Even in terms of bald statistics, it's impossible not to be impressed by the Park Lane Group's annual Young Artists Series. By the end of this week, 33 young players will have performed 60 20th-century works - the vast majority written in the last decade - including 11 world premieres.
And going by the quality of the first two days of concerts, there is cause for celebration at the excellence of the next generation of performers, and their dedication to new music. Two solo recitals by 18-year-old So-Ock Kim on violin and 16-year-old Wu Qian on piano were outstanding. Both featured some of the most challenging music of the last 20 years, with performances that would grace any of the world's new music stages.
What was so remarkable about Kim's playing was not only her technical mastery, but also the tenderness and warmth she found in music such as Elliott Carter's aphoristic Riconoscenza. And in Brian Ferneyhough's Intermedio alla Ciaccona - a touchstone of contemporary complexity - she created a wildly expressive polyphony at the extremes of the violin's register. This was an immediate, almost romantic, interpretation. The unashamed grandiosity of Nicholas Maw's Solo Sonata completed her programme.
The culmination of Wu Qian's recital was another Carter piece, Night Fantasies for solo piano, an enormous, 25-minute meditation on the elusive imagery of darkness. Qian's performance transcended the work's extraordinary difficulties, illuminating the poetry of Carter's vision with laser-like clarity. Earlier in her programme, Qian performed two of Gyorgy Ligeti's mercurial Etudes, and gave the world premiere of Malcolm Singer's Franco's Gone - Gifts of Tones: A Toccata, an ostinato-obsessed movement in memory of the Italian composer Franco Donatoni, who died last year.
Throughout her and Kim's recitals, there was an unmistakable sense of a personal, emotional involvement with the music, revealing astonishing musical maturity. The featured composer of this year's Young Artists Series is 37-year-old Philip Cashian. Sarah James on saxophone gave the first performance of Cashian's Songs from a Still World, which slowly grew from an eerie whisper to a passionate declamation. Another reflective Cashian piece, Strobod's Violin, for violin and piano, was played by the compelling Ukrainians Dmytro Tkachenko and Alexei Grynyuk.
On the other side of Cashian's creative spectrum was Dancing with Venus for cello and piano. Naomi Williams and Alasdair Beatson relished the music's ghoulish energy. Williams and Beatson also gave the premiere of Luke Bedford's Through Mazes Running, a study in idiomatic, elegiac melody. But there is still room for older classics on the Park Lane programme. Josep Sancho on clarinet and Lila Gailling on piano were engaging advocates of the austerity of Harrison Birtwistle's 1966 Verses, as well as the explosiveness of Peter Maxwell Davies's 1967 Hymnos.
• The series continues until Friday. Box office: 020-7960 4242.
