If the great Austro-American film director and actor Erich von Stroheim famously became known as the man you love to hate, Puccini’s Tosca, opening the Santa Fe Opera’s 56th season last Friday, ma

Believe it: where l’amour is concerned, speak French. Take that sentimental saying, “On revient toujours à son premier amour,” which translates clumsily as, “Your first love—it’s always t

My goodness, what doesn’t call itself a festival nowadays? Even delicious celebrations of green chile and barbecue are among my favorite feasts, to be sure, but not necessarily festivals in the, ahem, traditional sense of the word.

“Only in New Mexico.” That’s the motto emblazoned on the cover of the Santa Fe Opera’s 2011 season brochure.

Walking up the aisle at the Lensic Performing Arts Center during intermission at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s last concert of the season on Aug. 22, I heard startled comments everywhere: “Whew,” “Astonishing,” “Where’s that been all my life?”

Believe it: Summer’s on the wane. The kids are back in school; cottonwood leaves are falling into the Acequia Madre; and when you read this, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s 39th season will be history.

When Gyorgy Sándor thundered through Schumann’s “Carnaval” in Alamogordo’s public school auditorium a few decades ago, a little kid in the audience fell tumultuously in love with the piano. That would be me. And when Joyce Yang had her way with “Carnaval” at a recent Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival noon concert, Schumann plus Yang made that love affair seem like only yesterday.

A couple of years ago, a high-ranking local impresario opined that the Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov, after a promising career start, had gone commercial and sold out to mere popular taste.

Alban Berg wanted us to see his tormented hero Wozzeck from the inside out, and that’s precisely the vision that the Santa Fe Opera’s revival of its hallucinatory 2001 production provides.

Among the 35 or so programs the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival mounts this summer, we’d have to count four quartets. Nope, not Tom Stearns Eliot’s wartime sequence. We’re talking four string quartet ensembles.