The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has been a forward-thinking home for chamber music in Boston; consider The Concert: A Classical Music Podcast, which topped a million downloads in May, three years after the launch of what some thought was a novelty project. Under Music Director and esteemed violist Scott Nickrenz (left), the Gardner has continued its patronage of chamber music, scheduling concerts of music by the great familiar names (Bach and Hayden and the like) as well as the very new. Now Nickrenz and the museum are launching a series called Avant Gardner.
Nickrenz, 70, says he has tried all along to keep the century-old museum on the cutting edge musically, following the general artistic approach of Gardner, who was "a great adventurer" in all the arts. Six or seven years ago, though, he felt the need for "fresh ears." That meant a collaboration on the Composer Portraits series with George Steele of the Miller Theater in New York, and now Drury and the Callithumpian.
This season Avant Gardner means three Thursday night concerts by the Callithumpian Consort (right), a Boston-based new music ensemble under the
leadership of Stephen Drury. But Nickrenz says this is just the start of the program. He hopes to greatly expand it once it moves from the museum's Tapestry Room to the 300-seat concert hall in the museum's Renzo Piano-designed addition, now under construction. (Yazu Toyota, who worked on Frank Gehry's Disney concert hall, is the acoustician, he noted.)
"Right now it looks like three concerts, but it is is really going to be an umbrella for a lot of really magical, exciting and slightly crazy contemporary music, mixed with jazz," he said.
The Tapestry Room can hold up to 300 as well, he notes, but it's a museum, not a concert hall, and they've cut the max. attendance to 250 in recent years to reduce wear and tear. Details on the concerts after the jump.
New Japan
Special guest Jo Kondo
Discover innovative works from 20th- and 21st-century Japanese composers including Kondo’s Aquarelle (1990) and Standing (1973), Hosokawa’s Vertical Time Study I (1992), and Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea (1981).
Thursday, January 21, 7:00 p.m.
Hot Butterknife Knight
Music from the new generation: Adam Roberts, Nicholas Vines, and Lei Liang
Hear music from some of today’s freshest creative voices including the premiere performance of a collaborative work created by all three composers.
Thursday, March 18, 7:00 p.m.
Century Classics
Special guest Christian Wolff
Join us for a world premiere written for the Callithumpian Consort by Christian Wolff—Songs from Brecht: The Exception and the Rule—co-presented with the New England Conservatory Christian Wolff Festival (March 15-17, 2010), along with works by Ives, Cardew, and Cowell.
Tickets: $23 General Public; $18 Seniors; $15 Members; $10 College
Students; $5 Children ages 5-17 (children under 5 not admitted to
concerts). Concert tickets include admission to the museum’s three floors
of galleries, including the special exhibition gallery, and all Gardner
After Hours activities.
Tickets may be purchased by phone through the museum’s Box Office at 617 278 5156 (open Tues.–Sun., 10am–4pm), online via www.gardnermuseum.org, or in person at the museum entrance at 280 The Fenway (Tues.–Sun., 11am–4pm).
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