It may work. It was easy to spot early-music regulars (including performers and series directors) in the Sunday afternoon crowd. But when the audience members were asked, during a between-groups onstage chat, how many were attending their first early-music concert, a surprising number of hands went up.

Those people were given a reasonable overview of the repertory. Asteria — Sylvia Rhyne, soprano, and Eric Redlinger, tenor and lutenist — sang medieval and Renaissance love songs, including well-known ballads by Dufay (“J’attandray tant” and “Se la face ay pale”) and Sermisy (“Languir me fais”). Their spoken introductions also offered historical perspective, but in the absence of printed texts and translations, perhaps synopses of more of the songs would have been useful for those of us not conversant in medieval French.

The New York Consort of Viols gave the most finely polished and varied performance of the afternoon. Presented as a tour of the viola da gamba’s history, from its early use by Sephardic Jews to a contemporary score composed for the group, the program included spirited dances by Ortiz and Dalza, Henry VIII’s “Pastime With Good Company,” vibrantly played gigues by Charpentier and a handful of vocal works, sung by Lawrence Lipnik.

Between selections, the actor John Genke read from historical texts (including the 1492 edict by which Jews were expelled from Spain, and King James I of England’s 1604 excoriation of tobacco, offered as a prelude to Tobias Hume’s song about it). An attractive modern work among these antiquities, David Loeb’s “Cries of Kyoto,” was meant to bring the gamba’s history up to date, but mostly spoke in the instrument’s native accents.

The Spiritus Collective played an odd but fascinating selection of early-17th-century Italian works for violin, trumpet, sackbuts and continuo. Robert Mealy’s violin lines were, as always, deftly virtuosic, and Kris Ingles played the valveless trumpet bravely and mostly accurately. And Repast, a graceful, energetic ensemble that specializes in the late Baroque, gave vital performances of music by Corelli, Couperin and Telemann.

The Times Center, on West 41st Street in the new building of The New York Times, is a comfortable, attractive, visually open hall that is likely to be useful for chamber concerts. But its lack of resonance will keep it from being for all tastes, or for all musical styles.

The delicate voice and lute music of Asteria, for example, dissipated quickly in the hall’s dry acoustics. But the gambas of the New York Consort of Viols, Mr. Mealy’s violin and Ms. Ingles’s trumpet and the strings and continuo of Repast all projected strongly and with an appealing clarity.

Allan Kozinn : Nytimes.com