Talk about immersing yourself!
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. While professional orchestras sometimes play to half-empty halls, PACS performances typically sell out, even at $75 a ticket.
The group turns 20 this year, a milestone it’s marking Saturday (Nov. 23) with performances at 2 and 5 p.m. at Midtown’s DiMenna Center for Classical Music (450 W. 37th St.). The matinee is a children’s show with the same Bernstein and Copland program, only shorter and with an instrument “petting zoo.”
None of the group’s members are professional musicians. 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 had Whoopi Goldberg narrate their performance of “Peter and the Wolf.” (That last, in 2007, came after Vice President Dick Cheney shot one of his hunting companions, leading Goldberg to ad-lib, “Don’t shoot, Cheney!” during a climactic passage.)
“Playing in PACS is one of the most profound and meaningful activities of the many that I do,” says Lesley Rosenthal, a lawyer who works with both the Juilliard School and the New York Bar Foundation when she’s not playing second fiddle. The Upper West Sider has been with the group since it started, when her son was a toddler. Now he’s 23, works in artificial intelligence — and sits in the group’s cello section.
While Rosenthal finds her work satisfying, she 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 Inside Out concert, which she found on a Facebook events page. She and her daughter saw last year’s performance of “The Planets,” which featured visual aids and an actual astrophysicist, Dr. Jacqueline Faherty, discussing the science behind Gustav Holst’s score.
“We sat by the cellists, then by the first violins,” says Wolfe, who runs a pet-sitting service in Suffern, NY. “You could hear the music just coming off the bow. There’s music near you and behind you. It’s like ‘surround sound’!”