"...overflowing imagination and structural richness..." ICMA Jury

Francisco Coll will appear at the ICMA awards ceremony to conduct the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg on April 21 in his piece Aqua Cinerea. This year he receives the ICMA Orchestra Award and the award for Best Contemporary Recording, adding to his 2019 success in the ICMA Composer category.

The OPL, with whom Coll makes his conducting debut, will perform Coll’s 10-minute piece Aqua Cinerea (2005; rev. 2019). As his op.1, Aqua Cinerea offers a foretaste of Coll’s explosive and unsettling compositional imagination, elaborated in a host of works since. Several of these can be heard on the OPL’s 2021 Pentatone recording of Coll’s music, including the Violin Concerto, Hidd'n Blue, and 4 Iberian Miniatures (the latter in a version for violin and orchestra, performed by Patricia Kopatchinskaja.)

The ICMA jury said of Coll: “In just a few years, the young Valencian composer Francisco Coll...has become one of the great realities of contemporary European musical creation. His works, characterized by overflowing imagination and structural richness, as well as by an unquestionable and very attractive technical virtuosity, are commissioned by some of the most important international soloists, ensembles, and orchestras. Moreover, his ability to communicate with a wide audience seems to guarantee a bright future.”

Coll’s recording of Les Plaisirs Illuminés, his double concerto for violin and cello, has also been shortlisted in the Concerto category of the BBC Music Magazine Awards 2022, and for Best Contemporary Music Release