About

BrassWind is an annual festival where the concert content is aimed at new music for bands and ensembles. During the festival, wind bands, brass bands and ensembles meet, where skilled, committed amateurs and school band musicians meet professional performers, conductors and composers under the same roof.

Since the end of the 1970s, many music groups have invested heavily in new music for brass bands. This has led to a number of first performances and several CD releases that have profiled both this music and new Norwegian composers. MML must premiere at least one work each season, and the BrassWind festival was established by the orchestra in 2004 to establish a good arena for new music for orchestras, and to further promote this music to new audiences.

Manger Musikklag's work with new music was an important competence when the music group together with composer Torstein Aagaard-Nilsen started work with the festival in 2003. MML has a policy of ordering new music that fits the festival profile perfectly, and it is therefore quite natural that the band both owns and implements BrassWind - on duty!

The festival was first held in the Theater Garage in Bergen in October 2004, and was a great success. Since then, BrassWind has been staged both in Logen Teater, Johanneskirken, Manger church, Grieghallen,
The University Hall in Bergen, and were on tour to Os og Manger with the documentary opera "Hypermusikal" during the BrassWind festival 2009.

Many new Norwegian works have had their first performance during the festival, including scenic works, and one of the BrassWind festival's biggest successes is precisely the documentary opera "Hypermusikal" by Glenn Erik Haugland and Heidi Tronsmo. This was the thing for BrassWind 2009 and had four performances during the festival, a setup that led to MML, as the first brass band ever, being invited to stage two performances at Den Norske Opera & Ballett in Bjørvika in Oslo on 21 May 2011. the innovative documentary opera about and with MML was a success with over 600 tickets sold in Oslo alone, and "Hypermusikal" received glowing reviews from both the press and the public.