Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, November 4, 2026 — The Orchestra Now (TŌN) will present Gershwin, Jazz, and the Music of Jewish Émigrés on November 14–15 at the Fisher Center’s Sosnoff Theater at Bard College. Conducted by JoAnn Falletta and featuring violinist Mira Wang, the concerts will also be livestreamed. Recording engineer Marlan Barry will capture the orchestra and the hall’s acoustics primarily using Immersive Design Labs IDL-3203 omnidirectional microphones.
The Orchestra Now is a graduate program at Bard College that prepares accomplished conservatory graduates for careers as professional musicians. Alongside rehearsals, recordings and performances at venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center and the Fisher Center, its musicians participate in seminars, masterclasses, teaching and professional development.
The performance explores the music of five Jewish composers working during the rise of the Jazz Age, many of whom emigrated from Eastern Europe to the United States. Gershwin’s An American in Paris shares the program with works by Louis Gruenberg, Ignatz Waghalter, Lazare Saminsky and Ernst Toch, including the U.S. premiere of Waghalter’s Violin Concerto. The Fisher Center performances take place just days before TŌN presents the program at Carnegie Hall. “There’s a really cool, wide-ranging palette of music for people to listen to and hear the microphones,” Barry says.
Barry specializes in orchestral, chamber and operatic recording. His background includes 15 years as head recording engineer and musical producer for The Houston Grand Opera, and he regularly engineers and produces albums for some of today’s most acclaimed classical artists. He first evaluated the IDL-3203s during a recording session at Skywalker Sound this past summer with Grammy-winning and nominated artists Nicholas Phan and Myra Huang. At Bard, he will handle both the recording and livestream mix, using the IDLs as the main microphone array to establish the overall balance and stereo image.
At Sosnoff Theater, that means positioning four IDL-3203 half-inch omnidirectional microphones across the front of the orchestra. A central pair provides the main stereo image, while two more widely spaced microphones, known as outriggers, extend the capture toward the sides of the ensemble to solidify the stereo image and take in more of the hall.
Those four microphones will make up most of the orchestra’s sound in the livestream mix, supplemented by a couple of carefully positioned microphones over the woodwinds and a spot microphone for the violin soloist. Barry plans to route the IDLs through Metric Halo ULN-8 3D MK IV audio interfaces into a MacBook Pro. “It’s going to be a pretty minimal signal chain,” he says. The broadcasts will give listeners an opportunity to hear this setup across the program’s five works, capturing the instruments together within the natural acoustic space of Bard’s Sosnoff Theater.
The concerts will be livestreamed on Saturday, November 14, at 7 p.m. ET and Sunday, November 15, at 2 p.m. ET. To watch, reserve livestream access in advance through the Fisher Center’s livestream reservation page. Reservations are available on a pay-what-you-wish basis.
To learn more about Immersive Design Labs and its microphones, visit www.immersivedesignlabs.com.
About Immersive Design Labs
Immersive Design Labs (IDL) is redefining the future of immersive audio by grounding its products, methodologies, techniques, and research in the core principles of sound physics and human psychoacoustics. The company’s approach merges cutting-edge technology with a deep understanding of how humans perceive sound, creating innovative solutions for the next generation of immersive audio experiences.
