Paul Hopkins

I don’t often blog about anything I get up to but I’ve had quite an interesting weekend. I went up to Bradford, not the most interesting of places but it’s where I studied at University. I hadn’t been back up since I graduated, nearly 4 years ago so I was interested to see if it has changed. The bit of the City of Bradford I went through didn’t seem to have changed much (I didn’t go into the very centre) but the University, well that’s a different matter.

They have been doing (and are still doing) some major reshaping to the main University campus, they have built a new atrium to the main Richmond building, ripping out half a side of the building to achieve this. They’ve then knocked most of the on campus halls of residence down (including the one I used to live in), the place looked a bit like a building site. Even the Tasmin Little music centre has had a face lift. That links me nicely into why I went up there. We had a rehearsal at the music centre for a regional competition festival, it’s call the National Concert Band Festival. It’s a festival, not a competition because instead of being awarding positions you are given awards i.e. merit, bronze, silver or gold.

I have competed in this festival once before when I played in the Derbyshire City & County Youth Wind band, we managed to win the Gold award at the National festival that time. A lot of time has past since then and I’m now too old to be classed as ‘Youth’ so I now play with a different group Glebe Symphonic Winds, when I say ‘play’ I am a French horn player in my spare time.

As I was saying, we were only at the regional stage of the festival and so we were hoping to get a place in the national festival by getting awarded a gold. We had to do 20 minute performance and were then marked on our performance. The adjudicators were obviously impressed enough as they awarded us the Gold award. A great result for us made the trip worthwhile.