David Bernard leads the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony in works by Schubert at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in NYC. Photo courtesy of Park Avenue Chamber Symphony.
In last Monday’s (2/9) Front Row Center (New York City), Edward Kliszus writes, “Those who braved the arctic chill and made their way to the DiMenna Center for Classical Music [on February 7] were rewarded with something far warmer than any furnace could provide. The Park Avenue Chamber Symphony (PACS), under the baton of its visionary Music Director David Bernard, presented ‘Sublime Schubert’ … Bernard … opened the evening with warm welcomes and introductions, setting the stage for what would prove to be an extraordinary immersive experience…. Proximity, in every conceivable sense, was precisely what this evening delivered. What distinguishes a PACS concert … is the patented InsideOut Concerts format, pioneered and perfected by Bernard himself. Rather than the conventional proscenium arrangement—with its implicit barrier between performer and listener—the InsideOut model disperses the audience among the musicians of a 100-plus-member orchestra…. Every fortissimo is visceral, every pianissimo intimate, and every harmonic overtone palpable as it travels through the air and, quite literally, through your body. Bernard encouraged audience members to look around throughout the concert, take photographs, and observe the musicianship unfolding in every direction.… Bernard enriched the immersive tapestry with … a large projection screen displaying evocative scenes, historical imagery, and contextual text throughout the performance.”
