Coll - Violin Concerto; Mural, etc review | Andrew Clements's classical album of the week

The Guardian 0

Patricia Kopatchinskaja/Luxembourg PO/Gustavo Gimeno
(Pentatone)
The violinist has unlocked new expressiveness in the Spanish composer’s music since Gimeno introduced them

The first disc devoted exclusively to orchestral music by Francisco Coll traces a neat trajectory through his development over the last decade and a half. The earliest piece here is Coll’s opus 1, Aqua Cinerea, composed in 2005 when he was 19; the most recent is his Violin Concerto, written for Patricia Kopatchinskaja in 2019. It’s been a hugely impressive development, taking the flair for vivid orchestral colouring and stark, sometimes shocking juxtapositions of imagery that was evident from the start in Coll’s music in ever more distinctive and personal directions, while never forgetting the debt his music owes to tradition, whether modernist or more specifically Spanish.

The nervy, unstable rhythms of Hidd’n Blue, first performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under Coll’s teacher Thomas Adès in 2012, largely continue where Aqua Cinerea left off. But the five-movement Mural, which followed four years later, is much more substantial, almost symphonic attempt to reconcile past and present, to build something fresh from the rubble of musical history, while the Four Iberian Miniatures, for violin and chamber orchestra, lovingly and wittily adopts the rhythms and rawness of Spanish dance from tango to flamenco.