Beyond Bach and Beethoven

Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival

The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival begins its 44th season this week, offering a lineup of 40 concerts — mostly in Santa Fe, but with four run-outs to Albuquerque — from the opening-night performance on Sunday, July 17, through the closing one five weeks later, on Aug. 22. A browse through the repertoire and performing roster is mostly an exercise in the familiar. There is a certain virtue in that, as it makes it easy for concertgoers to figure out whether a given recital is one they want to attend or avoid based the pieces programmed (many of which are very well known) or on past experience hearing the players involved.

The composer most programmed by the festival this summer is the same one who is most frequently played by the city’s major concert organizations during the rest of the year: Ludwig van Beethoven. He’ll be represented by four string quartets (one early, two middle, one late), two piano trios, a string trio, and four piano sonatas (including his first and his last). That’s the closest the festival gets to a thematic thread this year, although the organization isn’t identifying it as such and seems not to have planned any ancillary aids to underscore what these particular works might tell us about their composer or the seminal decades of chamber music they embrace. Instead, the festival’s marketing materials point to other emphases that are, frankly, less prominent in the programming: a “Bevy of Bachs,” which means a handful of pieces by Johann Sebastian and three of his sons (one of whom the organization honors by misspelling his name in its marketing brochure); “Musical Families,” because three husband-and-wife couples will be here, as they have been every year in recent and mid-range memory; and a “British Invasion,” which means more pieces than usual by British composers, blessedly including Elgar’s delightfully campy Piano Quintet, which is dusted off less frequently than one wishes. On the whole, the programming seems lackadaisical. Most concerts sport a patchwork of miscellaneous pieces that have little to do with one another, assigned to ad-hoc groups of players whose styles and musical outlooks may or may not jibe deeply.

Connoisseurs of “the intimate art” are more likely to gravitate toward recitals featuring self-standing ensembles, which devote themselves full time to plumbing the detailed possibilities of the scores they perform, spending weeks and months developing an interpretation rather than hours. We happen to be living in a golden age of string quartets, and the very long list of quartets one wishes the festival might present will be reduced by one with this season’s appearances by the Pacifica Quartet. Formed in 1994, the ensemble rocketed up in the concert world, snagging numerous prestigious awards. Since 2012, the foursome has served as quartet-in-residence at the Jacobs School of Music of Indiana University in Bloomington, and they concurrently continue a long-term affiliation as “resident performing artist” at the University of Chicago. At some point they became obsessed with playing complete cycles of essential quartets: the 16 by Beethoven, the 15 by Shostakovich, the six by Mendelssohn, and (perhaps most astonishingly) the five by Carter. We’ll get a slight allusion to that propensity here, as the Pacifica will offer two Beethoven quartets on succeeding days: the F-major Quartet (Op. 59, No. 1, the

First Razumovsky) on Tuesday, July 19 (at noon), and the C-minor Quartet (Op. 18, No. 4) on Wednesday, July 20, at 6 p.m. On the Tuesday recital, the musicians will also present the String Quartet No. 3 (titled

Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory) by their University of Chicago colleague Shulamit Ran; on Wednesday, their Beethoven is bookended by extraneous music by Bridge and Dvoˇrák, played by other musicians. They’ll be back on July 24 and July 25 to team up with the Johannes String Quartet (by now a festival mainstay) for Mendelssohn’s Octet, which string-players enjoy performing every bit as much as audiences like hearing it. The Pacifica, by the way, is arriving in the nick of time. Last month, the group announced that Simin Ganatra, its founding first violinist, will be leaving at the end of the summer. That is sure to rock the boat, all the more so since she is married to the ensemble’s cellist. A replacement has not yet been announced, but a personnel shift of this sort invariably spells a change in an ensemble’s temperament and requires a settling-in period. These performances should not be missed, as they will offer some of the last opportunities to hear the Pacifica in the formation that has won them widespread and well-earned acclaim.

The other self-standing ensembles that figure on the summer’s roster are the Dover, FLUX, Johannes, and Orion Quartets. The Dover, formed only in 2008, is the most exciting of them, moving up quickly much as the Pacifica did a “short generation” earlier. That said, the two ensembles have very different characters. While the Pacifica has tended to infuse its interpretations with a rare sense of excited discovery, the Dover excels at quartettish classicism based on elegance of tone and sonic blend. The group displayed this impressively during the festival’s past two summers as well as in a recital for the Los Alamos Concert Association this past March. Given the nature of the Dover’s artistry, one might prefer to hear the musicians playing just as the foursome they are. Indeed, the festival has slotted them in for one quartet — Smetana’s First on Aug. 18 — but mostly they will appear in expanded formations, augmented by the brothers Benny Kim (violinist) and Eric Kim (cellist) for Dvorˇ ák’s String Sextet on Aug. 17, by Eric Kim for Schubert’s String Quintet on Aug. 21, and by pianist Peter Serkin for Dvorˇ ák’s Piano Quintet (Op. 81) on Aug. 22.

Serkin is this year’s artist in residence. Apart from his closing-night collaboration with the Dovers, one might anticipate interesting insights from his performance of Schumann’s late and strange D-minor Violin Sonata, in which he’ll assist Ida Kavafian on Aug. 18. Other than that, he will be one of the pianists in Bach’s C-major Concerto for Two Keyboards (along with Julia Hsu) in a Baroque program on Aug. 20, and he will play some version or another of Busoni’s cosmic Fantasia contrappuntistica in a mix-and-match program on Aug. 21. One of the highlights of the summer, however, will probably be his noontime