The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
French horn player’s practices beguile village in Minnesota
The tangled deciduous woods that surround the southeastern Minnesota village of Old Frontenac are busy with sound. 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.”
The source of the beguiling sounds was Kestrel Wright, 38, of Red Wing. Several days a week, he drives south to the rest stop where he sits atop a picnic table and practices for an upcoming audition and for his now largely in hiatus roles with the Fort Snelling Army Band and the La Crosse (Wis.) Symphony Orchestra.
“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.”
The outpouring of appreciative listeners is not what Wright had expected. He’s aware public practice irritates some and leaves his small apartment to practice so as not to bother his neighbors.
He attributes his unintended influence partly to his practice site near Fort Beauharnois, a 1700s-era battlement long lost in the shifting sands near the Mississippi River.
Wright makes his living as a repairer of brass instruments, a school bus driver and with his band and symphony gigs.
He recently participated in a solemn outdoors performance of James Naigus’ “Lionheart’s Call,” a tribute to health care workers, at Mayo Clinic Health System Red Wing.
Oliver, who followed the haunting sounds from her cemetery duties to Wright’s rest stop practice site, invited him to visit the Florence Township hall in New Frontenac, where she pointed out photos of a brass band that played there in the early 1900s and invited him to help re-create that on the town’s annual history day.
“It is only appropriate he should be there,” Oliver said. “He is echoing our history, and now he belongs with us.”
‘I couldn’t quite make out what it was. 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 ’ Virginia Oliver
Resident of New Frontenac