Seattle Chamber Players' 'Icebreaker' is a 20th-anniversary party

The Seattle Chamber Players (SCP) are celebrating their 20th anniversary the only way they know how — with more new music.

A lot more new music.

"Icebreaker V: Love and War" is a two-weekend festival featuring work from the Netherlands, Italy, Hungary, Germany, Iceland, Denmark, Russia and Ukraine. Almost all are world premieres commissioned by SCP.

"The way we operate, we just get excited about a new project, a new composer, a new country we want to explore," explains Mikhail Shmidt, SCP's violinist. In this "Icebreaker," the new territory is Western Europe (previous festivals have focused on the Baltic, the Caucasus, the U.S. and "the new Russia").

Shmidt and his fellow ensemble members aren't letting economic hard times slow them down.

"It's counterintuitive," Shmidt laughed over coffee last week. Instead of retreating inside their shells, he and SCP are bringing to town the best musicians, composers and ensembles they can find "to celebrate the vibrant European musical scene."

This weekend's offerings:

• "Amsterdam to Seattle: Post Modernism Strikes Back" (8 p.m. Friday): Pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama joins SCP in showcasing two young Dutch composers. Yannis Kyriakides' "Satellites" is an atmospheric suite for chamber instruments and "soundtrack," calling to mind György Ligeti's microtonal work and certain minimalist composers.

On the same bill: Michiel Mensingh's "Style Wars V — Minimal Madness," summed up by the composer as "tonality versus twelve-tone music, mass versus elite, Glass versus Schoenberg, but above all Mensingh versus himself — the battle will be fierce!"

• "Music from Modern Italy: Life, Color, and Movement" (5:30 p.m. Saturday): SCP turns the stage over to Xenia, a quartet of foreign musicians living in Italy. Xenia will be playing an all-Italian program, including works that take popular music forms (blues, fox trot, traditional Italian song) as their starting points.

• "Kafka Fragments" (8 p.m. Saturday): Shmidt and soprano Agata Zubel join forces on György Kurtág's sometimes beautiful, sometimes harsh setting of excerpts from Kafka's writings.

• "Russia and the Ukraine: Rivals and Lovers" (5:30 p.m. Sunday): Russian pianist Ivan Sokolov, featured in the first "Icebreaker," returns to join SCP in performing works that include Yevgeniy Sharlat's alternatively busy and plaintive "Divertissement" and Virko Baley's "Shadows — Homage to Borys" (described by Shmidt as "gentle and dreamy" with "spooky percussion").

• "Preludes to Disaster: Contemporary Danish and Icelandic Music" (8 p.m. Sunday). SCP teams up with Denmark's FIGURA, an ensemble with a cabaret edge — and with its own in-house composers.

"It's almost this kind of traveling circus," Shmidt says, "completely quirky and wonderful."

"Icebreaker V" continues March 4-6 when SCP collaborates with Pacific Musicworks. More next week.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com