Park Lane Group Young Artists, Purcell Room, London
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Your support makes all the difference.Now in its 48th season, this worthy PLG enterprise can, in prospect, conjure up visions of listening to endless solo works for accordion or bassoon composed by retired BBC producers with too much time on their hands. But though the format of this series has remained the same for longer than anyone can remember, there are always some excellent performers. And there is now further expansion of these activities, with a jazz weekend as well as a symposium for student composers.
The first evening of the 2004 series, on Monday, offered 12 pieces by mainly British composers, including John Casken and Elena Firsova. Female string players (from the Royal Academy of Music, like all the players reviewed here), provide two thirds of the evening. The 20-year-old cellist Rachael Tobin offers a brave recital of unaccompanied works, including Jonathan Harvey's beautiful Curve with Plateaux, all well chosen to demonstrate her often bold as well as welcomingly warm tone. Perhaps because of nerves, she's not always convincing when responding to the ebb and flow of phrasing or controlling tension; though in Kate Romano's plaintive new Nocturne, the sagging shape seems more the fault of the composer.
The more confident 24-year-old violinist Jane Gordon brings not only a ravishing tone and depth of timbre but a real sense of musical line to everything she plays. The combination of Slav volatility and frozen strangeness in Firsova's Vernal Equinox brings out her ability to manage musical contrasts with ease, while Casken's Après un silence shows both Gordon and her pianist - the 23-year-old Russian Jan Rautio - in the best light of all, vividly projecting this impressively ambiguous work's varying moods.
Yet it is the accordionist - perhaps surprisingly, but not for the first time in my experiences of the PLG bonanza - who steals the show. The 19-year-old Milos Milivojevic is a very serious Serb indeed; he doesn't smile once, even after capping his contributions with a searing account of Magnus Lindberg's Jeux d'Anches. But, playing everything from memory, he demonstrates not merely that this squeeze-box is capable of passion and power, but all the drama and nuance you'd hope for in a performer on a more promising instrument.
The contrasting challenges of Berio's Sequenza No 13 and Skempton's Twin Set and Pearls are met by Milivojevic with equal focus, drawing you irresistibly into the music's centre. And in Anthony Gilbert's new Rose luisante he appears to penetrate straight to the heart of the music's soul. While there are always some composers in these PLG recitals whom one scarcely hears elsewhere these days, Gilbert's piece movingly proves this can sometimes be a shame.
The final PLG Young Artists concerts are tonight and tomorrow at 6pm and 7.30pm (020-7960 4242)
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