Category: TEST PIECES (Major Works) Composer: Philip Sparke
This work has been set as the FOURTH Section Testpiece for the British Brass Band Championships, National Finals 2013.
Written in 1984 after a visit to Hereford & Worcester, this work is in three movements, each named after one of the "Three Choirs" venues. ( 10.56). 1. Worcester Cathedral 2. The Wye at Hereford 3. Gloucester Market
Category: TEST PIECES (Major Works) Composer / arranger: Edward Gregson
Written in 1968
Duration 4.00 Minutes
This popular little piece was written as an opener for brass band concerts, where it has become very well known. It is in normal march style, but uses fanfare like figures in the opening section. The central trio uses alternating metres, and the work closes with the return of the fanfare material with which it began
Category: TEST PIECES (Major Works) Composer / arranger: Kenneth Hesketh
Masque has been transcribed for brass band from Hesketh’s Scherzo for Orchestra, commissioned by the National Children’s Orchestra in 1987. The main theme is bravura and is often present, in the background. The form of the piece is a simple scherzo-trio-scherzo, and has colourful scoring (solos alternating with full bodied tuttis) with a dash of wildness!
Brass Band Grade 5: 1st Section
Duration: 6 minutes.
Grade equivalents for Brass Band test-pieces where there is considerable overlap at the higher levels, depending on the level of competition (local, regional or national):
Category: TEST PIECES (Major Works) Composer: Philip Wilby
Previously used as a Championship Section Testpiece ( 2002 ) Duration approx.12.00
Click on MORE DETAILS to view an image of the Solo Cornet part.
The first performance took place on the 4th. September 1993 at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester during the British Open Brass Band Championships.
Note by Philip Wilby: Masquerade is a centenary tribute to Verdi’s last opera Falstaff and takes its final scene as the basis for my own piece. Thus I have used some of Verdi’s music, and some of Shalespeare’s plot, and woven them into a fabric with highly demanding music of my own to produce a work in the great tradition of operatically-based brass band pieces. Such scores date from the very beginnings of band repertory and are often not direct arrangements in the established sense but new compositions produced in homage to a past master. They may still offer performers and audience alike something familiar interwoven with something new.
My own piece reuses some elements from the original story:
• . .Falstaff has been caught in a web of his own lies by the ladies of the town, who propose to teach him a lesson. The story opens at night in Windsor Great Park. The plotters, variously disguised in Hallowe’en fashion (as fairies,elves hobgoblins etc!) assemble in the park to await Falstaff’s arrival (musicologists will, perhaps, note a rare use of ‘large bottle in F’ being used during this scene of suppressed alcoholic revelry!). Falstaff’s companions, Bardolph,Piston and Robin, enter (represented here by the three trombones!), and are variously abused by the masqueraders.
At the height of the Tout an alarm sounds and Falstaff (euphonium cadenza) enters as Midnight strikes. From a safe hiding place he watches as the disguised Nanetta (principal comet) sings a serene solo as the moon appcars above the trees.
With sudden force the others seize him and drag him from his hiding place. As in the traditional game ‘Blind Man’s Buff’, he is roughly turned seven times (a sequence of solo accelerandi) until, at last, he recognizes his assailants as his sometime friends. Far from complaining, Verdi’s character concludes the opera with a good-humoured fugue on the words.... ‘All the World’s a Joke... Every mortal laughs at the others, But he laughs best who has the final laugh. Philip Wilby.
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