Hackney Music Development Trust's latest initiative is a dramatic cantata involving many collaborative partners. Librettist Tertia Sefton-Green, the trust's project director, selected the text from the writings of Jewish children at the time of the Holocaust, while composers Jonathan Dove and Matthew King set the libretto to music, much of their contribution being created during workshops with schoolchildren from the UK and abroad.

Hear Our Voice's international dimension extends to the participation of school choirs from Nuremberg and Prague and a youth orchestra from Fürth, all of whom took part in this world premiere performance, following which the show tours to Germany and the Czech Republic.

With a film by Marta Hruba providing backdrops to Clare Whistler's simple staging, the realisation of this ambitious project as music theatre is nevertheless only a partial success. The texts themselves - poems, extracts from diaries and in a few cases later reminiscences - are often intensely moving and almost beyond criticism, while the jointly composed score is a fluent and practical piece of work well-aimed at its intended performers.

They are not unduly challenged by it, but then neither are listeners. The ability to produce something of real musical quality for children to perform is a rare one, and too often Hear Our Voice floats along on a tide of the familiar and the facile. The piece's power derives essentially from the pure eloquence of the words and the commitment of the young performers, which is prodigious.

Eloquence, too, characterises soprano Alison Buchanan's singing of the narrative role of the Survivor, as well as Peter Selwyn's clearly inspiring conducting. Whistler's direction is largely confined to synchronised gestures and straightforward groupings, and the most involving images in Hruba's film are the infinitely poignant faces taken from archive photographs.

But whatever its limitations as a work of art, the value of the project in educational terms is immeasurable.