The big day (band wise) came and went on Sunday. We were in the first half of the 4th section draw, drawn 7th and played at around midday.

Organisationally, it went off smoothly enough everyone turned up with their instruments and music. Everyone got tickets and registration cards; no problems there.

Big problem was nerves. Not me personally, I’d expended all my nerves on getting everyone registered and there. But people have told me that they felt the band was a bit on edge when we took to the stage. And so it would seem as we certainly didn’t do ourselves justice on Sunday. I don’t know how many times we’ve played Partita in rehearsals, sometimes badly but sometimes very well; so it was very disappointing to put in a bad performance on the day. It wasn’t bad because people didn’t know their parts or were playing wrong notes, it was bad because people were nervous, so they weren’t confident, so entries were a bit ragged, bits weren’t together. The adjudicator summed it up in his comments as being untidy.

Overall we came 19th out of 21. Disappointing as I said, because if we’d played it as well as we could I think we may have been capable of a top 10 finish. But that’s the nature of contesting, and why I don’t like them. They are not a measure of how good a band is, only a measure of how good a band is on a particular piece on a particular day.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom. In fact, there are a number of positive aspects to be taken from the experience. First of all, the fact that we got a band there and made up almost entirely of the band’s own members (the only “ringer” being the 2nd horn player transferred from a band not contesting), is a testament to the recovery of the band over the last 15 months. Secondly, we know we can play the piece 100x better than we did on the day, so the fact that we came 19th is not a reflection of how good the band can be. Thirdly, by the nature of the contest environment, the adjudicator can only really write up negative criticism, so when he makes no mention of dynamics that must mean that they were spot on and this is something that Martyn, our MD, has been drilling into us leading up to the contest, so all that hard work paid off and the band has improved through the experience of the contest.

People will always tend to make mistakes when they are nervous and there’s little that can be done about it except putting it behind us, moving on to the next event (a CD recording for us) and hopefully through more experience and exposure nervousness can be overcome. And next year we’ll try and organise a rehearsal room for the morning of the contest to blow any pre-contest nerves away.