Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Renaissance String Quartet

The Gardner Museum is thrilled to present the Renaissance String Quartet for the closing performance of the Winter/Spring 2026 Weekend Concert Series. These four terrific musicians (violinists Randall Goosby and Jeremiah Blacklow, violist Jameel Martin, and cellist Daniel Hass) find time in their busy touring lives as soloists and chamber musicians to perform together as a quartet. Brahms’ String Quartet No. 2 in A minor anchors the program with its characteristic blend of passion and intellectual rigor. The concert also includes the great American composer Florence Price’s String Quartet No. 1 in G Major. Price had 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. The program closes with String Quartet No. 1, “Love and Levity,” by Daniel Hass, the cellist in the Renaissance String Quartet. He describes the piece as “Beethovenian in its thematic and structural tautness, but even more so in its motion towards excess.”

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Winter/Spring 2026 Weekend Concert Series features a fifteen-concert season curated by Abrams Curator of Music George Steel running from January 25 through May 17, 2026. The winter/spring season showcases world-class artists in the Museum’s extraordinary Calderwood Hall—a 300-seat “sonic cube” with three levels of balconies designed so that 80% of seats are front row, creating a uniquely intense and intentional listening experience. Dating to 1927, the Gardner’s Weekend Concert Series is the longest running museum music program in the country.