UFO Info Week-End

Manchester’s new £5m biannual arts festival starting in 2007 and featuring new work and new ideas should find a willing partner

Manchester’s new £5m, biannual arts festival, starting in 2007, and featuring new work and new ideas, should find a willing partner in the protean Hall?. Britain’s first specially designed professional theatre for children, under construction in London, is running out of cash. Celebrities from Dame Judi Dench to Robbie Williams have contributed to the £12.6m appeal, with half the money coming from public bodies such as Arts Council England.Members of the public who contribute £1,000 will have a seat in the main auditorium named in their honour and those who donate £100 will have their name inscribed on a special wall inside the building.Emma Thompson, the actress and Unicorn patron, said children of all backgrounds should have access to theatre. “It’s no good London having a first-class theatre, which is only available to children whose parents have high incomes,” she said. “The Unicorn will combine its steady excellence with accessibility.”.

It was a beautifully judged, exuberant performance, Christophers’s brisk tempos testing the Hall?layers’ deftness. The concert opened with the suite from Abdelazer, featuring this theme in a Rondeau, and its dramatic flourishes and intensity suggest that Purcell’s passions were stirred by Aphra Benn’s bloody Restoration tragedy.On this evidence, the first occasion on which Harry met Hall?there’s clearly future in pursuing the relationship. The children were thrilled, clapping their hands over their ears at the boisterous brass, beating their small fists in imitation of the timpani as it takes up the muscular theme Britten borrowed from Purcell’s theatre music for Abdelazer. Not even the sensitive accompaniment Christophers drew from the chamber-musical forces of the orchestra or the interplay between the polished soloists could disguise the fact that the first movement feels long and that the Adagio is not one of the composer’s most inspired. After that Bach’s Third Orchestral Suite brimmed with wit and brilliance, even the famous flowing Air (of G-string fame) sounding remarkably fresh.In Britten’s A Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, the youngsters (and we older members of the audience who still remember when the now dated text accompanied Britten’s filmscore for the Ministry of Education) got their reward. The work’s provenance remains a mystery but the French impresario who, according to the composer’s letters, omitted to give the work its promised first airing, may have realised that, contrary to Mozart’s own opinion, it wouldn’t in fact have “made a great hit”. I know I’d have been hoping for musical fireworks, something visceral and contemporary, with lots of action and I’m not sure I’d have sat so patiently through Purcell, Bach and Mozart in this slightly underwhelming, though cleverly devised programme, under Harry Christophers’s stylish direction.

Imagine your school has adopted a player from City or United. Not a not a striker or sweeper, but a percussionist or tuba-player in the ranks of the Hall?And you come, as part of four enthusiastic groups of primary children did, to this Hall?Opus” series concert, to see and hear your player in action. And a lot of Indian classical music – Vilayat Khan, Hariprasad Chaurasia, Zakir Hussain. And maybe Shakti, who bring raga and jazz together…” Come on, Sue: this sounds fun.Britten Sinfonia and Nitin Sawhney, Royal Festival Hall, Wednesday; then touring to Brighton (Thursday), Cambridge (24 November), and Birmingham (27 November).