Our Kind Of Music – Oxnop Singers

THE OXNOP Singers’ annual concert last Sunday was in familiar style at Oxenhope Community Centre, offering a mixed programme of vocal and brass band numbers.

The choir under the excellent musical director Helen McCrory, with Joyce Holbrook their attentive accompanist, were in very good voice.

The choir very properly began proceedings with fairly familiar numbers, including Annie’s Song, White Shade Of Pale, with its Bach origins, and Barbara ann.

The Silsden Town Band under Andrew Dunn then increased the decibels to fever pitch in this relatively small venue with a spot including their leader’s trumpet solo and closing with Baggy Trousers, of Madness fame.

The choir returned with two favourites, Climb Every Mountain and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, definitely the audience’s kind of music, as was the band’s Gilbert and Sullivan medley before tea and biscuits.

Still in 2014, the choir’s six-strong selection of First World War numbers was touching, as was there affecting performance of Goodnight, Sweetheart.

The band’s final numbers included some famous names: Strauss, Mozart (a horn concerto) and John Ritter, and bowing out with the Floral Dance.

Andrew Lloyd Webber brought proceedings to a conclusion with a choral arrangement of his epic score for Evita.

This got going with What Happens Now and concluded with a beautifully rousing Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina with excellent solos.

The concert in aid of the Yorkshire Air Ambulance was introduced by the choir’s president.

The present Silsden Town Band was reformed in 1990 to promote brass band music in the town.

Over the years, the band has seen many changes in members, and its numbers have varied with youngsters going to university and older members taking a well-earned break

Sylvia Somers kept the band together in recent times as musical director, then in 2000 Andrew Dunn took over, with Sylvia resuming her position as principal horn.

John Pettitt