Francisco Coll’s Cello Concerto, which received its UK premiere in the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Sunday morning Prom with conductor Tianyi Lu, is one of a series of works that Coll has composed for the Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta. Typically for Coll, the concerto packs a huge amount of instrumental energy into its compact four movements, with textures jostling and colliding with each other in the outer movements (so that perspectives within the music are constantly shifting) and a pair of predominantly slow reflections between them, culminating in a cello cadenza.
While always remaining unmistakably itself, the stylistic frame of Coll’s music is deliriously wide. The ghosts of tangos from Gabetta’s native Argentina haunt the first movement of the concerto, and their dislocated rhythms also seem to hark back to the cubist world of Stravinsky’s wartime pieces for string quartet, while there are turns of phrase in the cello writing elsewhere that could refer to Elgar’s concerto for the instrument. As if to underline the music’s South American connections, Gabetta’s encore was a solo piece that Coll had composed for her, The Secret Life of Tango, which circles around the dance before finally and briefly allowing itself to become one.
Gabetta’s brilliance was matched by the BBCSO, too, for the frantic orchestral writing in the concerto sometimes seems as technically demanding as the solo cello part, yet under Lu’s cool control even the most tangled passages were perfectly precise. So was the rest of her programme, which was framed by showpieces – Dukas’s symphonic scherzo The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, one of the underrated miracles of French music, and a suite from Stravinsky’s Firebird ballet, not the usual 1919 selection, but the longer one from 1945 – both full of carefully tended, if slightly cool detail. And there was also a nod towards one of this year’s anniversarians with a Puccini rarity – the Preludio Sinfonico, written as a graduation exercise in 1882, but later partially recycled in his first two operas, Le Villi and Edgar, and seeming to come from an utterly different world to the rest of Lu’s programme.
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