Audience on stage

Patrons are seated with PSO musicians

There are some shenanigans going on at Heinz Hall this weekend, but you can’t get tickets.

Actually, there were some shenanigans at City of Asylum on Wednesday as well. You probably missed those, too.

Both events sold out shortly after ticket sales went live online. On Saturday night, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra debuts a new concert series, PSO360, which obliterates the divide between performers and audience by seating them together on the Heinz Hall stage. Wednesday’s PSO event at City of Asylum on the North Side featured live poetry readings interspersed with musical offerings by the PSO’s own Clarion Quartet.

Both performances involve much smaller audiences than usually found at Heinz Hall. PSO360 is capping capacity at about 200 guests, and City of Asylum at Alphabet City was filled with about 140 people.

Clearly, there’s a healthy demand for these more intimate experiences. The second PSO360 concert in January is already sold out, and the final concert in May is filling rapidly. All tickets cost $60 (PSO tickets typically fall between $20 and $94).

There are four more PSO events at City of Asylum in November, January, March and June, and each ties into a subscriptions series concert. Tickets aren’t available online yet, but if Wednesday is any indication, they’ll go quickly. Tickets are free with a reservation (pittsburghsymphony.org).

These sorts of events beg the question: For an art form already plagued by cries of elitism, is creating an exclusive experience really the way to go?

“This — PSO360 — is an idea born of practicality, really,” said Mary Persin, the orchestra’s vice president of artistic planning. “People tend to think that being innovative with a symphony means programming alternate music and exploring different genres, but it can also mean adjusting the delivery. I think we need to do what we do best but adopt a heightened experience.”

Unlike other famous halls, Heinz Hall doesn’t have a smaller concert space for chamber music performances. Ms. Persin said that inviting the audience onstage is a way to mitigate that issue.

Each 360 concert features the weekend soloist and a small cadre of PSO musicians. On Saturday, violinist Ray Chen performs The Seasons, an exploration of musical representations of the seasons throughout the ages. The January

concert features pianist Kirill Gerstein performing the original jazz band arrangement of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” and the final PSO360 concert fronts violin phenom Augustin Hadelich.

Mr. Chen, 28, was born in Taiwan and raised in Australia.He entered Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music at age 15. This weekend marks his debut with the PSO performing the Bruch Violin Concerto in G Minor on Fridayand Sunday.

“Usually I play events like this for sponsors or donors in their homes,” said Mr. Chen, an Armani-sponsored artist. “Doing this onstage in a concert hall is unique.”

Mr. Chen will perform as soloist and direct the PSO musicians, facing different directions before and after intermission.

“The audience will feel the energy of the performers, and I think the performers will feed off the energy this creates in the audience as well,” said Sussane Park, PSO violinist and chair of the orchestra committee.

The PSO’s symphonic series used to run for three days (Friday-Sunday) on 14 weekends. Due to financial considerations a few seasons ago, seven of the Saturday evening concerts were eliminated. The PSO360 concerts are filling three of those Saturdays, with a Messiah concert and a Yo-Yo Ma appearancefilling two others.

While this concert format is exciting, it’s not revolutionary. New York’s Park Avenue Chamber Symphony, for example, is in its second year with InsideOut, wherein audience members actually sit next to performing musicians.

Ms. Persin said that the series will continue to be developed, and she hopes to expand beyond three concerts in years to come. There are also talks of live-streaming the series on Facebook or another platform.

The New York Philharmonic last year sent musicians to perform chamber music in smaller venues, including a bookstore in Soho. So the emerging partnership between City of Asylum and thePSO isn’t a new concept either by any means, although itis new to Pittsburgh.

Wednesday’s event focused on suppression and the Holocaust, replete with poetry, discussion and music. The Clarion Quartet, whose mission is to spotlight composers whose work has been historically suppressed, performed admirably. Their program relates to the weekend’s Shostakovitch Symphony No. 5 concerts in Heinz Hall, a sort of musical preview of that regime-controlled fifth symphony. (You can still catch the Sunday matinee).

The string quartet performed music by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a composer of Soviet and Jewish origins who lost most of his family to the Holocaust. The Clarion played an aria and capriccio, the former with gorgeous lyrical lines and the latter with a pleasant sense of spunk.

The quartet also played music by Korngold (another war-displaced artist), who halted his classical output during World War II. They played two movements from his third string quartet, Korngold’s first classical composition after the war’s end. It was suitably profound, the scherzo filled with spiky dissonances and inconsistentrhythmic gestures.

Pittsburgh writers Jacob Bacharach and Philip Terman both read excerpts from their writings, the latter with an engaging sense of rhythm. The evening started with a video recording of Anjelina Polonskya, a Russian author, giving a brief reading.

It was a thought-provoking, intimate event. The quartet closed with an arrangement of a psalm by Boris Pigovat, whose music was featured in the opening PSO’s season-opening concert in September.

Although the PSO360 and City of Asylum events provide different sorts of experiences, they’re both refreshing takes on the typical concert experience. With such limited seating, higher ticket prices (in the case of PSO360) and a noticeable lack of marketing, these sorts of concerts will do little to reach new listeners, but they’ll undoubtedly help to deepen the orchestra’s relationship with current concertgoers. And that’s a worthy goal.

It’s tricky to get tickets, but go if you can. It’s worth the effort to secure a spot.