Music at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

As I review the podcasts and posts I have provided so far at ITYWLTMT, I haven’t spent much time exploring chamber music. I plan to fix that this week, with a Chamber Music posting, with Internet links rather than creating a montage (like I did a few weeks back for my Easter Vigil post).

I do have a decent collection of chamber music, but I also have a secret: I have pillaged a particular site over the years for chamber (and solo piano) music. When I spent about a month in Australia a few years back, I looked for some musical companionship on the Web, and came across the music library of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston:

Until recently, the museum hosted its regular concerts in its “tapestry room”. The museum is doing some major renovations, which includes building a new concert venue. In the meantime, the concert series continues in nearby venues, and as its website says:

“[…] The Gardner Museum honors this musical legacy by welcoming world-renowned musicians and exciting emerging artists to perform classical masterpieces, new music, and jazz on Sunday afternoons and select Thursday evenings. The museum’s rich musical program is also available to listeners across the globe through concert videos, audio recordings, and a free classical music podcast.“

The web feed for the podcasts: http://www.gardnermuseum.org/rss.xml

The Gardner’s music library provides notable performances of piano sonatas by Beethoven and Schubert, an impressive cross-section of duet, trio, quartet and small ensemble works from the baroque to the contemporary, and even some jazz.

Some of the noteworthy artists that I have found on this site are Cecile Licad and her teacher at Julliard, Seymour Lipkin, Canadian violinist Corey Cerovcek and the Lincoln Centre chamber players – only to name a few. The quality of the recordings is very good, and the performances are, for the most part, top notch.

The best part – this is all FREE and designed to be sampled and shared.

I highly recommend this site to satisfy your chamber music cravings. This site, and some others, are featured on this coming Friday’s music post.

[Because we are not managing third-party web content, ITYWLTMT does not guarantee the currency of the link – all we can guarantee is that the link worked “as advertised” at the time of the original blog post.]