The Arts

Anyone who's attended a Seattle Chamber Music Society concert knows SCMS' shows set the gold standard for local chamber-music performance. In piece after piece, the players' virtuosity and spontaneity are so marvelously matched that you'll often exit a concert feeling like a denizen of the musical heavens yourself — even if all you can pound out on the piano is "Chopsticks."

That makes SCMS' 2012 Winter Festival a bright spot on the calendar in Seattle's rainy season. This year, the performances of more than half a dozen works new to SCMS' repertoire provide another reason to head to Benaroya Hall, Thursday through Sunday, when the festival gets under way.

Friday's show looks especially enticing. It includes the first SCMS outings of Bartók's Quartet for Strings No. 4 (perhaps the finest — and certainly the wildest and eeriest — of his chamber works), plus works by Brahms, Richard Strauss and Joseph Suk also new to SCMS.

This is the first SCMS festival with Grammy-winning violinist James Ehnes at the helm as artistic director, following SCMS-founder Toby Saks' retirement last summer. But Ehnes hasn't been consumed by his offstage duties. He'll be performing in all four concerts, including a special violin-piano recital Saturday, when he and pianist Andrew Armstrong join forces on works by Beethoven, Franck and Paganini.

Other highlights include SCMS' first performances of Shostakovich's Quartet for Strings No. 1 on Thursday night and of two unusual Dvorák works at Sunday's midday concert. Ehnes' fellow performers are regulars at New York's Lincoln Center, London's Wigmore Hall and Washington, D.C.'s, Kennedy Center.

As usual, a free recital precedes all the concerts except for Saturday's Ehnes-Armstrong bill.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com