CAMBRIDGE - There is a part of the classical-music world that has for so long made a desperate attempt to cast off the art’s perceived starchiness that the desperation has become as traditional as the starch. And then there is the Boston Chamber Music Society, which, like an enduring fine-dining monument, maintains old-fashioned ways at such a high level that one is reacquainted with their virtues.
Saturday’s concert, the last of BCMS’s summer series at Longy’s Pickman Hall, followed a predictable programming pattern: a contemporary hors d’oeurve followed by entrees of 19th-century standards. The tuxedos were pressed, the applause was ritually withheld between movements. But formality doesn’t always create distance, sometimes it collapses it; the thoughtfulness and accomplishment of the playing was consistently stimulating, even when a garnish or ingredient wasn’t exactly to one’s liking. It was enough to draw a healthy crowd, even in the face of an approaching hurricane.
Violinist Steven Copes and violist Maiya Papach presented the first course, selections from George Tsontakis’s “Knickknacks,’’ a polystylistic anthology of short duos. The music tries out various roles - minimalist cheer in “Shuffling,’’ Latin drama in “Fandango Façade’’ - but most of the pieces revealed a core of sinuous, austere counterpoint. (Only “Bumpkinesque,’’ a fiddle-powered engine revving hard in second gear, defied the pattern.) Copes and Papach, fellow principals in the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (where Copes premiered Tsontakis’s Second Violin Concerto a few years ago), had ample flair to set off the more sober passages.
