Piccolo Concerto “Dialogues with Axel”

Interest for the piccolo as a distinct specialty from its older sister (the flute) has been growing in recent years. The expressiveness, the emission of sound, the breath and many other aspects of the piccolo have lead to the instrument requiring a thorough, specific study, separate from the flute.

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.

The concert was composed during the summer of 2012, at the request of a number of performers and dedicated to my father, my teacher and piccolo soloist of the Orquestra Ciutat de Barcelona for 42 years.

(Salvador Brotons)

Youtube