Grammy-Nominated A Far Cry with Pianist Simone Dinnerstein

GRAMMY®-nominated chamber orchestra and “world-wide phenomenon” (WBUR) A Far Cry opens its 20th anniversary season with its first Mainstage Concert of the year at New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, performing a modern reimagining of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations with pianist Simone Dinnerstein.

Jordan Hall

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Twelfth Night Ensemble

The long-awaited Boston debut of Twelfth Night Ensemble finally arrives on Sunday, September 20, in a program postponed from January due to the blizzard. Violinist Rachell Ellen Wong—the only Baroque violinist to be awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant—joins harpsichordist David Belkovski and cellist Coleman Itzkoff in Baroque works by Nicola Matteis, Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, John Eccles, Giuseppe Tartini, J.S. Bach, Jean-Marie Leclair, Francesco Maria Veracini, Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer, and Jacques Duphly, alongside contemporary composer Wanessa Dourado's Conto Bachiano from 2023. Inspired by Shakespeare’s play of the same name, Twelfth Night strives to invoke a spirit of boundless revelry, celebration, and community in their programming. 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.

Calderwood Hall

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.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Ivalas Quartet

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum presents the Ivalas Quartet in their Weekend Concert Series. Franz Schubert's monumental “Death and the Maiden” quartet anchors the Ivalas Quartet's program, paired with two American works: an early piece in George Walker's "American" style (Walker died only a few years ago at age 96) and An Elegy: A Cry from the Grave, a moving miniature by Carlos Simon, whose Requiem for the Enslaved had its Boston premiere at the Gardner Museum in 2022. Hailed by The Strad for playing with “tremendous heart and beauty,” the Ivalas Quartet has been changing the face of classical music since its inception in 2017 with a mission to enrich the classical music world by spotlighting past and present BIPOC composers alongside the standard repertory. 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.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Celebrating Chrysanthemums

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s annual John Lowell Gardner Chrysanthemum Installation inspires Celebrating Chrysanthemums concert on Sunday, October 25, an exploration of the flower as artistic muse hosted by the Gardner’s Stanley P. Kozak Director of Horticulture Erika Rumbley and Abrams Curator of Music George Steel, who will also read related poems, letters, and horticultural texts. An all-star cast performs music by Jules Massenet, Léo Delibes, Giacomo Puccini, Scott Joplin, Dora Pejačević, Nikolai Harito, William Penn, Zbigniew Maciejowski, Ernesto Lecuona, Tōru Takemitsu, Xiaogang Ye, and Juantio Becenti. 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.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Eleanor Alberga with Green Room Ensemble

Jamaican-British composer and pianist Eleanor Alberga, one of the most exciting composers writing in the U.K., takes the stage on Sunday, November 1 with the Green Room Ensemble — violinists Thomas Bowes and Nathan Meltzer, violist Jordan Bak, and cellist Sterling Elliott, who are all stars in their own right. The concert is part of the world premiere tour of Alberga’s Piano Quintet No. 2, “Stark” and will also include her String Quartets Nos. 1, 2, and 3. Alberga has been commissioned by the BBC Proms, The Royal Opera, and Covent Garden, among many others. 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.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Poiesis Quartet

Founded only in 2022, the Poiesis Quartet has already become a much-talked-about force in classical music. On Sunday, November 8, they tackle two landmarks of the repertoire—Ludwig van Beethoven's final string quartet (a work full of good humor despite having been written in trying circumstances) and Sergei Prokofiev's String Quartet No. 1. They also bring two recent works: Many Many Cadences, a bright and brilliant work by Sky Macklay, and Tapestry of the Beloved Beatified, a new commission from Jeff Scott, founding horn player of Imani Winds. The Poiesis Quartet was named among the best classical performances of 2025 by The New York Times. 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 at 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.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Lysander Piano Trio

Formed while its members were students at Juilliard, the Lysander Piano Trio performs on Sunday, November 15, featuring music by the remarkable Swedish violinist-composer Amanda Maier, who knew and worked with Brahms and Edvard Grieg. The program also includes works by Grieg and Antonín Dvořák, and Two Nguni Dances by South African composer Bongani Ndodana-Breen, whom the Museum has commissioned in the past, and whose sophisticated style draws on sub-Saharan musical traditions, including those of the Xhosa clan, to which he belongs. The Lysander Piano Trio has been praised by The Washington Post for playing with, “an uncommon degree of heart-on-the-sleeve emotional frankness.” 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.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Rachel Barton Pine, violin

Acclaimed violinist Rachel Barton Pine, praised by The New York Times for her “bravura technique and soulful musicianship,” opens the Gardner Museum’s 2026 Fall Weekend Concert Series on Sunday, September 13, returning to Calderwood Hall after her triumphant concert last season. Joined by pianist Matthew Hagle, she presents a recital of Johannes Brahms’s violin sonatas — including Brahms's own violin version of a sonata better known on clarinet, which Pine has been championing. She performs on the astonishing Guarneri "del Gesù" violin that Brahms himself selected for his chamber music partner, Marie Soldat-Roeger. 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.

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.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Isata Kanneh-Mason, piano

The stellar pianist member of the great English Kanneh-Mason family of musicians, Isata Kanneh-Mason, takes a moment away from the concerto stage to bring this thoughtfully constructed program to Calderwood Hall: two of Beethoven’s best-loved sonatas, the “Moonlight” and the “Waldstein;” Ravel’s astonishing three-movement tour-de-force Gaspard de la nuit, inspired by the dark poetry of Aloysius Bertrand; and pair of shorter works, Halo and Nocturne, by Bulgarian-British composer Dobrinka Tabakova. 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.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Butter Quartet

Butter Quartet, a period-instrument string quartet, presents a program exploring the origins of the Classical period string quartet. The four composers on this program—Haydn, Mozart, Vaňhal, and Dittersdorf—are reported to have performed together as a string quartet at private gatherings. At the core of this program is a musical tip-of-the-hat between two of them: Hadyn’s Opus 20 “Sun” quartets number among his greatest works—witty, erudite, profound. Dazzled by Haydn’s fusion of counterpoint and gallant gesture, Mozart dedicated his most learned set of quartets to Haydn. 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.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Imani Winds

The celebrated wind quintet Imani Winds returns to the Gardner Museum with a typically wide-ranging program showcasing works by composer-performers. Including the great American ‘oud player Simon Shaheen, Turkish pianist Fazil Say, the nonpareil Stevie Wonder, and Imani’s own Valerie Coleman, this program demonstrates the quintet’s commitment to expanding the wind repertoire with music that crosses cultural and stylistic boundaries. From Wonder’s jubilant Overjoyed to Coleman’s evocative Red Clay &amp; Mississippi Delta, from Finnish composer Kalevi Aho’s substantial Wind Quintet No. 1 to Paquito D’Rivera’s A Little Cuban Waltz, this wonderful program is full of color and invention. 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.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Boston Children’s Chorus

Boston Children’s Chorus honors the remarkable legacy of Melnea Cass, the “First Lady of Roxbury,” presented by the Gardner Museum. 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 Boston and her influence continues to resonate today. Audiences are invited to celebrate the enduring impact of this powerful yet often unsung Boston icon through a program of music that reflects her spirit of activism, community, and hope. 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.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Randall Goosby, violin with Zhu Wang, piano

Virtuoso violinist Randall Goosby returns to the Gardner Museum with pianist Zhu Wang 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. The concert also includes Southland Sketches by Harry Burleigh, who was key in forging a quintessential American musical language, modifying the gorgeous modal inflections of spirituals with the chromatic ambiguities of Wagner’s harmony. Romance by Boston’s Amy Beach, the best of the Second New England School of composers, gorgeously drinks from a similar Wagnerian well. Dvořák’s Four Romantic Pieces provide a bridge between these worlds, showing how Romanticism and folk traditions can be seamlessly interwoven. 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.

S22: conversations

Wondering what to do in Boston? Places to eat? Free activities? Good for a group? Date night spot? Girls night out? The best things to do? Ask Joyraft!

Best places to go in Boston? Things to do? Places to eat?

Questions & answers about things to do in Boston

Recs 💬

Community recs 💬

S4: top picks

The most fun, cool and unique things to do in Boston. Can’t miss events, shows and experiences. Concerts, restaurants, bars, free things in Boston and beyond.

The most fun and cool events happening around Boston

Hot and new things to do in Boston

Hot & new

Hot & new 🔥

S11: happening this weekend

What to do in Boston this weekend? From festivals, concerts, performances, free events, screenings and more, Joyraft has the best things to do in Boston.

25+ things to do in Boston/Cambridge/Somerville this weekend

Things to do in Boston this weekend

This wknd

This weekend for you

S21: roundups

Our top picks: outdoor dining, free events, spring festivals, best bars, upcoming concerts, museum parties - the latest in and around Boston.  Slug: joyraft-top-picks-best-things-to-do-boston-ma

Top picks of the best things to do in and around Boston

Joyraft picks: Boston’s best things to do

Roundups ⭐️

Curated by Joyraft ⭐️

S28: calendar experiences

This week in Boston

This week in Boston 📆

This week 📆

S20: c+d experiences

Discover new, unique events and experiences happening in and around Boston. Perfect for date night, good for a group or with a friend. Be the first to know.

The newest events happening in and around Boston

The newest events on Joyraft

Just added

Just added to Joyraft

S16: editor picks

The most unique and can’t miss things coming up in Boston / Cambridge / Somerville and beyond. Festivals, food, drinks, fairs, concerts, art and free activities.

Unique and Can’t Miss Things to Do in Boston

Can’t-miss things to do in Boston 🚨

Can't-miss things to do 🚨

S2 (A): top experiences

The most popular things to do on Joyraft. Concerts, restaurants, bars, events, parties, openings, kid friendly, date ideas, free things in Boston and beyond.

Top 20 things to do in Boston

Top 20: Joyraft’s most popular

Top 20

Top 20 on Joyraft

S3 (A): trending experiences

Discover can’t miss events and things to do in Boston. The most fun, unique and cool events coming to the Boston area this spring and summer.

The hottest events happening in Boston

Trending events on Joyraft

Trending 📈

S19: interest based

Kid-friendly events in Boston

S18: interest based

Where to eat and drink in Boston? Joyraft has Boston’s newest bars, restaurants and specials. Drinks and pre fixe dinner menus. Cambridge & Somerville too.

Where

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Experiences