Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Chamber Music Celebration

A new annual tradition begins on Sunday, September 27, with the inaugural Chamber Music Celebration, endowed to honor the life and work of the late Scott Nickrenz, the Gardner's first Abrams Curator of Music and a superb violist and chamber music impresario and evangelist. Violinists Geneva Lewis and YooJin Jang, violist Emma Wernig, cellist Jay Campbell, and pianist Conrad Tao present a wide-ranging program featuring music by Henry Purcell and Franz Joseph Haydn, Ruth Crawford Seeger's Suite No. 2 for Four Strings and Piano, and crowned by the thrilling Piano Quintet of Ukrainian-American composer Leo Ornstein, whose life bridged three centuries.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Fall 2026 Weekend Concert Series features a ten-concert autumn season curated by Abrams Curator of Music George Steel held on select Sundays from September 13 through November 22, 2026. The fall 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.