Carlton Brass

Ah, the regional contest. How we have missed you! Covid has been a horrific disruption to our banding activities, and while we just managed to get the 2020 contest done before we all had to isolate, it’s been a very long two year wait.

It didn’t help that the normal venue (Bedworth Civic Hall) couldn’t host the contest as normal due to it being a Covid centre, so the excellent Midlands committee had to find somewhere new, at very short notice. Thankfully, they were able to secure The Core in Corby – a rather striking venue.

The Core turned out to be an excellent place to play. It’s a modern space, but had enough rooms for bands to move about. The stage was seemingly underground in the basement – there were a lot of stairs down to it – and the acoustics were terrifyingly accurate. There was nowhere to hide bad tuning or wrong notes – all the mistakes were very much audible.

This was very helpful to the adjudicators, if not the nerves of those playing. The piece – Spectrum by Gilbert Vinter – is a heck if a piece to play. We found it quite a test, but an enjoyable one. A piece of music that is challenging to play but very interesting to listen to. It certainly tested all the bands of the day.

We went into the contest under threat of relegation into the second section, despite a great result the year before. We had a 14th place in 2018 lowering our average score, so we really needed a top 10 finish to calm the nerves. In the end we managed a disappointing 11th place out of 16. We played well enough and were proud of our performance, but a few nerves here and there meant that we didn’t quite put a performance in that earned a higher placing with the adjudicators.

Our result was enough to maintain our ranking in the first section, however, so we survive to fight another day!

The adjudicators were both kind in their remarks and we had a lot to be proud of. They said in their summing up that the most important part of the day was that our banding movement was back in action, and that it we should all be immensely proud of making music together after such a long time away. We all agreed on that – the brass band movement has suffered a great deal over the last two years: many people have given up playing completely, or found that they cannot commit as much of their free time as they did before. And yet, here we were with sixteen excellent bands competing on the same stage, with some wonderful music being played. Now there’s something to be proud of.

We would like to thank all the players for doing so well on the day, and for putting some much effort in during rehearsals in the lead up to the contest. We had a lot of fun with Spectrum, although I can’t imagine we’ll get it out again in a hurry! It’s a tricky piece and we’ve played it a lot over the last three months.

Massive thanks must go to Tony Wilson in particular, who has picked the baton up again in our time of need. He retired from conducting a few years ago, but he’s stepped up when we needed someone to lead us once we could restart rehearsals and done an incredible job directing us. We couldn’t have done it without you Tony! Thank you so much.