Product Description With pieces composed between 2005 and 2019, the album traces Coll’s spectacular musical development, from his studies under Thomas Ads in London to his present bloom. The lush, sensuous nature of his orchestral writing fully comes to life in these performances. Besides the strong relationship between Coll and conductor Gimeno, this new release also showcases the exceptional violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, for whom he has written several works, including his violin concerto, first recorded here. Patricia and I had a magical, and extremely fortunate, first meeting in Valencia – the kind of meeting where feelings of trust and deep friendship were evident from the very first minute...The Concerto encouraged me to face things that I had never done before. It seemed to be telling me: ‘don't try to please a conservative public, or the institutionalized avant garde, just write what you hear, and dare to fail’. Francisco Coll The OPL and Gustavo Gimeno have released composer portraits of Shostakovich, Bruckner, Ravel, Mahler, Stravinsky, Debussy, Rossini and Franck on PENTATONE. Patricia Kopatchinskaja makes her PENTATONE debut. Review The Violin Concerto is the fourth work that Coll has composed specifically for Kopatchinskaja since they were introduced by the conductor Gustavo Gimeno five years ago – another of those pieces was the double concerto Plairs Illumines, which appeared on disc earlier this year. Kopatchinskaja’s extraordinary, freewheeling virtuosity appears to have unlocked a new vein of immediacy and expressiveness in Coll’s music, which the Violin Concerto seems to me to take on to another plane altogether. It’s a fabulously assured piece in three evocatively labelled movements – Atomised, Hyperhymnia, Phase – which outline the shape of a traditional concerto, complete with solo cadenza. Ligeti’s violin concerto, and more specifically Kopatchinskaja’s dazzling performances of it, seem to lie behind the pyrotechnics of the first movement, while something more deeply personal is explored in the murmuring expressiveness of the second, before the music explodes again in the anarchy of the third. It’s compelling from first note to last, and could hardly be better played by Kopatchinskaja and the Luxembourg orchestra under Gimeno. -- The Guardian