French horn player’s forest practice beguiles Minnesota village
OLD FRONTENAC, Minn. — The tangled deciduous woods that surround the southeastern Minnesota village of Old Frontenac are busy with sound. Especially at dawn and dusk, they echo with birdsong. Wind whooshes through live trees and rattles dead ones. At night, coyotes trade lonesome calls with faraway trains.
Of late, a new sound, melodic, often melancholy, has floated through the woods.
Virginia Oliver, 73, of New Frontenac, heard it as she watered flowers in the Old Frontenac cemetery.
“I couldn’t quite make out what it was,” she said. “I thought it must be a horn, but I didn’t know right away where it was coming from. It was a concert for one — for me.”
Sonda Featherstone, 63, of Florence Township, was riding her bike east on Goodhue County Road 2 when she heard something “coming closer and closer.”
“It was a trumpeter swan descending right at me,” she said.
For a moment, she said, she thought it would land on her.
“I also heard another unusual sound,” she said. “I came around the bend and there was a man playing a French horn. I believe the trumpeter swan heard it too and possibly thought it was me on my bike.”
The source of the beguiling sounds was Kestrel Wright, 38, of Red Wing. Several days a week, he drives south to the rest stop off Highway 61 and County Road 2, an entry point to Old Frontenac and to two Frontenac State Park hiking trails. Sitting atop a picnic table, he runs through strength and breathing exercises and arpeggios, then practices for an upcoming audition and for his now largely-inhiatus roles with the Fort Snelling Army Band, as well as the La Crosse Symphony Orchestra in Wisconsin.
Why is this man with a falcon’s name — Kestrel is Old English for “a piercing cry” — playing Mozart, Bach, Haydn and Strauss in the woods?
“I’m just practicing,” Wright said. “I’m not busking, or looking for an audience. I need to stay in shape musically, and here I can practice without bothering anybody. I hope I’m considerate, and that I’m not changing the way this place is used.”
Amid frequent pauses, his horn’s gently trembling notes echo the sounds of nature, and inspire callbacks from wrens, bluebirds, goldfinches and the occasional lovesick swan.
The outpouring of appreciative listeners is not what Wright had expected. He’s aware that public practice irritates some, and leaves his small apartment to practice so as not to bother his neighbors. During one practice at the Red Wing skatepark, he was greeted by a sheriff’s deputy who told him that a nearby resident had created a social media post with a dartboard featuring — him. At the Frontenac rest stop, he’s had deputies stop to make sure he’s not up to anything nefarious.
“I don’t mind,” said Wright, a courteous, softspoken man. “They’re doing the right thing.”
He attributes his unintended influence partly to his practice site — a historical marker for Fort Beauharnois, a 1700s-era battlement long lost in the shifting sands of Wells Creek, which splays into the nearby Mississippi River.