Piano Concerto
Francisco Coll García was born July 17, 1985, in Valencia, Spain, and lives in Lucerne, Switzerland. He composed his Piano Concerto for pianist Kirill Gerstein at the initial request of conductor Simon Rattle. The work was jointly commissioned by the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo, Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León, and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. The BSO commission was made possible by the New Works Fund of the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency. Kirill Gerstein was soloist and Simon Rattle led the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in the premiere performance at the Herkulessaal in Munich, Germany, on March 26, 2026. American premiere: Kirill Gerstein with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons conducting, October 8-10, 2026, at Symphony Hall.
The score of Francisco Coll’s Piano Concerto calls for solo piano plus an orchestra of piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (four players: crotales, glockenspiel, xylophone, cowbells, tubular bells, mark tree, 2 triangles, flexatone, metal guiro, 3 tin cans, sizzle cymbal, crash cymbals, 2 suspended cymbals, 2 tam-tams, stop sign [street sign, noted as “non-theatrical”], castanets, 2 whistles, slide whistle, wood blocks, temple blocks, whips, chopping board, cajon, tambourine, 2 cardboard boxes, rototoms, snare drum, bass drum, drum kit [splash cymbal, hi-hat, metal box, 4 tom-toms, table tom, kick drum]), harp, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).
I compose as I paint: in layers, through densities and textures. Every musical piece has its painting, its silent double.
—Francisco Coll
Francisco Coll expresses his artistic impulses through both music and visual art. An accomplished painter, he typically creates a painting corresponding to each composition, a practice that explains the process he outlines in the comments above. For many years, Coll kept his paintings private, only recently agreeing to show them publicly. The first-ever exhibition of his work was mounted this past spring in the Pasillo Interactivo gallery of the Centro Cultural Miguel Delibes in Valladolid, Spain, to accompany the first Spanish performances of his Piano Concerto by Kirill Gerstein and the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León under Thierry Fischer’s direction. The exhibit included his large painting Piano Concerto, his visual manifestation of his Piano Concerto.
Visual metaphors are common in talking about music—we speak of the color of sound, describe timbres and textures as bright or dark, liberally use terms like “line” and “palette” and “sound painting.” More than just the visual, the tactility and material presence of the finished artwork (“densities and textures”) and the physical act of painting also resonate with the process of composition, which begins as an idea, an image, and ultimately comes alive in performance.
Coll’s experience as a performer, first as a trombonist and more recently as a conductor, has helped make clear the path between the introspective, abstract process of composing and a work’s final stage, the performance itself. Although no one in his immediate family studied music, he was introduced to classical music by his mother via a set of recordings. Witnessing a recital by the adventurous Swedish trombonist Christian Lindberg was an important event. Coll started composing, he has said, because he’d become tired of the recordings available to him.
Coll initially studied at the conservatories of Madrid and Valencia before moving to London to enroll at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. A great admirer of the music of the British composer Thomas Adès, while still in Spain Coll sent the older composer some of his work unsolicited, which led to Adès inviting him to study privately with him. To date, Coll has been Adès’s only private student. He also worked with Richard Baker at the Guildhall School. His presence in London eventually led to the 2012 London Symphony Orchestra premiere of his short, colorful orchestral work Hidd’n Blue, which has since entered the repertoires of several major orchestras. Adès has consistently programmed Coll’s music. Adès conducted Coll’s Four Iberian Miniatures for violin and chamber orchestra and the premiere of Mural, both at the BBC Proms, and in his role as the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Artistic Partner led Four Iberian Miniatures as part of the 2018 Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood.
Coll’s music continues to be performed frequently in England, and he has developed relationships with many of Europe’s important orchestras. He has been composer in residence with Camerata Bern and Orquesta de València and Artistic Partner with Orquesta Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias, collaborating with the ensemble as both composer and conductor. His music has been performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Luxembourg Philharmonic, London Philharmonic, Bamberg Symphony, and in the U.S. the Seattle Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, and Los Angeles Philharmonic. Along with Adès, the Valencia-born Spanish conductor Gustavo Gimeno has championed Coll’s music, particularly in his role as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Gimeno led the Luxembourg Philharmonic in recordings of Coll’s Mural, Hidd’n Blue, Four Iberian Miniatures, and the Violin Concerto with soloist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, another of the composer’s frequent collaborators. Coll’s music has also been taken up by such international soloists as cellist Sol Gabetta, pianist Javier Perianes, and violinists Augustin Hadelich and Pekka Kuusisto.
Adès and Coll are in many ways kindred spirits, sharing an interest in unexpected combinations of styles, brilliant, energetic textures, far-reaching artistic and philosophical ideas, and wry humor. Both have gravitated toward surrealism and its legacy. Coll, in fact, described both his own and Adès’s music with reference to the Spanish painter Salvador Dalí’s painting of elephants with mosquito-like legs—a jarring but whimsical juxtaposition of familiar concepts. In Coll’s music, this can mean a distortion of a familiar genre like the waltz, references to older music or styles, or glosses on Spanish musical tropes as in Four Iberian Miniatures.
It’s no accident that Kirill Gerstein, who requested and premiered Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, also approached Coll. Gerstein first requested from Coll a solo recital work, resulting in Dos valses hacia la civilización (Two Waltzes Toward Civilization), which Coll felt allowed him to understand and feel more fully Gerstein’s musical sensibilities prior to writing his concerto.
Coll took the title Dos valses hacia la civilización from the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca’s collection Poet in New York, and many of his pieces likewise reveal connections to his artistic influences. His Ciudad sin sueño (City That Does Not Sleep) takes its title from the same Lorca source; he has written solo piano pieces referencing the painters Francisco Goya and Francisco de Zurbarán, and his double concerto for Kopatchinskaja and Gabetta, Les Plaisirs illuminés (Illuminated Pleasures) is named for a Dalí painting. Even more pointedly, Coll’s chamber opera Café Kafka employs text fragments from the famously elusive author. Coll more recently conducted the premiere of his opera Enemigo del pueblo (Enemy of the People) in Valencia in November 2025; it was also staged in Madrid in February 2026. Based on Henrik Ibsen’s play, the opera’s plot parallels the political conflicts that catastrophically derailed coordination of the worldwide response to the COVID pandemic. He also cites the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the filmmakers Béla Tarr, Wim Wenders, and Yorgos Lanthimos, and composers including Mauricio Kagel, George Antheil, George Crumb, and György Ligeti as touchstones. Coll is particularly interested in artists with unique perspectives on reality:
When I was at school, I remember skipping a week of classes to spend my days in the library reading André Breton’s surrealist manifestos. It was an experience that marked me deeply. I felt that a space was opening up before me where perception could expand, and where the concrete, the rational, and the apparently closed could transform themselves and relate to one another in unexpected ways…. I was attracted by the possibility that the conscious and the unconscious, the logical and the absurd, the structured and the spontaneous could coexist.
In its outward form, Francisco Coll’s Piano Concerto mirrors that of the traditional concerto: a three-movement work in the pattern fast-slow-fast, as we find in the concertos of Mozart. The form, then, and equally the basic relationship between the piano and the orchestra, are the familiar foundation.
The titles of the three movements broadly indicate their characters: Humoresque, Balada (ballad or song), Rag. The Humoresque has a scherzo-like quality. The solo part is primarily in a fast three-beat meter, with syncopations and quick slippages into other realms. Several gestures stand out and recur: a series of dense, falling chords and a rising phrase to balance it; a pounding, roiling phrase at the bottom of the piano keyboard; and a light, transparent texture in arpeggiated octaves. Momentary flashes of clear, tonal harmony—very brief—speed by like familiar faces half-recognized in a crowd. (One such moment, perhaps the most audible, is the strings’ minor chord at the end of the movement.) The piano writing is brilliant, virtuosic, and energetic with a touch of cheek; its relationship with the orchestra is, in a sense, conventional, amplifying and punctuating the piano’s gestures. The instrumental palette is incredibly varied and changes swiftly. Coll at times nods to the piano’s percussive character by using the full orchestra as a percussion ensemble.
Originally titled “Paisaje” (“Landscape”), the second-movement Balada is from a different world. Opening in a distinct minor-key tonality, the music is sustained and slow, but the intricately notated rhythm in the solo piano conjures an anguished, poignant tension. Musical ideas of hauntingly Spanish character are heard through nuanced and fragmented layers of instrumental color and chromatic detail. The closing measures for piano alone are devastating.
The Rag finale begins with manic, irregular rhythmic energy reminiscent of Ligeti’s or Conlon Nancarrow’s piano etudes. Double basses and contrabassoon establish a strict pulse that acts as a rondo-like marker recurring throughout the movement. Brief solos for other orchestral instruments comment on and goad the soloist. This energy obtains throughout, with the exception of the episode immediately following the opening, in which a bass clarinet solo accompanies a plaintive passage for the soloist. This plaintive tone returns only in the solo cadenza toward the movement’s close, appearing like a summation of the soloist’s thoughts. A definitive D major cadence is the final surprise.
Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.