Principals of the Thing : Music: Boston Symphony’s 12 main players face challenges as a chamber group, but it’s the enrichment that counts, says the concertmaster. The ensemble will perform at the Irvine Barclay.

The idea may seem obvious, but of all the orchestras in the United States, only the Boston Symphony has managed to do it: form a permanent chamber-music ensemble with the orchestra’s principal players.

“Contractually it’s quite complicated,” the orchestra’s concertmaster Malcolm Lowe said Thursday in a phone interview from Boston Symphony offices.

“Basically, (other orchestras) do want to make use of their principals in a chamber-music setting, but finding the time is difficult. It’s very difficult to incorporate (chamber) concerts into a regular (symphony orchestra) season. We have a tremendous challenge in doing that.” In fact, the Boston Symphony Chamber Players can only manage to do so 10 to 12 times a year.

The ensemble, which plays Tuesday at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, was organized in 1962 by Joseph Silverstein, then concertmaster of the orchestra and now music director of the Utah Symphony. The group draws on all 12 principal players, expanding and contracting as required by the repertory.

The chance to participate in such a group, Lowe said, is “something that makes orchestras alive and specifically our life in the Boston Symphony really enriching because we do have an opportunity to explore almost every aspect of our instrument, given the orchestra repertory and chamber repertory and the solo things we do. I can’t think of a more enriching experience.

“Programming is decided around our tours and recordings and just our own interests,” said Lowe, who became concertmaster in 1984. “Primarily I end up being responsible for the programs and the final decision-making.”

Lowe noted that “our goals in the orchestra and as chamber musicians are quite similar. It helps us to play well together in a smaller setting, the fact that we are playing together in the orchestra. The means of achieving that sound and the signals that one gets are different, but all of that becomes more familiar with experience. It helps in both situations.”

There’s one big difference between the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and most other small groups formed specifically to play chamber literature: They can’t select personnel.

“We don’t get to choose who the next principal flute is,” Lowe said. “Our music director and orchestra committee chooses those people, and we have to work with them. That, in a sense, is dictated to us.”

There are, moreover, pulls in various directions and inevitable personnel conflicts, but “none that we can’t resolve.

“It’s very difficult in terms of time organization,” Lowe said. “Some people would prefer to play more solos and more chamber repertory than we do. I miss playing more string quartets, which are the most difficult to incorporate into our programs because it really does take more time to execute that repertory the way it deserves to be done.”

It’s not, he said, that “other mediums don’t need a lot of rehearsal. The difference has to be that more of a group sound or thought must be worked into a string quartet.”

Generally, “there are themes that run through our programs,” he said. That’s not the case this time because “our stay is short.” Just eight players are on the current mini-tour.

“It was not economically feasible to have 14 players on a four-day tour. It’s not the full tour we would like to do, but there are opportunities to play a couple of concerts.

“It’s very difficult these days to do tours during the time we’re available, in May,” he added.

But the “biggest conflict,” he said, “always is having a union trade agreement and, overtop that, a desire to make music and play chamber music.

“We run into trouble about the kinds of concerts we can give, whether we can make a tour in April as opposed to May,” he said. “All that is basically decided in our trade agreement. We battle through it.”

The Boston Symphony Chamber Players will plays works by Handel, Beethoven, Poulenc and Brahms on Tuesday at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. The program is sponsored by the Laguna Chamber Music Society and the Orange County Philharmonic Society. $14 to $25. (714) 854-4646.