nd his problem family @ Poetry takes on Broadway Sophie (Rebecea the closing duet. Anne Evans haa clearly chosen to retire atthe peak of her powers, Since her voice, with its cool, silvery tone, sounds much as | itdia 30 years ago. When it | was over, Mackerras, whose conducting captured something of the resigned sadness of the occasion, led | her baek to the platform fora standing ovation. Before the interval, Mackerras gave us the Symphonic Fragment from Siratse's Die Liebe der Danae exquisitely shaped, though the BBCSO’ dry-ish sound | il suits this music— before aking way fora performance fn den Baum Daphne, tonduicted by Stephen Cleabry. One of Strauss’ tars aray’s ints accom: Jyitten in4943 a5 a pendant to Daphne and reworks thematie material from the operas closing pages. vocal writing, covering | extremes of range, is murderou Tdeally, it also needs a larger choir than the com bined forces of the BBC Singers and the Choristers of | Kings College Cambridge | who sang it with aplomb | rather than ease, while much of the detail was blurred by the unflattering Jacqui Dankworth Guiting Power festival FAKE Singer Jacqui Dankworth has just made the best album of her career (As the Sun Shines Down on Me, for jazz label Candid), and surrounded herself with premier-league iazz improvisers in her brother Alec on bass, Mike Outram on guitar and Roy Dodds on drums. The album's tracks domin. ated the last night of this fes- tival in the village of Guiting Power, near Cheltenham. But Dankworth also stepped outside its predominantly fragile and occasional playful Latin party musi. Her range often echoes that of her mother Cleo Laine in its stretch from airy high sounds to a reverberating low purr. But ifthe singer found her strength in the upper atmosphere to be ‘occasionally faltering in the first half, her rich tonal palette, some very distinctive new angles on familiar jazz songs and the buoyancy of the players' variations gave the show a momentum that swept the tremors aside. Alec, one of the best jazz-bass exponents, fired off a sueces- sion of urgent solos that were all resoundingly different. ‘Outram is a young jazz guitarist with world-class credentials, and his sympa. support for the band ler was a centrepiece of the performance ‘Outram indicated the chapter-like development of his improvisations on a softly padding September in ‘the Rain, The guitarist and reworked Blue Moon as g, with Dankworth spinning spookily up from a distant low thunder to a fading falsetto. Soul-phrasing lent poignancy to a heartfelt Not Like This, and a similarly low-key duet with Outram on the second half’s Ina Senti pod was exquisite. guitar-vocals duet that caught the song's ecstatic essence, anda Ben Okri poem furnished some of the best lyri of the night. Drummer Dodds uncoiled a quirkily soft-sounding Latin-drums break on This Can't Be Love, and an encore on Bob Dylan's I Threw It All Away stirred some of the singer's most subtly dramatic manipula: tions ofa lyric, and the most elegantly melodic of solos from Outram. John Fordham |Escapade _ South Bank Centre, London_ eke ‘Anear kiss: the eyes look, but the lips don't touch. This exact moment of aching suspense, astaple of many Bollywood films, drives the drama of Escapade, an open- air extravaganza. Produced by south Asian dance organi: sation Akademi, conceived | by its director Mira Kaushik | and directed by Keith Khan, Escapade involves 10 choreo- graphers and more than 100 performers from a diverse range of professional, ‘community and education ‘groups. It deliriously captures the spark of a London-based, Asian- influenced cultural vibrancy. Escapade opens not with an archetypal pair of romantic leads, but with 12 couples, of both genders, each enacting their own scenario of desire, rebuttal or coneiliation. But, as in the Dest musical films, the narrative is simply a pretext for the numbers, and the drama blossoms into spectacle. Dressed in neon colours, wigged, jewelled, booted and slippered, performers take over the concrete walkways as loud. speakers blare a heady mix of Hindi film songs, R&B, rock and club beats above the throng of spectators. Line- dancing Bollywood babes flash seductive glances from a balcony, while a posse of punk women get down to an urban vibe in the underpass below. Leggy ballet types flail their extendible limbs, school kids act out film-star fantasies, skateboarders surf the | ramps, and an open-topped red bus laden with “Indian tourists” chugs into the fray. The action culminates at the back of the building, the wall becominga giant screen showing two lovers about to kiss. They are censored by’ jump-cut to an Indian family, whose lightly comic struggles for control ofthe video remote send the projection. into dizzying rewinds, play- backs and channel-hops. Meanwhile, the live performers spill out onto balconies and podiums: Indian Chau dancers are kitted in bandanas and low- slung shorts and the aston ishing Anand Kumar rolls up fora rivetting mix of film Kathak tips is: do the lovers finally get to kiss? After countless near-misses, they do, igniting exuberant bopping as fireworks explode triumphantly from the roof, ‘Sanjoy Roy