{TABLE} Catacombs ........................ Raymond Deane Sun Rituals ...................... Andrew Hamilton In Lines of Dazzling Light ....... John Buckley {/TABLE} THE demise of Nua Nos in 1993 was regrettable, as its performances of contemporary music set standards for others' to follow. In 1995, some Nua Nos players formed Sli Nua to continue this work, though with a concentration on Irish composers. Last Thursday, at the Bank of Ireland Arts Centre in Foster Place, Sli Nua played three recent Irish works as part of the bank's "Mostly Modern" series.

These included the premiere of 19 year old, Dublin born Andrew Hamilton's Sun Rituals, the winning entry in the second Mostly Modern/IMRO Young Composers' Competition. This one movement work, scored for piano, violin, cello, clarinet and horn, shows vivid ideas sustained by strong harmonic and contrapuntal techniques. Its rhythmic style seems indebted to later Stravinsky (what better model?), but the language is bang up to date.

Raymond Deane's Catacombs is inspired by the Hartmann painting Catacombae and by the description which Mussorgsky included in his Pictures at an Exhibition. It freely borrows Mussorgsky's ideas from that movement. Deane's is the best sort of musical borrowing, for it avoids, "here's the quotation" techniques and uses adaptations of Mussorgsky to launch and punctuate his own elaborations. The result is in its turn original, strong and engaging.

John Buckley's In Lines of Dazzling Light (1995) adds bassoon to Hamilton's scoring and shows a tighter, more contrapuntal style than much of Buckley's ensemble music. I, found that some of its eight" short sections were among the most convincing work I have heard from this composer.

Fergus O'Carroll directed Sli Nua. The playing did not have the precision of Nina Nos, but it was vigorous and good at conveying the character of each piece.