Darwin's Dream is no nightmare

When a project has aims as commendable as interesting youngsters in both music and science, a critic feels churlish in quibbling.

Composer Graham Treacher and librettist Stephen Webster took as their inspiration Haydn's Creation, and replaced the characters of Uriel, Adam and Eve with Joe the Fossil Hunter, Dr Evelyn the DNA scientist and the theorist of evolution himself, Mr Darwin.

They also added a choir of more than 250 schoolchildren and, one supposes, waited for a big musical bang.

At the one-off gala performance of Darwin's Dream last night, that bang was somewhat muted. Happily the kids, a girl-dominated chorus dressed in T-shirts bearing images of the natural world, were in fine voice, giving impressive welly to lines that appeared to come straight from a biology textbook.

The professional soloists were also, presumably, telling us Important Things about science, although their words were disappointingly hard to decipher.

Coloratura soprano Catherine May failed to shed any light on the double helix as Evelyn, although tenor Andy Morton had a strong, pleasant voice and made his Joe affable and industrious.

In between the suitably Protean musical numbers, accompanied by chamber ensemble The Fibonacci Sequence, images of rainforests and weird proto-fish played on a giant screen.

There were also, less felicitously, linking passages of prose requiring a lot of people to get very excited about fossils and awkward lines of the 'Five hundred million years? That's old' ilk. But the proud parents rightly loved it, as the kids did great.

Darwin's Dream