“Mein Brandenburg” was written by Kees Vlak as a commission for the Brandenburg Police Band on the occasion of the ceremony marking the retirement of Brandenburg’s Minister of the Interior, Jörg Schönbohm. Schönbohm’s personal motto, “Nothing is too difficult for those determined to achieve” (Ignatius of Loyola), can also be seen as the motto for all who are seriously concerned with music. With Kees Vlak the Brandenburg Police Band commissioned one of the most renowned composers on the European wind music scene, whose tonal language, pleasing harmonies and forms of variation are most suited to the writing of a musical birthday greeting for the retiring and deserving Minister. Vlak was born in 1938 in Amsterdam, where he studied music, majoring in piano and trumpet. From 1967 until his retirement in 1998 he taught in his native city, primarily as a piano teacher. As early as 1966 Kees Vlak turned his attention to wind music and also learned clarinet and double bass in order to gain a greater familiarity with the specific possibilities of a wind orchestra. In “Mein Brandenburg” Vlak presents a merry firework of quotations in which the march “Alte Kameraden" (Old Comrades) has as much a role to play as the Brandenburg anthem “Märkische Heide" (The Heath of the March). Through his elegant and humorous treatment of the march Kees Vlak demonstrates that he is anything but a Prussian militarist. All in all, “Mein Brandenburg” is a work that, thanks to its pleasant character and noble fullness of sound, will find a public beyond the borders of this beautiful region of Germany.