Concert: Portraits of Tibshelf - An Evening of Film and Music

Rich in imagination and concept
Portraits of Tibshelf - An Evening of Film and Music
Black Dyke Band and Professor Nicholas Childs
Tibshelf Infant and Nursery School
Town End Junior School
Tibshelf Community School
Saturday 18 March 2017

The word legacy is possibly an overused word in the arts, yet when Carole Hirst retired from her post as Arts Development Officer at Bolsover District Council just a few months ago, that is exactly what she left. Fortunately, she will still have a hand in the running of perhaps her most telling legacies of all, the Bolsover Festival of Brass and Summer School.

This thoughtfully conceived community project, featuring a fusion of music, poetry and iPad art, and utilising the combined forces Black Dyke, Derbyshire poet laureate Matt Black, iPad artist Mick Godley, composers Jonathan Bates and Philip Sparke, and Simone Rebello as percussion tutor, all working with a host of local school children, typifies the innovation and creative approach to funding that resides at the heart of everything that Carole undertakes.

The band's concert programme was woven around two new commissions. Portraits of Tibshelf by Jonathan Bates, during which projections of the fabulous iPad art of Mick Godley, featuring familiar local scenes, were projected above the band whilst local schoolchildren, tutored by Simone Rebello and Jonathan Bates himself, performed on an array of percussion instruments. The colourful and dynamic score, by turns engaging and uplifting, but not without its darker moments, certainly found favour with the children, whose enthusiasm in front of a large audience was a joy to both hear and watch.

Focused around a film by Martyn Harris that cleverly brought together historical images of the local area with pictures of modern-day Tibshelf, A Tibshelf Tale drew on the words of Matt Black and narration by Frank Renton in defining the history of Tibshelf, from its origins in the Domesday Book, through its heritage of farming, mining and the steam age. Philip Sparke's attractive score proved crucial in creating a montage of words and music that served both as an engaging concert item in its own right, as well as a valuable historical document of a village with a richly diverse and ancient history.      

Elsewhere in the programme, familiar items such as the theme from Out of Africa, The Great Escape and Dyke's big band set found clear favour with an enthusiastic audience, many of whom were hearing a top-class brass band for the first time, whilst soloists Daniel Thomas on euphonium, Richard Marshall on cornet and Zoe Hancock on flugel gave sparkling accounts respectively of Peter Graham's Bravura, The Green Hornet and Children of Sanchez.

An encore of 76 Trombones, renamed 75 Trombones in tribute to long-serving bass trombonist, Adrian Hirst, who just days before had suffered a serious road accident and remained in a critical condition in hospital, made for an upbeat, yet thought-provoking end to a concert rich in imagination and concept.

CHRISTOPHER THOMAS – CHIEF CONTRIBUTOR

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