David Bates, Katie Littlemore and Cordelia Williams, who all performed at the Children's Chance Majors and Minors Gala Concert. DA4667P2MUSIC spanned the generations last Friday night when stars of the world operatic stage shared the local platform with rising talent of a new age. The gala concert was in aid of the charity, Children's Chance, for whose fifth anniversary appeal the event raised more than £2,500.

Fresh from triumphs at Covent Garden, where she appears in Sweeney Todd, and the New York Metropolitan, Salisbury based mezzo-soprano Rosalind Plowright opened a remarkable programme with a selection from Carmen, Tchaikovsky and Gounod designed to exploit the range of an operatic voice of Wagnerian proportions.

Then came Katie Littlemore, a diminutive violinist with a precocious record of attainment for a 14- year-old that already embraces the Proms and the Vintner's Hall. Playing an early 18th century violin from Bologna, she delighted the gathering with Gypsy music by de Sarasate.

Highlight of the evening, however, in more ways than one, was a performance by the distinguished counter tenor James Bowman whose artistry in Handel's Where'er You Walk and Britten's Sally Gardens in particular possessed all the deceptive ease of the consummate professional.

As if this were not enough, Bowman summoned back to the stage former Bishop Wordsworth's School pupil and Salisbury Cathedral choral scholar David Bates, who is making quite a fist of a counter tenor's career for himself these days. The younger counter tenor enjoyed the thrill of a duet with the master in Purcell's Sound the Trumpet.

In any other company, 15 year-old Cordelia Williams, who has been performing piano recitals since she was eight, would have been the star attraction with her stylish performance of a Chopin sonata, but then so would the distinguished cellist Lionel Handy who held us with Schumann's Five Pieces in Folk Style.

Add the accompanists, Hanover professor Jeffrey Smith, former Cathedral organist Richard Seal and harpsichord soloist Sharon Gould, and the powerful appeal of the campaign to give promising youngsters to play anything from music to tennis is clear.

Kevin Catchpole