As stimulating as new year's resolutions - and, one fears, as quickly forgotten after a fortnight - the Park Lane Group's January concerts pack more than 30 young musicians playing mostly contemporary music into a week. No doubt about the first night's stars. A female vocal trio called juice (trendy lower-case name, naturally) proved as tangy as their moniker.

They have light, folky voices and a delightful manner: big smiles; music memorised so that they communicate directly. But there's nothing casual about their technical skills. They breezed through the brilliant, Berio-like vocal effects of a piece called luna-cy by one of their members, Kerry Andrew, then deftly sang two exquisite carols by Nicola LeFanu.

Later they displayed their theatre skills in six surreal melodramas from Roger Marsh's Pierrot Lunaire - with another composer, Robert Fokkens, matching them histrionic for histrionic as a highly-wrought narrator. The latter's own wittily minimalist Words, James Lindsay's rap-inspired Sanbiki no Kashikoi Saru, and two well-crafted songs by Piers Hellawell completed the contribution of a group that could have a big future in cabaret.

I was less dazzled by the Harpham String Quartet and the cello-piano duo of Gemma Rosefield and Nicola Eimer. The Harpham must have put countless hours into Helmut Lachenmann's String Quartet No 3, Grido. But I'm afraid my brain was grido-locked well before the end of this pointillist mix of scrapes and screeches. And although the players plunged robustly through the quick movements of Malcolm Arnold's schizophrenic Second String Quartet, they never mustered the tonal reserves to bring out its melancholy lyricism.

As for Rosefield, she has a big, luscious tone, but put no memorable stamp on Shostakovich's Cello Sonata (where Eimer was the more impressive partner). Still, I enjoyed Cecilia McDowell's Falling Angels, a limpid homage to Venice. And although James Francis Brown's Prospero's Isle could have been written in 1906 rather than 2006, it had a well-schooled, solid feel that suited Rosefield's playing.

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