When I first arrived in New Zealand, I was looking for a musical group to join, and I chose the University of Auckland Concert Band, also known as UniBand. This concert band is made up of students from different careers, and it plays a great selection of the concert band repertoire. Jono Palmer, its conductor, does a fantastic job, joining all these players and inviting some students of musical conducting to work with us.
I was thrilled to join in all the band’s activities during the second half of 2024, starting with the New Zealand Concert Bands Association festival in Hamilton in August, where we performed the “Symphonic Suite from Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (John Williams, arr. Jay Bocook) and the “Second Suite for Military Band in F Major” (Gustav Holst), and then in the university’s Open Day in the same month, playing Holst again and “Themes from Jurassic Park” (John Williams, arr. Michael Sweeney).
The final concert was on 12 October, and the programme was:
Part I
- “Folk Dances” (Dmitri Shostakovich, arr. James Curnow)
- “October” (Eric Whitacre)
- “Second Suite for Military Band in F Major”, movements 1 and 4 (Gustav Holst)
Part II
- The Divine Comedy (Robert W. Smith)
In this last work, in the second movement “Purgatorio”, there was an interesting soprano saxophone solo which you can hear on the link (the second movement starts in 10:09):
I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to play with this wonderful team. They are so well organised, musical and a really enjoyable musical group to play with! Almost all of them are very young compared to me, but they have such a great attitude, and it’s been an absolute pleasure working with them. I’ve played soprano, alto and tenor saxophone in the band and tried to help out where I could.
And one happy thing was that starting from the sectional saxophone rehearsals, we decided to form a saxophone ensemble with the band’s sax players, which we provisionally have called UniSax (but this will be another story in this blog).