Earlier this year, Francisco Coll appeared as composer/conductor on an Alpha album featuring Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Sol Gabetta and the chamber orchestra Camerata Bern (Alpha, 1/21). Two works by Coll from 2018 were included in an attractively varied programme – the double concerto Les plaisirs illuminés and LalulaLied. In his review Tim Ashley drew attention to the music’s associations with Spanish surrealism (Dalí, Buñuel), as well as Kopatchinskaja’s liking for vocal effects that ‘hover in unnerving territory between childishness and mania’.

Since then, Coll has been featured in Gramophone’s Contemporary Composers series, alongside an interview with Kopatchinskaja about her role as the vocal protagonist in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire (5/21). Vocal effects are absent in Pentatone’s new all-Coll collection, but Kopatchinskaja as violinist is heard to brilliantly entertaining effect in two compositions that reveal explicit Spanish associations within very different formal templates. The Four Iberian Miniatures (2014) have a winning, Dalíesque blend of the sinister and the extravagant – a reminder that Coll has worked with Thomas Adès, whose Buñuel-derived opera The Exterminating Angel (2016) offers its own memorable take on sinister extravagance with a Spanish tinge. Coll’s 2019 concerto for Kopatchinskaja is on a much larger scale than the Miniatures, and is notable for a 15-minute central movement – called ‘Hyperhymnia’ – that compiles a beguiling sequence of diverse gestures and moods, often lyrical in character, before building to a dazzling cadenza calling for all Kopatchinskaja’s distinctive dramatic flair. After this, the five-minute finale, matching an introductory movement of similar length, is not quite so successful as a way of balancing out and rounding off such a substantial symphonic design.

This well-filled disc finds room for a pair of colourful early scores – Aqua cinerea (2005) and Hidd’n Blue (2008) – as well as a much longer ‘symphony in five movements’, Mural (2016), that provided an effective workout for the NYOGB, especially in its more energetic passages. Maybe Coll – still in his thirties – has yet to make a completely convincing advance into larger-scale structures that mould time persuasively rather than merely mark its passing. But there is no mistaking the resourcefulness of his rhythmic patterning and his exhilarating capacity for bringing raw and refined materials into conjunction in orchestral writing, which come across strongly in these well-conceived and technically immaculate recordings.