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The Axelrod String Quartet—Marc Destrubé and Marilyn McDonald, violins; James Dunham, viola; Kenneth Slowik, violoncello—came into being in 1998 when Herbert and Evelyn Axelrod established a generous endowment to perpetuate string quartet performances at the museum using the quartets of instruments by master luthiers Antonio Stradivari, Nicoló Amati, and Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume which they had donated to the Smithsonian. But, since beginning with the time of Haydn, the string quartet has been a central formation of chamber music, a resident string quartet had already figured prominently in SCMS programming from 1982, when the Smithson String Quartet (Jaap Schröder and Marilyn McDonald, violins; Judson Griffin, viola; Kenneth Slowik, violoncello) was founded. That ensemble existed—with Jorrie Garrigue and David Cerutti replacing McDonald and Griffin late in its career—for fourteen years. It was succeeded by a somewhat ad hoc quartet called Party of Four (the immediate predecessor to the Axelrod Quartet), whose lower end was anchored by Slowik and violists Steven Dann and Douglas McNabney while a succession of players—Mayumi Seiler, Malcolm Lowe, Ian Swensen, and Catherine Manson—rotated between the violin chairs.

Central to the philosophy of each of these quartets has been the presence of gut strings, which were in regular use until at least several decades into the 20th century. This set-up, and the incorporation of other elements of the historical performance practices of a succession of periods from the High Classical through the early 20th century, has made elegance, clarity, and stylistic freshness hallmarks of SCMS quartet playing for nearly thirty years.

The Smithsonian Chamber Orchestra was established in 1982 as a period-instrument ensemble for Viennese Classical-era music. Jaap Schröder conducted the orchestra from his concertmaster position through 1987, leading it in many concerts and in two major recording projects of works by Mozart and Beethoven. Kenneth Slowik became conductor in 1988, continuing the Beethoven symphony and piano concerto cycles. He also led Washington’s first historically-informed performances of the major Bach choral works, culminating in a recording of the St. John Passion, BWV 245, that was judged “unequivocally the best of the period instrument recordings” by the Cambridge Guide to Choral Music on Record. In the mid 1990s, Slowik and the Orchestra began to explore the repertoire and performance practices of the late 19th and early 20th centuries through works of Elgar, Schönberg, Mahler, Richard Strauss, and others. Recent productions have included works of Stravinsky, Copland, Bartók, and Shostakovich, all presented with intense focus on drawing the most rhetorically expressive performances from a group of dedicated and engaged musicians.