Wollongong City Brass & Wind Bands

The Brass and Wind Bands are looking forward to presenting our first concert of 2023, “Set The Wayback Machine!”, as part of the Wollongong Seniors Festival! The concert will be at the Figtree Anglican Church Auditorium at 2pm on Saturday 4 February 2023.

Come and travel back through time with us to hear music from The Renaissance to Rock!

The ticket price includes afternoon tea, and there will be a great selection of raffle prizes if you want to try your luck with some raffle tickets. Concert tickets are available at the door, or online at TryBooking.

The Brass Band is looking forward to presenting our next concert, “A Cornucopia of Brass”! The concert will be at the Figtree Anglican Church Auditorium at 2pm on Saturday 19 November 2022.

The program includes a fantastic selection of music, featuring Australian composers and arrangers. The concert also showcases our Junior Brass Band, come along and hear the results of all their hard work this year!

The ticket price includes afternoon tea, and there will be a great selection of raffle prizes if you want to try your luck with some raffle tickets. Concert tickets are available at the door, or online at TryBooking.

For the first time since 2019, the NSW State Band Championships were held “live” at The Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre in Penrith and our bands were well represented. It was fantastic to be back at the venue with a live audience and experience the atmosphere and camaraderie of a band competition event.

All of our competing bands performed to a very high standard and we finished with some terrific results.

The City of Wollongong Junior Brass Band won the Junior C Grade Brass category, and the City of Wollongong Brass Band came away with 2nd place in the Open C Grade Brass! The brass band won the Sacred Item and placed second in both the Test and Own Choice. Brilliant results, and a testament to the hard work of our band members and musical directors.

Our newest band, Illawarra Brass, competed in Open B Grade and produced great performances in each category. Unfortunately the B Grade competition was too strong and we weren’t able to get a place, but we’re thrilled with the standard that the band was able to achieve with limited rehearsal time.

Congratulations to everyone who participated, and we’re looking forward to competing again at Nationals in 2023!

We’re excited to present our second concert for 2022 as our Brass Band celebrates with A Festival of Film Music! Join us as we head off on a journey from Sherwood Forest to the high seas of the Caribbean, from galaxies far, far, away to Middle Earth, and much, much more!

The concert will be at Figtree Anglican Church Auditorium at 2pm on 21 May. The ticket price includes afternoon tea, and there will be a great selection of raffle prizes. Tickets available in the foyer on the day, or online at TryBooking.

To kick off our concert series for 2022 the combined City of Wollongong Wind & Brass bands present a Seniors Festival event “Wind & Brass Returns”. We’re looking forward to holding our first live concert for many months and getting the bands back together after a long year of lockdowns and cancelled events. We hope you can join us for an afternoon of music and a COVID-safe afternoon tea.

The concert will be at Figtree Anglican Church Auditorium at 2pm on 26 March. The ticket price includes afternoon tea, and there will be a great selection of raffle prizes. Tickets available in the foyer on the day, or online at TryBooking.

It’s been a long road through months of lockdown, but today we’re on the verge of getting the bands back together! Now that vaccination rates are high enough, we’re allowed to run small group rehearsals at the band hall and we’ll slowly get back to playing live music.

We’re in the process of planning our concert series for 2022, and we’ll be participating in the NSW State Band Championships that were postponed from 2021.

There’s plenty of work to do and we’re just getting started, so watch this space for updates over the next few months.

P.S. Once again, a big Thank You to our dedicated Musical Directors for their efforts running weekly online get togethers to keep us all in touch and thinking about music!

Sadly, we’ve had to cancel the remaining concerts we had planned for 2021.

While there is some light at the end of the COVID-tunnel, none of our bands are currently able to rehearse face-to-face at the moment and we expect that it will be a while before enough restrictions are lifted to enable us to prepare a concert.

We’re hoping that we might be able to hold an outdoor concert before Christmas, keep your fingers (and toes!) crossed and we’ll let you know!

In the meantime, we hope everyone is doing well in these difficult times, and that we’ll get back to live music soon.

Congratulations to all of our Junior Brass members who participated in the 2021 Wollongong Eisteddfod! We had a great turn out this year with competitors in a variety of Solo, Duet/Trio, and Ensemble events, with some great results:

Quinn	Wind Instrument Solo (13-16yrs)	Highly Commended
Jerome	20th/21st Century Wind Instrument Solo (13-16yrs)	3rd Place
Sara & Thomas	Instrumental Ensemble Duets and Trios (Open Age)	Highly Commended
Joseph, Josef, Aaron, Nick & Jaxon	Mini Groups 3-8 Players (13 years and under)	2nd Place
Junior Brass Band	Instrumental Ensemble 9 or more Players (Open Age)	1st Place

A special mention goes to the Junior Brass Band who won their Open Age Ensemble event, they sounded great on the night and their success was well deserved.

A big thank you also to our Junior Brass M.D. Des Cannings who organised all the entries, backing tracks, accompanists and rehearsals for the competitors.

We’re very excited to be participating in ANZAC Day services in 2021! Our band members will be up bright-and-early, playing hymns and national anthems in support of ANZAC Day events at Shellharbour (Harrison Park) and Windang (Windang Bowling Club), and we’ll also be providing a small drum corps for the march in Wollongong.

We hope you can join us to commemorate this very special day.