Decoda’s American Renaissance Rehearsal at Weill Recital Hall
Weill is a room where I can get close, but only at a rehearsal. During a performance I'm fixed at the back behind the audience, working long. This time the seats were empty, so I could move. I got near enough that the musicians caught me in their sightlines, and I'd been in the room since they started setting up, so by the time Decoda started running the material, nobody was clocking me anymore.
Decoda is a New York-based chamber ensemble, and American Renaissance is their program for Carnegie Hall's United in Sound: America at 250 festival. It runs from Ives through William Grant Still, Carlos Simon, Margaret Bonds, Zenobia Powell Perry, Florence Price, and a piece by the ensemble's own Sarah Elizabeth Charles, with the whole evening built around the question Charles Ives poses in The Unanswered Question and never resolves.
Rehearsals don't run in order. Sections repeat, pieces get skipped, someone stops to fix a balance and starts again eight bars back. I wasn't documenting the program top to bottom. The only thing the access was good for was distance, so that's what I worked: getting close enough to pull frames I can't get from the back of the house, and reading which stretches would play through before the next stop.
The wind pieces put five musicians on stage at once. Catherine Gregory on flute, Stuart Breczinski on oboe, Carol McGonnell on clarinet, Brad Balliett on bassoon, and Laura Weiner on horn play together across several pieces, spread in an arc with stands between them and the Steinway behind. Up close I could pull tight on one of them and still feel the others in the frame, or drop them out of focus and isolate a single face.
The strings gave me the same kind of frame in a smaller group. I held Clara Lyon sharp behind Doori Na, who was closer to me and softer, both mid-phrase, the shallow focus doing the separating. Claire Bryant I caught in profile, glasses on, the cello scroll riding above her shoulder and the bow at full extension. Profile and full bow length together are the kind of frame I can't count on from a fixed seat, so I stayed on her for a while. Andrew Gonzalez on viola I got scanning across the section while he played, eyes moving between the other strings, not a frame I could've asked him to pose into. I had it because I was close enough to already be there when it happened.
One frame had Na alone, mid-phrase, bow arm fully extended on a downstroke, eyes nearly closed.
A program this size, seven composers and a century of American music inside a Carnegie festival, gets used long after the one night on stage. Rehearsal frames are the version where nobody's dressed for an audience yet, and that's exactly why they're worth having: they show the work itself, before it gets cleaned up for a crowd. If you've got a program like that coming up, the rehearsal is often the room where the best of it happens, and I'd be glad to talk through covering it. Reach out here.
