String Quartet

Since 1984, four of the principal string players of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra have led something of a double life. For a portion of each year, the foursome — violinists Daniel Stabrawa and Christian Stadelmann, violist Neithard Resa, and cellist Dietmar Schwalke — gets out from under the conductor’s baton and devotes itself to chamber music as the Philharmonia Quartett Berlin. The group made its Boston debut on Friday. The Berlin orchestra is famous, in part, for its strings, which produce a warm, plush sound with a unique sense of legato.

There was no filler, no curtain-raisers, no bonbons on the Borromeo String Quartet's program Sunday afternoon at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Just three summits of the chamber literature looming there, craggy and vertiginous: Beethoven's Quartets Opp. 130, 131, and 132. The program was the last stop in the Borromeo's traversal of the complete Beethoven Quartets, one that stretched over two years and three different venues, tracing the arc of the Gardner's own Sunday concert series as it migrated from the museum's Tapestry Room, to temporary quarters at...

What's the big deal about a string quartet playing on a Tuesday night in Boston? Granted, this particular string quartet was anchored by superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma. And the rest of the lineup was a little unorthodox, not to mention bluegrass: fiddler Stuart Duncan, Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers mandolinist Chris Thile, and double-bassist Edgar Meyer. And they were playing at the House of Blues, where they were joined by vocalist Aoife O'Donovan. And NCM Fathom and Sony Masterworks were cinecasting the first of the evening's two sessions live to more than 400 theaters nationwide, including...

Vienna is a city that laughs and cries at the same time, as the string ensemble A Far Cry demonstrated Sunday afternoon in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's new Calderwood Hall. Ranging from the 17th century (Johann Heinrich Schmelzer) to the 20th (Alban Berg and Arnold Schoenberg), with a stop in between for Mozart, the program plumbed emotional depths but never lost its sparkle. A sense of play was evident throughout. Schmelzer's "Die Fechtschule" - one of some 150 ballets he composed for Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I - incorporates a fencing match into its penultimate movement.

ROCKPORT - The schlockiest concert I've seen in a long time came last summer courtesy of the Rockport Chamber Music Festival. It was the British Baroque music outfit known as Red Priest, who brought to town a program about musical piracy, gleefully punning on their subject by dressing up as pirates, prancing around the stage, shouting inanities while playing. It must be said, though, that many in the audience seemed to love watching classical musicians cutting loose, daring to have fun in such a serious business.

WALTHAM -- The string quartet is, by its nature, a conservative organization and the Lydian String Quartet's "Around the World in a String Quartet" series didn't begin very far from home. At Brandeis University's Slosberg Recital Hall on Saturday, in the first concert in a planned five-year series, the Lydians programmed pieces by a Brandeis faculty member with Taiwanese heritage, an exiled Cuban now living in America, and Beethoven. If the choices were not outlandish, the performances were top-notch, as one expects from this group, Brandeis' resident quartet since...

HANDEL AND HAYDN SOCIETY Harry Christophers leads the Handel and Haydn Society and guest vocal soloists in one of Bach's most revered works, the "St. Matthew Passion. " 3 p.m., April 1, Symphony Hall. 617-266-3605, www.handelandhaydn.org ST. LAWRENCE STRING QUARTET This formidable ensemble comes to Rockport's Shalin Liu Performance Center with music by Beethoven and Dvorak alongside a new work by Osvaldo Golijov. 3 p.m., April 1. www.afarcry.org, rockportmusic.org Jeremy Eichler

PETERBOROUGH, N.H.—The Peterborough Town House’s clean vault might seem an architectural rebuke to Parisian decadence, but the Monadnock Music Festival bridged the gap on Sunday with a program of French-born refinement. The theme, “Paris of the Senses,’’ emphasized composers’ almost tactile use of instrumental color. It could also have referred to a sense of history, focusing on two periods — the 1890s and the 1920s — when Paris’s culture and historical circumstances particularly intertwined.

A sense of collective journey builds when a string quartet takes on an epic cycle such as the 15 string quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich. This is of course one of the two great string quartet cycles of the 20th century, the other being the quartets of Bartok. With Shostakovich, these are the astonishing documents of a creative life that in retrospect seems, paradoxically, both archetypal and utterly sui generis. For all its deep connection to the composer's inner life, the music is filled with truths that transcend their time and place.

Any young string quartet that presents a complete program of music by the formidable German avant-gardist Helmut Lachenmann is, shall we say, not messing around. That was what the New York-based Jack Quartet brought to the Goethe Institute last year for a concert in the composer’s presence. On Tuesday night, the Jack returned to town, this time for a bracing performance in the sleek theater at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The Jack lists both the Arditti and Kronos quartets among its teachers, but this program seemed distinctly in the orbit of the former group, with...

ROCKPORT - The schlockiest concert I've seen in a long time came last summer courtesy of the Rockport Chamber Music Festival. It was the British Baroque music outfit known as Red Priest, who brought to town a program about musical piracy, gleefully punning on their subject by dressing up as pirates, prancing around the stage, shouting inanities while playing. It must be said, though, that many in the audience seemed to love watching classical musicians cutting loose, daring to have fun in such a serious business.

HANDEL AND HAYDN SOCIETY Harry Christophers leads the Handel and Haydn Society and guest vocal soloists in one of Bach's most revered works, the "St. Matthew Passion. " 3 p.m., April 1, Symphony Hall. 617-266-3605, www.handelandhaydn.org ST. LAWRENCE STRING QUARTET This formidable ensemble comes to Rockport's Shalin Liu Performance Center with music by Beethoven and Dvorak alongside a new work by Osvaldo Golijov. 3 p.m., April 1. www.afarcry.org, rockportmusic.org Jeremy Eichler

CONCORD - In the past decade or two, classical music performers have increasingly cultivated something approaching the amplified energy and impact of rock music. At its concert in Concord on Sunday, the Brentano String Quartet demonstrated the merits - and occasional demerits - of going in the opposite direction. The group, celebrating its 20th anniversary this season, is united by a pursuit of a more old-fashioned musical virtue: refinement. In Beethoven's F-major String Quartet, Op. 18 No. 1, the Brentano method was on full display.

It has been one of the more unusual stories in the realm of contemporary classical music. Some 35 small to mid-size orchestras joined forces to commission a work by Brookline resident Osvaldo Golijov, a Grammy Award-winning former MacArthur Fellow who is one of the most admired composers of the past decade. But questions about the creative process behind his 2010 composition "Sidereus" - which is on the Longwood Symphony Orchestra's Saturday program - have given rise in recent weeks to what is either a scandal or a tempest in a teapot, depending on your view.

Classical music is not often noted for its sense of humor, but one was palpable in "Heartbeats," the program that the string ensemble A Far Cry presented at Jordan Hall on Friday. A wry humor, to be sure: The evening began with Dmitri Shostakovich's grim, tortured Chamber Symphony in C minor and ended with the palpitations of John Adams's "Shaker Loops. " In between came Kip Jones's "Three Views of a Mountain," a concerto for violin and double bass whose soloists, Jones and Karl Doty, were identified as "K2" - as in the world's second-highest mountain.

What's the big deal about a string quartet playing on a Tuesday night in Boston? Granted, this particular string quartet was anchored by superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma. And the rest of the lineup was a little unorthodox, not to mention bluegrass: fiddler Stuart Duncan, Nickel Creek and Punch Brothers mandolinist Chris Thile, and double-bassist Edgar Meyer. And they were playing at the House of Blues, where they were joined by vocalist Aoife O'Donovan. And NCM Fathom and Sony Masterworks were cinecasting the first of the evening's two sessions live to more than 400 theaters...

One of the treasurable things about four people making music, as opposed to having a conversation, is that they can all talk at the same time. You could even call chamber music the art of talking and listening at the same time. The young women of Quatuor Zaïde, a string quartet that formed in Paris in 2009, made that point Thursday evening in their free concert at Jordan Hall, the culmination of a weeklong residency at the New England Conservatory. Violinists Charlotte Juillard and Pauline Fritsch, violist Sarah Chenaf, and cellist Juliette Salmona left plenty of room for one another...

It's tempting to regard Osvaldo Golijov more as brilliant curator than brilliant composer. He's become so famous for incorporating diverse musical cultures -- tango, klezmer, pop -- into his classical works that we often speak of them as if they could be reduced to the sum of their nontraditional ingredients. Yet with each new piece it becomes clearer that the Grammy Award-winning Golijov is not simply a sophisticated scavenger but a wholly original composer with a dramatically forceful musical imagination.

One of the treasurable things about four people making music, as opposed to having a conversation, is that they can all talk at the same time. You could even call chamber music the art of talking and listening at the same time. The young women of Quatuor Zaïde, a string quartet that formed in Paris in 2009, made that point Thursday evening in their free concert at Jordan Hall, the culmination of a weeklong residency at the New England Conservatory. Violinists Charlotte Juillard and Pauline Fritsch, violist Sarah Chenaf, and cellist Juliette Salmona left plenty of room for one another...

The oddest entry on the Callithumpian Consort's Wednesday concert was Debussy's Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp. This is not the way things work with most ensembles: Debussy's 1915 work is supremely listenable and not infrequently encountered on chamber music programs. But the Callithumpian Consort is not most groups. A loose confederation of musicians under the intrepid direction of pianist Stephen Drury, the group is dedicated to exploring every facet of the avant-garde, the more experimental the better.