Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Marlborough band takes honours in Australia
FEDERICO MAGRIN
Picture a 30C Australian day, playing a brass instrument on a tar-sealed square, wearing a black, double breasted wool uniform.
This is what the Marlborough Brass Band endured before being crowned Australia’s champion B grade brass band.
The band’s executive officer Brian Nicholas said the 34-strong group travelled to Adelaide at Easter weekend to compete against other bands from Australia.
“In some cases [they] had never been overseas, I think in one case they have never been on a plane before,” he said.
The band had not participated in the Australian National Brass Band Championships since 1992, Nicholas said, but last year they decided they were ready to join the competition again.
Ages of members ranged from 14 to 76 and nearly a quarter of the group came from the same family: “We had eight members of one family involved in the group.”
The band had to play four pieces, Nicholas said, and the most challenging piece was the set test Keystone by French composer Thierry Deleruyelle, picked by the organisers.
He said a set test was a piece composed to test the band’s skills in musicianship, co-ordination, range and dynamics.
The main difficulties of Keystone were the exposed entries, Nicholas said, where different instruments would start and stop playing at different times while hitting the right speed, tempo and note.
However, the remaining three pieces were chosen by musical director Robin Randall, he said.
One of them was Cap Hoorn by Mario Bürki.
“It’s a very nice and descriptive piece of music. It describes an old, tall sailing ship
sailing around Cape Horn and coming across storms and big waves and seagulls.
“And then it comes into a niece calm patch, and you can hear all that in the music,” Nicholas said.
The band also had to do a marching performance on the Torrens Parade Ground, a tar-sealed square in central Adelaide, while the thermometer reached 30C.
“Our marching uniform is a black, double-breasted coat made of wool ... so when you go to Australia and it’s suddenly 30C, it’s not really ideal.
“However, it did look smart,” he said. Nicholas said the brass band had to line up in a square formation, then the judges inspected how the formation looked and how clean and tidy the instruments and the uniforms were.
There were no other Kiwi brass bands competing, and they were up against 10 Australian bands in the B grade. However, for the marching, they faced bands from all categories and Marlborough came out on top, winning the title of Australia’s Champion Marching Brass Band.
Overall, the band won first place in the B grade category, and was awarded the silver cup.