For those who feel that supporting young performers and new music must be a good thing, the Park Lane Group's annual Young Artists series offers the perfect new year's resolution: intense, worthy, high-quality, and all over by the second weekend in January.
Fifteen world premieres are promised this year; the opening pair of concerts included two. Kate Romano's new Nocturne featured in Rachael Tobin's solo cello programme. Some unwieldy chordal writing in its middle section seemed to tax Tobin, but she's a responsive, committed player who was elegant in John Casken's Spring Cadenza, and mesmerising in the lilting last movement of Dallapiccola's Ciaccona, Intermezzo e Adagio. And even if Jonathan Harvey's 1982 Curve with Plateaux came across as the more substantial and effective piece, Romano's work, its upward-curving lines underpinned by resonating plucked notes, was the more consistently atmospheric.
Half of the second concert belonged to the violinist Jane Gordon and pianist Jan Rautio, two individually strong players making a well-matched team. They were formidable in Après un Silence by John Casken, one of this year's featured composers, interweaving their lines lyrically and creating a surge of energy at the start. Martin Dalby's Unicorn went with a flow that made some other works sound ponderous; Luke Bedford's haunting Dream Thou and the brief yet effective Vernal Equinox by Elena Firsova - the other featured composer - made others seem indulgent.
However, the highlights came from a perhaps unexpected source: the young Serbian accordionist Milos Milivojevic. Berio's Sequenza No 13 - its first UK performance - and Lindberg's frenzied Jeux d'Anches showed him to be a serious and fearless virtuoso. But it had been in Anthony Gilbert's new Rose Luisante, inspired by a window in Bayeux Cathedral and drawing on the accordion's associations with French music and the organ, that we had been first introduced to the intensity, colour and even sensuality of Milivojevic's playing. Judging by the speed with which Gilbert bounded on to the platform to shake his hand afterwards, he was a very happy composer.
· Series runs until Friday. Box office: 020-7960 4242.
