The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra: Three Decades of Enthusiastic Music
by Rebecca Webb

The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra was started 31 years ago. The story of the orchestra’s conception has, in fact, become rather famous. An abridged version runs like this: in 1979 three women are having lunch in Woodstock. The first says, “there are so many great musicians around,” the second says, “probably enough for a small orchestra,” the third says, “let’s do it.” And so the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra was born. The orchestra’s professed mission was to provide an outlet for local musicians to play together and improve their skills. The group has grown since 1979, but this mission has remained the same.

Though the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra is a professional orchestra, not all members are necessarily musicians by profession. The orchestra is mostly made up of individuals who are deeply passionate about music but have an alternate career. It is telling that David Leighton, the Conductor and Artistic Director of the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra, says that working with the group gives him “the feeling of going to Thanksgiving dinner.” I picture the musicians, coming home from their jobs, on their way to rehearsals, like members of an extended family coming home for America’s favorite meal. There is a sense that the musicians really want to be there, at rehearsals and performing on stage. They are eager and enthusiastic. Leighton, who worked for ten years with the Metropolitan Opera, can tell. He believes that this is in part what makes his work with this group “the most fun” he’s “had with an orchestra.”

The orchestra, for being so tightly knit, is an intriguingly varied group in terms of age and experience. Al Sweet, the orchestra’s former Executive Director, told me a story about a ten-year-old boy, a student of an orchestra member, who once played with the group. Leighton then told me about a member in his 90s, one of the original players, who only very recently retired. Much beloved Barrytown artist and violist Peg Gummere regularly performed with the group for years. Qualified Bard students also often join as substitutes and soloists, and twice a year Bard students take on the part of conductors. Leighton’s beloved predecessor, Luis Garcia-Renart, was, and still is, a professor at Bard. This connection fostered the close relationship the orchestra now has with the school, and further demonstrates how, as Sweet put it, The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra is “an orchestra of opportunity.”

Chamber music started way back when and was meant to be performed at small dances and dinner parties held in the “chambers” of a wealthy so-and-so’s home. A chamber orchestra is then simply an orchestra composed of a small group of musicians. For example, where a symphony orchestra has approximately 80 performers on stage at a time, a chamber orchestra has only 40.

The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra performs full overtures, small symphonies, and concertos. And though the orchestra’s size can sometimes be restrictive when it comes to music selection, much of the music written by Mozart and Beethoven was done with a chamber size in mind.

Current Executive Director Natalie Robohm worries sometimes that the “word chamber scares people.” Sometimes when people think of chamber music, she says, “they think it’s going to be weird music or two violins on stage.” Leighton, on the other hand, thinks the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra’s diminutive size gives it a niche, setting it apart from the new Northern Dutchess Symphony and other larger groups also performing in the area.

The group typically offers four programs a year, each in three locations. They perform Friday evenings at Olin Hall, on the Bard College campus, Saturday evenings at Pointe of Praise Church in Kingston, and Sunday afternoons at the Bearsville Theatre in Woodstock. For the program near Christmas, the orchestra joins forces with the Kingston High School Choir, for whom they have nothing but praise. This performance is one of the orchestra’s most heavily attended.

The orchestra’s programs sometimes have themes intended to entice an increasingly iTunes-addicted public. One of these, Leighton’s favorite to date, was “Bed, Bach and Beyond.” The musical pieces in this set of concerts centered around Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata Wachet auf (“Wake up”). Leighton confessed, however, that not everyone got the pun.

Since its inception, the group has premiered an impressive 45 new works, written by local and nationally recognized composers alike. The once small strictly local group now includes members from Westchester County, Ellenville, and a reported two members from Connecticut.

Robohm, who became the orchestra’s Executive Director in September of 2009, said she has dreams of seeing the orchestra continue to grow. In ten years she confessed that she’d like to see the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra become the Woodstock Symphony Orchestra. Such a decision, however, will be up to the orchestra members themselves. The Woodstock Chamber Orchestra is and has always been an orchestra for and about the musicians who comprise it.

If you want to know why you should go to see the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra play—besides the talented performers, their professionalism, its local shows, and because it’s just an all around good time—you should go because going to the Woodstock Chamber Orchestra is like going to Thanksgiving dinner. The Woodstock Chamber orchestra, in a word, is family.