Wind Orchestra Welcomes Coast Guard Soloists Saturday

For its spring concert on Saturday, May 2, the Gustavus Wind Orchestra and Conductor James Patrick Miller will commemorate the 75th anniversary of Composer Percy Grainger’s historic concert tour with the Gustavus Concert Band and also welcome two soloists from the U.S. Coast Guard Band as guest artists. Musician First Class Laurie Baynard, flute and Chief Musician Kelly Watkins, trumpet and conductor, will be featured artists in the wind orchestra’s Honors Day concert at 7:30 p.m. in Jussi Björling Recital Hall. Admission to Saturday’s performance is free.

Saturday’s concert will include a performance of Percy Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy, commemorating the composer’s concert tour with the Gustavus Concert Band in 1941. The famed Australian composer traveled with the ensemble on its winter tour and then returned to the campus to work with the Band later in the 1940s. (Photos from that tour, taken by band member Wendell Holmquist ’41, are on display in the 1st floor hallway of the Department of Music.)

For the Honors Day concert, Conductor James Patrick Miller and the Gustavus Wind Orchestra will open with the Festive Overture, Op. 96 by Dmitri Shostakovich. U.S. Coast Guard Band Conductor Kelly Watkins, will then join the ensemble, as solo trumpet, for The Prayer of St. Gregory from Etchmiadzen by Alan Hovhannes and, as conductor, will lead the wind orchestra in its performance of the Commando March by Samuel Barber. Dr. Miller will return to the stage with U.S. Coast Guard Band Flutist Laurie Baynard as soloist in Joel Puckett’s The Shadow of Sirius. The wind orchestra’s spring concert will conclude with the anniversary performance of Percy Grainger’s Lincolnshire Posy.

Admission to the Gustavus Wind Orchestra’s spring concert, Saturday, May 2 at 7:30 p.m. in Jussi Björling Recital Hall, with performances by U.S. Coast Guard Band guest artists Laurie Baynard and Kelly Watkins, is free and open to the public. Tickets are not required. This performance will be live-streamed at: http://portal.stretchinternet.com/gacadmin/.