Tomorrow night and Sunday are more typical Barge programs with the violinist and artistic director Mark Peskanov joined by Steven Beck (piano) and Dmitry Kouzov (cello) in music by Haydn, Beethoven and Rachmaninoff.
The cost of the 20-year-old barging program for juvenile salmon, known as smolts, is just part of more than $3 billion the government has spent over that period trying to save salmon on the Snake and Columbia Rivers.
The barging program is derided by critics as a "techno-fix" that harms fish, interfering with their natural migration rhythms, causing them to die early, and perhaps interfering with their fabled and mysterious ability to find their way back home to spawn in their native river after spending years and traveling thousands of miles in the Pacific Ocean, as far north as Alaska.
Although some federal biologists argue that the barging programs should be given more time, most scientists believe that breaching the dams would be the most effective step toward restoring the wild salmon runs.
But now, another performer in the theater of dinner has managed to barge into the program, with menus increasingly giving credits for clothes.
On Sunday the Opus Two ensemble takes over the barge for a program of works by Paul Schoenfield, with Mr. Schoenfield joining in on excerpts from "Five Days from the Life of a Manic-Depressive," a piano four-hands work.
Last week it played the set in a pair of concerts; on New Year's Eve it offers them all at once, in a gala to benefit the concert barge and its programming.
Tomorrow and Sunday the Borromeo String Quartet move into the barge with two programs: the first surrounds Mozart's Quartet in C (K. 464) with Copland's Two Short Pieces and Bartok's Quartet No. 1; in the second, Beethoven's String Trio in D is sandwiched by a Martinu Duo for Violin and Cello and, once again, the Bartok First Quartet.
The piece was included in an engaging piano duo program in the barge's Here and Now series.
BARGEMUSIC April 12-13 at 8: In an unusually festive program at the barge, a scrum of exceptional musicians (including the cellist Edward Arron and the pianist Dick Hyman) offer a smorgasbord of music by Leclair, Mozart (the Clarinet Quintet), Gershwin, and Richard Rodgers (along with Hyman's Sextet for Clarinet, Piano, and String Quartet).
