Sunday afternoon is a time for comfort, and superstar violinist Itzhak Perlman had a comfortable concert in mind for Sunday afternoon’s audience at Hill Auditorium.

Playing chamber music - music for violin and piano, with frequent partner Rohan De Silva - at this first University Musical Society concert of the season, Perlman made the vast hall feel like a living room into which he had invited the audience.

Admired for who he is and what he does, this artist at the pinnacle of the music world received a prolonged ovation before he had played a single note. He shot the warmth right back over the footlights. His playing, as sweet as it could be powerful, had a sort of gemutlich ease and reach. And his patter from the stage, in introducing selections made on the spot to round out the program of Leclair, Beethoven and Stravinsky, was full of puns and funny groaners that reminded me of Sunday afternoons with some of my uncles. If they’d been musical (which they were not), they might also have introduced a Rachmaninoff “Chanson sans Paroles” (“Song Without Words”) with a story about how it was written for a friend who went to jail for a long time for a minor offense. No parole, get it? Oy!

Connect, only connect. Perlman does it. With the music, with the crowd. The Leclair baroque Sonata in D Major (Op. 9, No. 3) with which he and De Silva commenced was charming. For audiences, it’s something of a rarity; for Perlman it is an old friend from the first recording he made. He delivered it Sunday with jollity and gusto in its fast movements, nipping out the notes of the Gypsylike interlude of the “Tambourin” finale, and with suavity and intimacy in its slow movements.

De Silva impressed with rhythmic fastidiousness to match Perlman’s in the Leclair. In the Beethoven “Eroica” Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 7 in C Minor that followed, which gives equal hard work to both players, we got to hear what he could really do, and it was great. He and Perlman gave a passionate performance of this highly dramatic sonata, taking time for the fun and tricky timing of the mocking, jaunty scherzo movement, and racing to a thrilling finish in the finale.

There is lots of wit and joy and dance in the Stravinsky “Suite Italienne” that opened the program’s second half; Perlman and De Silva enjoyed it, and the audience did, too - for all the times that you hear an audience cough at Hill (and Perlman did give the coughers the hairy eyeball at one point, causing an even greater cascade of coughs) how often do you hear one laugh? This one did, enjoying Stravinsky’s abrupt “I’m done now” endings as much as the players who showed us the humor.

When Perlman returned to the stage after the Stravinsky, he came with stacks of music, and made picks of eight short pieces, a few of which were by composers you (and in the case of Riccardo Drigo, Perlman) had never heard of, and/or arranged by the likes of Kreisler and Heifetz. Some were by well-known composers: Tchaikovsky (“Chanson sans Paroles”), Gluck (“Melodie” from “Orfeo ed Euridice”), Rachmaninoff (“Oriental Sketch”). Some were a showcase for Perlman’s virtuoso technique, others for his lyrical way with melodic material.

The zillion-notes-per-measure finale, by Reise, a “Motto Perpetuum” Op. 34, No. 5, caused Perlman to crack that it was one of Reise’s many pieces. But like a good dieter, Perlman knew when too many Reise’s pieces was too much. He stopped on a high note before surfeit of salon music set in.

For the record, the other pieces in the program that Perlman announced from the stage were: Martini/arr. Kreisler, “Andantino;” Hummel/arr. Heifetz, “Rondo in E-flat Major;” Fiocco, “Allegro;” and Drigo, “Valse Bluette.”