In the Ascendancy
Butlins.
Of course, everyone has a different experience of the Butlins weekend, but for most that attend it often involves catching up with people you haven’t seen for a decade (sometimes significantly more), dashing around to rehearsals, putting in the best performance you can, a pint in the Jellyfish Bar and fun and frolics in the novelty of chalet living for three days. For sections one to four a more relaxing day on the Sunday lets you to take in the Championship section performances and some quality entertainment in the evening. For us, a combination of the two extremes of intense, focused rehearsal and some serious letting our hair down proved to be a winning combination and one that the current incarnation of The Flowers Band has been building to since Paul Holland’s return to the helm at the end of 2018.
The band’s steady rise over the past twelve months has not only been a musical phenomenon but one that, we feel, comes from us gelling as a group of people. It’s no secret that the high turnover of players in recent times has taken a while to settle, but there’s a satisfying buzz around the stands that is confidently reassuring, inherently respectful (but with copious banter) and hugely exciting as we continue to discover what this combination of musicians are actually capable of.
Band Manager, James Harris describes it as ‘community banding mixed up with top, top section playing’. We all know that it takes more than the dots on the page to make a performance; it even takes more than the right man in the middle to find the layers of musicality in a score. Might we have found a unique amalgamation of musicians to seriously challenge our contemporaries in 2020? Time will tell, but for a brief moment we’re relishing our recent clean sweep at the Butlins Mineworkers Championship.
We were placed first in both the Test Piece and Entertainment sections and there was a soloist prize for Emily Evans, our Principal Horn, for her sublime playing in Jonathan Bates’ “ Songs of Ascent”. Huge congratulations to her. For our Entertainment programme, we used our highly successful Brass in Concert Captain Nemo’s Forgotten Journey to great effect, securing Most Entertaining Band and Overall Champions.
We send our heartfelt thanks and good wishes to Harmen Vanhoorne for his awesome (in the true sense of the word) musicianship as our Principal Cornet for weekend. This was his final contest in the northern hemisphere before his imminent emigration to New Zealand and we wish him the very best.
We should also congratulate our quartet members, Luke Barker, Lauren Chinn, Emily Evans and Matt Rowe for their engaging performance of “Capriccio” by Roger Payne, which saw them awarded with the British Open Champion Quartet Trophy. Bravo!
What a great weekend and such a promising start to the year. Congratulations to all the prizewinners from the championship. It’s back to some hard graft for us to be the best we can be in 2020!
See what the internet thought of our performances by clicking this link!