Late in the final season of the Emmy-winning HBO Max comedy Hacks, the legendary stand-up Deborah Vance, played by Jean Smart, solidified her place in the pantheon of comedy greats by performing for a large and enthusiastic audience in New York’s Central Park.
Six weeks after the episode aired, the Los Angeles-based string orchestra Delirium Musicum made its case as a joyous new voice in classical music in precisely the same way.
On July 7, the ensemble, founded in 2018 by violinist and Artistic Director Etienne Gara, completed a three-concert tour of the Northeast with its New York debut at the Naumburg Bandshell in Central Park, presented by Naumburg Orchestral Concerts. It wowed an enthusiastic audience estimated at 1,400 to 1,500, while a live simulcast on New York’s classical station WQXR brought the performance to many thousands more.
“Being LA-based, I wasn’t sure how we would be received,” Gara said in an interview. “But the audience was extremely warm and very focused. During the slow movements, you could hear a pin drop. In Central Park!”
More impressive still: rain fell during the final 15 to 20 minutes of the concert, “but nobody moved,” he reported. “We were under the shell, a stone structure that protected us a little bit. But the first row of violins and myself — we got rained on. I was concerned about the instruments, but they’re fine.”
This was an important milestone for Delirium Musicum, which has established itself in California over the past few years as an artistically innovative and audience-friendly ensemble. The group swept SF Classical Voice’s 2024–2025 Audience Choice Awards, winning all five categories in which it was nominated: Favorite Chamber Ensemble, Favorite New Music Ensemble, Favorite Chamber Performance, Favorite New Music Performance, and Favorite Orchestra Performance.
New Yorkers were equally enthusiastic. “We felt a real communion with the audience — a bonding,” Gara said. “You could feel the energy going back and forth. We got four standing ovations.”
How does the group inspire such excitement? “We want classical music to be a red-hot concert experience,” Gara said. “We don’t expect audiences to follow strict 20th-century codes, where one is not supposed to breathe too loudly or clap between movements. [We hope audiences] have a blast listening to it.
“We don’t forbid ourselves anything, in terms of repertoire. We play [an arrangement of] a Beethoven quartet. We also play movie music, Korean folk music, French baroque music. [Composer] Gabriella Smith is a great love of ours. It’s amazing to work with her. I feel we are musical siblings. We speak the same language.”
For 2026–2027, Delirium Musicum is planning its usual season of four to six programs in Southern California, each performed twice — once on the Westside and once on the Eastside. For the season opener, Sept. 26 at L.A. Dance Project near downtown and Sept. 27 in Santa Monica, it will mark the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s death, in March 2027, with a new string-orchestra arrangement of the “Kreutzer” Sonata (Violin Sonata No. 9, Op. 47).
The program will also feature a new arrangement of the Rondo alla zingarese, the finale of Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 25, plus a world premiere by the ensemble’s composer-in-residence Gianluca Bersanetti, who also made the arrangements Delirium played in Central Park. A spring tour follows in April 2027: Cal Poly Arts in San Luis Obispo, Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, and then the ensemble’s Canadian debut in Kingston and Montreal. A return to New York City is in the works.
As a famous Italian American singer once noted, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
