String quartet ensembles are hot these days, and a news release Tuesday from the Flagler Museum on Palm Beach reminded me of that when it announced the lineup for its series of chamber music concerts that begin Jan. 11 of next year and run through March 8.

It’s worth looking at the websites of a few of these groups to see what they’re up to; I’ve had deeper experiences hearing dedicated foursomes like these at various South Florida venues than almost any other kind of concert. The Flagler series is a good one: the venue is remarkable, being Henry Flagler’s big Beaux-Arts mansion, and while the acoustics are almost too resonant, groups seem to enjoy playing there, and it’s one good way to find out what’s going on in chamber music today.

The first quartet on the series is the Enso Quartet, founded at Yale in 1999 and based in New York. The group joined with soprano Lucy Shelton for a recording of the complete quartets of Argentina’s Alberto Ginastera (the third one has a vocal part) on Naxos that was nominated for a Grammy this year.

The Enso Quartet. (Photo by Richie Hawley)

The Enso lost out to a recording of the two Janacek quartets by the Emerson Quartet, but the Enso gained a higher profile through its Grammy exposure. [Here’s a link to their samples page, which has lots of performances; check out the last one, the finale of the Ginastera Second Quartet.

The Alianza Quartet, also founded at Yale, also is on the schedule, and this is a young group with a recent (2007) Carnegie Hall debut and a recording of quartets by the American composer Ezra Laderman.

Here’s a sound clip from his Ninth Quartet. Contemporary music is an important part of the Alianza repertoire, with pieces by Bresnick, Combier and Jarrell on the group’s repertoire list.

The third quartet on the series is the Ying Quartet, which broke into the national consciousness back in the early 1990s when its four members, all Chinese-American siblings from the Chicago suburbs, took up musical residence in Jesup, Iowa, as part of a National Endowment for the Arts program to bring classical music to rural America. The Yings were Grammy winners in 2005 for a disc they did with the Turtle Island String Quartet (who also will be in South Florida in the coming season).

Founding violinist Timothy Ying left the group last year and has been replaced by Frank Huang; the group continues its laudable LifeMusic commissioning project, which has seen the creation of several important new works by contemporary composers for string quartet. Here they are doing a piece called Gobi Gloria, by Lei Liang, a Chinese-born American composer who teaches at University of California-San Diego (although this is nominally a video, it has none, but the sound quality is good). This is just a sample of the kind of chamber music we can look forward to this coming season. This area always has more worthwhile chamber concerts in a season than one person can comfortably get to, but that’s one reason the winter months are so cheering.