At most Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society concerts, human voices are only heard introducing the music and cheering the performances. But at the society’s first gala benefit on July 22, the Old Whaling Church rang to the rafters with vocal music from opera, Broadway and the Island itself.

Titled Brio Bliss Boffo: Celebrating Music Through Song, the concert featured seven singers, including three soloists from the Metropolitan Opera and an award-winning bass-baritone who are on the Vineyard to perform in this weekend’s Opera at Featherstone. Actor Donavon Dietz was master of ceremonies.

The evening also showcased Island vocalists in a program of celebrated arias and show tunes, along with Vineyard composer Philip Dietterich’s settings of poems by James Joyce.

Opera singers are actors too, and Sunday’s performers kept the audience riveted.

Met soprano So Young Park opened the concert with a sassy, devil-may-care Quando men vo from Puccini’s La Bohème.

Met tenor Luke Grooms, who plays opposite Ms. Park in Featherstone’s La fille du régiment this weekend, brought just a hint of classic clowning to his entrance, bumbling his way past the front pew to the stage stairs. Then, like Sherlock Holmes throwing off a disguise, he launched into Ecco, ridente in cielo, the aria that opens Rossini’s The Barber of Seville.

Mr. Grooms’s high C was pure and soaring, ringing through the Whaling Church. His vocal decorations were both detailed and perfectly controlled, with a sense of focused, almost ecstatic power that recalled both the late Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and the 20th-century saxophonist John Coltrane.

The compelling bass-baritone Adelmo Guidarelli joined Mr. Grooms for Bizet’s Au fond du temple saint, from The Pearl Fishers, weaving a gorgeous braid of voices around Ed

Bak’s piano.

Mezzo-soprano Karolina Pilou took command of the stage for another Bizet favorite, L’amour est an oiseau rebelle (Habanera) from Carmen.

Continuing with Carmen, Mr. Guidarelli returned to the stage to sing the massive crowd-pleaser Votre toast, je peux vous le render, better known as Toreador. From the first notes to his final “Olé!,” he inhabited his character of the bullfighter Escamillo.

Mr. Bak accompanied the opera singers and a duet between two Island vocalists, soprano Olivia de Geofroy and baritone David Behnke, who sang Mozart’s Bei Mannern, welche Liebe fuhlen from The Magic Flute.

Mr. Behnke also sang Donizetti’s Bella siccome in angelo, from Don Pasquale and, in the Boffo portion of the evening, a soaring Oh, What a Beautiful Morning, from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma, with Molly Sturges at the piano.

The Brio program ended with Verdi’s Libiamo ne’lieti calici (Brindisi), bringing the four off-Island professionals and Mr. Behnke together, glasses in hand, for what master of ceremonies Donavon Dietz introduced as “an old drinking buddy from La Traviata.”

Film buffs might also recognize this rollicking ensemble number as the trigger that sends Ray Milland into an alcoholic spiral in Billy Wilder’s 1945 movie The Lost Weekend, but on Sunday it was simply a send-off to the opera portion of the evening.

The Bliss section of the program featured Islanders Philip Dietterich and soprano Molly Conole with Mr. Dietterich at the piano for his Strings, Waters and Winds, impressionistic vocal settings of three poems by Joyce. Ms. Conole’s silvery soprano invested the songs with Joycean nostalgia, longing and agitation.

For the Boffo, Mr. Behnke’s Oklahoma solo was followed by another Rodgers & Hammerstein hit, Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific, sung by Mr. Guidarelli.

Ms. Park returned with I Could Have Danced All Night, from Lerner & Loewe’s My Fair Lady, with its roof-raising high notes. Ms. Conole turned in a charmingly comic performance as Lucy in the Clark Gesner song Schroeder, from You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.

In the non-singing, non-speaking role of Schroeder, pianist Peter Boak was quietly hilarious as he dourly ignored Ms. Conole while playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

Ms. Pilou mined a darker vein of humor as the philosophical, opportunistic Old Lady in Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s I Am Easily Assimilated, from Candide, and Mr. Grooms delivered a rousing Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat, from Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls.

For the finale, the four visiting opera singers performed the famous Quartet from Verdi’s Rigoletto, in which every character is burning with unsatisfied desires. Ms. Park was particularly smoldering as the seduced and abandoned Gilda.

Then the entire cast of singers joined Mr. Bak on stage for one more song from Candide, the closer Make Our Garden Grow.

The Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society continues its 48th festival season July 30 at the Whaling Church and Juy 31 at the Chilmark Community Center, when artistic director and festival pianist Delores Stevens plays Mozart, Beethoven and Robert Schumann with violinist Gary Levinson, violist Michael Klotz and cellist Jason Calloway. For more information: mvcms.org.