On 2 December Kirill Gerstein premieres Francisco Coll’s Two Waltzes Toward Civilization in Napa Valley. The 10-minute work was commissioned by John Kongsgaard and Chamber Music in Napa Valley for Kirill Gerstein.
Inspired by Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York, Coll has created a pair of waltzes, both named for poems in the hallucinatory, hard-edged collection. Just as Lorca’s verse teeters on the point of crisis, Coll’s dramatic, colourful music of extremes exists on a knife edge. Waltz in the Branches begins with flourishes and bell-like sounds, before settling into the characteristic triple-time, capturing the capricious and magical mood of the poem’s opening. Little Viennese Waltz follows, borrowing its imaginative pattern from Lorca’s poem: a cheerful, beautiful waltz warped into something much more macabre. A longing, freewheeling melody is underpinned by surreal harmonic and rhythmic changes and breaks down into its constituent gestures as if falling over its own feet. The atmosphere, like that of the poem, grows heavy, heightened, and obsessive.
Further performances follow in December at Cleveland’s Severance Hall, Carnegie Hall, and the Salle Bourgie, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. In March 2025 Gerstein gives European premieres of the work at Saffron Hall, Teatro Petruzzelli (Bari), Don Bosco (Basel), the Musikverein, and the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. In May Two Waltzes receives its German premiere at the Boulez Saal.
Lorca is one of the many touchstones from Spanish modernism to figure in Coll’s creative imagination. …de voz aceitunada, a trio for flute, viola, and guitar (2010, rev. 2021, 2023), takes its title from a line in Lorca’s Ode to Salvador Dalí – the man “of the olive voice”. Ciudad sin sueño, a 20-minute fantasia for piano and orchestra premiered by Javier Perianes and Gustavo Gimeno in February 2024, also shares its name with a poem from Poet in New York (‘City That Does Not Sleep’). It will receive its Spanish premiere from Perianes on 20 December, who is joined by James Gaffigan and the Orquestra de la Comunitat Valenciana.