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Talented youngsters from across the country will take to the stage for the 33rd Youth Brass Band Championship and the 2nd Junior Brass Band Entertainment Festival of Great Britain, raising funds for children’s charity Action Medical Research.
The Opera House, Blackpool Winter Gardens, will once again play host for the championships which will take place on Sunday 12 February.
Paddington BearTM, Action Medical Research’s mascot, will be making an appearance as well as Mayor of Blackpool Councillor Kath Rowson.
The competition will see nine bands in the Youth category, and six in the Junior, vying to win the championship trophies from last year’s victors, Youth Brass 2000 and the Wigan Youth Zone Brass Band.
Musical adjudicators Paul Norley and Dave Collins (juniors) and entertainment adjudicators John Doyle and Alex Bray (juniors) will be judging the event whose supporters include Unity Theatre Trust and the Finderman Trust, amongst many others.
The competing bands in the Youth category are: Elland Silver Youth Band (Brighouse, W Yorks), Enderby Youth Band (Leicestershire), Houghton Area Youth Band (Sunderland), Lions Youth Band (Crewe), Macclesfield Youth Brass Band, Rochdale Borough Youth Band, Seindorf Ieuenctid Beaumaris Youth Band (Anglesey), Wardle Academy Youth Brass Band (Rochdale), Youth Brass 2000 (East Midlands).
In the Junior category, the competing bands are: Kearsley Youth Brass Band (Bolton), Wigan Youth Zone Brass Band, Red Admiral Music Academy (Lancashire), Wardle Academy Beginners’ Band (Rochdale), St Kentigern’s Catholic Primary Brass Band (Manchester), Over Wyre Brass (Blackpool).
The pre-results entertainment in the Opera House will be by the A4 Brass Quartet, who are based at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester. The quartet is made up of principal players from the Grimethorpe and Wingates bands.
For 65 years Action Medical Research has been saving and changing children’s lives and has spent more than £115 million funding medical breakthroughs, including helping to introduce the first polio vaccines in the UK, discovering the importance of taking folic acid before and during pregnancy to prevent spina bifida, developing the use of ultrasound in pregnancy and testing the rubella vaccine.
The charity is currently funding research into conditions including prematurity, epilepsy, meningitis, cerebral palsy, brain cancer and some rare and distressing conditions.
For more information please visit action.org.uk/youth-brass-band
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For high-res images of the Elland Silver Youth Band with Paddington Bear after winning last year’s competition, please click on the links below:
For illustrated images of Paddington getting musical, please click on the links below:
https://www.action.org.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/press/paddington_conductor.jpg
https://www.action.org.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/press/paddington_trumpet.jpg
NOTES TO EDITORS:
For more information on Action Medical Research, contact Toni Slater, Interim Fundraising Communications Officer, on:
T: 01403 327480
Follow us on Twitter at @actionmedres and @amr_events
Like our Facebook page at facebook.com/actionmedres
Follow us at pinterest/actionmedres
Action Medical Research is a leading UK-wide charity saving and changing children’s lives through medical research. For 65 years we’ve helped pioneer ways to prevent disease and develop treatments benefiting millions of people. Our research has helped to beat polio in the UK, develop ultrasound, fight meningitis and prevent stillbirths. But we urgently need to develop more new treatments and cures for sick babies and children and we can’t do it without you.
Join our fight for little lives today.
Charity reg. nos 208701 and SC03928