This Saturday night at the University of Miami, you have two chances to take in an intriguing chamber music concert: one from an Illinois-based string quartet on the cutting edge, and the other from a new, homegrown trio of guitarists.

First, there’s the Pacifica String Quartet, which despite its Californiac name is based in the middle of corn and soybean country at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Its most recent recording project consisted of the five quartets by the leading American modernist Elliot Carter, who turns 102 later this year.

The Pacifica Quartet. I’ve been listening to one of those discs (on Naxos), with the First and Fifth quartets, and it’s expertly done. These performances provide good examples of Carter’s rhythmic and tonal aesthetic, and I wouldn’t be surprised should future listeners turn to these records for study purposes.

The string quartet has been an ideal form for exploration on the part of composer and audience alike. Something about the form encourages composers to try out their most challenging thoughts, and something about being in a quartet moves musicians to find the best examples of this engagement with this form begun so auspiciously by Haydn.

And so it is with the Pacifica. This Saturday, the group wraps up the concert season for the Sunday Afternoons of Music series (it’s a special Saturday performance) with a nourishing program of quartets by Beethoven (No. 9 in C, Op. 59, No. 3), Shostakovich (No. 3 in F, Op. 73) and Schumann (No. 1 in A minor, Op. 41, No. 1). The Beethoven is one of the three Razumovsky quartets, written for a Russian count of that name who commissioned them in 1805, while the Schumann dates from 1842, the year the composer was immersed in chamber music.

The Shostakovich, written in the summer of 1946, is one of the composer’s best-known quartets, and has been arranged as a chamber symphony by Rudolf Barshai (it’s on a Boca Raton Symphonia program later in the season). There’s no reason to expect anything but a fine performance from the Pacifica (violinists Simin Ganatra and Sibbi Bernhardsson, violist Masumi Per Rostad, and cellist Brandon Vamos), and ending the concert with the Beethoven, which has one of the most celebrated endings of any string quartet – a blazing perpetual-motion machine that every group tries to play as fast as possible – should provide a terrific sendoff.

(Here they are playing the first movement of the second of Leos Janacek’s two quartets.)

The Miami Guitar Trio. While that’s going on at Gusman Hall, another group will be gathering at the Chapel of the Venerable Bede on the same UM campus for the first concert in the Miami Bach Society’s new season.

The featured artists are the brand-new Miami Guitar Trio, featuring three recent UM grads: Alan Nguyen, Federico Bonacossa and Federico Musgrove. For this concert, Bonacossa has arranged the three-part Sinfonias of J.S. Bach, which every piano student knows in their original form, as well as music by Vivaldi and Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto, which is more or less a trumpet concerto in the original, and should count as an arranging tour de force.

Chamber groups of classical guitarists are not completely unusual; the Romero family and the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet are among the groups that have had strong careers. But this trio already has taken part in the Miami International Guitar Festival and played fresh UM student works at the behest of the Society of Composers.

I’m particularly interested in hearing the Brandenburg arrangement, and if I can’t make the show, here’s hoping it gets out on video soon afterward. (Here’s the trio playing Brazilian composer Paulo Belinatti’s Baiao de Gude.)