Spanish passion, flying tackles and comedy at its juiciest: it’s all about the sensations, as composer-conductor Francisco Coll and pianist Elisabeth Brauss join the BBC Symphony Orchestra, in this free concert recorded for BBC Radio 3.
They call it Duende - the untamed passion at the heart of flamenco. For the poet Gabriel Garcia Lorca, it was “that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain”, and it’s the driving spirit behind Coll’s extraordinary Ciudad sin sueño (“The city that never sleeps”), a piano concerto inspired by an impossible dream, played today by the superb Elisabeth Brauss with the composer himself conducting.
A composer always hears things differently, and Coll has made his concerto the centrepiece of a whole concert inspired by fantasy at it most thrillingly physical.