Carnegie Hall

An artist-led collective, Decoda seeks to create a more compassionate and connected world through music—thoughtfully curating outstanding performances of live chamber music, facilitating creative community projects, and inspiring the next generation of musical artists to rethink and reimagine their role in society.

Decoda’s work is anchored by creative programming of mixed ensemble chamber music repertoire. The ensemble’s debut album was released in spring 2024 and features a panoply of musical perspectives, including a Grammy-nominated, world premiere recording of Revelry by Valerie Coleman (a Carnegie Hall commission for the group).

Decoda’s 2024–2025 season includes engagements with Musical Masterworks in Connecticut, the Joye in Aiken Festival in South Carolina, Charlotte SHOUT! in North Carolina, Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts in Connecticut, and Við Djúpið Music Festival in Iceland, among others. Now in its 11th season, the Decoda Chamber Music Festival at Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina, offers young pre-professional artists the opportunity to collaborate and grow alongside Decoda faculty members. Past performances, creative community projects, and artist-training residencies include engagements with the Southbank Centre, Barbican, Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Royal College of Music, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and Abu Dhabi Festival.

Music for Transformation, a long-standing partnership with communities of incarcerated musicians across the country, has resulted in the creation of hundreds of original songs and pieces of new music that Decoda proudly shares on concert stages around the world. In 2015 and 2016, the Obama administration honored this initiative with invitations to share this work at the White House. An album that features music by Xiao Bao He, a composer formerly incarcerated at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, is planned for later this season.

Decoda was founded in 2012 by musicians who first collaborated as members of Ensemble Connect, a two-year fellowship program of Carnegie Hall, The Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute, in partnership with the New York City Department of Education. In recognition of its members’ ongoing success as artists, educators, and advocates for music, Decoda is the only independent ensemble to be recognized as an affiliate ensemble of Carnegie Hall. Learn more at decodamusic.org.

Noted for her “dazzling, virtuoso singing” (Boston Globe), soprano Lucy Fitz Gibbon delights in the range of sonic possibility inherent in the human voice. With a repertoire ranging from the Baroque to the present day, she specializes in the dusty corners of the canon—giving modern premieres of rediscovered works from the Baroque through the mid-20th century—and is sought out for her collaborations with today’s composers.

Ms. Fitz Gibbon has appeared as soloist with ensembles such as the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Tafelmusik, Naples Philharmonic, and American Symphony Orchestra, and debuts with the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra this spring. Recent operatic engagements include Alexander Tcherepnin’s La Fée et le cultivateur (Fée) with New Asia Chamber Music Society in Alice Tully Hall; Hao Weiya’s AI Variations (Scientist) in Zankel Hall; the Seattle Opera premiere of Sheila Silver’s A Thousand Splendid Suns (Laila, cover); and the Chinese premiere of Tan Dun’s Tea: Mirror of Soul (Princess Lan) in Shanghai’s Shangyin Opera House, a role she will reprise in Fuzhou and Hong Kong later this season.

An avid chamber musician, she has recently collaborated with the Aizuri and Brentano string quartets, Merz Trio, and flutist Marina Piccinini. The New York Times described her 2024 Ojai Music Festival performance of György Kurtág’s monumental Kafka Fragments with violinist Alexi Kenney as “by turns silly, shocking, and mysteriously profound.” With her husband and long-standing collaborative partner, pianist Ryan McCullough, she performs repertoire ranging from 18th-century melodrama to 21st-century songs on a variety of keyboard instruments. Her discography with Mr. McCullough includes works by Katherine Balch (The Labor of Forgetting, False Azure Records), James Primosch and John Harbison (Descent/Return, Albany Records), and Sheila Silver (Beauty Intolerable: Songs of Sheila Silver). A forthcoming LP features songs by Argentine American composer Pablo Ortiz.

Ms. Fitz Gibbon serves on the faculty of the Bard College Conservatory of Music and has been in residence at the Marlboro Music Festival annually since 2016. She is honored to be the recipient of a 2024 Fellowship from the Borletti-Buitoni Trust, whose generous support will enable upcoming commissioning, recording, and performance projects. For more information, visit lucyfitzgibbon.com.

Baritone Thomas Meglioranza has won the Walter W. Naumburg, Concert Artists Guild, Franz Schubert and Modern Music, and Joy in Singing competitions. Recent highlights include the role of Rufus Griswold in Argento’s The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe with Odyssey Opera, Wreck in Bernstein’s On the Town with the Seattle Symphony, J. S. Bach’s solo bass cantatas with Lyra Baroque, and performances of Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin with pianist Reiko Uchida, and Winterreise with fortepianist David Breitman.

Described in The New Yorker as an “immaculate and inventive recitalist,” his program Songs from the WWI Era was named one of the Top Ten Best Classical Performances of the Year in The Philadelphia Inquirer. His discography includes three acclaimed albums of Schubert lieder and French mélodies with pianist Reiko Uchida, songs of Virgil Thomson with the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and Bach cantatas with the Taverner Consort.

Mr. Meglioranza has been an oratorio and pops soloist with many of America’s leading orchestras, and has sung Copland’s Old American Songs with the National Symphony, Davies’s Eight Songs for a Mad King with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, John Harbison’s Fifth Symphony with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Babbitt’s Two Sonnets with The Met Orchestra Chamber Ensemble, Roberto Sierra’s Missa Latina with the Houston Symphony, and Bach cantatas with Les Violons du Roy and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. He has also appeared with many period instrument ensembles, including the American Bach Soloists, Philharmonia Baroque, Portland Baroque, and Apollo’s Fire.

His operatic roles include Fritz in Die tote Stadt, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Count Almaviva, as well as Chou Enlai in Nixon in China, and Prior Walter in Eötvös’s Angels in America with Opera Boston. He also regularly performs with the Mark Morris Dance Group, including the role of Aeneas in Dido and Aeneas.

A native New Yorker of Thai, Polish, and Italian heritage, Mr. Meglioranza graduated from Grinnell College and the Eastman School of Music. His non-musical interests include fungi and birds.

Richard Powers is the author of 14 novels that explore connections among disciplines as disparate as photography, artificial intelligence, musical composition and performance, ecology, genomics, game theory, virtual reality, race, biology, and business. His books have won numerous recognitions including The Rosenthal and Vursell Awards, James Fenimore Cooper Prize, Corrington Award, a PEN/Hemingway Special Citation, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, two Pushcart Prizes, and TIME magazine’s Book of the Year. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award. He won the W. H. Smith Literary Award for best novel of 2003, and the Ambassador Book Award in 2004. His novel The Echo Maker won the 2006 National Book Award. He has twice been a finalist for the Man-Booker Prize. The Overstory was awarded the William Dean Howells Medal and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His work is translated into 35 languages.

Mr. Powers makes his home in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains, where he is an avid hiker and a student of the incredible diversity of life in the Southern Appalachians. His favorite hobby is holding still.