The Rural We: Kathleen Beckmann
The music director of the Northern Dutchess Symphony Orchestra is excited to bring back concerts after a forced year off.
Like most performing organizations, the Northern Dutchess Symphony Orchestra is returning to the stage after taking the year off due to COVID-19. Kathleen Beckmann, the music director and conductor of this now all-professional ensemble, has been involved with it from the very beginning in 2006, when a group of “music boosters” from the area got together around a kitchen table to talk about creating a local orchestra. On Sunday, Oct. 24 at 3 p.m., the NDSO will present the first of its four programs of the 2021-22 season. The second half of the program is going to be a multi-media piece, as Beckmann explains.
I’m from the Binghamton area, but I lived in the Poughkeepsie area for at least 30 years — my husband was an IBMer. I was the orchestra teacher at FDR High School in Hyde Park. We live in Fort Lauderdale now, and I fly up for rehearsals and concerts.
The orchestra was formed after a group of people who were big supporters of the high school music program got together. That group became the board of the NDSO. I was pursuing advanced conducting degrees, so my involvement was a good fit. We had to figure out how to fundraise — in fact, all of us had to learn a lot as a group.
The orchestra started with two concerts at Roosevelt High School. We wanted the concerts to be something for everybody, very affordable, and to have a real educational influence. We figured if the concert is at the school, it would encourage students to come.
Over time, the orchestra got better, with more professional players, and now it’s all professional, with musicians coming from places like the Albany Symphony and Hudson Valley Philharmonic. I try to have students play with the orchestra when I can to keep up the educational aspect. We moved the concerts to Rhinebeck High School, and now they’re at the [theater at the] Culinary Institute, which is a beautiful facility. People enjoy coming there to have dinner before a concert, and we occasionally offer a special dinner at special pricing.
In the concert on Sunday, since we’re coming back from the pandemic, we wanted to program real audience favorites: Danse Macabre by Saint-Saëns and Romeo and Juliet - Fantasy Overture by Tchaikovsky. The second half of the program features Ellis Island: The Dream of America by Peter Boyer, which was nominated for a Grammy for best classical contemporary composition and was featured on PBS a couple years ago. The performance will have video projections above the orchestra depicting various scenes of Ellis Island. Students from Arlington High School will be portraying seven different immigrant experiences and narrating their stories.
I’m going to be keeping three wheels turning at the same time: conducting the orchestra, and paying attention to the projections above me — my timing has to be pretty good to match the projections. And I’ll need to adjust the music I’m conducting as the students are reading their stories. I have to be on my toes for this one!
