The Park Lane Group series of concerts is nothing if not worthy. Over five days each new year, a stream of young musicians play programmes devoted to new music, exploring a huge range of repertoire and showcasing their talents on the South Bank. But it's sometimes easy to forget the necessity of the enterprise, listening to stodgy and unimaginative programmes that seem to be foisted upon the young performers.

This year's featured composers are Elena Firsova and John Casken, and their pieces connected the two concerts on Tuesday. However, they produced the least convincing performances of the evening. Anna Dennis is a dynamic young soprano, but she sounded ill at ease in Casken's bland and lugubrious song cycle, La Orana, Gauguin. Equally unflattering was Firsova's maudlin and monochrome setting of three Osip Mandelstam texts. But Dennis and her accompanist, John Reid, showed the potential of their partnership in a searing performance of Kurtag's Requiem for the Beloved, in which the soprano created a devastating portrait of emotional torment.

Pianist Daniel Becker played Firsova's overwrought Elegy, but his strongest performance was his world premiere of Paul Whitmarsh's mercurial Bagatelle. In both concerts, it was as if the Firsova and Casken pieces had been thrust upon the performers, rather than being a vital part of their repertoire.

And yet there were moments of real inspiration. The Aurora Ensemble played Elliott Carter's early Wind Quintet, composed in 1948, with energy and enthusiasm, and they revealed a work of syncopated playfulness that sounded like a prototype of his recent music. It was an enthralling interpretation, and a glimpse of the passion that 20th-century repertoire can inspire in the next generation of performers.

· Series runs until Friday. Box office: 020-7960 4242.