98th Spring Brass Band Festival 2018

Blackpool’s Winter Gardens will once more be ablaze to the sound of music on Saturday 12th May as the 98th Brass Band Spring Festival will take place.

Promoted by the organisers of the British Open Brass Band Championship (the oldest musical competition in the world still in existence and that started in 1853) around 1800 amateur musicians will compete in three separate competitions as they dream of competing against the finest bands in the world, at the British Open which takes place at Symphony Hall in Birmingham every September.

The qualification process sees promotion and relegation for competing bands in the three tiered contest and makes this event one of the toughest and competitive days in brass banding.

Each of the three competitions will see twenty bands in each section try to impress the two adjudicators who hear the musical performances from behind a covered curtain. All of the three competitions have a set piece of music to perform.

In the Grand Shield (where the top two will qualify to compete against the defending champion, Valaisia Brass Band from Switzerland at the British Open in the autumn) the competing ensembles are faced with performing Peter Graham’s 2014 work, The Triumph of Time.

In the middle section, known as the Senior Cup, the set test piece will be Frank Wright’s arrangement of Guillaume Balay’s ‘Diadem of Gold’.
Finally to complete what promises to be an enjoyable day, one of the renowned Salvation Army composer Eric Ball later contest works -‘A Kensington Concerto’, which will be heard in the Senior Trophy.

The action starts at 10.00am in the morning with the results of all the competitions being announced after all the music has taken place and the judges have made their decisions, not long after 6pm.