Wind Quintet

The Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, all members of that august orchestra, made their Boston debut on Friday with a Celebrity Series concert at Jordan Hall. The wind quintet is, tonally speaking, a fractious bunch; only the oboe and bassoon can claim any true family resemblance, the rest a miscellany of timbres and shades. The question for any iteration of the group is whether to regard that dissimilarity as a virtue or a problem. The Berliners fall into the latter category, and have solved the problem extremely well; their blend, their ability to unite all five disparate sounds into...

The Berlin Philharmonic Wind Quintet, all members of that august orchestra, made their Boston debut on Friday with a Celebrity Series concert at Jordan Hall. The wind quintet is, tonally speaking, a fractious bunch; only the oboe and bassoon can claim any true family resemblance, the rest a miscellany of timbres and shades. The question for any iteration of the group is whether to regard that dissimilarity as a virtue or a problem. The Berliners fall into the latter category, and have solved the problem extremely well; their blend, their ability to unite all five disparate sounds into...

One of the most reliably creative chamber groups around, Chameleon Arts Ensemble marked the close of its 10th season with an anniversary concert dedicated to that round number. Two of the works shared Opus 10 designations, and the rest featured at least some decimal reference. Three instruments - Joanna Kurkowicz's violin, Scott Woolweaver's viola, and Rafael Popper-Keizer's cello - made a surprisingly big sound in Ernst von Dohnányi's Op. 10 Serenade, low and open strings creating a folk-tinged Romanticism, a village band essaying Brahms; the players brought appropriate rustic vigor, but...

One of the most reliably creative chamber groups around, Chameleon Arts Ensemble marked the close of its 10th season with an anniversary concert dedicated to that round number. Two of the works shared Opus 10 designations, and the rest featured at least some decimal reference. Three instruments - Joanna Kurkowicz's violin, Scott Woolweaver's viola, and Rafael Popper-Keizer's cello - made a surprisingly big sound in Ernst von Dohnányi's Op. 10 Serenade, low and open strings creating a folk-tinged Romanticism, a village band essaying Brahms; the players brought appropriate rustic vigor, but...

Imani Winds blew stylishly into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on Sunday afternoon, bearing an assortment of music old and new, and yes, borrowed and even blue. Now recognized by many as the leading wind quintet in America, Imani revels in challenging preconceptions about “classical’’ music and musicians. All five of its members are young — no gray hairs in sight. All are African-American. Only one is male. Their on-stage demeanor is hip, casual, and chatty, with informatively humorous commentary by each player.

BOOKS Brookline: Lisa See will be reading from “Dreams of Joy,’’ the sequel to her 2009 best-selling novel “Shanghai Girls,’’ in an author’s talk at 7 p.m. tomorrow at the Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St., in Coolidge Corner. Free. 617-566-6660, www.brooklinebooksmith-shop.com. MUSIC Harvard : The 65-piece Concord Band presents “In a Latin Mood’’ at 7:15 p.m. Wednesday as part of the annual series of summer concerts on the grounds of the Fruitlands Museum, 102 Prospect Hill Road.

CAMBRIDGE - Perhaps inevitably, the highlight of Saturday's Radius Ensemble concert at Longy was Bohuslav Martinu's 1945 "Fantasia" for theremin, oboe, and piano quintet, because, really, a theremin is going to be the highlight of any concert it's in. Both Kathryn Bacasmot's program notes and a spoken introduction by oboist Jennifer Montbach, Radius's artistic director, reassured that the instrument wasn't just a gimmick, but it is, at least partially,...

LENOX -- Grief paralyzes the spirit; grieving liberates it. Thomas Hampson's recital at Tanglewood on Tuesday explored both , but the integrity of his engagement with text and music banished any maudlin sentimentality. In the first half, Hampson and his superb pianist, Wolfram Rieger, presented Robert Schumann's "Dichterliebe" ("Poet's Love"), a journey from romantic hope to despair. The work was published as a 16-song cycle, but Hampson sang the original 20-song version, as preserved in Schumann's manuscript in the Deutsche Staats Bibliothek Berlin.

All is fair in love, war, and apparently chamber music. The kind of programming that the Boston Symphony Orchestra would typically not dream of in Symphony Hall - a concert made up of four works written within the last half-century - went over just fine in Jordan Hall on Sunday afternoon, as the Boston Symphony Chamber Players ambitiously closed their season with music by Irving Fine, Lukas Foss, Osvaldo Golijov, and Michael Gandolfi. The afternoon's printed program also contained a bit of ensemble news: This chamber troupe, staffed by principal players from the...

One of the benefits of concerts by the intrepid Chameleon Arts Ensemble is its performance venue. Most of its concerts take place at the Goethe-Institut, in what must have once been an oversized living room. The intimacy of the space makes it possible to experience the music in the kind of proximity that the term “chamber music’’ used to imply. That sense of immediacy was present throughout Chameleon’s Saturday night concert, nowhere more so than in its centerpiece: an impassioned and broadly scaled performance of the Brahms Piano...

WESTON — None of the music the Radius Ensemble presented at its weekend concert was terribly shy. But alongside a varied straightforwardness was a certain coyness: Did the music have meaning on its own or only through extra-musical reference? Tiptoeing around that venerable formalist question, references of time and place invited listeners to fill in a story, even when there might not have been a story to fill in. Take, for instance, Alan Hovhaness’s 1947 “Divertimento’’ for wind quintet.

Arthur Berger (1912-2003), the theorist and educator (who taught at Juilliard, Brandeis, and the New England Conservatory), cofounder of the influential journal Perspectives of New Music (who regretted the title's syntactically suspect preposition), and critical advocate of musical modernism (who was once sued for a bad review), was a composer first and foremost. Keeping his music alive was the goal of the first Arthur Berger Memorial Concert at NEC's Jordan Hall on Tuesday. Berger was initially regarded as a follower of the neoclassical Stravinsky; the...