With Thanksgiving falling as late as possible this year, Christmas arrived in a hurry. Even worse, we had a major weather change in early December, which sometimes triggers laryngitis for me. This time, I had an unusually bad case and felt terrible for a week, setting our Christmas preparations behind schedule. As a result, the only community holiday event we attended before Christmas was the Holiday Brass Concert at a church in St. Louis County.

I attended the concert with a friend last year and it was so good, I wanted Ted to hear it this year. It’s presented by the International Women’s Brass Conference and includes brass and percussion instruments. The IWBC presents four performances each December in the Manchester United Methodist Church. The church seats 1,200 people, and all four concerts sell out every year. Ted and I bought our Dec. 2 tickets in early June as soon as they went on sale. The concert is indescribable. No photos were allowed, so I’m going to describe some of the concert highlights, but words cannot begin to do justice to the experience.

The church is beautifully decorated for Christmas and has excellent acoustics, both of which greatly contribute to the experience. There is a large balcony above the sanctuary, flanked by a smaller balcony on each side, as well as a large balcony above the rear of the nave. An outstanding choir I estimated at around 80-100 members performs in the back of the sanctuary, and musical pieces are performed in the aisles, along the side walls, and in the corners of the nave, as well as in all the balconies. In addition to every variety of brass instrument, there are marimbas, alphorns, bagpipes, a piano, and soloists. A sign language interpreter is present during vocal musical pieces.

Except for the final selection, the entire group of musicians does not perform simultaneously in a concert-style seating arrangement, nor do they always perform in the front of the nave. Selections are performed by smaller ensembles of 4-12 musicians at a time, with individual musicians participating in multiple ensemble combinations. While one ensemble performs somewhere in the building–sometimes vocally, sometimes instrumentally–the next moves silently and invisibly into place at another station. As soon as the first ensemble finishes, there is time for brief applause before the next ensemble begins. With each musical selection followed by a piece performed in a different area of the nave, the music seems to surround the audience. The variety of ensembles and performance locations is a highlight of this concert.

The selections and the quality of music are impressive. Four alphorns played “Silent Night”–two in the front balcony and one on each side of the rear balcony; the bagpipers played as they came down the center aisle; for one song, the choir entered from the rear and spread along the two side walls.

Even a video would not capture the experience of this holiday concert. The best I can offer visually is a picture of a man in Halifax, NS playing an alphorn. Even so, his alphorn is white, not brass-colored. An alphorn varies from 9.5-13.0 feet long and, at full volume, can be heard over several kilometers. (A friend of mine knows an alphorn player and asked him if the instrument comes apart for transporting it. The answer is that there is a case for it, but it does not come apart.) Imagine one of these horns playing from each of four balcony corners simultaneously. Awesome!

Ted and I have already marked our calendar to order our tickets in early June for next year’s IWBC Holiday Brass Concert.