The Melbourne Symphony Orchestra has announced the premiere of Francisco Coll’s Piano Concerto for Kirill Gerstein, conducted by Jaime Martín, in May 2025.

The work, which will last around twenty minutes, was commissioned by Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. It will receive its world premiere from Simon Rattle and the BRSO on 26 March and its Spanish premiere in Valladolid with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León – where Coll is Artistic Partner – in April.

The work complements two existing compositions for piano and orchestra in Coll’s catalogue: the Piano Concertino (2012) – written for Nicolas Hodges and subsequently performed by Thomas Adès and the CBSO – and Ciudad sin sueño (2023) – a 20-minute fantasia for piano and orchestra premiered by Javier Perianes and Gustavo Gimeno in February 2024 in London and Toronto, loosely inspired by Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain.

In December 2024 Gerstein premiered Coll’s Two Waltzes Toward Civilization – a 10-minute work inspired by Lorca’s Poet in New York -  at Chamber Music in Napa Valley before outings at Severance Hall, Carnegie Hall and the Salle Bourgie, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal – a tour lauded by critics. In spring 2025 Gerstein gave European premieres of the work at Saffron Hall, Teatro Petruzzelli (Bari), Don Bosco (Basel), the Musikverein, the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and the Boulez Saal.  Just as Lorca’s verse teeters on the point of crisis, Coll’s dramatic, colourful music of extremes exists on a knife edge.

Coll’s music made a major Australian debut in In September and October 2025, as Trio Isimsiz gave the Australian debut of the Piano Trio (2021) as part of a nationwide Musica Viva tour. A four-movement work of brilliant – but barbed – invention, it takes in everything from allusions to Strauss’ Die schweigsame Frau to a Larghetto ‘imbued by melodic features from the flamenco’, and a ‘hallucinated fugue’ as well as fragments of tango. The trio recorded the 17-minute work in 2023 – it was praised by The Strad as “teeming with rhythmic detail” and “seismic dynamic shifts”.

Limelight was similarly enthused about the work’s Australian premiere: “it takes the classical piano trio by the scruff of the neck and forges a tessellated language which deconstructs as it builds…concise rhythmic, harmonic, melodic and textural gestures contribute to a cohesive language which seem…to have emerged perfectly naturally.”