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There is a particular hush that settles over Merkin Hall just before the downbeat — a quiet breath shared by several hundred strangers — and on a recent June evening, that hush carried an unusual freight of expectation. For this was no common recital. This was the Barbara Brandt Winners’ Concert, the night when the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony hands its stage to the laureates of its annual Concerto Competition, and when the future of the art form, ordinarily abstract and far away, steps blinking into the light and asks to be heard.

An Orchestra That Believes in the Young

To understand why the room seemed electrified, one must understand the host. Founded in 1999, the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony has long made a virtue of its singular character: an ensemble of classically trained players who perform, as the competition’s own judges once put it, in a manner “extremely impressive, well-shaped.” Under David Bernard, its founding music director and a three-time First Prize winner of The American Prize, the orchestra has earned the kind of notices — “Triumphant…polished…exquisite” — that most professional bands would frame and hang in the lobby. Yet Bernard has never been content merely to be admired. His whole project, from the immersive InsideOut Concerts to nights like this one, rests on the belief that classical music is a living inheritance, something to be handed forward rather than embalmed.

Fittingly, the evening opened with Mozart’s Overture to The Magic Flute, its three solemn chords building tension, then the scurrying fugato, as the orchestra engaged with the music with audible relish. Here, Mozart’s late theatrical writing fuses the comic and the sublime into a single breathing organism, and Bernard’s reading honored that doubleness: grave portals giving way to mischief, the woodwinds chattering like Papageno himself. It was a generous curtain-raiser, setting the table.

David Bernard introducing the Shostakovich Concerto in C for Piano, Trumpet and String Orchestra, Op. 35, from the piano bench with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony in the Barbara Brandt Winners' Concert at Merkin Hall. Courtesy The Kaufman Center

Ilaria Hawley: Crystalline Mozart

The first laureate to step forward was the flutist and composer Ilaria Hawley, winner of the Winds, Brass, and Percussion division and a student of Laura Cocks, who performed the opening Allegro maestoso of Mozart’s Flute Concerto in G Major, K. 313. Mozart famously professed to dislike the flute, which has always struck me as one of music history’s more delicious jokes, since the writing he produced for it is so radiant. Hawley met its demands — the long-breathed cantabile lines, the filigree that can so easily turn brittle — with a tone at once silvery and warm, her phrasing unhurried where lesser players rush. Indeed, she seemed to understand instinctively that the concerto’s grandeur lives not in volume but in poise. One is reminded that a true Allegro maestoso is a matter of bearing rather than speed; Hawley carried herself like a young queen.

Ilaria Hawley, Flute, performing the W. A. Mozart Flute Concerto in G major, K. 313, I. Allegro maestoso, with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony in The Barbara Brandt Winners' Concert at Merkin Hall. Courtesy The Kaufman Center

Tobia Im and the Northern Fire of Sibelius

Then the temperature dropped, and the latitude shifted. The “Wildcard” winner, violinist Tobia Im — a student of the former Juilliard Quartet’s first violinist, Joseph Lin — gave the finale, the Allegro ma non troppo, of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto in D Minor. Sometimes described as a “polonaise for polar bears,” the Allegro ma non troppo is a stamping, glittering display of enormous physical hazard. Im attacked its thickets of double-stops, delicate harmonics, and lunging rhythmic insistence with a fearlessness which belied his years. Moreover, he resisted the temptation, common among gifted teenagers, to play merely fast; instead, he uncovered the music’s brooding undertow, the Nordic chill beneath the bravura. The orchestra dug into Sibelius’s granite accompaniment, and for seven minutes, Merkin Hall felt swept by wind off the Gulf of Finland.

Tobia Im, Violin, performing the Sibelius Violin Concerto in D Minor, Op. 47, III. Allegro, ma non troppo, with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony in The Barbara Brandt Winners' Concert at Merkin Hall. Courtesy The Kaufman Center

Zachary Whelan: A Tenor’s Two Languages of Desire

If the strings brought ice, the Vocal Division winner brought ardor. Zachary Whelan, a tenor, composer, and cellist who studies with mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger and made his Carnegie Hall debut at fifteen, offered a pairing of exquisite cruelty for any young singer: Tosti’s Ideale and Lalo’s “Vainement, ma bien-aimée.” The Tosti, in Émile Tavan’s orchestral arrangement, is all yearning suspension — “Come back, dear ideal, for an instant / to smile on me again,” runs Carmelo Errico’s text — and Whelan floated its arching lines with delicacy that never tipped into sentimentality. Subsequently came the aubade from Lalo’s Le Roi d’Ys, that desperate vigil at a closed door: “In vain, my beloved.” Here, Whelan brought forth a more brilliant, more pleading squillo, and one heard the makings of a real lyric instrument — youthful still, but governed by taste. This fall, he goes to Oberlin Conservatory; Oberlin is fortunate.

Zachary Whelan, Tenor, performs the Francesco Paolo Tosti Ideale and the Édouard Lalo Vainement, ma bien-aimee from Le Roi d'Ys, with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony in The Barbara Brandt Winners' Concert at Merkin Hall. Courtesy The Kaufman Center

Liam Meyers: Finding the Folk Song Inside Hindemith

Perhaps the evening’s most quietly courageous choice belonged to the String Division winner, violist Liam Meyers, a Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist and student of Carol Rodland, who played the first movement of Hindemith’s Der Schwanendreher — “Zwischen Berg und tiefem Tal,” between mountain and deep valley. Hindemith built this 1935 concerto entirely from old German folk tunes, and its viola writing is famously thorny, demanding a player who can sing through dense contrapuntal underbrush. Meyers did precisely that. It was a full, burnished, unfashionably generous sound, and masterfully hewn as he located the melancholy human voice that Hindemith tucks beneath all that craftsmanship. There is something moving about a seventeen-year-old already understanding that the viola’s great subject is consolation. The genre is essentially a negotiation between the one and the many; Meyers negotiated like a diplomat, neither bullying the orchestra nor disappearing into it.

Liam Meyers, Viola, performs the Hindemith Der Schwanendreher, I. Zwischen Berg und tiefem Tal, with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony in The Barbara Brandt Winners' Concert at Merkin Hall. Courtesy The Kaufman Center

Elle Gurevich: Shostakovich’s Wit and Steel

The Piano Division winner, Elle Gurevich — a composer who has written a musical, won acclaim for her role in Marnie at the Metropolitan Opera, and is a student of Alexandre Moutouzkine — closed the program with the outer movements of Shostakovich’s Concerto in C Minor for Piano, Trumpet, and String Orchestra, Op. 35. This is music of sardonic brilliance, a thumb to the nose dressed in evening clothes, and it requires a soloist with both fingers and nerve. Gurevich had both. She rifled through the first movement’s quicksilver irony and the finale’s manic gallop with percussive glee, sparring delightedly with the orchestra’s trumpet in Shostakovich’s vaudevillian duet. Bernard kept the strings taut and the comedy sharp, and the concert ended, as it should, in mirth and applause. Trumpeter Patrick Saguineti performed his role with aplomb.

Elle Gurevich, Piano, performs the Shostakovich Concerto in C Minor for Piano, Trumpet, and String Orchestra, Op. 25, with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony in The Barbara Brandt Winners' Concert at Merkin Hall. Courtesy The Kaufman Center

Why an Evening Like This Matters

These young artists are products of Special Music School and Juilliard Pre-College, institutions whose alumni now appear on NPR, at Carnegie Hall, and on Grammy-winning recordings. Yet what one carried home was not a list of credentials but a sentiment — the rare and renewing sense of watching a tradition refuse to die. Clearly, the concerto is the form in which a single human being stands before the crowd and dares to be heard. On this night, five of them dared, and the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony, with generous backing from the Barbara and Gary Brandt Family Foundation, gave them the room and the peace to do so. The future, it turns out, can sing.

Our Musical Guide: Maestro David Bernard

What no printed program could capture was Maestro Bernard himself, microphone held between selections, serving as the evening's genial guide. For this is one of the abiding pleasures of a David Bernard concert: his gift for the spoken word, the way he frames each work with a few deftly chosen sentences before stepping back to let it speak. He showed a knack for illuminating asides — a remark about Mozart's famous grumbling over the flute, a thumbnail sketch of the folk tunes hidden inside Hindemith, a wink at the sly comedy lurking in Shostakovich — never lecturing, always inviting. Moreover, he generously turned the spotlight on the young soloists, introducing each by name with cordiality and a touch of well-earned pride, so that the audience met the musician before meeting the music. These interludes, anecdotal and unhurried, dissolved the invisible wall between stage and seats; by the time the downbeat came, we had ceased to be simple spectators but confidants, leaning in. It is a trademark of his — this insistence that great music is a conversation rather than a monologue — and it converted a concert of notable repertoire into something disarmingly human.

David Bernard, selected as Conductor of the Year and Platinum Prize Winner, European Classical Music Awards — Annual Grand Prix 2025

Concert Details & Tickets

Concert: The Barbara Brandt Winners’ Concert — Park Avenue Chamber Symphony, David Bernard, Music Director

Venue: Merkin Hall at Kaufman Music Center, Abraham Goodman House

Address: 129 West 67th Street, New York, NY 10023

Box Office: 212 501 3330 · [email protected]

Current & upcoming season / tickets: Park Avenue Chamber Symphony · Upcoming Concerts

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