“Symphonic music was designed to be heard by people sitting in a large, resonant hall,” writes David Wright in Sunday’s (11/21) New York Classical Review. “So why would you trade your favorite seat in Row P for one not just onstage, but inside the orchestra itself? That’s exactly where the audience was Saturday afternoon at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan, seated among the players for the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony’s ‘InsideOut’ performance of music by Mozart, Brahms and Elgar, with music director David Bernard conducting. Was this a Walter Mitty fantasy of being one of the rosin-stained wretches in row three of the second violins? … The answer is: It’s New York. Here we live by the Gospel of Being Where the Action Is…. Ticketholders [sat] in one of the clusters between the string sections or behind the woodwinds…. From my seat between the second violins and the violas, that magical transition [in Brahms’s Variations on a Theme of Haydn] when the reedy little theme blossoms into the first variation, with its soft throb and swirl of the full orchestra, was like going from narrow screen to CinemaScope.”
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