Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Holiday Music in the Courtyard 

Ring in the holiday season with this jubilant special performance in the Gardner Museum Courtyard! Led by George Steel, Abrams Curator of Music, this immersive evening will showcase music from across four centuries, celebrating a variety of winter traditions. The performance features the acclaimed Vox Vocal Ensemble and the all-star American Brass Quintet, with opportunities for everyone to sing along with familiar carols.  The music and sing-along will run from 7–8 pm, and ticket holders can come early at 6 pm or stay late until 9 pm to enjoy the Museum galleries, shop at Gift at the Gardner, or purchase treats from Café G’s holiday menu of small plates and cocktails/mocktails. Guests are invited to watch from the surrounding galleries, strolling through the Museum to take in the music from every angle. Please note, this is not a seated concert.

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Courtyard

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Michelle Cann 

Pianist Michelle Cann, a two-time GRAMMY® Award winner lauded as “a pianist of sterling artistry” by Gramophone, makes her Gardner Museum debut. Cann’s program features dazzling music from pianist-composers, including Florence Price’s Sonata in E minor, as well as three 19th-century showpieces from Romantic greats—Mendelssohn, Liszt, and Chopin. Cann will also perform Joel Thompson’s “My Dungeon Shook” from Three American Preludes, composed in 2020 and inspired by the words of celebrated author and civil rights activist James Baldwin. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Fall 2025 Weekend Concert Series features an eleven-concert autumn season curated by Abrams Curator of Music George Steel running from September 13 through November 23, 2025. 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: Sasha Cooke 

Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, one of America's greatest singers, takes a night off from the global operatic stage to present a program of American songs, including a Gardner Museum co-commissioned Boston premiere from Jasmine Barnes. Cooke’s program with pianist Myra Huang, titled Of Thee I Sing, celebrates the rich tapestry of American song while offering a nuanced exploration of the still-unrealized American dream. It includes music by iconic 20th and 21st century American composers such as William Bolcom, George Gershwin, Samuel Barber, Jennifer Higdon, Aaron Copland, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Stephen Sondheim, as well as émigré composers Alma Mahler and Erich Wolfgang Korngold. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Fall 2025 Weekend Concert Series features an eleven-concert autumn season curated by Abrams Curator of Music George Steel running from September 13 through November 23, 2025. 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.&nbsp;

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Clayton Stephenson 

Pianist Clayton Stephenson, winner of the 2025 Sphinx Medal and recent Harvard and New England Conservatory graduate, makes his Gardner debut with a brilliant solo piano program featuring J.S. Bach, Schubert, Albéniz, Stravinsky, and Gershwin. Gramophone magazine raves, “Stephenson is not just a remarkable virtuoso, but a poet, a dramatist and a master story-teller.”  The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Fall 2025 Weekend Concert Series features an eleven-concert autumn season curated by Abrams Curator of Music George Steel running from September 13 through November 23, 2025. 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: Flutist Claire Chaise

MacArthur Fellow, Harvard Professor, and innovative, vanguard flutist Claire Chase, joined by period instrumentalists—violinist Aisslinn Nosky, cellist Katinka Kleijn, and pianist/harpsichordist Alex Peh—presents a fascinating program blending the old and the new, combining Baroque masterpieces by Marais, J.S. Bach, and Boismortier with new music from the 20th and 21st centuries by Messiaen, Saariaho, Tania León, Marcos Balter, Michael Oesterle, and Dai Fujikura. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Fall 2025 Weekend Concert Series features an eleven-concert autumn season curated by Abrams Curator of Music George Steel running from September 13 through November 23, 2025. 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.&nbsp;

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Rachel Barton Pine 

Rachel Barton Pine, praised for her “bravura technique and soulful musicianship” by the New York Times, returns to the Gardner Museum for a special recital on her own violin and viola d’amore. She will also perform on the Gardner Museum’s extraordinary 18th century viola d’amore (on display in the Yellow Room), last played in the 1980s. This instrument, crafted in the 1770s, was given to Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1903 by composer Charles Martin Loeffler, who was her close friend and central to music programming at the Museum. Pine will perform selections by Vivaldi, Telemann, and Haydn for viola d’amore, as well as two works composed by Loeffler—his Mescolanza “Olla Podrida” and Norske Land. On violin, she will perform Brahms’ Violin Sonata and Sarasate’s Introduction and Tarantella. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Fall 2025 Weekend Concert Series features an eleven-concert autumn season curated by Abrams Curator of Music George Steel running from September 13 through November 23, 2025. 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: Miranda Cuckson and Blair McMillen 

A musician’s musician, violinist Miranda Cuckson comes to the Gardner Museum with pianist Blair McMillen to present a program comprising nearly two hundred years of violin music—from Beethoven’s Sonata in G, Op. 30, No. 3 (1802) to Lili Boulanger’s D'un matin de printemps (1918) to Jamaican-British composer Eleanor Alberga’s The Wild Blue Yonder (1995). The centerpiece of the concert is Prokofiev’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in F minor, Op. 80 (1946), an ideal showcase for Cuckson’s virtuosity and range of expressive colors. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Fall 2025 Weekend Concert Series features an eleven-concert autumn season curated by Abrams Curator of Music George Steel running from September 13 through November 23, 2025. 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: Sphinx Virtuosi with Sterling Elliott 

The blazing 22-member Sphinx Virtuosi, praised for their “elegant ascent into the upper ranks of string orchestras” by The Strad, returns to the Gardner Museum for a performance featuring cellist Sterling Elliott in a program spanning the Americas—from biracial Cuban composer and violinist José White Lafitte, to Argentine Alberto Ginastera, to the Mexican composer Manuel Ponce. The concert will include two Boston premieres of newly commissioned works by Quenton Blache and Jessie Montgomery.  The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Fall 2025 Weekend Concert Series features an eleven-concert autumn season curated by Abrams Curator of Music George Steel running from September 13 through November 23, 2025. 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: Catalyst String Quartet

The Catalyst String Quartet returns to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum after their astonishing Gardner debut last season. The quartet’s program features Concertante Quartets No. 2 in G minor (1777) by the legendary violinist-composer Joseph Bologne (Chevalier de Saint-Georges), a superb swordsman who led an all-Black regiment in the French Revolution, alongside Dora Pejačević's splendid String Quartet in C major from 1922—re-introducing Gardner audiences to the work of this late-Romantic Croatian composer—and Beethoven's monumental String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Fall 2025 Weekend Concert Series features an eleven-concert autumn season curated by Abrams Curator of Music George Steel running from September 13 through November 23, 2025. 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: Junction Trio Plays John Zorn 

The superb Junction Trio presents an afternoon of virtuosic chamber music by John Zorn. The acclaimed supergroup—Stefan Jackiw (violin), Jay Campbell (cello), and Conrad Tao (piano), joined by special guests Jorge Roeder (bass) and Ches Smith (drums)—will perform Zorn's vivid and theatrical music, which has become an audience favorite at the Gardner. Their program includes two world premieres—Zorn’s Notes on the Assumption of Mystical Solidarity Approaching Nine Neological Approximations Illuminating the Eternal Return of the Same and But Doth Suffer a Sea-Change, as well as his Philosophical Investigations I and II and I Am Your Labyrinth…, all composed in the last three years.&nbsp; The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Fall 2025 Weekend Concert Series features an eleven-concert autumn season curated by Abrams Curator of Music George Steel running from September 13 through November 23, 2025. 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.&nbsp;

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: ACRONYM 

Baroque-band and period-instrument superstars ACRONYM, praised for their “consummate style, grace, and unity of spirit” (The New York Times), perform J.S. Bach's complete Brandenburg Concertos. In anticipation of overwhelming demand, the ensemble will perform the complete cycle twice, featuring Bach's masterworks on authentic period instruments including flutes, recorders, trumpets, hunting horns, gambas, and violins of every size—a motley “kitchen” of continuo instruments, and more.&nbsp; The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Fall 2025 Weekend Concert Series features an eleven-concert autumn season curated by Abrams Curator of Music George Steel running from September 13 through November 23, 2025. 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.

Jupiter String Quartet: Concord Chamber Music Society

The award-winning&nbsp;Jupiter&nbsp;Quartet, “an ensemble of eloquent intensity” (The New Yorker), are presented by&nbsp;Concord Chamber Music Society&nbsp;at&nbsp;Concord Academy Performing Arts Center&nbsp;(166 Main St.). For this performance, the&nbsp;Jupiter&nbsp;Quartet brings its well-honed musical chemistry to three works that span more than two centuries and several musical eras ––&nbsp;displaying artistic contrast between the 19th and 21st centuries. Featured works on the concert program include:&nbsp;Beethoven’s&nbsp;Quartet in F minor, Op. 95 (1810);&nbsp;Kati Agócs’&nbsp;Imprimatur (2018), and&nbsp;Schubert’s&nbsp;Quartet in G Major, D. 887 (1826). The&nbsp;Jupiter&nbsp;String Quartet is a particularly intimate group, consisting of violinists Nelson Lee and Meg Freivogel, violist Liz Freivogel (Meg’s older sister), and cellist Daniel McDonough (Meg’s husband, Liz’s brother-in-law). Brought together by ties both familial and musical, the&nbsp;Jupiter&nbsp;Quartet has been performing together since 2001. The group's connections to each other and the length of time they’ve shared the stage always shine through in&nbsp;Jupiter's intuitive performances.

Concord Academy Performing Arts Center

Pianist Simone Dinnerstein with Emmanuel Music

Simone Dinnerstein, described by The New York Times as “an utterly distinctive voice in the forest of Bach interpretation,” performs with Emmanuel Music conducted by Artistic Director Ryan Turner in three piano concertos - J.S. Bach’s Keyboard Concerto in D Minor BWV 1052, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C Major, K. 467, and Philip Glass’s “Tirol” Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. The performance will be coupled with a visual counterpoint in the form of an abstract video journey by artist Laurie Olinder.

Distler Performance Hall

S22: conversations

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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

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S28: calendar experiences

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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.

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S3 (A): trending experiences

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S17: interest based

Your guide to everything free in and around Boston. From events, to fairs, to festivals, to outdoors. Joyraft has all the free events happening near you.

100+ free things to do in Boston and beyond

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S19: interest based

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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.

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Experiences

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Holiday Music in the Courtyard

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Michelle Cann

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Sasha Cooke

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Clayton Stephenson

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Flutist Claire Chaise

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Rachel Barton Pine

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Miranda Cuckson and Blair McMillen

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Sphinx Virtuosi with Sterling Elliott

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Catalyst String Quartet

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: Junction Trio Plays John Zorn

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: ACRONYM

Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: ACRONYM

Jupiter String Quartet: Concord Chamber Music Society

Pianist Simone Dinnerstein with Emmanuel Music