Calendar of Events

The Wadsworth is pleased to host the season finale performance of the Arazzo Music Festival, a new initiative building community through musical performances here in Connecticut. Join Connecticut cellist and festival director Samuel DeCaprio as he performs an evening of string music in Morgan Great Hall with musicians from across the region. The program centers around Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s String Sextet in D minor “Souvenir de Florence”, Op. 70 (1890). Free with required registration. 

A musical instrument made of glass? Explore the contemporary glass art on view in Fired Up: Glass Today as Vera Meyer performs an informal concert on the glass harmonica, a musical instrument developed by Benjamin Franklin. Free with museum admission. 

Listen to an informal musical performance in Avery Court by the Hartford-area Oboe Duo Agosto: oboist Ling-Fei Kang and oboist/English hornist Charles Huang. Free with museum admission. 

Listen to an informal musical performance by members of the Hartford-area Azul String Quartet, cellist Pablo Issa and violist Eugenio Figueroa, while you explore the works on view in Morgan Great Hall. Free with museum admission.

Entwyned Early Music Ensemble returns to the Wadsworth for an informal program of seventeenth-century music from the Dutch Republic. Enjoy the works on view in Chasing Rembrandt and the nearby Dutch art galleries while listening to the sounds of Rembrandt’s time. Free with admission.

Presented with support from The Saunders Foundation Music Endowment at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

Drop in for an informal performance by Chia-Yu Joy Lu, director of the Chinese music ensembles at Wesleyan University and Smith College, and Flora Gu, Wesleyan University student musician, featuring the erhu (Chinese two-string fiddle) and guzheng (Chinese 21-string zither). As you listen, view artworks from East Asia in the Wadsworth’s collection, including a porcelain “Vault of Heaven” vase dating to the Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty. Free with admission.

Presented with support from The Saunders Foundation Music Endowment at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

”Vault of Heaven” vase (tianqiu ping), Qing Dynasty, Qianlong period (1736–95). Porcelain. Bequest of Elisha E. Hilliard, 1951.321

Join trumpet player and composer Haneef Nelson, the Greater Hartford Arts Council’s 2023 Jazz Activation Fellow, for an informal performance with the Birth of the Cool Ensemble led by Drake Smith. While you listen, view Bob Thompson’s monumental painting Garden of Music (1960), which features depictions of Ornette Coleman, Don Cherry, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, and other jazz legends that inspired Thompson’s work. Free.

Presented with support from the Greater Hartford Arts Council and the Saunders Foundation Music Endowment at the Wadsworth Atheneum

Image: Bob Thompson, Garden of Music, 1960. Oil on canvas. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1987.4

New England Ballet Theatre’s contemporary interpretation of the story inspired by the 1948 film is set in Hartford in 1954 where young dancers yearn to become prima ballerinas amidst a flourishing arts scene. A pair of blood-red ballet shoes promises unparalleled dance prowess, but the Shoemaker’s dark price taints their ambitions. As Karen rises to prominence after acquiring these enchanted shoes, her relationships falter and her longing for stardom isolates and consumes her. In the aftermath, she discovers that success emerges from within, yet the Shoemaker’s sinister influence continues to lurk, tempting new hopefuls to tread his treacherous path. Visit neballettheatre.com for tickets.

Directed and choreographed by Rachael Gnatowski.

New England Ballet Theatre’s contemporary interpretation of the story inspired by the 1948 film is set in Hartford in 1954 where young dancers yearn to become prima ballerinas amidst a flourishing arts scene. A pair of blood-red ballet shoes promises unparalleled dance prowess, but the Shoemaker’s dark price taints their ambitions. As Karen rises to prominence after acquiring these enchanted shoes, her relationships falter and her longing for stardom isolates and consumes her. In the aftermath, she discovers that success emerges from within, yet the Shoemaker’s sinister influence continues to lurk, tempting new hopefuls to tread his treacherous path. Visit neballettheatre.com for tickets.

Directed and choreographed by Rachael Gnatowski.

Drop in as regional musicians create a sound map of our city throughout the galleries with a special recreation of the 1970 musical composition (Hartford) Memory Space by Alvin Lucier (1931–2021), one of the most influential American composers of the last hundred years, best known for his works that explore the properties of sound and how we perceive them. (Hartford) Memory Space premiered at Hartford Art School, inviting musicians to recreate the sounds they heard while out in the city. In conjunction with the exhibition Rules & Repetition. Free with admission.

Performances by Joan La Barbara, The Daxophone Consort (Daniel Fishkin, Cleek Schrey, and Ron Shalom), Tongue Depressor (Henry Birdsey and Zach Rowden), Trevor Saint, Ronald Kuivila, Emerson Jenisch, and Sam Boston.

Presented in partnership with Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts and Hartford Art School at University of Hartford with support from the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation Fund at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

Image: Contact sheet from the Museum Archives Photograph Collection documenting Alvin Lucier’s performance of Music for Solo Performer (1965) at the Wadsworth Atheneum on April 23, 1996, part of an “Evening Lecture Series” on performance art.