ISGM-2026 Winter | Spring Music Brochure

THE

TICKET INFORMATION

SEATING SECTIONS & RATES

PERFORMANCE LEVEL

AND FIRST BALCONY

Members

Adults

Seniors

$65

$85

$75

Students & Children

ages 5–17

$20

SECOND BALCONY

Members

Adults

Seniors

$50

$65

$55

THIRD BALCONY

Members

Adults

Seniors

$40

$50

$45

MEMBER CONCERT PRESALE

NOVEMBER 19–25, 2025

Purchase tickets before they become available to the general public on November 26, 2025.

WEEKEND CONCERT SERIES WINTER | SPRING 2026

NOT A MEMBER?

Students & Children ages 5–17

FROM THE CURATOR OF MUSIC

GEORGE STEEL

$20

$20

Students & Children ages 5–17

Dear Friends,

I am very excited about our Winter/Spring season in Calderwood Hall. Violinist Randall Goosby returns for two concerts: a solo recital and a performance with his group Renaissance String Quartet. We have guitar and lute recitals—Calderwood Hall is the ideal venue for those. And a wonderful range of chamber music: piano quintets from Amy Beach and Louise Farrenc, string quartets from Schubert, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Daniel Bernard Roumain, and more. Please join us for a season of beauty and rediscovery.

Yours, George Steel

Abrams Curator of Music

Music at the Gardner is supported by Nora McNeely Hurley / Manitou Fund. The Museum thanks its generous concert donors: The Coogan Concert in memory of Peter Weston Coogan; Fitzpatrick Family Concert; James Lawrence Memorial Concert; Alford P. Rudnick Memorial Concert; David Scudder in memory of his wife, Marie Louise Scudder; Wendy Shattuck Young Artist Concert; and Willona Sinclair Memorial Concert. The piano is dedicated as the Alex d’Arbeloff Steinway. The harpsichord was generously donated by Dr. Robert Barstow in memory of Marion Huse, and its care is endowed in memory of Dr. Barstow by The Barstow Fund. Music at the Gardner is also supported in part by Barbara and Amos Hostetter, Nicie and Jay Panetta, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which is supported by the state of Massachusetts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Join today for discounts and exclusive experiences: gardnermuseum.org/join-give.

To receive monthly updates about concerts, performances, and more, visit gardnermuseum.org/signup.

Members receive early access to concert tickets. Learn more and buy tickets at gardnermuseum.org/about/music. Or call the Box Office at (617) 278-5156.

Open daily from 10 AM–4 PM. Open until 6 PM on Thursdays; closed Tuesday.

Additional information about seating sections and policies is available online. Concert programs and COVID guidelines are subject to change; please see the website for up-to-date information.

TWELFTH

Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber

Arcangelo Corelli

Giuseppe Tartini

J.S. Bach

Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer

Francesco Maria Veracini

Jean-Marie Leclair

SUNDAY

JANUARY 25 1:30 PM

Sonata V in F major, C. 140 (1685)

Sonata in D minor, Op. 5, No. 12, “La Folia” (1700)

Sonata in G minor, Bg.5, “The Devil’s Trill”:

III. Andante, arranged for solo violin (1713)

Sonata No. 2 in A major for Violin and Harpsichord, BWV 1015 (1717–1723)

La Marche des Scythes (1746)

Sonata in D minor, Op. 2 No. 12, “Sonate accademiche” (1744)

Sonata in D major, Op. 9, No. 3, “Tombeau” (1743)

The Winter concert season at the Gardner opens with a bang: Rachell Ellen Wong, the first Baroque violinist ever to receive an Avery Fisher Career Grant, makes her overdue Calderwood Hall debut in a program of trio sonatas with her collaborators from the excellent (and seasonally named) group Twelfth Night. Wong is a major talent—eloquent, virtuosic, and always musicianly. What an excellent way to warm up January.

TWELFTH NIGHT ENSEMBLE IS:

RACHELL ELLEN WONG, VIOLIN , DAVID BELKOVSKI, HARPSICHORD, COLEMAN ITZKOFF, CELLO

SUNDAY

FEBRUARY 1

1:30 PM

TRIO

Clara Schumann

Johannes Brahms

Claude Debussy

Lili Boulanger

Jessie Montgomery

3 romances for violin and piano (1853)

Piano Trio No. 3 in C minor, Op. 101 (1886)

Sonata for cello and piano, L. 135 (1915)

D’un soir triste (1918)

Duo for violin and cello (2015)

Violinist Romuald Grimbert-Barré comes from a family of very talented French/ Caribbean musicians. He has built this program of chamber music especially for the Gardner Museum, joined by two equally talented colleagues, the Spanish/ Dutch pianist Albert Cano Smit, and Tommy Mesa, the Cuban-American cellist who won the 2025 Avery Fisher Career Grant on the heels of winning the 2023 Sphinx Competition. These are three terrific musicians to look out for.

GRIMBERT-BARRÉ,

Louise Farrenc

SUNDAY

FEBRUARY 8

1:30 PM

Maurice Ravel

Shulamit Ran

Piano Quintet No. 1 in A minor, Op. 30 (1842) with Rosemary Nelis, viola, and Bradley Aikman, bass

Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello (1914)

Soliloquy (1997)

The splendid Claremont Trio returns to Calderwood Hall, joined by Rosemary Nelis, viola, and Bradley Aikman, bass, to play the piano quintet of 19thcentury French composer Louise Farrenc in its first Calderwood performance. The trio also will take on Ravel’s luscious piano trio, and Shulamit Ran’s yearning movement that grew out of her work on an operatic adaption of The Dybbuk by S. An-sky.

CLAREMONT TRIO IS: EMILY BRUSKIN, VIOLIN , JULIA BRUSKIN, CELLO, SOPHIKO SIMSIVE, PIANO

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 22 1:30 PM

Felix Mendelssohn

Béla Bartók

David Lang

String Quartet in E minor, Op. 44, No. 2 (1839)

String Quartet No. 4 (1928)

daisy (2024)

*ISGM co-commission

The impossibly talented Attacca Quartet returns to the Calderwood stage, bringing Bartók’s pungent fourth quartet, which mixes Hungarian funk and modernism with foot-stomping ferocity. Mendelssohn’s Apollonian musicianship will be on display in his elegant E-minor quartet; the program is balanced by the premiere of a Museum-commissioned work by David Lang, who created his “in-ear opera” true pearl for the Gardner Museum’s Tapestry Room in 2018.

FITZPATRICK FAMILY CONCERT

ATTACCA QUARTET IS:

AMY SCHROEDER, VIOLIN , DOMENIC SALERNI, VIOLIN , NATHAN SCHRAM, VIOLA , ANDREW YEE, CELLO

SUNDAY MARCH 1 1:30 PM

Franz Joseph Haydn

Amy Beach

Grażyna Bacewicz

String Quartet in E-flat major, Op. 33, No. 2 “Joke” (1781)

Piano Quintet, Op. 67 (1907)

String Quartet No. 4 (1951)

Boston piano star Gloria Chien returns to Calderwood Hall to join the young German stars of the Goldmund Quartet to play Amy Beach’s Piano Quintet—one of the finest works by the greatest of Boston’s “Second New England School” of composers. The Goldmunds will offer Haydn’s “Joke” quartet, from his astonishing Opus 33 set of quartets, along with the fourth quartet of Polish midcentury modernist Grażyna Bacewicz. Her music, only now finding a wider audience, balances Baltic intensity and Mendelssohnian wit.

THIS CONCERT IS THE ANNUAL COOGAN CONCERT MADE POSSIBLE BY DEBORAH W. COOGAN AND IS IN MEMORY OF HER LATE HUSBAND PETER WESTON COOGAN.

GOLDMUND QUARTET IS:

FLORIAN SCHÖTZ, VIOLIN , PINCHAS ADT, VIOLIN , CHRISTOPH VANDORY, VIOLA , RAPHAEL PARATORE, CELLO

SUNDAY MARCH 8 1:30 PM

John Dowland Seven Passionate Pavans, arr. Hopkinson Smith (1600)

The great American lutenist Hopkinson Smith comes to Calderwood Hall to celebrate the life and music of John Dowland, the great Elizabethan songwriter and performer. This concert, commemorating the 400th anniversary of Dowland’s death in 1626, will be built around lute transcriptions of Dowland’s celebrated “Lachrimae Pavanes,” a set of exquisite variations on his own song “Flow My Tears,” one of the supreme examples of glorious Tudor musical melancholy. Don’t miss this special event.

SUNDAY MARCH 15

1:30 PM

J.S. Bach

Franz Schubert

Igor Stravinsky

Dmitri Shostakovich

Caroline Shaw

Vijay Iyer

Jessie Montgomery

Prelude and Fugue No. 4 in C-sharp minor, BWV 849, arr. Nicholas Kitchen (1722)

String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, D. 810

“Death and the Maiden” (1824)

Three Pieces for String Quartet (1914, rev. 1918)

Prelude and Fugue in B-flat major, arr. Nicholas Kitchen (1950–51)

Entr’acte (2011)

Dig the Say (2012)

Source Code (2013)

Boston’s beloved Borromeo String Quartet pays a visit to the Gardner with a program built around Schubert’s monumental “Death and the Maiden” quartet, one of his supreme late masterpieces and a paragon of the Romantic spirit. The Borromeos also bring a quartet by jazz pianist and composer Vijay Iyer, who is Harvard’s Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts and a MacArthur Fellow. Nicholas Kitchen has arranged a pair of preludes and fugues from Bach and Shostakovich. The Entr’acte of Museum-favorite Caroline Shaw rounds out the program.

BORROMEO STRING QUARTET IS:

NICHOLAS KITCHEN, VIOLIN , KRISTOPHER TONG, VIOLIN , MELISSA REARDON, VIOLA , YEESUN KIM, CELLO

CASTLE

OF OUR SKINS

WITH DANIEL BERNARD ROUMAIN, ELECTRIC VIOLIN AND VAL-INC, SOUND CHEMIST

SUNDAY MARCH 29 1:30 PM

Daniel Bernard Roumain

String Quartet No. 1, “X” (1993)

String Quartet No. 2, “King” (2001)

String Quartet No. 4, “Angelou” (2004)

Our longtime collaborators Castle of Our Skins perform a portrait concert of violinist, composer, and musical firebrand Daniel Bernard Roumain. This concert presents three string quartets from his cycle of musical portraits of major Black figures. Roumain’s music thrillingly mixes classical American music, jazz, and hip-hop, all transformed through his own unique voice. This will be an exciting concert.

SUNDAY APRIL 5

1:30 PM

John Dowland

Sir John Souch his Galliard (1605)

Unquiet thoughts (1610)

Sir Henry Guildford his Almaine (1610)

Tarleton’s Resurrection (before 1626)

J.S. Bach

French Suite No. 2, BWV 813: Menuets I & II (1722–25)

French Suite No. 4, BWV 815: Allemande (1722–25)

French Suite 5, BWV 816: Sarabande (1722–25)

French Suite No. 6, BWV 817: Menuet (1722–25)

Partita No. 1 in B-flat major, BWV 825: Gigue (1726)

Partita No. 5 in G major, BWV 829: Tempo di Menuet (1729)

Franz Joseph Haydn

Isaac Albéniz

Maurice Ravel

Lennox Berkeley

Sonata, Hob.XVI:33 (1777)

Suite española, Op.47 (1886): III. Sevilla España, Op.165 (1890):

I. Prelude

II. Tango

III. Malagueña

Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn (1909)

Quatre pièces (1927–28)

Superstar Paul Galbraith is a dazzling guitarist and a superb interpreter. With music of Bach and Albéniz at the heart of his program, he will perform on his remarkable eight-string “Brahms Guitar,” which he holds like a cello. His instrument and his artistry are sui generis. There is no better place to hear his miraculous playing than Calderwood Hall. Don’t miss this chance to see one of the great guitarists of our time.

PAUL GALBRAITH

Ludwig van Beethoven

Antonín Dvořák

Amy Beach

Harry Burleigh

Claude Debussy

Violin Sonata No. 5 in F major, Op. 24 (1801)

Four Romantic Pieces, Op. 75 (1887)

Romance for Violin and Piano, Op. 23 (1893)

Southland Sketches (1916)

Sonata for Violin and Piano in G minor, L. 140 (1917)

Superstar violinist Randall Goosby returns to Calderwood Hall for an intimate recital of epic music. Two major sonatas bookend the program: Debussy’s elusive and gorgeous sonata is paired with Beethoven’s

sunny F major essay in the form. Harry Burleigh was key in forging a quintessential American musical language, which modified the gorgeous modal inflections of spirituals with the chromatic ambiguities of Wagner’s harmony. The Romance of Boston’s Amy Beach—the best of the “Second New England School” of composers—gorgeously drinks from a similar Wagnerian well.

BOSTON CHILDREN’S CHORUS

SATURDAY

APRIL 18

2:00 PM

SUNDAY

APRIL 12 1:30 PM

THE ROAD SHE PAVED

“If we cannot do great things, we can do small things in a great way.”

MELNEA CASS

Boston Children’s Chorus honors the remarkable legacy of Melnea Cass, the “First Lady of Roxbury.” A tireless advocate for justice, Cass championed women’s suffrage, Black employment, early childhood education, care for the elderly, and civil rights leadership as president of Boston’s NAACP. Her lifelong commitment to equity shaped generations in our town. Join us as we celebrate the enduring impact of this powerful yet often unsung Boston icon.

SUNDAY APRIL 19 1:30 PM

Stevie Wonder

Simon Shaheen

Kalevi Aho

Valerie Coleman

Fazil Say

Paquito D’Rivera

Overjoyed, arr. Mark Dover (1985)

Dance Mediterranea, arr. Jeff Scott (2001)

Wind Quintet No. 1 (2006)

Red Clay & Mississippi Delta (2009)

Alevi Dedeler rakı masasında (2011)

A Little Cuban Waltz (2023)

We are delighted to welcome back the wonderful wind quintet Imani Winds with a typically wide-ranging program showcasing works by composerperformers. Including the great American ‘oud player Simon Shaheen, pianist Fazil Say, nonpareil Stevie Wonder, and Imani’s own Valerie Coleman, this will be a wonderful program!

IMANI WINDS IS: BRANDON PATRICK GEORGE, FLUTE , MEKHI GLADDEN, OBOE , MARK DOVER, CLARINET, MONICA ELLIS, BASSOON , KEVIN NEWTON, FRENCH HORN

IMANI WINDS

SUNDAY APRIL 26 1:30 PM

STRING QUARTET

Franz Joseph Haydn

String Quartet (“Sun”) in C major, Op. 20, No. 2, Hob. III:32 (1772)

String Quartet (“Sun”) in D major, Op. 20, No. 4, Hob. III:34 (1772)

String Quartet No. 6 in B-flat major, Op. 18, No. 6 (1800)

Four superlative musicians (all colleagues in the Baroque ensemble ACRONYM) will perform these crowning glories of the Classical era on period instruments with gut strings. Haydn’s Opus 20 may be his finest works for string quartet. These players will know how to bring out the contrapuntal splendors of Haydn’s writing—the second quartet concludes with a witty fugue on four subjects!

SUNDAY MAY 10 1:30 PM

Ludwig van Beethoven

Maurice Ravel

Dobrinka Tabakova

Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 27, No. 2, “Moonlight” (1801)

Piano Sonata No. 21 in C major, Op. 53, “Waldstein” (1804)

Gaspard de la nuit (1908)

Halo (1999)

Nocturne (2008)

The stellar pianist member of the great English Kanneh-Mason family of musicians, Isata Kanneh-Mason takes a moment off the concerto stage to bring this program to Calderwood Hall: two of Beethoven’s best-loved sonatas, Ravel’s astonishing three-movement tour-de-force, and a pair of shorter works by Bulgarian-British composer Dobrinka Tabakova.

WENDY SHATTUCK YOUNG ARTIST CONCERT

ISATA

STRING QUARTET

SUNDAY MAY 17 1:30 PM

String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 51 (1874)

String Quartet No. 1 in G major (1929)

String Quartet No. 1, “Love and Levity” (2021)

We are thrilled and lucky to be able to present these four terrific musicians, who find time in their busy touring lives to perform together as a quartet (Randall Goosby plays a solo recital here in April). The great American composer Florence Price has a special gift for quartet writing; the exquisite and eloquent slow movement of her first quartet shows her love of American song, especially Black spirituals. Daniel Hass, cellist of the quartet, describes his beautiful first quartet as “Beethovenian in its thematic and structural tautness, but even more so in its motion towards excess.”

RENAISSANCE STRING QUARTET IS:

ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER MUSEUM

25 EVANS WAY

BOSTON, MA 02115

GARDNERMUSEUM.ORG

COVER: Bartolomeo Veneto (Turin, active 1502–1531), A Girl with a Lute (detail), 1520. Oil on nut wood panel, 66.8 x 50.5 cm (26 5/16 x 19 7/8 in.) Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

INSIDE: George Steel, Abrams Curator of Music, photo by Whitney Lawson; Twelfth Night Ensemble, Mei Stone; Albert Cano Smit, Shervin Lainez; Romuald Grimbert-Barré, Laurent Bugnet; Tommy Mesa, Tommy Mesa; Claremont Trio, Merri Cyr; Attacca Quartet, David Goddard; Goldmund Quartet, Gregor Hohenberg; Gloria Chien, Pilvax; Hopkinson Smith, Philippe Gontier; Borromeo String Quartet, Jürgen Frank; Castle of Our Skins, Robert Torres; Daniel Bernard Roumain, Julieta Cervantes; Paul Galbraith, Paul Galbraith; Randall Goosby, Jeremy Mitchell; Boston Children’s Chorus, Boston Children’s Chorus; Zhu Wang, Kevin Condon; Imani Winds, Titilayo Ayangade; Diderot String Quartet, Tatiana Daubeck; Isata Kanneh-Mason, Karolina Wielocha; Renaissance String Quartet, Renaissance String Quartet.