28 Years of Brotherly Love at Weill Recital Hall
Valentine's Day at Carnegie Hall, and the San Diego Jewish Men's Choir showed up to perform a concert called "28 Years of Brotherly Love."
The San Diego Jewish Men's Choir has been performing together since 1997. Twenty-eight years is a long time for any ensemble to stay together, and the group's range of backgrounds, ages (21 to 91), and life experiences shows up in the music. Their director, Ruth Hertz Weber, has built something that's genuinely community-driven rather than just another professional ensemble doing a polished show.
The concert took place at Weill Recital Hall, the more intimate of Carnegie Hall's performing spaces, and was presented by Distinguished Concerts International New York. The hall's warmth suits this kind of program well. When you're performing music that spans Ladino folk songs, Yiddish humor, Hebrew prayer, Israeli anthems, and full-on musical theater parody, an intimate room helps everything land.
And this program covered a lot of ground. It opened with "Ale Brider" (All My Brothers), a traditional song about unity, and moved through "Shiru L'Adonai" (a setting of Psalm 150), a Ladino song with roots going back to the Spanish Inquisition, and a genuinely funny parody of "Vey-O" from The Prince of Egypt. At one point they did a "Fiddler on the Roof" medley, complete with a comical take on the "Tradition" number, featuring a full cast of Mamas narrating the scene. The audience clearly loved it.
The mix of sacred and comic is part of what makes this choir's programming interesting to photograph. One moment you're shooting quiet, focused attention during a Hebrew prayer setting. The next, a soloist is selling a punchline in Yiddish. The emotional range keeps you on your toes.
Different singers stepped forward for different pieces throughout the evening, and the accompaniment included piano, clarinet, drums, and accordion, giving the performance a lot of range to work with.
For an organization that travels from San Diego to perform at Carnegie Hall, documentation matters in a specific way. These images go back to California with the singers, the directors, the families who supported this tour. They end up in grant applications, anniversary programming, fundraising materials, and archives that mark what the group accomplished in a given year.
DCINY brings ensembles from across the country and internationally to perform in New York, and part of what makes those partnerships work is giving groups something to show for the trip. A gallery of photos from the concert is something the choir can use long after the evening itself is over.
Performing for 28 years and landing at Carnegie Hall on Valentine's Day is not something that happens by accident. The energy in that room matched the occasion.
If you're planning a concert at Carnegie Hall or another New York venue and want to talk about photography coverage, I'd love to hear about it. You can see more of my work at danwrightphotography.com.
