Piccolo Concerto (Concerto for piccolo and symphonic band) “Diàlegs amb Àxel”

Coming from a family of flautists, and having started studying music as a child, the piccolo was my first musical instrument. Perhaps my identification of the piccolo sound with the voice of a child started then. The innocence, purity, sweetness and fluidity of its sound remind me of childhood. Faced with the challenge of writing a concerto for piccolo, I did not want to fall into the trap of writing a work full of bird sounds, trills, technical brilliant passages, the upper register, and so forth. My desire was to express something deeper with the voice of a child. Inspired by reading the book Dialogues with Axel by Jose Antonio Fortuny from Menorca, where he explains his fight as a child with a degenerative spinal muscular atrophy, I found a story full of humanity which combines innocence, brutal challenges to overcome, with the ongoing effort to fight and the triumph of the mind over the body. (Salvador Brotons)

Listen