EVEN by their own peerless standards, the musicians of the Hebrides Ensemble excelled themselves in their scintillating academy recital at the weekend. Usually, when a new work is included in the programme, musicians get it out of the way

first, before proceeding to more familiar fare.

The Hebrides, on Friday, kept the new composition till last, and, in so doing, held an ace up their sleeves. Seldom have I heard a work by a student composer which was more immediate in its impact, more lucid in its intention, better crafted, or sparkling in its effect than the mischievously-entitled Impog (a conflation of Imp and Ogre), written by Claire Griffin, Dublin-born post-graduate composer in her early twenties, now studying at the RSAMD.

Not only was Impog extremely well-written for the septet of instruments in The Hebrides (string trio, wind trio, and piano), but its strongly rhythmic impetus, with persistent two-chord jazzy punctuations, and a pungent flavour somewhere between Gershwin and Stravinsky, was presented with fire and exuberance by the brilliantly-prepared Hebrides players.

It also formed a good counterpart to Stravinsky's phenomenally intricate and exquisitely structured Septet at the start of the programme - a real rarity that here achieved the attention it deserved from these top-drawer musicians (in a group that, for the first time as far as I'm aware, featured a student player in Christine Smith, an alert, articulate horn player who more than held her own among her mature virtuoso colleagues).

In between the two septets, The Hebrides played Glinka's Trio Pathetique, an oddball, bottom-drawer piece that had little to say, and Jean Francaix's String Trio, a first-class piece that said everything with subtlety, and scarcely raised its voice in doing so.