A concert program doesn’t just invent itself. Somebody has to visualize the thing and put it out there. Some programs stick with a single composer. Some take the thematic or nationalistic route, or just go with what a given set of artists may have in its repertorial bag. Still others choose challenging or suggestive juxtapositions, like the recent John Adams/Bruckner couplings by the Cleveland Orchestra at the Lincoln Center Festival. In its opening week’s five programs, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival offered all of the above.

Simone Weil wrote in 1943, the last year of her life, that “at the center of the human heart is the longing for an absolute good, a longing which is always there and is never appeased by any object in this world.”

“I’ve never been interested in running after audiences.” That’s the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s artistic director, Marc Neikrug, commenting last week on 2011’s festival programming.

Director Paul Curran’s La bohème, a plain vanilla, no-frills presentation, doesn’t exactly disappoint. Unlike his exciting Britten stagings, it just sort of sits there.

While there may be plenty of excuses to head up the hill for the Santa Fe Opera’s gobsmacking new production of Gounod's Faust, there’s one for-sure reason: the fine-spun Marguerite of Ailyn Pérez in her SFO debut.

It’s opening night of the Santa Fe Opera's 55th season and the company’s premiere production of—Faust! Well, SFO, what took you so long?

Santa Fe’s contemporary music scene awakens from semi-hibernation with two important concerts this week. And they’re all about anniversaries.

When audiences hum happily out of The Crosby Theatre after, say, a jolly evening with Albert Herring, or when they linger cheerily outside St. Francis Auditorium after, say, a rousing reading of Mendelssohn’s Octet, their immediate concerns probably aren’t dollars and cents.

The music stops, the audience jumps up, claps like mad, bravos crazily, whistles (don’t try this in France) and stomps its collective foot. That’s a standing ovation. That’s what met Yuja Wang as she rose from the piano after her demonic Aug. 17 noon recital.

Cagey, brilliant composer-critic Virgil Thomson commented, “Criticism joins the history of its art only when it joins battle, for or against, with the music of its time.” Well, opportunities galore for battling with music of our time popped up in recent programs at the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival.