Thank you Cold Ash Brass and Wantage Band, come back to Newbury very soon

Cold Ash Brass and Wantage Band
at St Nicolas’ Church, Newbury
on Sunday, June 2

Review and pictures by FIONA BENNETT

Twice as nice

The 2024 Newbury Spring Festival is over but this doesn’t mean our favourite venues have fallen silent and on Sunday, June 2 at 7pm, St Nic’s Church welcomed not one, but two brass bands for an evening of exciting and, at times, gently beautiful music.

There is a link between Cold Ash Brass and Wantage Band and it is in the form of Jemma Johnstone who conducts Cold Ash but plays solo tenor horn for Wantage. Cold Ash began the evening with The Home of Legends by Paul Lovatt-Cooper; the opening bars of tam-tam and a brightly played fanfare set the tone for the evening. Jemma has been working the band hard and they’ve stepped up a notch since I last heard them play. We enjoyed everything from movie themes to a beautiful original composition by Tom Davoren and even a cheeky tango, which had us all tapping our feet and swaying in time.

The first time I heard Wantage play was when my husband John and I travelled up to ‘have a blow’ with them a few years ago. They sounded awesome then and nothing’s changed on that front. Their musical director Chris King introduced himself and proudly announced he’d been with this Championship band for a whole year, but bemoaned the fact they hadn’t presented him with a bouquet of flowers – yet!

They started with Bernstein’s Candide overture, always a crowd pleaser although the church acoustic occasionally interfered with the crispness of the ensemble. We enjoyed variations on A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square and another highlight was Chris’s arrangement of a Siciliano by JS Bach, featuring the band’s solo baritone, Imogen Fewster. She was terrific but occasionally, I felt the band could have toned it down in order to let her shine even more brightly.

Two joint items brought the house down. Jemma stepped forward to conduct John Miles’s epic song Music and the enthusiasm and joy on the tambourine player’s face summed up the entire evening. Chris and the two bands closed the show with Arthur Sullivan’s The Lost Chord and those of us who’d thought some live music, rather than the final of Britain’s Got Talent was the way to go, felt rather pleased with ourselves as we stepped out into the lovely June evening.

Thank you Cold Ash Brass and thank you Wantage Band, do come back to Newbury very soon.