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King Band performs today

Each week during June and July, the Karl L. King Municipal Band presents its Sunday evening concerts in Oleson Park at the historic Karl L. King Band Shell, and each week the band presents a wide variety of band music to appeal to all ages and musical tastes. This week’s concert is no exception. Beginning at 7:30 p.m, conductor Jerrold P. Jimmerson will offer selections in many different styles during this hourlong program.

If marches are your favorites, then you will hear several, including Karl King’s “Alhambra Grotto” and “Royal Scotch Highlanders.” To celebrate Bastille Day in France each year on July 14, the band will close the concert with French composer Camille Saint-Saens’ “March Militaire Francaise,” the finale from his Algerian Suite.

Many people enjoy those classic overtures that the band plays, and this concert will include Austrian composer Franz von Suppe’s overture to his 1864 operetta “Pique Dame.” The operetta is primarily known today for its overture which remains a popular concert piece.

Other people enjoy the variety of other Karl King compositions. Included in this concert will be one of King’s beautiful aerial waltzes, “Amorita,” written under his pseudonym of Carl Lawrence. Still others wait for those fast-paced circus galops, which this week will feature King’s “Walsenburg,” named for a city in Colorado where the circus had stopped.

Each week the band usually features a soloist as well. This Sunday night, our guest will be Philip Dixon from Ames. Mr. Dixon was born in England and spent his teenage years in southern California. He first played the bassoon in high school, stopped while in college, and started playing again for fun when in graduate school at Cornell University. His family spent 11 years in South Carolina before moving to Ames in 1998.

Dixon is now a University Professor of Statistics at Iowa State University. He currently is principal bassoon in the Fort Dodge Area Symphony and also plays in the Central Iowa Symphony and the Ames Municipal Band.

Mr. Dixon will first perform “Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann,” subtitled “The Happy Farmer.” He will follow that with a whimsical selection titled “The Old Grumbly Bear” by Julius Fucik. This charming and humorous music “depicts the antics of a slow moving, lumbering old bear — until the end when the bear gathers some momentum!”

Dan Cassady will guest conduct the King Band this week in assistant conductor David Klee’s absence. Cassady, from Twin Lakes, is a well-known area musician, having taught at Fort Dodge Senior High, Iowa Central Community College, and St. Edmond High School. He also performs with Jive for Five and the Lone Tree Revival. Mr. Cassady has chosen Vasilij Agapkin’s fine march, “A Slavic Farewell,” along with a medley of classic hit songs by one of America’s legendary performers, titled “Tony Bennett Unplugged.”

People attending these concerts are reminded to bring along their own lawn chairs, since there is no seating provided. These summer concerts are provided for everyone free of admission charge by the City of Fort Dodge. The Good Shepherd Lutheran Church Bell Choir also offers a homemade ice cream social before the concert starts each week, beginning at 6:30 p.m.

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