On Friday we visited the Deal Festival to give a concert as part of their excellent music festival. Deal is a beautiful small costal town with a very English stoney beach and plenty of chip shops. Paul Max Edlin is the Festival Director and a composer who trained at the RCM as a trumpet player. He really understands the variety of repertoire that we enjoy playing and that works best. Our premiere by Hugo Ribiero was a great success with the audience. Someone told me that the opening sounded like a spaceship taking off: we played repeated cross rhythms on harmon mutes and Steve Burke played a cymbal with a double bass bow. The diversity of the music that is written for us is huge and we love knowing that we are extending the brass repertoire.

As an encore we played a collaborative piece by Micheal Mills, the festivals resident composer, and a group of year 10 boys from Dover Grammar School. It had a great tune and could easily be the opening music for next big action film.

In the evening Alison Balsom gave a concert with her ensemble of piano, violin and cello. It was inspirational to hear her play, she is such a fine player. Her Baroque playing was beautiful and I loved her arrangements of Spanish music by De Falla and Argentinian music by Piazzolla.

We are now looking forward to our recital at Harrogate and hope that you can join us.

For the Deal and Harrogate festivals we are playing some very fine British brass music, both old and new. Maxwell Davies’ trumpet quartet Telos 135 and Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary will benefit from the addition of timpani to our usual line up of four trumpets. Purcell wrote excellent music for the trumpet much of which is very widely loved, Trumpet Tune is one of his most famous and often played by us at weddings. The Canzona and March begins both recitals and this is Purcell at his best, beautiful and heart wrenching.

Ross Brown is a trumpet player with a special interest in Renaissance and Baroque performance practice. We asked him to compose us a piece influenced by the popular music that was around in Purcell’s time. Entitled Booze, Ballads and Bloodshed, he draws from drinking songs, military tunes and popular airs, some of which are still in circulation today. He also quotes from Man that is born of a woman used in Purcell’s funeral music in 1695 and from Lillibulero, satirical verses set to a popular tune that Purcell composed in 1678. The premiere will be at the Harrogate Festival on the 30th July.

In a different vein the premiere of a new work by young Portugese composer Hugo Ribiero will be at the Deal Festival on 11th july. I don’t want to give away too much but there will be lots of percussion and action from Bella Tromba. Steve Burkes percussion will include a host of different metal instruments with very different sounds. Vibraphone, cymbals to be played bowed and my personal favourate a giant Tam Tam.

Last week saw Bella Tromba perform at The Corn Exchange in Newbury as part of the annual Newbury Spring Festival. This is a fantastic festival with a really varied programme, other artists performing there this year included Guitarist John Williams, English Chamber Orchestra, Grimethorpe Colliery Band, Fine Arts Brass and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.
As well as being a great Festival, Newbury is my home town so it was a lovely gig for me and there were lots of familiar faces in the audience and even a class of children from my old Primary School Falkland.
We chose a really varied programme including works by Bach, Elgar and Mendlessohn and finished off with the Carnival of Venice arranged by Torbjorn Hultmark. This is a fantastic and challenging arrangement which always makes me feel slightly nervous, especially on this occasion when my old trumpet teacher Andy Smets of the Berkshire Maestros was in the audience. Luckily all went without a hitch and the audience seemed to really be enjoying themselves. We couldn’t have asked for a warmer reception.

Vickie recently stood in for Richard Marshall of Sonar Brass at a birthday party concert for Giles Whittome in Bassingbourn, and Giles is a maker and collector, as well as a player, of unusual brass instruments. The quintet played its last number on flugophone (a flugel made in saxophone format), a mellophone, Billy Cotton’s old sousaphone, a buccin (a dragon-headed trombone made by Giles) and an 1861 cornopean (the precursor of the cornet) — we claim a first for that instrumentation!

Also in Giles’ collection are a piccolo trumpet in F, with no stays but with snakes wrapped round and through the body, a low F/G trumpet, a four-valve F/Bb trumpet, an echo cornet, a trombugel (a weird mixture of tenor horn, flugel, and valve trombone) a valide (trombone with both valves and slide), a gorgeous Webb slide trumpet with crooks in all different keys, a natural trumpet made entirely by hand by Giles and engraved and silver-plated, a large valve trombone with four rotary valves, a Taylor four-valve Phat Boy copper flugel, a dozen or more various trumpets and cornets, a series of Ab posthorns and one in Bb, a cornetto, several piccolos, a newly-designed and made flumpet with copper bell and more flugelly tone than usual, a bell-forward althorn, a soprano and an alto trombone, and so on.

Vickie is hoping to find time to take the whole quartet down to Bassingbourn to give some of the collection a work-out!

We are currently in the run up to a summer crammed with Music Festivals, as you can see by our concert listing, we have Newbury coming up very soon and Deal following swiftly behind. We have had several lengthy rehearsals over the past few weeks on new pieces for these two festivals, works such as; Pagnini Variations, an Original work by Koper and great opening entitled Regina Delle Vittorie.

We are off to have a coaching session with Bob Farley this week. We feel it is important as a group to get regular sessions with other musicians, helping us to collate an overview of our rehearsal result and often gain different interpretations of various pieces we are working on.

I am looking forward to the Deal festival as Alison Balsom will be playing the evening concert and the group are planning to stay for the day. Alison is performing a few pieces which I will be performing later on in the year at an Arts Festival in Derby, especially looking forward to hearing her play the Neruda Concerto and the “Siete Canciones Populares Espanolas” by Manuel de Falla. I already have my Spanish dress for my performance in September, I’ll post more details nearer the time!

Happily many couples like to include a trumpet at their wedding. It creates a sense of occasion and there is a wealth of great and well known voluntaries to choose from. As soloists we all play at weddings and as a group the quartet played at a lovely wedding in a castle at Kent in the summer.

Last weekend we went up to Warrington to the wedding of one of our friends Katie Hodges. Katie is one of our regular deps who covers for us when one of us is unable to be at a concert. Her partner Steve Burke plays percussion with our ensemble from time to time and he will be playing some Purcell and Max with us at the Deal Festival.

Of course the music for their wedding was always going to be spectacular. Clare, Heidi Sutcliffe and Tommy Foster played a fanfare on natural trumpets and kettledrums. I was a bridesmaid so was preoccupied with not treading on Katie’s gown and walking gracefully in new shoes but everyone agreed it was a fantastic start to the ceremony. Later on they had a brass quintet and organ for the hymns and finally finished off with Hallelujah Chorus from Handels Messiah.

With so many trumpet playing friends at your disposal it’s easy to go a bit wild and I have often contemplated having a section of Janaceks Sinfonietta which features 9 offstage trumpets in C, 3 trumpets in F, 2 bass trumpets and a whole load of percussion. Hmm pretty noisy in your average church. Watch this clip and let me know if you think that’s a good idea or completely tasteless.

So Congratulations to Katie and Steve and hopefully they will get to play on one of our gigs together at some point!

I hope you all have a fantastic Easter! We have all been really busy in the lead up to Easter, as a group and individually. With Easter being so early, lots of concerts have been crammed into a very short space of time. The weekend before Easter was extremely busy – every musician I know was phoned up to play for at least two concerts! I do enjoy the busy times, but you do end up running round like a headless chicken!

Recently I have been doing a complete variety of things, including playing at Cadogen Hall last week, marching (it was supposed to be outside but luckily as it was pouring with rain, we got to stay inside!) as well as many other concerts and putting some of the children I teach through music exams.

As a group we have been up and down the country from Somerset right up to Carlisle with Live Music Now! We have been involved in some very interesting projects lasting a number of weeks in pupil referral units. We came up with pieces with them and Jo even had them playing some Black Eyed Peas! We really enjoyed getting to know these children and working with them. We also played at City Hall last week. After opening the Live Music Now 30th anniversary celebrations, we listened to some of the other musicians and then we had the chance to talk to some very interesting people, including fellow musicians (swapping Live Music Now! stories), festival organisers, MU people and people from within Live Music Now! It was a really nice evening. We are now going to start some work for the festivals coming up, as we have some new pieces to play, as well as some old favourites.

After all this running around I am going to relax over the Easter weekend, put my feet up and eat some chocolate!

Well, we are back from Skeg Ness and had a whale of a time. I saw band members of bands that I have played with and ones I still play with now, I think I swayed Jo into seeing if a band would take us for the summer (around our regular Dartington Orchestral Summer Course) so any banders out there reading that could do with a couple of bottoms on seats while people take there yearly holidays, you know where we are! Jo and I have just come back from some trumpet demonstrations in and around Lincoln, my car needed washing two times before you could see what colour it was actually meant to be, it was that caked in mud. We had a good old kareoke night mid week but I wouldn’t sing a duet with Jo which I still haven’t been forgiven for! Anyway we are all very much looking forwards to music festival season with Deal and Newbury not too far away.

Bella Tromba will be performing at the Butlins Mineworkers Brass Band Contest on the 20th of January. We will be performing at 5:15pm. I am especially looking for to it, always takes me back to my roots, hearing a brass band. We will performing a varied programme, pieces such as Share my Yolk and Carnival of Venice are on the cards, but also we will be playing some original contemporary works by composers such as Koper and Alan Civil. We are looking to get there early for a soundcheck but also to try to listen to a couple of the bands. See if we can predict the winner, always a good game. Best of luck to all those competing and we’ll see you in the bar for a pint afterwards!

Last night was my last concert before Christmas, and I will be taking a few days off work. Clare is heading back to Newbury and Vickie has already gone up to Manchester. Nicole I think is on a ski slope somewhere in the South of France. (Alright for some) It has been a great year for us and we all feel we worked hard and gained some reward for that. We started the year with a recital in the Purcell Rooms as Park Lane Group Young Artists and did numerous recitals, outreach concerts and broadcasts on BBC Radio 3. The highlight for me would be playing at the Cheltenham Festival and working alongside the composers whose premieres we have given, but I am sure all the girls would have a different faveourite moment.

In 2008 we wil be playing at a few festivals including Newbury and Deal, and beginning several outreach projects including a longterm project in Pupil Referal Centres in the midlands. We have also recently begun to be represented by The Morris Agency who will be handling any commercial work we undertake. So if you would like to book us for any parties, conferences or weddings Daniel is the man to speak to.
We begin learning a whole new pad of music in January and some of it will get its first airing at the brass band extravaganza on the 20th. I won’t tell you too much about this concert now because Vickie loves talkng about Brass Bands and I have only ever done one contest so I am not very well educated on the subject.( I played with Coventry band when I was in my 2nd Year at college) I think I am goiung to know a whole lot more after the Butlins weekend though.

Have a great Christmas and a fantastic 2008.