Free Music Archive - Music from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Blog

ISGM Fall Selections & New Performance Space

2011-11-22T15:59:23-05:00

As the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum prepares to open its innovative new performance space, the museum's music program curates a mix of Fall Selections from their Creative Commons classical music podcast The Concert.

In the tradition of Music at the Gardner, works by Brahms, Beethoven, Debussy, Dvorak, Haydn, Charles Ives, Mozart, Carl Nielsen, Pachelbel, Schubert, Schumann, and Camille Saint-Saens are brought to life by some of the world's foremost and emerging classical music performers, including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Claremont Trio and ISGM's own resident chamber orchestra, A Far Cry, formed by local music students. On January 22nd, the Claremonts -- an award-winning piano trio of Donna Kwong and sisters Emily Bruskin (violin) and Julia Bruskin (cello) -- will open the new season and inaugurate the new space with performances of Mozart, Mendelssohn, and a Sean Shepherd world premier in honor of Calderwood Hall (link).

Calderwood Hall is the 300-seat performance space at the heart of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's innovative new wing designed by Renzo Piano. In her will, Isabella Stewart Gardner stipulated that the museum -- a Venetian palace and her former home -- must be left exactly as she designed and arranged, and so the new wing is an exciting opportunity for the museum to expand in keeping with her will. The hall is designed with acoustics in mind, and -- like the Tapestry Room that previously housed Gardner concerts and is currently under renovation -- there is no stage separated the performers from the audience. Its opening is "one of the most eagerly anticipated developments in Boston's musical life" (Boston.com) and you can read more about it at buildingproject.gardnermuseum.org.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's Revamped Website & Spring Selections

2011-04-12T16:15:55-04:00

This Spring, Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum launched a revamped website and online music library to accompany their world-renowned classical music podcast, The Concert

To celebrate, ISGM digs into their vast library to curate this fresh batch of world-class performances of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Debussy, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schoenberg, Schumann, Vivaldi & more for the Free Music Archive and beyond, all available under a Creative Commons Music Sharing license.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is a unique gem of a museum; at once a time capsule and a window toward the future. Recently nominated as Best Museum In Boston, the ISGM houses works by Rembrandt and Michelangelo amongst the thousands in its permanent collection. In her will, Isabella Stewart Gardner (April 14, 1840 – July 17, 1924), stipulated that the museum must be left exactly as she designed and arranged. Even when the museum was victim of a robery in 1990, the frames of the stolen paintings remained on the wall.

Through The Concert, a Creative Commons-licensed classical podcast presenting performances from the museum's Tapestry Room (pictured above), the ISGM is able to reach beyond the museum's walls to share incredible performances with a worldwide audience. The Concert launched in 2006, but Music at the Gardner is the longest-running museum program of its kind, and the Tapestry Room regularly plays host to worldclass performers. We hope you enjoy these "Spring Selections!"

dig deeper...
* Interview at Creative Commons
* An Unlikely Story
* Music from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on the Free Music Archive
* Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Music Library & The Concert podcast