“At the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony’s InsideOut concerts, you can sit at an oboist’s elbow, perch beside a piccolo or take a chair by a cellist,” writes Barbara Hoffman in Friday’s (11/21) New York Post. “The group turns 20 this year…. Conductor David Bernard says his unpaid, 80-member ensemble of teachers, doctors, engineers and finance people are ‘high-achieving, serious players’ who make music for the sheer love of it. So far, they’ve performed at Carnegie Hall, toured nine cities in China, recorded all of Beethoven’s symphonies and [in 2007] had Whoopi Goldberg narrate their performance of ‘Peter and the Wolf.’ … Lesley Rosenthal, a lawyer who works with both the Juilliard School and the New York Bar Foundation when she’s not playing second fiddle … says that making music with others brings joys that ‘a positive quarterly earnings report or a good trial result’ never do. The audience seems to agree. ‘It was so amazing!’ Colleen Wolfe says of her first InsideOut concert … last year.… ‘We sat by the cellists, then by the first violins,’ says Wolfe…. ‘You could hear the music just coming off the bow. There’s music near you and behind you. It’s like ‘surround sound’!”
Posted November 26, 2019