This Saturday and Sunday, as well as on Saturday, June 21, and Sunday, June 22, the Roycroft Chamber Music Festival celebrates its 15th anniversary season at St. Matthias’ Episcopal Church on Main Street in East Aurora. Its artistic directors, Juilliard graduates Eugene Gaub and Nancy McFarland Gaub, former residents of East Aurora who are now on the faculty of Grinnell College, Iowa, founded the festival in 1994. The Gaubs moved to Iowa in 1995, but they have returned every year since to lead the festival.

As recently as 2006, only one piece of music had ever been played more than once in the festival’s history, no mean feat when presenting four concerts each year. The varied and challenging repertoire is due in no small part to the high-caliber, ever varying lineup of musicians that the artistic Gaubs have always managed to recruit. The musicians this year include several Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra first chair players: Roman Mekinulov, principal cello, John Fullam, principal clarinet, Jacqueline Galluzzo, associate principal second violin, and the associate concertmaster, Amy Glidden. In addition to the other BPO players and freelance musicians on this year’s roster, the Gaubs are featured on at least one work on every program.

The two Saturday concerts begin at 8pm, while the Sunday concerts begin at 7pm, with the programs running the gamut from the baroque to the 20th century, including some true rarities. Here is a brief rundown of the schedule:

Saturday, June 14

A pair of Trio Sonatas by baroque composer Arcangelo Corelli features Nancy McFarland Gaub and Rebecca Ansel, violins, Eva Leininger Herer, cello, and Marilyn Cornelius providing the organ continuo, an interesting change from the more usually programmed piano or harpsichord continuo. For Franz Schubert’s lovely, posthumously published, single-movement Notturno for Piano Trio, D. 897, beginning and ending with lilting rhythms and a slow harmonic movement that create a nocturnal atmosphere, Matitiahu Braun, violin, and Michelle Djokic, cello, will be joined by Eugene Gaub, piano. Ansel and Djokic will join Donna Lorenzo, viola, and Gail Niwa, piano, in a performance of Gabriel Faure’s passionate Piano Quartet in G Minor, Op. 45. The Buffalo Chamber Players gave a fiery performance of this very same work at their final performance this season a few weeks ago at the Buffalo Seminary, setting the bar high for other performers.

Sunday, June 15

Robert Hanford, violin, will join Gaub and Fullam in a rare performance of an arrangement for clarinet trio of the transcendent adagio movement from Alban Berg’s Chamber Concerto. McFarland Gaub and Niwa will offer Beethoven’s Sonata in C Minor for Violin and Piano, Op. 30, No. 2. Hanford, Braun, Lorenzo, and Mekinulov combine for a performance of the String Quartet No. 1 in A Major by Russian composer Alexander Borodin. Mercifully, for attendees at this performance, the cannibalized Borodin theme that first made its appearance as the song “Baubles, Bangles and Beads” in the 1954 Broadway musical Kismet, later becoming a major pop hit, is based on the scherzo from the String Quartet No. 2 in D Major, not this work.

Saturday, June 21

Jacqueline Galluzzo, Amy Glidden, Ann Roggen, and Nancy Baun combine for a performance of Mozart’s radiant final quartet, the String Quartet in F Major, K. 590, written in 1790, the year before his death. A genuine rarity, few local concertgoers have probably heard a live performance of the Clarinet Quintet in F-sharp Minor, Op. 10 by the late 19th century African-English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Rebekah Johnson, violin, and Tom Kreutter, viola, will join Fullam, Hanford, and Baun in a performance of the work. The evening concludes with one of the true masterpieces of the 20th-century piano trio literature, Maurice Ravel’s Piano Trio, performed by Gaub, McFarland Gaub, and Scott Ballantyne, cello.

Sunday, June 22

The final performance in the festival begins with another rarity. Susan Royal, flute, will join Glidden and Kreutter in the Serenade for Flute, Violin and Viola by the enormously prolific late-19th-century German composer Max Reger. Gaub, Johnson, Lorenzo, and Herer will offer the popular Piano Quartet No. 1 in D Major, Op.23 by Antonin Dvorak. The evening and the entire festival concludes, appropriately enough, with a performance of one of the most beautiful and deeply felt chamber music works ever written. Hanford, McFarland Gaub, Roggen, Ballantyne, and Herer will perform the String Quintet in C Major for two violins, viola and two cellos, D.956, Op. 163 by Franz Schubert. In the adagio movement of this deeply sublime work of symphonic proportions, the sense of other worldly tranquility is suddenly interrupted traumatically, only to return, now incorporating some of the very elements that disturbed it.

Tickets are $12 in advance, $15 at the door. For more information, visit roycroftchambermusic.org.