Fantasy liberalism?

London Sinfonietta/Tavener | Pentonville Prison, London

Marking the arrival of Britain's first Human Rights Act with a prison concert seemed an unlikely rush of fantasy liberalism - on a par with the police setting up a Stephen Lawrence Institute. Sure enough, Pentonville's performance on Monday was a neat coincidence between two politics-free zones, the London Sinfonietta's long-running community programme and the capital's current festival of music by Sir John Tavener.

Marking the arrival of Britain's first Human Rights Act with a prison concert seemed an unlikely rush of fantasy liberalism - on a par with the police setting up a Stephen Lawrence Institute. Sure enough, Pentonville's performance on Monday was a neat coincidence between two politics-free zones, the London Sinfonietta's long-running community programme and the capital's current festival of music by Sir John Tavener.

We old lags in the reviewing fraternity knew what to expect. Even so, the experience held some surprises. Anti-racism posters had gone up in the entrance lobby. Survivors of the security check and the first round of double doors walked on to a barred gate, rattling keys and a mock-cheery bellow of, "Welcome to Pentonville". Unlike other prison arts events, this one took us right through the Victorian cell block, clattering up an iron stairway to the bland, 20th-century chapel.

The sense of having wandered onto a film set continued. A sea of white faces, half of them familiar from the music world, filled the audience space. In one corner was a small multicultural island, whose more relaxed and animated air gave it away as the prisoners' chorus. Tavener's programme note said that the piece should be performed in "a resonant acoustic". But the sound was clear enough to hear anybody's whispers. When the Sinfonietta's education manager thanked prison staff, the audience clapped rapturously and the chorus fell about laughing.

Reality arrived with the music. Mark van de Wiel played solo clarinet music by Stravinsky, short and spiky, to intense concentration and warm applause from the inmates. Mary King sang Stravinsky's dry Shakespeare settings to some bemusement, but had a hit with the one about feared cuckoldry (close to home for the long-stayers). Then the show became Tavener's and the residents'. His Lord's Prayer drew an extraordinary sound from the 20-odd Europeans and Afro-Caribbeans. Half of them held their line, half strayed, but the tone was as fervent and rhythmically fluent as an east European male choir.

Tavener, obviously moved, rose to give a little sermon. "We're all obsessed with technical perfection," he said, and it came from the heart. His new piece, In One Single Moment, sets a prayer text citing "the well-disposed thief". "We're all thieves," he observed. "Every single one of us is in prison." Like his music, the sentiment may look bathetic on paper, but when uttered, it has a simplicity that can touch depths shunned by his more ironic colleagues.

The same quality had caused My Gaze Is Ever upon You - his haunting sequence of miniatures for two violins punctuated by the slow breathing of a deep double-bass drone - to hold prisoners and visitors alike in total silence. And in the new piece it led him to echo the choral sentences at the front of the room with strings at the back: warmth and intensity offsetting finely tuned harmony, the two elements linked by a group of inmates playing bells among the strings, and by some gleeful grinning around the back of Terry Edwards' patient conducting.

Afterwards, the mystery member of the chorus wearing a suit declared himself as the prison governor, who had been responsible for commissioning the piece. By all accounts this was an institutional as well as a musical success. All the same, such events don't really show some new human face of the penal process. Rather, they spotlight the waste of human potential that prisons otherwise routinely enforce. It is therefore crucial for the musical processes, once started, to continue - and it's good to know that the musicians will be going back.