December is notorious for being the busiest season for brass bands. For Otterbourne Brass, this is no exception. Sarah was hard at work in the early months of 2015 booking us into shops, garden centres and Christmas Markets to give us the opportunity to play for donations. This is essential for us, as we are a charity and in order to run the band, stock and maintain instruments and have a fresh supply of music for our concerts, we rely on donations from the public.

We were able to play at 7 different venues for donations, as well as 3 venues we were invited to play at for Christmas functions. Our thanks go to:

• Alton Masonic Centre
• Bitterne Conservative Club
• Littleton Gardening Club
• Arturi Garden Centre
• Port Solent Christmas Market
• Sainsbury’s Shirley
• Sainsbury’s Broadcut
• Sainsbury’s Badger Farm
• Winchester Council

As usual we also donated a proportion of our collections to our Charity of the Year, NeST.

In addition, Otterbourne Village Hall hosts 2 Christmas Concerts back to back. On the 12th of December, Otterbourne Brass played Christmas music for 4 hours, to regular and new audience members at the hall. We love putting this showcase together for our local fans, and this gave us an opportunity to show Melvin, Paul and Roland off to our audience.

Finally, we could be as bold as to say we finished our year off in style. We were extremely pleased and proud to be playing for George (Soprano) and Sarah (Trombone) Arnold at their 25th anniversary wedding vow renewal service. With guest soloist Kevin Crockford, and soloists Sonja Charters, our principal cornet player, and Becca Charters, our repiano cornet player, there wasn’t an arm hair or goosebump left to raise after their beautiful playing. Congratulations George and Sarah, and here’s to the next 25 years

If you’d like to hear some of the playing from the wedding, please click here.

Article by Harriet Orchard