SANTA FE, N.M. - The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival presents top-flight performers in attractive theaters in the historic heart of the city each summer and has a strong following among locals and tourists alike. Sadly, it is overshadowed in national awareness, by the Santa Fe Opera, with its spectacular open-air theater a few miles north of the city and its fancy productions. Critics flock to the opera, often without even bothering to see what is playing at the chamber festival.
But it doesn't escape the attention of musicians around the country. Orchestra players come to mingle with full-time chamber musicians and instrumental and vocal soloists for reasons that are obvious, given the beauty of the natural and man-made surroundings. But there are also sheerly musical reasons: For orchestra players in particular, the festival offers an opportunity to perform works by composers little represented in the regular-season orchestral repertory.
A good example took place on Saturday evening at the St. Francis Auditorium of the New Mexico Museum of Art, an hourlong concert in the festival's Bach Plus series (with no plus, just Bach).
Joseph Johnson, the principal cellist of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and of the Santa Fe Opera Orchestra, led off with a lovely performance of Bach's towering Suite No. 1 in G for solo cello. Mr. Johnson paced the opening Prelude beautifully, with its rise to a climactic series of repeated high G's, among the most ecstatic moments in all of Bach.
Many - including, of course, world-class soloists like Mstislav Rostropovich and Yo-Yo Ma - have found greater passion in the work, but Mr. Johnson performed with a beautiful, rich sound, and his account was altogether appealing in its modesty and its meticulous care for the clarity of line and counterpoint.
Joshua Smith, the principal flutist of the Cleveland Orchestra, ended the program with Bach's Partita in A minor for solo flute, a particularly brave choice. Not only does the flutist have to shape the melody and the counterpoint largely with his breathing, but Mr. Smith was also performing at an altitude of some 7,000 feet, where the air is thin, and breathing is hard to begin with. No matter: Mr. Smith, performing on a wooden flute with modern keys and fittings, made it sound ... not easy, exactly, but comfortable and even magisterial at times.
Choon-Jin Chang, the third featured performer in the program, is the principal violist of the Philadelphia Orchestra and the violist of the Johannes String Quartet. He gave a solid account of Bach's Sonata No. 3 in G minor for viola da gamba and harpsichord, using a modern viola, with Kathleen McIntosh as harpsichordist.
A somewhat longer concert at the museum on Thursday evening featured the splendid rising baritone Matthew Worth in a performance of Schumann's song cycle "Dichterliebe" ("Poet's Love") with the young pianist Shai Wosner, who had been heard earlier in the festival in a Schubert program.
Mr. Worth was simply superb, singing with exquisite sensitivity where needed but also growling strongly - despite the protestations of the text - in "Ich grolle nicht" ("I don't complain"). His voice and manner seemed ideally suited to the lieder format, although he is also making his way in opera.
The Johannes String Quartet filled out that program with a pleasant reading of Schubert's Quartet in A minor ("Rosamunde"), but it wasn't quite enough to support the claim in the program notes that many consider this "Schubert's finest quartet." It has a lovely Andante, familiar to many from its use as a radio theme and given a lovely turn here, but there is nothing in it to rival Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" Quartet, the late G major or even the single-movement "Quartettsatz." Still, a good try.
The Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival runs through Aug. 19 in Santa Fe, N.M.; (505) 982-1890, sfcmf.org.
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