On a scorching hot Saturday night, we performed our third and final Victoria Hall concert of our ‘comeback’ season after the pandemic lockdown years of 2020 and 2021 and another great night was enjoyed as always by everyone who took part and attended.

As is customary, the first half of our Victoria Hall concerts features the full Eagley Band throughout, joined by our Tuesday evening Community Choir for a number of joint items slotted in, and after the interval we are further joined on stage by our Saturday morning Community Band, all conducted by Chris Wormald, MD of all three ensembles.

With a hugely unfortunate and untimely national upsurge in positive Covid tests throughout the UK in the final few days before our Summer concert, very sadly for everyone due to be involved, this trend was reflected most dramatically in our choir and audience numbers especially, but also within Eagley Band too. We had to take to the stage without three of our most senior and experienced players whom we had very much hoped would be negative and available by the time of the concert, but sadly this was not to be the case, so some hasty re-writing of arrangements throughout the day and re-seating of certain players was needed by our MD so that nobody in the audience would have been aware or any the wiser that there were unavoidably missing players on the night. With the standard of the band so high, fortunately everything went superbly without a hitch throughout the whole evening.

The usually eclectic mix of established and new repertoire for our concerts was happily very much in evidence once again, ranging from the traditional march B.B. and C.F. composed in 1900, the William Himes setting of Amazing Grace and the exciting Blenheim Flourishes by James Curnow to a tribute in celebration of film composer John Williams’ 90th birthday, brand new arrangements of Stay With Me Till Dawn by Judie Tzuke, Heaven Help My Heart from the musical Chess and I’ll Be Over You by Toto, through to Holst’s I Vow To The My Country and finally Wagner’s Procession To The Minster, which brought the evening to a rousing climax and drew the biggest ovation of the night with its thundering climax of the full forces of every instrumentalist on stage.

Principal Cornet Lynsey Hayes led the entire concert even more superbly than ever throughout what was an extremely busy evening for her, with numerous solos within the opening march of the night, especially the John Williams tribute and through to the Wagner finale. There were notable solo contributions by Principal Horn Deb Lyons in Jurassic Park, Flugel player Janet Walsh in Procession and Repiano Cornet Rebecca Crompton in It Don’t Mean A Thing, and the brilliant percussion team, led superbly all night as ever by Leo Turner-Patel, was kept extremely busy throughout, none more so than in Baba Yaga and The Great Gate of Kiev, performed in tribute to the people of Ukraine during the first half.