Phenomenal Fusion for NYBBS
The National Youth Brass Band of Scotland (NYBBS) enthralled a capacity audience at The Mitchell Theatre, Glasgow on Saturday 19th January when they performed as part of a highly successful musical fusion with a folk band led by renowned Shetland fiddlers, Jenna and Bethany Reid. As part of the internationally acclaimed 2013 Celtic Connections Festival (which sees over 250 different performances from approximately 2,000 artistes),
NYBBS became a fully integrated musical addition to the Reid's folk band, performing the narrated musical suite ‘The Shetland Bus' (an emotional account of an extraordinary wartime story). The combination of sounds was evidently well received by an enthusiastic audience and Jenna, Bethany and their band were overwhelmed by the new dimension NYBBS brought to this already highly successful piece.
Andrew Duncan, SBBA Development Manager, who orchestrated the music for the band and conducted the performance at The Mitchell Theatre commented "The whole performance was an enormous success. The NYBBS players had to perform a diverse variety of styles for the Suite, working alongside a musical genre with which the band had no previous experience prior to their first rehearsal earlier in the month. The approach of a folk ensemble is very different from that of a brass band, and so the NYBBS members are to be congratulated for the way in which they took the challenges in their stride so professionally and effectively - it was as if the two groups had always worked together!
Jenna and Bethany Reid, the writers of the suite and leaders of the folk ensemble, were overwhelmed by the success of the project and felt that this level of integration and fusion of sounds will open up a new dimension of collaborative performances for both brass bands and folk groups. With this in mind, we look forward to pursuing possible future performances of ‘The Shetland Bus', and other works for that matter, to further establish this new strata in the development of brass band versatility and performance opportunities
