We’ve just had our first rehearsal for this year’s Christmas concerts, and things are shaping up nicely for the first concert in Scotland in a few weeks’ time.

Christmas has been the inspiration for so many great musical masterpieces, and brass instruments are a vital part of this festive musical fabric. In these concerts we’ll focus on some of the highlights of the rich Christmas canon, but where the years of repetition may have dulled their impact, we hope to illuminate them afresh, casting them in a brand new light through the unique sound of the brass septet.

This year our big new piece is Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker — a sizeable chunk of the ballet makes up the second half of the concert. Growing up listening to the symphonies, I was never very keen on Tchaikovsky’s music, which seemed to veer between schmaltzy sentimentality and overindulgent bombast. It was only when I heard the ballet scores, and The Nutcracker in particular, that I began to realise his true genius. This is a score so rich in wit and elegance, and so full of life and colour, that its enduring popularity is no surprise. It’s simply a joy to revisit each year, and many happy hours were spent arranging it from Tchaikovsky’s piano score this summer.

Some of what we play will be familiar from the orchestral  suite — the Miniature Overture, March, and the dances from Act II. Less well-known perhaps are the scenes from Act I, but these contain some of the best music in the ballet. They’re also crucial to the plot, and this will be important because the whole performance will be tied together with a narration — performed by Clemency Burton-Hill in Kings Place, and Brian Kay in Burford. The narration is based on the beautifully-written original Dumas story, and will hopefully make the musical performance even more vivid.

The Nutcracker is one of the most significant secular pieces of Christmas music, but of course there is a rich sacred repertoire. In the first half of the concert we’ll play excerpts from two of the most important pieces: Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and Handel’s Messiah. These are now well established in our repertoire — we recorded them last year — but we never tire of playing them. They give us an opportunity to feature soloists from within the group: piccolo trumpet in the final chorus from the Christmas Oratorio, and bass trombone in The Trumpet Shall Sound from the Messiah.

This is where we’ll be and when, so get your tickets now, and we’ll see you there!

We’ve just finished recording a new disc for Naxos (our 7th). This latest one is the longest we’ve ever undertaken, and also probably technically the hardest. But the music holds a special place in our hearts because it brings us on to home turf. Our recordings so far have taken us to Germany and Austria, Russia, Italy, and France. But this one is decidedly British: Elgar, Parry, Finzi and Walton.

The process actually began about a year ago. We’d just finished recording Christmas with Septura, and so were looking to the next volume. Our series is broadly planned out (we can tell you roughly what we want to play on volume 25!), so we knew that we wanted to pay a visit to 20th-century England. But the particular composers and the specific pieces were agreed only in the autumn of 2016, after a summer of very English listening. Early on we decided that we’d stolen enough choral and keyboard works for the time being, and it was time to plough another particularly fertile furrow: music for strings. Elgar’s beloved Serenade, Finzi’s Prelude and Romance, and Walton’s Sonata all fitted the bill, and most importantly we could immediately hear them as pieces for brass. Ultimately though we couldn’t resist including some masterpieces from the rich English choral tradition: Finzi’s rousing anthem “God is gone up” is such a natural fit for brass (“The Lord with sounding trumpets’ melodies”); and the first four of Parry’s Songs of Farewell have long been an ambition for the group.

Repertoire set, there was the small issue of divvying it up and actually arranging it, as well as getting permission for the works in copyright. I bagsied the Elgar and Parry, which was lucky because Simon was keen to do the Walton – he had first heard it 10 years beforehand at La Mortella, the composer’s home in the Bay of Naples. With a deadline of mid-May, we set to work. After comparing notes, incorporating a few suggestions, and pinching some ideas from our Royal Academy students, the scores were ready just a week before the first read-through in June.

The first read-through is always a slightly dispiriting experience. Having spent months immersed in this music, imagining every detail of its glorious reincarnation for brass, it’s slightly worrying when – despite the unparalleled sight-reading of Septura’s members – it doesn’t quite sound as you’d expected. Simon’s Walton in particular is very hard – totally un-sight-readable. “Will it be ok? Have we bitten off more than we can chew this time?”, I ask nervously. “Relax, it’ll be fine – it’s always like this the first day”, Simon reassures me. Sure enough, when we meet again a couple of weeks later, after a bit of frantic private practice (not least for me), everything comes together. We hone our new versions over the next few weeks – aided by performing the Elgar at the Gregynog Festival in Wales – and then we’re ready for the red light of the recording studio.

The recording itself is always very intense – we do two three-hour sessions a day, three days in a row. Normally we aim to get 20 minutes of music a day (and just about manage) but because of the length of this disc we needed 23. We felt better prepared than ever before though, and, in the familiar surroundings of St Paul’s New Southgate, we sailed through the Elgar on the first day, with our Producers Phil Rowlands and Jim Unwin expertly guiding us through the musical rigours of recording. Day 2 was the big one: the Walton. And for the first time in our recording history disaster struck. Its form: an oil leak, leaving Alan stranded at the side of the M40 as the session was due to start. A two-and-a-half hour delay put us on the back foot, but the group rallied and we ended the day weary at 11.15 pm, but relieved to have the Walton in the can. The final day is always a bit of a challenge – tired faces plus time pressure make for an intense race to the finish. This time the Finzi and Parry were actually fairly straightforward, and we made it to our favoured watering hole, The Charles Lamb, in plenty of time for last orders.

Now Phil and Jim have the unenviable task of piecing the takes together. Meanwhile Simon and I are planning disc number 8 – so watch this space!