In the world of chamber music, there are numerous string quartets but fewer small ensembles combining wind instruments. The Dorian Wind Quintet, founded at Tanglewood more than 50 years ago, has collaborated with a number of composers, festivals, and educational institutions, exploring and creating repertoire for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn. The five members of the Dorian Wind Quintet came to Richardson Auditorium last Thursday night as part of the Princeton University Summer Concerts series, presenting works from the 18th to 20th centuries.

Flutist Gretchen Pusch, oboist Gerard Reuter, clarinetist Benjamin Fingland, bassoonist John Hunt, and hornist Karl Kramer-Johansen opened their program with an intriguing work from a composer with longevity in both age and reputation — the 1948 Quintet for Woodwinds of Elliott Carter, who died last year at the remarkable age of 103. The music of Carter can be described as intricate and complex and the Dorian Quintet achieved a smooth blend among the instruments, with crisp rhythmic figures and refreshing unisons. Mr. Kramer-Johansen’s horn playing melded well into the instrumental texture, and the quintet found particularly elegant sonorities in the second movement, Allegro.

The Dorian Quintet devoted a considerable portion of Thursday night’s concert to the musical influence of Antonin Reicha, one of a myriad of late 18th-century Bohemian composers who were overshadowed by the German and Austrian titans. Reicha’s Quintet in E-flat Major for Winds was every bit as charming as the chamber music of Mozart, but the works of Reicha and some of his contemporaries is not nearly as well known. Reicha’s Quintet in E-Flat is but a portion of his Opus 88, a large compendium of wind quintets, and the Dorian players focused on the work’s classical sophistication and characteristic melodic appeal that marked European music of the late 18th century.

The opening movement of the Reicha Quintet began with similar chords to Mozart’s opera overtures, and the Dorian Quintet made the most of every tapered phrase and appoggiatura. The players demonstrated graceful dialogs between flute and bassoon as well as clarinet and horn. The third movement, Andante, was so melodic (especially from the horn solo) it could have been an aria from an opera.

The Dorian Wind Quintet took Reicha’s tunefulness one step further in the early 2000s by commissioning five composers to write variations on the opening theme of the Quintet in E-flat Major. The grazioso theme was presented by oboist Mr. Reuter, after which the Dorian Quintet launched into five variations marked by quick and precise playing, as each instrumentalist took a turn leading the music. The variation by Sir Richard Rodney Bennett was sprightly with a quick harmonic twist and full of moving parts, while George Perle’s treatment was led by flutist Ms. Pusch (with echoes by Mr. Reuter) and contained some of the more dissonant passages. Staccato effects from hornist Mr. Kramer-Johansen marked the “Draino” variation of Bruce Adolphe and a majestic variation, complete with horn call, by Lee Hoiby closed the set with complex and intricate instrumental colors.

Thursday night’s performance, the second in the 2013 Princeton Summer Concerts series, was as refreshing as water ice in a summer which is starting off a bit on the hot and muggy side. The remaining concerts in the series will no doubt be just as energizing as Princeton relaxes into the summer music season.

—Nancy Plum