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Want to introduce your child to the classics? Then maybe the queen of the toy store can help. Lynne Walker reports
She's a successful businesswoman, a member of a rock band and a women's world cup soccer player. As if that wasn't enough, the anatomically improbable, plastic queen of the toy stores has a new mission. She's out to introduce classical music to a young generation of fans, aged three upwards, in a touring concert programme called Barbie at the Symphony.
I'm sitting amid a sea of pink in Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall, wishing that I too had some fuschia pop-up wings. A lot of children, mainly little girls, are chattering excitedly about their idol, probably unaware that they are there to "learn about classical music" the Barbie way. By the way, that's 15 a head (no concessions) for an hour's music.
On to the platform comes the ponytailed American conductor Arnie Roth, who has put together the Barbie at the Symphony compilation. The orchestra, led by a reassuringly un-Barbie-like female, begins rather sleepily with part of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker. The ballet about Clara's Christmas encounter with a nutcracker doll formed the basis of the first computer-animated film in the "Princess" series, launched by the American toy giant and Barbie creators, Mattel, in 2000.
"It was the perfect choice," explains Roth when I speak to him before the concert,...