String Trio

NATICK - The indie cellist Matt Haimovitz has a stellar classical pedigree but he enjoys playing Bach, Hendrix, and avant-garde new-music in spaces as far afield as a punk shrine in downtown Manhattan and a pizza parlor in Jackson, Miss. He particularly loves venues where the vibe is informal yet the atmosphere still allows for close listening. So I'm sure he felt right at home in the converted brick firehouse at the Center for Arts in Natick, with its intimate jazz club feel. The venue seats an audience of 290 and is ideally suited for unstuffy chamber music.

CAMBRIDGE - "Mythic Beasts: Music of Myth and Imagination" was the title of Firebird Ensemble's first program of the season, and indeed, the small audience at Longy School's Pickman Concert Hall was transported, as if on the back of a great roc, to Japan for Eric Guinivan's "Mie: Caprice for Eight Musicians" (2008), Italy for Andrew Norman's "The Companion Guide to Rome" (2010), India and Pakistan for the world premiere of Guinivan's "Avalerion," and back home for John McDonald's "Seven Album Leaves" (2011)

CAMBRIDGE - "Mythic Beasts: Music of Myth and Imagination" was the title of Firebird Ensemble's first program of the season, and indeed, the small audience at Longy School's Pickman Concert Hall was transported, as if on the back of a great roc, to Japan for Eric Guinivan's "Mie: Caprice for Eight Musicians" (2008), Italy for Andrew Norman's "The Companion Guide to Rome" (2010), India and Pakistan for the world premiere of Guinivan's "Avalerion," and back home for John McDonald's "Seven Album Leaves" (2011)

BOSTON MUSICA VIVA "Time Cycles" At: Tsai Performance Center, Friday Boston Musica Viva opened its 2011-2012 season Friday with "Time Cycles," a quartet of 20th-century American works that cast an uneasy eye on the ravages of time. Lukas Foss's "Time Cycle" (1960) is a vocal piece whose four sections draw on texts from W.H. Auden, A.E. Housman, Franz Kafka, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Mark Berger's String Trio No. 2 (2007) takes its cue from T.S. Eliot's Cape Ann-inspired "The Dry Salvages," the third of his "Four Quartets.

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.

BOSTON MUSICA VIVA "Time Cycles" At: Tsai Performance Center, Friday Boston Musica Viva opened its 2011-2012 season Friday with "Time Cycles," a quartet of 20th-century American works that cast an uneasy eye on the ravages of time. Lukas Foss's "Time Cycle" (1960) is a vocal piece whose four sections draw on texts from W.H. Auden, A.E. Housman, Franz Kafka, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Mark Berger's String Trio No. 2 (2007) takes its cue from T.S. Eliot's Cape Ann-inspired "The Dry Salvages," the third of his "Four Quartets.

Emmanuel Music opened a new season under a new music director on Sunday, and, as was inevitable, one felt the absence of the man who founded and built the series of chamber concerts. Craig Smith’s programming touch was unerring — there was always something novel and something delightful in his surveys — and his touch as a pianist was like a line of gold filigree through any concert. John Harbison, who stepped in as acting director after Smith’s death in 2007, followed his own tastes, as he should have, and last season combined works of...

LENOX — This year’s Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood treated “contemporary’’ as a style more than a temporal measurement; the average age of programmed works was just about 28. Last year it was around 10. Age is relative, of course. Witness that it was the 101-year-old Elliott Carter who wrote the festival’s newest piece, a chamber-orchestra setting of Marianne Moore poetry titled, appropriately, “What Are Years.’’ Superbly sung by Sarah Joanne Davis and conducted by Oliver Knussen, the cycle’s wry conciseness and...

BOSTON CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY The city’s chamber music scene, too, goes on a long summer hiatus and this August series at the Longy School is one of the few signs of life. Works by Haydn and Brahms frame each program, and this week also features Francaix’s String Trio with Carmit Zori (violin), Robert Rinehart (viola), and Wilhelmina Smith (cello). Aug. 29 at 8 p.m., Longy School, 27 Garden St., Cambridge. 617-349-0086, www.bostonchambermusic.org BOSTON LANDMARKS ORCHESTRA The series of free performances on the Esplanade continues next Wednesday with...

DANCE Medford: The Tufts Dance Program's Spring Concert "In Closing" includes works by its retiring director, Alice Trexler, and graduating seniors Christina Aguirre and Aline Gue. The varied modern dance works are performed by Tufts students and guest dancers from the Boston dance community in the intimate setting of the Jackson Dance Lab. Friday and April 22, 8 p.m. both performances. Jackson Dance Lab, Aidekman Art Center, 50 Talbot Ave. Free. http://ase.tufts.edu/drama-dance/ MUSIC Salem: The Boston Artists Ensemble performs Beethoven's Duet for Viola and Cello, "With Two Eyeglasses Obligato,"...

Emmanuel Music opened a new season under a new music director on Sunday, and, as was inevitable, one felt the absence of the man who founded and built the series of chamber concerts. Craig Smith’s programming touch was unerring — there was always something novel and something delightful in his surveys — and his touch as a pianist was like a line of gold filigree through any concert. John Harbison, who stepped in as acting director after Smith’s death in 2007, followed his own tastes, as he should have, and last season combined works of Schoenberg and Haydn, an unlikely and...

LENOX — This year’s Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood treated “contemporary’’ as a style more than a temporal measurement; the average age of programmed works was just about 28. Last year it was around 10. Age is relative, of course. Witness that it was the 101-year-old Elliott Carter who wrote the festival’s newest piece, a chamber-orchestra setting of Marianne Moore poetry titled, appropriately, “What Are Years.’’ Superbly sung by Sarah Joanne Davis and conducted by Oliver Knussen, the cycle’s wry conciseness and...

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.

NATICK - The indie cellist Matt Haimovitz has a stellar classical pedigree but he enjoys playing Bach, Hendrix, and avant-garde new-music in spaces as far afield as a punk shrine in downtown Manhattan and a pizza parlor in Jackson, Miss. He particularly loves venues where the vibe is informal yet the atmosphere still allows for close listening. So I'm sure he felt right at home in the converted brick firehouse at the Center for Arts in Natick, with its intimate jazz club feel. The venue seats an audience of 290 and is ideally suited for unstuffy chamber...

Gabriella Mondini, the driven protagonist of Regina O'Melveny's picaresque fiction debut, is as much of an anomaly in her time (a female doctor in 16th-century Italy) as she would be in ours (she's had it up to here with Venice). What would propel a woman to go into medicine in an age when women in that line of work are likened to witches, and suspected witches meet a terrible end? And who among us would willfully kiss off a comfortable home in Venice, servants included, during a time when the pigeons still outnumbered the tourists and the $20 Bellini was not yet an option at the...