My Experience - 2026 Yorkshire Regional Brass Band Championships, Grimethorpe Colliery Band.
- 13 hours ago
- 6 min read
This blog post outlines my experience at this year's Yorkshire Regional Championships, held in Huddersfield Town Hall, where I performed with The Grimethorpe Colliery Band.
Anyone who subscribes to my blog will have seen me write these 'My Experience' type posts in the past, so have a search through my older posts for some of them if you are interested.
This was my third Yorkshire Area Contest with Grimethorpe and while it doesn't get any easier, I really did enjoy this one the most out of the three so far. Obviously the result helps a lot (we came 2nd!) but I personally felt that I was better prepared than ever and the band overall were also at a level I haven't experienced on the contest stage before.
When the test piece, Elgar Variations by Martin Ellerby was first announced, I was happy because I had played it once before and I always like Ellerby's music. The euphonium part didn't really have any great challenges apart from a fairly substantial solo. I still had my hand written copy of the solo written a tone higher from when I last played it (in 2008!) and this again proved to be very useful.
My early preparations on this test piece included listening to the Brass Band Willebroek version, conducted by Frans Violet, because we had managed to secure him as our conductor for the contest. This was something I was very excited about.
I also tried to run the solo section through every day, just to get more familiar with it. I then started playing it all sorts of different ways just to test my musicality and see how might be the best way of shaping the music. For some test pieces, I like to run the whole piece a lot from start to end but for this one, the last few pages were not taxing at all, so I didn't feel the need to do it.
We had our first rehearsal with Frans Violet early in January when he visited for a weekend and this proved to be very useful. We wouldn't see him again until the week before the performance and the rest of the prep work was expertly done by the bands musical director Ben Dixon, who had to fit the rehearsal time in around the bands busy concert schedule.
As the contest got closer, I felt the need to get working hard on my mindset. I do sometimes suffer from anxiety and for most people, the idea of performing with a famous band at the Yorkshire area, while amazing, might just push that anxiety out of control. I have a few strategies that I use and this year I felt like I needed them a lot. A big part of this I think, was just because I know how much it means for the band to get back to winning ways and I never want to be the one to let the band down.
I also personally felt that there were some frustrations related to the band and my own general enjoyment of banding that was on my mind a lot in the months leading up to the contest. So, alongside my daily practice, I made sure to find time to work on my own positivity and self belief.
It was clear from rehearsing with Franz in the week before the contest that he is an immensely talented and passionate musician. Rehearsals consisted of fine nitty gritty stop start rehearsals which sometimes felt frustrating but you could gradually see and hear the picture forming.
On the Thursday before the contest we gave a performance in the local church in Grimethorpe and I was feeling unstoppable, totally in control of my playing and just excited for the whole thing. It was great to get out of the band room and perform to an audience as well. The band were sounding good but there was no stopping there. In past years I have always felt that the Thursday is a good rehearsal and then the band take their foot off the gas. Not this year, we continued to work hard on the test piece right until the last moment.
On the day of the contest, I felt very confident. The thing that gets me on contest days is the waiting, I think this is the main thing that makes me nervous and I need to find new ways to address this. Maybe I am just impatient and I want to get on the stage and do it.
We were drawn to play band number 8 out of 12 so had a long wait on the day. Walking on stage felt great and as soon as the performance started, I felt that it would be a special one. My big solo was okay in the test piece, it was clean and I did what Frans wanted but I just felt that it wasn't my very best. I had so many different versions of it in my mind and in the end it had a bit more flow than the adjudicators wanted and I wish I had tried to keep to my initial ideas, which was to make it more expressive with greater adjustments of tempo.
At the end of the performance the audience erupted into applause and I felt emotional and proud, but as always, there was also a sense of relief. This is the side of brass banding I think people can fall out of love with, especially at the very top. There is so much pressure, so much riding on a perfect performance and zero room for error. I love the challenge but do wish sometimes I could feel the enjoyment during a contest that I do from playing concerts.
After the performance, I felt like I had well and truly had enough brass banding for the week and I headed home straight away. I had mixed feelings of hope and also despair should we not get a good result, you just never know. When I got home the results had still not been announced but I soon found out that we had been awarded 2nd place, meaning we had achieved what we set out to do, qualify for the National Finals at the Royal Albert Hall.
Here is a video containing some clips from our performance, including my solo section and a big chunk leading to the finale.
I never take playing for this band for granted and feel honoured for every experience I can get. Many who heard us thought we might win. This band is more than capable of winning everything and I truly hope this can happen while I am in the band. The year ahead is very exciting for the band with some performances of Brassed Off Live in the diary (one is the night before the National Finals in October) and we have plenty of other concerts around the country.
I am also very excited to be awaiting the delivery of my brand new Sterling Virtuoso euphonium. For the past few months, I have been using a JP374ST (JP Sterling) and perhaps it took a bit of time to properly blow it in and get comfortable with the tuning but it has been fantastic and has dealt with lots of daily practice, teaching commitments and of course has coped very well with the challenges of playing in a top brass band. If you are looking for a new euphonium, please try one of these before taking out a loan for something more expensive.
For anyone interested, this is just a standard model JP374 with the trigger but I swapped out my valve tops and caps for smaller buttons and heavier caps, plus added a heavy 4th valve cap as found on the Sterling Virtuoso. These small changes helped me a bit with solidarity of tone and intonation but it is also perfectly fine without.
I am now looking forward to the end of this school term where I will be conducting the Stafford Wind Band in the Staffordshire County Youth Music Festival and then heading off to Singapore for a little family break where I will also be doing some work with the Singapore Armed Forces Band!
Congratulations to all the prize winners in the area contests so far and good luck to all those bands taking part in the other regional contests!
Thanks for reading! ❤
Mark Glover
10/3/26
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