Danish String Quartet; cellist Joshua Roman; The Water Engine; Bless Me, Ultima

Coincidence conspired to make the first two weeks of February dense with classical concerts, and particularly with performances that spotlighted string players. Last week we reported on recitals by the string quartet Brooklyn Rider and the violinist Vadim Gluzman, and this week we play catch-up, beginning with a pair of concerts that took place on Feb. 11: the Danish String Quartet (presented by Santa Fe Pro Musica at St. Francis Auditorium) and the Santa Fe Symphony with cellist Joshua Roman (at the Lensic Performing Arts Center). A scheduling overlap prevented music-lovers from attending both, at least in their entireties, but the two events boasted good-sized audiences all the same.

The Danish String Quartet got off the starting block first, at 3 p.m. The group increased its international exposure through an affiliation, from 2013 through 2016, as members of CMS Two (the youngartist development program of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center) and by receiving the 2011 Carl Nielsen Prize, a prestigious award from the nation of Denmark. The musicians recently gained attention through a heavily promoted crossover album on which they play their own arrangements of Danish folk and traditional tunes. They have been lauded for their commitment to contemporary scores — and, indeed, they included Jörg Widmann’s Jagdquartett (Hunt Quartet), from 2003, on the Santa Fe program, which consisted of compositions that alluded to hunting, mostly through 6/8 meter and harmonic sequences involving “horn fifths.” Unfortunately, I did not hear the GRAB BAG: CONCERTS, THEATER, OPERA Widmann. I was among those who dashed up the aisle just before it began in order to reach the Lensic when the Symphony got underway at 4 p.m. a few blocks distant.

My incomplete experience of the Danish String Quartet’s concert was limited to the first two numbers, quartets in B-flat major by Haydn (Op. 1, No. 1) and Mozart (K.458, the Hunt). The opus number of Haydn’s early quartets were assigned by publishers some years after they were written; whether his Op. 1, No. 1 was truly the first step in his glorious stream of quartets is unknowable. Period sources call it a cassatio or divertimento, and it does follow the expected layout of the latter, comprising five movements with two minuets among them. This pleasant, largely unremarkable piece is more elementary in its language than we encounter in later Haydn, with accompaniments sometimes consisting merely of repeated chords. Only its swirling fifth movement offered a glimpse of the panache the composer would achieve later in his career. The playing was not as tight as the group might achieve on a better day. Pizzicatos were sometimes attacked very much out of unison, and the first violin often produced a bright, glassy tone that sounded out of place in the context of the group’s richer timbre overall. Mozart’s famous

Hunt Quartet, which happened to be dedicated to Haydn, benefited from more polished ensemble work. The group’s approach tended toward the athletic, although the lower voices did sometimes mine expressivity in a more overt way. The quartet’s rendition of the finale was a delight, bristling and cheeky. Still to be heard when I left were the Widmann piece and Brahms’ Quartet No. 3.

Off to the Santa Fe Symphony, where Guillermo Figueroa led a buoyant interpretation of Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmila Overture, if one in which the woodwinds sometimes sounded coordinated as a group but slightly out-of-sync to the rest of the orchestra. Joshua Roman took to the stage for a laudable performance of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 1. Dating from 1959, after the iron-fisted cultural control of Stalin’s U.S.S.R. had yielded to a limited thaw, the piece retains characteristics of officially approved Socialist Realism but also gives voice to the composer’s signature sarcasm, along with episodes that are giddy in their playfulness, choking with high anxiety, or moody to the point of depression. Roman proved an adept champion of this score, drawing on secure technique to underscore the shifting character. Near the end of the second movement, his extended exhalation of “whistling-in-the-graveyard” harmonics proved captivating (enhanced by the frigid flickering of the celesta), and he paced the cadenza — which is the entire third movement — with a compelling sense of drama. It is easy for an orchestra to overwhelm a solo cello, but Figueroa enforced excellent balance that allowed the soloist to be heard clearly. Principal horn-player Nathan Ukens was everywhere commendable in Shostakovich’s prominent obbligatos for that instrument. The second half of this all-Russian