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August 2009 - Lorient Interceltique Festival, Brittany.
So we arrived back in Edinburgh on Monday after 10 excellent days at the Lorient Interceltique Festival in Brittany. We took a large band with us, 19 pipers and 12 drummers, and as well as performing for five nights at the festival Magic Night show, we also had our own stage show, played a couple of parades, including the Grand Parade with over 72 bands and performed at the Celtic Village outside the Scottish Tent.
The Grand Parade was broadcast on French national TV as were most of the main events of the Festival so this was good exposure for our Band. It took about 5-hours for all the bands to march through the city and into the main stadium where the parade finished and with 3-5 deep crowds all along the parade route and the stadium filled to capacity this really was one of the main highlights of the Festival.
The Magic Night, held in the main stadium at the centre of Lorient, was a 3-hour spectacle of Celtic music and dance accompanied by an amazing lighting and visual display and culminating in a 10-minute long fireworks finale. We performed along with the Methil and Toronto Police pipe bands for a 20-minute slot, also performing further massed band sets with the Irish pipe bands, Welsh Choir and Keltika Highland Dancers from Scotland. As well as our set pieces, a couple of pipers, including our youngest player, 12 year old Lewis Blyth, were also invited to join the Keltika piper Andy Gibb and drummer Lee Erskine on the main stage for part of the dancer’s Set.
We also entered an open pipe band and drum fanfare competition competing against a total of nine other bands including Toronto Police and another G1 band, the recently promoted Bagad Cap Caval. Our drummers placed 3rd in the fanfare competition, and we placed 5th in the Medley and joint 3rd in the MSR competitions.
Our stage show at the Espace Marine was a very well set up affair with over 2000 people paying to watch us perform for 50 minutes. We’d learnt new material for this event, which included backing musicians and dancers from Keltika performing onstage with us, and everyone pulled out the stops to ensure we put on an excellent show.
Having arrived back in Edinburgh on Monday at 9am, we held practice as normal that evening and despite everyone being very tired we had a good solid practice with our competition corps in preparation for the World Championships this weekend.
And quite a few of us are off to watch the Simon Fraser University pipe band Pre-Worlds concert this evening (Wednesday) at the Glasgow Concert Hall before we have our final practice on Thursday night.
We’re scheduled to play in our Qualifying Heat at 11:06am on Saturday morning; with three heats of 12 bands and only four bands going through to the Final from each heat it’s going to be a very tough competition!