Lima Pops returns for holiday concert

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

As it has for at least 15 years, the Lima Pops Orchestra will again be in Fountain Park to celebrate the Independence Day holiday with its own inimitable mix of patriotic, movie, theater, and pop music. The concert begins tonight at 7, with food served from 5:30 p.m.

“There will be a lot of variety, a lot of red-white-and-blue patriotic music, some Hollywood, some Broadway, a couple of Sousa marches,” said LSO Music Director Maestro Crafton Beck, who has conducted the orchestra for nearly two decades. “The idea is just one fun thing after another.”

This year will also feature a vocalist, Kirsten Osbun-Manley, who will sing “God Bless America” and a number of Gershwin tunes, such as “S’wonderful,” and “Strike Up the Band.”

Also included this year will be music from the new “Star Wars” movie and the PBS television series “Downtown Abbey.”

Beck said he loves performing in Fountain Park.

“It’s such a great space; intimate, beautiful,” he said, adding that the orchestra’s Fourth of July concert in Faurot Park in front of approximately 40,000 people is more impersonal. “It’s so different from what we have in Van Wert, so you can imagine how much we enjoy coming there.”

Maestro Beck said having an orchestra in the park is a tradition that goes back 150 years, and is still alive and well at events such as the Boston Pops’ Tanglewood music festival and the Chicago Symphony’s Ravinia summer music series.

“I like to think of what we do as the summer band, the summer concert in the park kind of thing,” he said of the Lima Pops’ series of summer concerts.

Beck also gave kudos to The Van Wert County Foundation for its creation of the Fountain Park Summer Music Series and for its great support of the arts in the community.

“That foundation is an extraordinary thing; I’ve never seen anything like it,” he noted. “For a little town like Van Wert to have those resources and to use them so wisely.

“It has changed that community and will continue to change what that community is, because of what the community sees and hears,” Beck said.