Two performances of solo Dutilleux works were the highlights of Tuesday's concerts in the week-long series by the Park Lane Group's Young Artists - which ended last night. There was scintillating drama in the dazzling colours that cellist Alice Neary created in the Trois Strophes sur le Nom de Sacher. Dutilleux's invention transforms the instrument into everything from a guitar accompanying its own serenade to a furious cannonade of snapped strings.
Waka Hasegawa's account of one of Dutilleux's piano preludes, Le Jeu des Contraires, was a keenly delineated play of opposites, as if the textures of Debussy's piano music had been fantastically enhanced. In Martin Butler's Piano Sonata, another work of strikingly contrasted moods, Hasegawa captured the souped-up syncopations of the faster sections as well as the limpid stillness of the work's reflective centre.
The sparsity of Kurtág and Holliger allowed Brigitte and Yvonne Lang to demonstrate their impressive concentration and command in a concert of violin and piano music. Adam Gorb's Violin Sonata, on the other hand, gave them the opportunity to indulge in a post-romantic wallow of Prokofiev-like violence and saccharine modality.
The eclecticism of the programmes was both their greatest asset and most obvious weakness. The Beaumont Reed Trio premiered Richard Lannoy's Fabric'n'Phrazed - the unfortunate progeny of a supposedly cutting-edge crossover of drum'n'bass and classical. Its limp, literal "fusion" amounted to no more than an anaemic dance track over-dubbed by predictable riffs from the instrumentalists.
But Luke Stoneham's Ubiquitous Hums was an effective vehicle for Matthew Sharp's polyvalent talents as cellist, singer and actor. Sharp and his accompanist, Dominic Harlan, hummed and hammed magnificently through Stoneham's repetitive, obsessive textures and games of false endings.
Showing that the quality of performance was sometimes higher than that of the music chosen, Christian Immler gave an amazingly committed account of Aribert Reimann's uncompromisingly dreary song-cycle Shine and Dark. The bitter nostalgia and pastoral evocations of Geoffrey Poole's Five Brecht Songs provided a more winning revelation of Immler's svelte baritone.
