For 50 years the PLG has fulfilled its original intentions splendidly: promoting new young musicians already remarked in the profession but hardly known by the public, and - especially more recently - in programmes of mostly contemporary music.
Their record is impressive, with many successful artists and composers owing some of their first notices to prescient PLG invitations. This is hardly surprising, for the selection team has many artists and composers of a modern bent.
The PLG's double concert on Tuesday, part of their annual South Bank week (which boasts an enviable list of patrons), began with the Veya Saxophone Quartet: two boys and two girls, all graduates of the Royal Northern College of Music. There cannot be much of a repertoire for this ensemble, but they have found some and commissioned more.
Though four saxophones make a big, homogeneous sound, with nothing like the variety and subtlety of a string quartet, the Veyas compensate with fleetness and precision. They offered a jazzy, spiky piece by Joe Cutler, a dramatic but over-long one by the late Tristan Keuris and mild, pleasant things from Judith Bingham, Gabriel Jackson and the Americanised Richard Rodney Bennett (characteristically professional and ingratiating). One of these days they may find - or inspire - a really good piece to test their mettle.
The main concert involved two duos, the pianists David Eaton and James Young with the percussionists Oliver Cox and Owen Gunnell. Inevitably, their programme had to culminate in Bartók's splendid Sonata for just that ensemble, but there was also Berio's Linea for them too.
By themselves the pianists offered refined delicacy in Dutilleux's Figures de résonances and rollicked noisily through Kenneth Hesketh's Vecherinka (inspired by a Gogol party-scene); the percussionists had fun with Resolution, by another "featured composer" in this PLG week, Michael Zev Gordon, and especially with their own highly effective transcriptions of three Ligeti piano sketches.
As for the Bartók Sonata, they judged all its varied moods admirably; another two or three performances should hone it to tighter precision. I wondered whether they had listened to the old recording by the composer and his wife; they could usefully take tips from what that duo did with the dark Lento and the witty, humorous finale.
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