Perpetual Light at Carnegie Hall
Stern Auditorium from the back of the house gives you one fixed vantage and a long lens, and the work is always the same: hold the scale of what's on stage, and still find the single voice when it steps forward. What changes over a program is the balance between those two, and Perpetual Light, produced by DCINY, moved that balance around more than most nights, because the stage held something different in each part of the evening.
The first set was the St. Louis County Community Chorus on its own, conducted by Andy Waggoner, with Sue Goldford at the piano. A community chorus singing accompanied works is a particular thing to shoot. The energy is in the group, not in any one voice, so the frame that holds up is the one that keeps the whole risers section together and waits for a phrase where the singing reads on enough faces at once. From the back of the house that's a matter of timing more than reach.
The Vivaldi Gloria pulled the balance toward the tight frame. Now there was an orchestra, Catherine Sailer conducting, and soloists out front, which means the picture has to do two things at once: hold the scale of everyone on stage, and still find the single voice when it steps forward. Amy Owens, the soprano, and Abigail Nims, the mezzo, were each singing in front of the full orchestra with the chorus banked behind them, and a tight frame is the only thing that lifts one of them out of all that mass. That's the shot I'm holding for whenever a soloist moves into a phrase.
A conductor presents the opposite challenge from a soloist. Sailer is reading across the orchestra in front of her, which means from the back of the house she has to be big enough in her gesture to carry that far, and most of the time she was. The frame I keep from a conducting moment is usually the one where the arms are fully extended and the face is turned out toward the musicians, because that's the only angle where a single image shows who's holding the whole thing together. In this case I was lucky enough to capture her smiling as well.
After intermission came the Duruflé Requiem, conducted by Marie Bucoy-Calavan, with Nims again as mezzo, baritone Peter Kendall Clark, and Gabriel Evans at the organ. The Duruflé is a quieter, more sustained piece than the Gloria, and the gesture that drives it is smaller, so the readable moments come less often and you have to be patient for them. Clark sang from an open score, his head up and out past the conductor.
There's a frame in the Duruflé I held for a while before it came: the conductor seen from behind, arms up, the full chorus on the risers facing back into the hall and responding. From that angle the whole room becomes one image, the singers, the conductor, the organ loft above them. It's the picture that does the most work for an organization later, because it shows the size of what they built in a way no caption can.
That's where the documentation pays off well past the night itself. A chorus traveling to Carnegie Hall is making a case for itself, to its members, its board, its donors, the people who funded the trip, and a frame that holds the chorus and the conductor and the hall all at once is the cleanest version of that case.
Same work all night, same seat at the back, but the rhythm of it kept shifting with the stage. If you're bringing a chorus to a venue like this one and want coverage that follows the program rather than running the same wide shot from start to finish, I'd be glad to talk through it. Click here to reach out.
