Summer Splash

MICHAEL DRAKE

This was the culmination of a couple of months of enterprising Waterside Weekends organised by South Norfolk Council and funded by the Arts Council and might have been called "incidental music for a pleasant summer afternoon".

The meadow was dotted with picnickers to listen to the wind and brass sections of the London Mozart Players in a programme of popular music on a watery theme and director Alisdair Malloy became the Pied Piper of Whitlingham, persuading several youngsters to make appropriate noises in Strauss' Cuckoo Polka.

Open air concerts may not be artistically as satisfying, but the LMP ensemble was accessible acoustically, particularly in two of Borodin's Polotsvian Dances.

There was a local element too in Philip Sparke's lively Norfolk Dances - a tribute in style to Sir Malcolm Arnold, whose own sea shanties rang out merrily.

It may well have introduced music to many, not least by the use of the rhythm "noise makers" made from the programmes

Michael Drake