The Perspectives project at Carnegie Hall works so well because the musicians invited to programme it generally don't limit their offerings to star turns for themselves. They take the opportunity to present favorite works beyond those they play and invite other musicians they admire.

Mitsuko Uchida presented some illuminating Perspectives concerts last season, and she began this season's installment on Saturday evening at Zankel Hall with a survey of Viennese classics, presented in reverse chronological order: Schoenberg first, then Schubert and Mozart.

All are composers Ms. Uchida has been closely associated with, both in concert and on recordings, but she did not take a parochial view. She played only Schubert, leaving the rest to members of the Brentano String Quartet.

Schoenberg was represented by the String Trio, a work composed in 1946, just after he survived a heart attack. It is tempting to describe it as an unusually personal work, given the degree to which it documents Schoenberg's illness and recovery, to say nothing of his state of mind during the ordeal. But then, the more this supposed master of abstraction slips into the mainstream, the clearer it is that virtually all his music was personal and deeply felt.

The performance by Mark Steinberg, violinist; Mischa Amory, violist; and Nina Lee, cellist, was precise and shapely, and had a sharp edge and a dynamic fluidity that helped define the passions at its core.

The same players closed the concert with Mozart's Divertimento in E flat (K 563). This work's depths are so thoroughly at odds with its modest appellation that one has to wonder what Mozart had in mind when he called it a Divertimento, a title usually meant to describe a light entertainment. Ms. Uchida and company may have been uneasy about the discrepancy: the program listed the work only as Trio for Violin, Viola and Cello, and Mr. Steinberg, Mr. Amory and Ms. Lee played it with the emotional heft and the deft interplay between brightness and troubled rumination that the score demands.

Schubert's Moments Musicaux also hide substantial explorations behind an innocuous title. Ms. Uchida's sound was as graceful and varied as ever, but she resisted the temptation to couch these works in sonic opulence, or to make them merely studies in Schubertian melody. She worked a different kind of magic on them, transforming each work into a reasoned, if sometimes high-strung discourse, and rendering their composer as a creature of flesh and blood, desires, triumphs and frustrations.

Tonight, in another installment in her series, she collaborates with the tenor Ian Bostridge, the Brentano String Quartet and a chamber ensemble conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.