This Sunday, December 3rd at 1:00 on the Centennial Concert Hall’s Piano Nobile the Manitoba Band Association (MBA) will be warming up audiences hands, feet and especially ears with the low, warm, sonorous sounds of low brass courtesy of a mass choir of tuba and euphonium players.
2023 marks the MBA’s 11th annual Holiday Tuba Festival. Every year tuba and euphonium players from far and wide gather together at the Centennial Concert hall to perform holiday selections as a way of welcoming in the holiday season. In many respects you could say the holidays are not officially here until the tubas make their arrival at the Centennial Concert Hall.
Tubists of all ages and skill levels will be welcomed and encouraged to take part in the fun. One of the things that makes this event extra special is that musical arrangements have been created that will play to the strengths of any level of player, from those who have been playing the instrument for only a couple of years, to those who are the highest calibre of virtuoso.
For young tubist Aria Fast this will be her first time performing at the Holiday Tuba Festival, but not her first time taking it in. Her mother Bobbie Fast is a first rate tubist and has passed on the love of the tuba to her daughter who has been playing for two years. As Bobbie Fast explains, “Believe it or not I did not groom her [Aria] to play the tuba…but I think all the influences of hearing it in the house and coming to tuba Christmas…I have pictures of her when she was little just coming and listening, and so when she got to pick her band instrument last year she picked the tuba and I was very proud.”
There will be a huge number of tuba and euphonium players performing such holiday classics such as Frosty the Snowman, O Hanukkah, Winter Wonderland and others with some of the arrangements done by Winnipeg composer and arranger Chris Byman, and long-time former Director of Bands at the University of Manitoba Fraser Linklater.
The Holiday Tuba Festival is sure to be a blast!! (pun intended) It takes place this Sunday, December 3rd at 1:00 on the Centennial Concert Hall’s Piano Nobile. For more details visit the Manitoba band Association’s website
