The Amernet String Quartet.The Mainly Mozart Festival is in full swing at the Westin Colonnade in Coral Gables, and for the next two weekends, the Amernet String Quartet takes on music mainly not by Mozart, but the festival is still a good way to catch some chamber music as the hurricane season gets under way.

This Mainly Mozart series is now in its 17th season, and like older series such as New York’s Mostly Mozart Festival, which debuted (though not under that name) in 1966, it offers chamber music for the summer months. Classical music activity has increased during the past few summers, and insiders tell me that despite the weak economy and its negative effects on the arts, freelance classical musicians in South Florida are keeping pretty busy.

The Amernet Quartet has been in residence at Florida International University for years, and its players are familiar to veteran concertgoers. This Sunday’s program features one work by Mozart (an unspecified Quartet in G, probably K. 387, though there are two others in that key written when the composer was barely into his teens), and two works the group has played in concerts over the past couple months.

One of them is an arrangement of six preludes from the Op. 34 set of 24 by Dmitri Shostakovich, written for piano, but arranged here by Yuri Vitenson, father of the Amernet’s first violinist, Misha Vitenson. I heard the Amernet play this arrangement in early April on the Chameleon Music series in Fort Lauderdale, and it’s a striking effort. I followed along with the score during the performance, and it’s fascinating to watch the choices the elder Vitenson had to make to get the music across, given that the quartet can’t reproduce everything the piano is capable of.

These are pieces in Shostakovich’s more experimental, youthful and sarcastic vein, written before the stylistic changes that came about under the Stalinist arts terror. It’s very interesting and rewarding music, and while the composer made a sizable contribution to the string quartet literature with his 15 quartets, the piano preludes are not as well-known as they could be, and this is a useful way to give this music another hearing.

Also on the program is the Quartet No. 14 in A-flat, Op. 105, of Antonin Dvořák, the last of the Czech master’s fine series of quartets. This is a beautifully written work, ravishing in its radiant third movement, and full of the memorable melody that makes this composer popular. The Amernet played it with clarity and strength during the Lauderdale performance, and it always whets the appetite for hearing more of the Dvořák quartets.

Next weekend, the Amernet will perform again at the festival, joined by violist Chauncey Patterson for two great works for string quintet: the Mozart G minor, K. 516, one of the most beautiful pieces Mozart ever wrote, and the gorgeous G major string quintet (No. 1, Op. 88) of Johannes Brahms. That will be the concert for chamber music fans who need a glimpse of Parnassus as the weather gets hotter and stickier.

If you’re really enamored of chamber music, you can think of the Mainly Mozart series as a scene-setter for the Palm Beach Chamber Music Festival, which begins in early July and features a good deal of chamber music with wind instruments. Organizers of that festival have a fine series of programs in store, including the Nonet of Bohuslav Martinu, pieces by Roussel, Ibert, Poulenc and Sapieyevsky, and contemporary American music by Kenneth Frazelle and Clark McAlister.

The story is that the original Mostly Mozart Festival came about in part because the new Lincoln Center had an air-conditioning system that made it possible, and I like to believe that. Many’s the time I’ve enjoyed going to a Sunday afternoon concert in August simply because I know it will be great to sit there in the chill with a bunch of other music-loving heat refugees. (For tickets to Mainly Mozart, call 305-444-4475 or visit www.mainlymozart.com.)