Francisco Coll’s Cello Concerto (2022) received a celebrated UK premiere at a sold-out BBC Prom on 18 August; Sol Gabetta, the work’s dedicatee, was joined by Tianyi Lu and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. The commission for the Cello Concerto was led by Kammerorchester Basel with the support of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, with co-commissioners Radio France and BBC Radio 3; it premiered, with Coll conducting, at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2022, and received its Swiss premiere from Coll and Kammerorchester Basel in January 2023.
The 20-minute work is cast in four unbroken movements. After the jerky, syncopated rhythms of the opening, the second movement turns to transparent and crystalline sonorities before a more agitated waltz sequence breaks through. The third movement, Misterioso, sees an impassioned song-like soliloquy from the cello against a numinous backdrop of strings, before a cadenza; the Festoso finale bursts forth with a gesture that turns the work’s opening on its head. The work’s lyrical middle sections were tailored, Coll has said, to underline the special qualities of Gabetta’s highly expressive vibrato and songlike playing.
Gabetta followed her performance of the concerto with the premiere of The secret life of T – an encore written especially for the occasion. The tango-inspired showpiece lasts 2 ½ minutes and is inspired by Gabetta’s Argentinian background. Listen again to both concerto and encore on BBC Sounds.
Typically for Coll, the concerto packs a huge amount of instrumental energy into its compact four movements, with textures jostling and colliding with each other in the outer movements…While always remaining unmistakably itself, the stylistic frame of Coll’s music is deliriously wide…dislocated rhythms also seem to hark back to the cubist world of Stravinsky’s wartime pieces for string quartet…
The Guardian (Andrew Clements) 19 August 2024 ****
…it feels like a substantial slow movement, mournful with mysterious overtones, flanked by two jagged, irregular dances…Coll’s writing for the orchestra has acquired a bracing, clean-cut, modern edge…Gabetta is a fine ambassador for the concerto.
Financial Times (Richard Fairman) 19 August 2024
…it travels through contrasting emotional territory as well as stretching the cello as far as it can go... From a sense of opening anxiety…the concerto soon relaxed into long, lyrical lines in the highest cello register, set against softly chirring accompaniment from woodwind and strings. All of this was quite magical…there was much chamber-like delicacy in the piece, the astute balances between cello and orchestra maintained throughout…
Bachtrack (Alexander Hall) 18 August 2024 ****
Coll provides beautiful cantilena passages too for the cellist…The middle movements are often movingly beautiful…The orchestral texture is well balanced; it never covers the solo cello but feeds it…There is a transparent dialogue between solo cello and orchestra, often with humorous contributions…
Seen and Heard International (Agnes Kory) 18 August 2024
The Cello Concerto is Coll’s fourth collaboration with Gabetta, who, with violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, premiered Coll’s double concerto Les Plaisirs Illuminés (2018), commissioned by Camerata Bern. Their subsequent recording of the piece on Alpha Classics won the 2022 BBC Music Magazine concerto prize. He also composed the Rizoma for the duo in 2017, which appeared on Sol & Pat (2021, Alpha Classics) and has toured widely. In 2021 he composed Dialog ohne Worte for Gabetta and Bertrand Chamayou, a 2 ½ minute work that they recorded for their 2024 album Mendelssohn on Sony Classical.
In December 2024 Kirill Gerstein premieres Coll’s Waltzes Toward Civilisation, a 12-minute work for solo piano that takes its title from Federico Garcia Lorca. Gerstein gives the first performance at Chamber Music in Napa Valley, before touring it to Severance Hall, Carnegie Hall, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, and, in 2025, the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian and Boulez Saal. On 20 December Coll’s Ciudad sin sueño makes its Spanish debut with Javier Perianes and the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana conducted by James Gaffigan. A 20-minute fantasia for piano and orchestra, it also takes its title from Lorca and follows the pattern of Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain; Perianes premiere the piece with Gustavo Gimeno and the London Philharmonic Orchestra in February 2023.