Forty this year, Francisco Coll is now established as one of the most compelling and distinctive voices among the younger generation of European composers, and his development over almost 15 years between 2009 and 2023 is traced out in these five instrumental and ensemble works, all played with great virtuosity by members of The Hague-based New European Ensemble. It’s a remarkably assured collection; even the earliest work here, the ensemble piece Piedras, with its parade of brilliantly coloured musical images which are managed so confidently, shows the startling fertility of the Valencia-born composer’s aural imagination, and the same ability to conjure up ideas with an utterly distinctive rhythmic and melodic profile is displayed on a smaller scale in the four movements for flute, viola and guitar of ... De voz aceitunada, which was written in 2010 and then revised in 2023.
The influence of flamenco, which had first appeared in Coll’s music around the middle of the previous decade, is clearly heard in the yearning viola solo that opens the third movement of the revised ... De voz aceitunada, while in the three-movement Taleas oblicuas for oboe and ensemble, first performed in 2023, it’s the sheer brilliance of the instrumental writing that is so compelling, as the solo instrument skates across ever-changing percussion-dominated surfaces, interrupted by moments of profound lyrical introspection.
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