Campbelltown City Band

Welcome to Spring in the Hills? At 9.30am it was about 8 degrees with enough of a gentle breeze to blow the music around – but no rain. Be thankful for small mercies we thought as we shivered through our programme. Possibly the enthusiastic reception…

As Philip Glass, an avant-garde classical composer who has also written music for cinema, pointed out, film today is what opera was formerly – the popular art form of our time. Back in the eighteenth century you wouldn’t have heard many people strolling round London…

The pandemic grinds on and event organisers must always consider that a sudden lock down could throw all their carefully laid plans into disarray. The folks at Mitcham are cautious optimists, however, and, fingers crossed, decided to go ahead this year with a mini-festival over…

“And the best of British luck!” was probably what most of us were thinking when our eternally optimistic MD Peter Smith produced his programme for the 2021 Fringe. Planning a concert in the middle of a global pandemic with all the problems of social distancing,…

Welcome to 2021, a year we all hope will be a considerable improvement on its predecessor. We are incurable optimists in Campbelltown band and plans for an action-filled year are well in hand. Our first outing for the year was the Campbelltown Citizenship ceremony. Covid…

Picture, if you will, a desolate Scottish moor (or even a blasted heath if you’re feeling Shakespearean) and the distant sound of a lone piper. An inspired beginning to a War of the Celts concert, you would agree? Sorry. It turned out to be a…

In the spirit of Arnie, the Terminator, or General MacArthur, we vowed to return, but our inexperience in timing the duration of a global pandemic made it difficult to predict when that would be. Weeks crawled by and despite frequent prods from MD Peter and…

What a star studded performance our 2020 Fringe concert turned out to be. Not only did it feature one of Australia’s (via New Zealand) best cornet players, Kevin Joughin, but Hugh Jackman (channelled by M.D. Peter Smith) led us to the revolutionary barricades of the…

Following our usual attendance at the Australia Day Campbelltown Council ceremonies, the first concert for 2020 was Hymns of Praise in All Souls’ Anglican Church, billed as “an afternoon of hymns, sacred music and some popular tunes you never thought you would hear played by…