movement from Behzad Ranjbaran’s cello concerto. Mr. Ranjbaran was on hand for (what else?) a little talk before the music, and he related that he renamed the slow movement “Elegy” when the man who commissioned it died before the world premiere performance.

On this night, “Elegy” was presented as a stand-alone with Mr. Kay’s clarinet taking the cello part. It occurred to me during this performance that, if you truly want to create an interest in contemporary music, you had best offer top-flight examples. “Elegy” is instead a mawkish compendium of Hollywood style crocodile tears, but was played satisfactorily by the group. If you like the music from “Schindler’s List,”then you might have enjoyed “Elegy.” I don’t and I didn’t.