Starting this week at the Art Gallery of Ontario, you can have your art with music on the side.

AGO Friday Nights has begun a new concert series on Friday evenings, each featuring music go to hand-in-hand with what’s on at the Gallery. Yesterday the AGO launched J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free, an exhibition of over 50 large-scale paintings and watercolours by British artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851).

Tapestry Opera’s Michael Mori has curated a complementary concert, Music Set Free, with pianist and composer Adam Sherkin and mezzo-soprano Marion Newman. On the programme are works by Adams, Berio, Liszt, Beethoven, Elgar, Schubert, and more, including a world premiere of Sherkin’s own Light and Colour.

“These songs are set to text written by J.M.W. Turner himself,” says Sherkin. “The inscriptions were displayed alongside the paintings at his Royal Academy exhibition in 1843. Referring to Goethe’s theory of a colour-circle divided into plus and minus colours, the plus colours (reds, yellows and greens) were thought to suggest jubilance and warmth. The minus colours (blues, turquoise and purples) were thought to create “restless, susceptible and anxious impressions.”

AGO Friday Nights presents start November 6th at 7:30pm in the AGO’s Walker Court. Performances are free with general admission for the Gallery. For details and ticket information, follow the box office links below.