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NEWS/PREMIERE OF THE MONTH
CLIMATIC FINALE: Performers at the Incheon Art Center in South Korea were among 15 orchestras around the world uniting for the project The [uncertain] Four Seasons, a reimagining of Vivaldi’s composition against a backdrop of climate change. Performed by different orchestras around the world, each score has been altered using an algorithm incorporating climate modelling for predicted changes in rainfall, biodiversity and extreme weather events in 2050. The jarringly mutated music is designed to show how the world could be changed in 2050, if climate change goes unchecked; the performances coincided with the COP26 conference in Glasgow, UK. Five of the performances can be viewed at bit.ly/3I9BlDs. Photo: courtesy AKQA
From tango to Strauss, a composer’s first piano trio is the definition of variety
COMPOSER Francisco Coll
WORK Piano Trio
ARTISTS Trio Isimsiz
DATE 24 January 2022
PLACE Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain bit.ly/3rkWJj0
Francisco Coll
COLL PHOTO JUDITH LÖTSCHER. TRIO ISIMSIZ PHOTO GABRIEL MARA ISSERLIS
Trio Isimsiz
An all-Spanish cast, from composer and performer to commissioner and host, will present Francisco Coll’s first Piano Trio this month. Commissioned by Spain’s National Centre for Musical Diffusion and the Aldeburgh Festival, the collaboration stemmed from a conversation between Coll and Trio Isimsiz violinist Pablo Hernán a few years prior: ‘Pablo asked if I would write a piano trio,’ Coll recalls. ‘I thought it was a great idea. It was clear they wanted a substantial work.’ Staying true to the trio’s request, Coll’s piece is rich in contrasting styles and influences, ‘a voyage between the familiar and unconventional’, he says. The work’s four movements each recall classical forms, allowing Coll to ‘play with history’. More generally, he says he enjoys experiencing the ‘same traditional troubles composition has created over centuries’. The piano trio, he says, is just the place to do it.
The work begins with an allusion to Richard Strauss’s comic opera Die schweigsame Frau (‘The Silent Woman’). It is angular, with jutting quavers driving towards a quadruple forte only seven bars in. The Larghetto is ‘imbued by melodic features from the flamenco’, says Coll, while the third movement, is a ‘hallucinated fugue’, gradually returning to the work’s angular origins. The finishing Allegro is tangled with fragments of tango, waltz and the aforementioned Strauss.
Such a cornucopia of musical elements demands not only a skilled composer, but versatile players and instruments. ‘Strings have practically unlimited resources in terms of expressiveness, and players have great dexterity,’ Coll says. As with all premieres, it is difficult to predict the work’s reception, but Coll simply hopes that the audience feels ‘at least half of what I experienced while writing it!’