duggup

The Chill pieces today come from a museum in Boston (the one in the USofA). Back on New Years Day in 1903, Isabella Stewart Gardner welcomed visitors to her museum, the guests listened to the music of Bach, Mozart, and Schumann, gazed in wonder at the courtyard full of flowers, and viewed one of the nation’s finest collections of art. And 103 years later not much has changed. The Gardner Museum’s on-going concert series is the longest-running museum music series in the USA.

And here is the icing on the cake, you get to download free podcasts of concerts recorded live from the Tapestry Room, featuring unreleased recordings of music by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and others. Here is the hype….

ISGM Music: The Concert Podcast The Gardner Museum’s on-going concert series includes performances by the museums own Gardner Chamber Orchestra, world-renowned chamber music groups and soloists, and several of the most talented young musicians performing today, many of whom have won prestigious international competitions. The museums music programs, directed by Scott Nickrenz, include the Sunday Concert Series and Young Artists Showcase on nearly every Sunday from September through May and Composer Portraits on two Friday evenings at 7:00pm. The longest-running museum music series in the country. Come enjoy an afternoon of music in the museum and ticket prices include museum admission! Starting this fall, download free podcasts of concerts recorded live from the Tapestry Room, featuring unreleased recordings of music by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and others. Listen again to your favorite concerts from the last several years, get a taste of our concert series for the first time, or preview some of this season’s performers. Look for our podcast early this fall here on our website.

Currently there are four or five pieces listed on ISGM Music: The Concert Podcast page.   This weeks picks would be Chopin’s Piano Fireworks and Beethoven: Before & After. They post a new program every two weeks, so if you like what you hear, bookmark it and check back every so often.

The license is a generous one. You are free to share and reproduce the MP3s, and pass it along to your friends. The same goes for the individual tracks you’ll find sorted by musician and composer in the Music Library ( I forgot to mention they also have a Music Library). They only ask that you let people know where you found it, and don’t alter the recording or use it commercially. It’s  Creative Commons Share license folks.  They are truly wonderful recordings, the piano in the Chopin piece sounds like a grand should, with good dynamics and a great tone (my friend Bill will tell me if I am wrong) and the quality of the MP3′s is pretty bloody amazing. I really like the ambience of the Tapestry Room where the concerts are held. I was listening to some of the reissued Glenn Gould recordimgs from the late Fifties last year and this stuff holds up pretty well.

The audio geek in me wants to know all about the mics and stuff that Tom Stephenson (he’s the Recording Engineer) uses, but I will drop them an email and if I get a reply I will post an update later.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. The “normal” chill stuff will be back next week.

thatch is fascinated by guitars, music, guitars, production, silly noises, guitars and used to be a musician. Did I mention the thing about the guitars?
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