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The San Francisco Bay Area has one of the largest and most enthusiastic audiences in the country for the classical guitar. Internationally acclaimed artists are regularly featured by San Francisco Performances and the Omni Foundation, while young talent is often presented by smaller organizations.

Major anniversaries of a famous composer’s birth or death often occasion great fanfare, yet such honors are seldom accorded the anniversary of the publication of an individual piece.

Music composed before 1900 still pays the bills for many chamber groups, but our most adventurous ensembles, following the example of pioneers such as the Kronos Quartet, are increasingly likely to build their programs around works from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Sunday was string quartet night at the San José Chamber Orchestra’s concert, conducted by Barbara Day Turner, at Le Petit Trianon in its namesake city. The Cypress String Quartet played as guest soloists in the premiere of Pablo Furman’s Paso del Fuego, and the SJCO ceded the entire stage to the Cypress foursome for the first half of the concert, which consisted of Beethoven’s Quartet in F, Op.

It’s play time for the Ives Quartet. This time, in the second of its three-concert series titled “The Nature of Playing,” the Ives will explore how to play well with others.

Not that that’s really a problem; ensemble playing is not exactly a sand box. “Playing,” in all senses of the word, is something the quartet already does well.

Old First Concerts on Jan. 24 will do what it does best: promote talented, emerging young musicians, when it presents pianist Elizabeth Dorman in chamber concert with cellist Robert Howard and violinist Dan Carlson.

Garrick Ohlsson’s credentials as an interpreter of Frédéric Chopin — he has recorded the complete works, twice — place him in the top echelon of modern pianists. Many performers possess the technical prowess and power to treat the piano as a slave and to do pretty much as they please to the music.