MUSIC / Well-schooled orchestras: Cheap slurs detract from the real doubts about activities by orchestras in 'the community'

Everybody's doing it - 16 times over when it comes to The Turn of the Tide, this year's pet project of the Association of British Orchestras. 'It' is working with schools to help them produce pieces of their own. So much is it being encouraged that there's cynicism about the motives; education programmes, some say, are just the fashionable way to pick up a fatter grant.

I'd like to see the evidence to justify that. Nobody who heard the first Turn of the Tide session to hit London, brought to the Queen Elizabeth Hall by people from Newham schools as part of last week's City of London Sinfonia concert, could have been anything but knocked out by the vigour and sensitivity of the young performers. What's more, cheap slurs detract from the real doubts about such activities by orchestras in 'the community'.

The way this one works is that orchestras around Britain use a specially written piece by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies as the starting-point for the students' creations - all of them a response to environmental damage and revival. The results can either be incorporated in the Maxwell Davies piece or, as at the QEH, set up separately. The hard questions are about who, in the long run, is supposed to benefit. For the orchestra, apart from the few players working directly in the schools, does it make any difference?

Not much, to judge by the rest of the CLS's concert, conducted by Adrian Leaper, which included some sophisticated Stravinsky and Ibert as well as the orchestra-only version of the Maxwell Davies - which is, ironically, the project's biggest disappointment. It is a neatly wrought but thin, bloodless piece culminating in a bland tune (they say it sounds better when sung). The problem that orchestras have hardly begun to address is how to take all they have learnt from people's immediate feelings about music and feed it back into their 'normal' lives.

As for the schools, their pieces were big, theatrical and inspirational. But you have to ask where they turn next, when the schools' own musical structures are being taken apart and not rebuilt. Are the orchestras being exploited to provide what ought to be there by right? If they accept that function, are they taking their social responsibilities far enough? The week's most depressing remark came from a respected, liberal-minded orchestra manager who told Radio 4's Kaleidoscope that, thanks to the introduction of equal opportunities policies, all must be well. So why are orchestras still seas of white faces, and what sort of message does this give to an inner-city school? There's a long way to go.

Back in a thoroughly normal Barbican, in London, on Tuesday the BBC launched one of its bookish link-ups of composers. Tippett was hugely inspired by Beethoven but to the ear there isn't much enlightenment in putting them side by side, except with a handful of pieces - mostly chamber, so not part of the series. Artur Pizarro gave an absorbing performance of Beethoven's Second Concerto: very broad in tempo, sustaining spans of phrasing with firm, decisive tone, and leaving all the time in the world to relish the cross-talk between piano and orchestra and the rhythms of the finale. It was intelligent, scrupulous - and wrong if Beethoven actually meant the instructions 'con brio' and 'molto allegro', for this had the brio of a week's retreat for meditation.

Conducted by Nicholas Cleobury, the orchestra released its pent-up pace and fire in The Consecration of the House, and it looked as though the series' main impact might be to rehabilitate Beethoven's quirky, underplayed late overtures. That was to reckon without the lean, discursive sobriety of Tippett's early-mature First Symphony, in a superbly prepared and delivered performance.

A series to enjoy one piece at a time.

From Paul Spicer's professional Finzi Singers, taking their bright sound and vigorous part-singing to St John's Smith Square, London, on Monday, there came heartening signs of renewal - not in format but in the whole tradition of English unaccompanied choral music. They gave some strong pieces by Warlock and Bax, to be sure. But their three modern pieces made up the evening's most consistent and individual repertoire, whether by John Casken (The Land of Spices), Steve Martland (Skywalk - tender and rapt), or David Matthews, whose ravishing chordal textures and (for the singers) demands on control in The Ship of Death were met with glowing tone.

If this means a trend, the Society for the Promotion of New Music confirmed it by beginning its 50th anniversary celebrations with a BBC Singers workshop on Tuesday afternoon at the Maida Vale studios in London. How Still the Hawk by Karen Markham, and Missa Brevis by David Phelan, with its gift of strong, simple, firmly shaped ideas, showed that the medium has plenty of life in it yet.