Good things come in small packages on upcoming concerts of two area chamber music ensembles. Richardson Chamber Players will present “England’s Green and Pleasant Land” at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium on Sunday, and Concordia Chamber Players will present “All Things Strings” at Trinity Episcopal Church, Solebury, PA, on Feb. 26. Both concerts will begin at 3 p.m.

The Princeton University Concerts program will highlight folk-inflected works by Ralph Vaughan Williams (“Merciless Beauty,” on texts of Geoffrey Chaucer), Gerald Finzi (“Five Bagatelles” for clarinet and piano), John McCabe, and Benjamin Britten, with a classic example of the renowned English facility for writing for string orchestra, Edward Elgar’s “Serenade for Strings in E minor.”

Concordia will present string music on a more intimate scale, with quartets by Philip Glass and Claude Debussy alongside a quintet by Antonin Dvořák.

Glass, who turned 80 on Jan. 31, wrote his String Quartet No. 2 in 1983. It grew out of incidental music he composed for a production of Samuel Beckett’s “Company.” Debussy’s String Quartet in G minor, from 1893, is universally regarded as one of the greatest of French string quartets; it is certainly one of the most popular.

Dvořák wrote his String Quintet No. 3 in E-flat major, also from 1893, during the same trip that yielded his more famous “American” String Quartet. The composer had been lured to the United States from Bohemia to take up the directorship of the National Conservatory of Music in New York. He summered at a Czech community in Spillville, IA. The environment obviously agreed with him, as both works share an ingratiatingly sunny disposition. The music brims with Bohemian inflections and American inspiration.

You can read more about it in my article in today’s Trenton Times.

http://www.nj.com/times-entertainment/index.ssf/2017/02/classical_music_richardson_cha.html

PHOTOS (clockwise from left): Concordia artistic director Michelle Djokic, Glass, Debussy and Dvořák