The band was delighted to perform once again for the Friends of St. Dunstan’s. This year it was during the afternoon of Sunday 25th June and the temperature in the church was hovering around a sweltering 28o C.
The Senior Band and the Training Band both performed excellently to a good sized and extremely appreciative audience, with six tremendous solos from Bob Turner on soprano; Russ Kemp on cornet; Alan Smithers on horn; David Newsom on euphonium; Jon Vokes on trombone and Geoff Collins on Eb Bass. In between these, the band gave the audience a wide range of music and musical styles, arrangements and original compositions, ranging from Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, through James Swearingen, Henry Mancini, George Gershwin, Alan Fernie, Steven Ponsford and The Bee Gees.
The Training Band (pictured above) gave the audience three pieces to enjoy – the Hornpipe from Handel’s ‘Water Music’, the Hymn Tune ‘Whitburn’ and ‘Gonna Fly Now’, the theme from the film ‘Rocky’. As usual, they started the second half of the concert and played exceptionally well.
It was fantastic to have so many of the audience come up and thank members of the band in the interval and at the end of the concert and the band are looking forward to performing in the church again soon.
The whole concert was recorded on one of these “new-fangled” High Definition camera phones from a great vantage point in the Church. However, while the video was really good, the audio was completely distorted and the volume way over what the microphone could handle, as a result we are only able to bring you three pieces which were recorded from the audience sitting further away. Conversely the video of these recordings was quite low resolution, so with some clever video editing, we have the audio from one recording mixed with the video of the other.
If you like these pieces and want to hear the whole programme, the band’s next two performances are:
8th July – Benenden School for the Army Benevolent Fund and 16th July at Tonbridge Castle.