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Gallery: Inside the Orchestra

Monday, March 9, 2020

InsideOut concerts place members of the public at the heart of the symphony orchestra

American conductor David Bernard has created the 'InsideOut Concerts' program - first trialed with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony (PACS) orchestra - that seats all audience members in amongst the players. Bernard has called it 'musical surround sound' and 'a high-definition classical experience', inspired both by IMAX and site-specific theatre. Here, Bernard conducts a sold-out PACS 'InsideOut' at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Manhattan.
Bernard will often rotate audience members around mid-concert, so they can experience being in the sound-world variously from the back row of the violins, in amongst the brass, front row of the cellos and so on.
Special family 'InsideOut' events are often run, alongside as the 'full works' experiences, welcoming young children for musical excerpts and sometimes the concert is followed by an instrument zoo where young musical explorers can get even closer and actually touch the intrustuments.
Although so far largely sticking to quite standard repertoire, Artistic Director David Bernard has begun to use the experiential format to expose InsideOut audiences - many of whom are new to classical concert-going - to repertoire that might be considered somewhat edgier, with gratifying and sometimes surprising results. A performance of Ligeti's Atmospheres in 2019 was capped, after the long silence that ends that atonal work, by a voice in the audience distinctly saying, "Oh, YEAH!"
Having received a lot of media attention, some outlets such as New York One television and WQXR Radio have wondered aloud whether InsideOut Concerts is pointing a way forward for developing new audiences for classical events.
InsideOut Concerts has seen a steady rise in popularity during the past two years, with David Bernard taking the format to orchestras outside of New York. This image is from a 2020 concert with the Greenwich Symphony Orchestra in Connecticut. Other orchestras to have come on board include the Danbury Symphony and Massapequa Philharmonic.
A new audience member feeling the music with the Greenwich Symphony Orchestra's InsideOut Concerts event. For recent InsideOut events Artistic Director David Bernard has started to play with the format some more, introducing concerto soloists, a choir, even semi-staged opera excerpts.

Select any image above to open the Gallery.

The idea of InsideOut concerts is to place members of the public among the players of a symphony orchestra so that they can experience the thrill of orchestral music-making for themselves. David Bernard, who conducts the InsideOut concerts, has called it 'musical surround sound' and 'a high-definition classical experience', inspired both by IMAX and site-specific theatre. For more information, please visit: https://insideoutconcerts.com/ 

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