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.

Ever since the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s first season, those Sunday-evening concerts have been special. Back in 1973, six Sunday-evening programs were it, period, for festivalgoers. As time passed and plans grew, so did the number of concerts. Nowadays, that Sunday program gets a reprise on Monday evening, joined by plenty of other events scattered over the rest of the week.

“Chamber music” can be an evasive term. Definitions tend to be slippery. Strict constructionists exclude the solo piano. Goodbye, too, to many of Mozart’s serenades and divertimenti; they’re meant for the outdoors.

Comic opera hasn’t thrived over the last several dismal decades. Composers prefer to work the dark side. But fast-backward to July 1947 and the premieres of two comic survivors: Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias and Britten’s Albert Herring, which opened July 26 at the Santa Fe Opera.

A touch of glamour opened the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival’s 38th season at St. Francis Auditorium last week, personified in Susan Graham, the festival’s first artist-in-residence, and Jake Heggie, the hot youngish composer whose operatic ventures have been popular success stories recently.

If the Santa Fe Opera ever gets to heaven, and it surely shall, one of the reasons will be its obstinate policy of producing—grandly and expensively—new, challenging, important and sometimes awful operas of our time.

If you’re feeling bewitched, bothered and bewildered when you come away from the Santa Fe Opera’s astonishing new production of Jacques Offenbach’s Les Contes d’Hoffmann, don’t worry—you’re in good company.

A lucky 13th on the horizon? That might be Marc Neikrug’s upcoming 13th season as artistic director of the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, a role he’s filled since 1998