Gustavus Adolphus College

Nimmo and GWO in Stara Tura, Slovakia

Nimmo and GWO in Stara Tura, Slovakia

The Gustavus Wind Orchestra and Conductor Douglas Nimmo will present the Gustavus Adolphus College Department of Music’s Season Finale on Saturday, May 31 at 8:00 p.m. The finale concert, scheduled as part of the College’s annual Commencement festivities is free and open to the public and will be performed in Christ Chapel.

Conductor Douglas Nimmo has served as director of bands at Gustavus since 1987 and completes twenty years as conductor of the ensembles with Saturday’s concert. In addition to the Gustavus Wind Orchestra, Nimmo also conducts the Vasa Wind Orchestra, teaches conducting and supervises music education students during their student teaching semester. During his tenure with the band, he has conducted concerts across the United States and Europe. In January 1990, the Gustavus Band (now Wind Orchestra) was the first American ensemble invited to perform in a free East Berlin. Four years later, Nimmo led the ensemble on a ground-breaking tour through Central Europe with concerts in East Germany, Poland, the Czech and Slovak Republics and Hungary. The wind orchestra retraced these steps in 2006 with a standing-room-only concert tour ending with a performance in Salzburg, Austria on the 250th anniversary of the birth of Mozart.

For Saturday’s concert, Dr. Nimmo and the Gustavus Wind Orchestra will present historic and contemporary works as well as a featured soloist. The program opens with Frenergy by John Estacio and continues with Colonial Songs by Percy Grainger, the Australian-born composer who toured with the (then) Gustavus Band on two occasions in the 1940s. Following the Grainger, senior euphoniumist Hayden Kane, will be featured as soloist on Herbert L. Clarke’s Stars in a Velvety Sky, written in 1919 as a cornet solo and here transcribed for euphonium.

The wind orchestra concert continues with the Centennial Fanfare March by Roger Nixon and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Prelude in Eb. Saturday’s finale concert concludes with Eric Whitacre’s Ghost Train, Aaron Copland Down a Country Lane and Alfred Reed’s El Camino Real.

The May 31 season finale performance by the Gustavus Wind Orchestra is free and open to the public. It begins at 8:00 p.m. in Christ Chapel on the Gustavus campus as part of the Commencement Weekend festivities.