Some miscellaneous impressions from a neophyte:
1. The audience was even older than the average Halle audience.
2. Judging by the repertoire, you could be forgiven for thinking that modernism had never happened. On the downside this meant that some of the repertoire was woefully unambitious and footling. On the upside, the amount of new repertoire, enthusiastically played and greeted, showed that Brass Band culture is alive and well, unashamedly directed at the enjoyment of both players and audience, and entirely free from the stifling intellectual navel-gazing that acts as a thick layer of cobweb around modern classical music. In particular, Peter Graham, Professor at Salford, has evidently written some very skilful and breathtakingly exciting band music.
3. The actual sound of the ensemble is surprisingly mellow, at least to those of us used to wincing as orchestral brass comes crashing boisterously into the room. I'd attribute this to the preponderance of tubas, both large and small: a rounded and almost woolly timbre, comforting as hot cocoa.
4. The only bandsman/woman not wearing a lurid military tunic was a percussionist with Brighouse & Rastrick, who turns out to be one Minesh Patel, a percussion teacher resident in Leicester. What a player Mr Patel was, but could the chaps (all chaps in B&R) not club together to buy him the proper outfit? But perhaps Patel needed his arms unencumbered for his unrestrained and witheringly accurate assaults on the xylophone.
5. My tastes must be getting lower and lower - a favourite moment was an arrangement of a Mario Lanza tune. "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is", wrote Noel Coward.
6. Judging by the hairdo of Aussie conductor David King, the mullet has not yet become taboo down-under. And please don't tell me he was wearing it ironically. Or, worse still, that it's making a come-back.
