'After Hours' at the Gardner Museum
By MATT PARISH | August 5, 2008
DJ Die Young
Clusters of sharply dressed after-workers drifted wide-eyed in and out of the cavernous Tapestry Room at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum like tourists at an Old World cathedral. From his post at the front of the dark hall, a T-shirted DJ Die Young flipped gurgly beats on passers-by while, around the corner, Rembrandt’s Self Portrait, Aged 23 chilled. An epileptic live video projection drew its feed from a camera aimed down through the courtyard at guests gliding around with glasses of white wine.
It was the summer installation of the Gardner’s third-Thursdays “After Hours” program, a sold-out mixer in one of the classiest Barbie houses ever built. A crowd like this one lights up the whole house — the warm bodies and conversational hum providing séance juice for the ghostly presence of the mansion’s namesake.
Some guests shuffled back through a closet door to the small special-exhibition gallery for a look at Luisa Rabbia’s new video piece, a wall-sized montage of Mrs. Gardner’s photos from China spliced with rippling water and animated plant roots growing from beige landscapes like a Windows 95 screensaver. The small klatch sipped and listened to critic Mario Diacono parse the playfully trippy work with parlor-game nonchalance.
DJ Fa Ventilato stood in the courtyard garden mixing plainchant dirges with harps and ritualistic drum loops, tossing back his long hair, the Ronnie James Dio of highbrow sound collage. A young graphic designer and her social-worker friend gazed past him to the fountain. “We should do shrooms in here and run away from the fish that would fly out of that thing,” she said. Another guest wondered aloud how soon everything would turn into Eyes Wide Shut. Ventilato ended his set and raised his bottle up like Yanni staring down the Acropolis, which was in the general direction of the coat check. No secret-society masks appeared, but the night still managed to tweak reality into a few exotic kinks.
Related:
Too much too soon?, Touch the sky, Birdland, More 
- Too much too soon?
Two of the most exciting concerts announced for this winter are on the same date, February 24.
- Touch the sky
The term “polyptych” usually refers to the multi-panel paintings designed as altarpieces for churches and cathedrals in Gothic and Renaissance Europe.
- Birdland
Our fragile and threatened natural environment weighs on the mind of Swedish artist Henrik Håkansson, who takes a biologist’s approach to artmaking .
- Budding groves
More and more, museums are getting into the live-music scene.
- Solved?
In the wee hours of March 18, 1990, two men posing as police officers gained entrance to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, tied up the two security guards, and stole 13 pieces of art.
- Leon Kirchner, 1919–2009
Craggy, tender, passionate, witty, rough-edged, lyrical, uncompromising, Leon Kirchner's music, so like the man himself, made an indelible impression. Even in his recent appearance at a 90th-birthday tribute concert at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the old fire and wit, the frankness and the refusal to sentimentalize, were there.
- Dollhouses and dream states
Autumn highlights in the museums and the galleries.
- Personal code
The connection between jazz and India is at least as old as John Coltrane’s composition named for that country.
- Erwartung . . .
BOSTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA music director James Levine will be back in February to continue his survey of Beethoven and Schoenberg with Metropolitan Opera diva Deborah Voigt in Beethoven’s “Ah! perfido” and Schoenberg’s Erwartung (“Awaiting”), along with Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture and Eighth Symphony (Symphony Hall, February 1-3).
- Facets of brilliance
The current show in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s special-exhibition room, “Bellini and the East,” is another flickering jewel in the Gardner’s crown.
- Bookworms
“Under Cover” is one of those lucid, edifying shows the Harvard museums excel at.
- Less
Topics:
Live Reviews
, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Gardner Museum, Rembrandt van Rijn, More
, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Gardner Museum, Rembrandt van Rijn, Luisa Rabbia, Ronnie James Dio, Less
