“Songs for a Summer Night”, Opera Maine’s title for the program presented Tuesday evening at Oceanside Meadows Inn at Prospect Harbor, suggests music that is enchanting and perhaps light-hearted, but not quite as serious or substantial as concert fare. Enchanting the evening certainly was. Lighthearted? More often than not. Musically lightweight? Anything but!

The selection of songs and composers would have delighted any audience in as demanding a setting as Alice Tully Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center, where freshness and innovative programming are (or should be) appreciated. The musical performances were notably fine.

Elizabeth Patches, mezzo-soprano, and Diane Kern, flutist, are accomplished professionals who, throughout the evening, sang and played not as a soloist and accompanist but as co-artists, which is just what their music requires. Vocal and flute lines were frequently moving in quite different directions yet always compatible, congenial and cleverly interwoven. This voice-flute interplay is especially characteristic of 19th and 20th century music, which dominated the presentation, but also was a favorite technique of earlier composers, especially in opera. They were ably accompanied, when another musical line was needed, by Annabeth French, piano and harpsichord, and Adele Adkins, cello.

Patches is a stunning singer whose unfailing taste, knowledge of vocal styles and clarity of tone enable her to give any song exactly the character it requires. In a biblical cantata by the 18th century German composer Telemann she used the unornamented, pure voice we tend to identify also with English oratorio singing. Love songs had a quite different and charming lyricism.

Kern’s flute sound is pure music, with never a hint of breathiness. She tailors her tone to the text as required, including a piquant use of flutter-tongue in American composer Warren Benson’s “Three Lyrics of Louise Bogan.”

Major work of the evening was “Bilitis” for narrator (Patches), flute and piano. Based on the Greek poet Sappho’s verses about love among women, it shocked the French a century ago in the poetic adaptation by Pierre Louys as set to music by Claude Debussy. Nobody at Prospect Harbor on Tuesday night seemed to be shocked, but we were all brightly entertained.

Musically trained since childhood, Norman Nadel was a symphony trombonist and U.S. Army bandmaster before becoming music critic of the Columbus (Ohio) Citizen. He continued to write about music after becoming drama critic of the New York World Telegram, later of the New York World Journal Tribune, and critic-at-large for two national newspaper syndicates. Recently he retired from his position as writer and editor at the Philharmonic Center for the Arts in Naples, Fla.