When live audiences disappeared during COVID, the River Cities Symphony Orchestra needed a way to keep performing for their community. I set up multi-camera concert productions so they could deliver full performances to their audience remotely.
The biggest challenge with orchestral recording is getting the audio right. You’re balancing room ambiance with individual sections, and the dynamic range of a symphony orchestra is enormous — a quiet string passage and a full brass crescendo are worlds apart. The multi-camera setup had to work around the musicians without being intrusive, and the final mix needed to feel like you were sitting in the hall.
The “Baroque for the Holidays” concert was the largest production — about 23GB of raw footage across multiple camera angles. We also captured “The Heights of Haydn” and “The Magic of Mozart” as part of their Great Composers Series, plus a chamber performance of the Brahms Piano Trio in C minor with Jessee, Harper, and Pressley that was a completely different shooting challenge — intimate, close-up, three musicians instead of a full orchestra.
Switching between those scales — full symphony to trio — kept me on my toes and forced me to rethink the camera work for each setup.