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Ryan Bancroft Conducts Hillborg’s Sound Atlas in Stockholm, Helsinki, and Los Angeles

Sep. 26, 2024

Across the 24/25 season, Ryan Bancroft takes up Anders Hillborg’s Sound Atlas (2018), giving performances with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Los Angeles Philharmonic that include its Finnish and US premieres. Bancroft presented the 20-minute work in Stockholm on September 25 and 26 and will perform it in Helsinki on November 27, and in April 2025 at Walt Disney Hall.

Sound Atlas is divided into five sections: Crystalline, River of Glass, Vaporised Toy Pianos, Vortex and Hymn. The first two parts establish the work’s pellucid, glittering sound world, before the Toy Pianos are ’vaporized’. The music then plunges into ‘Vortex’ – a violent, whirling, convulsive soundscape. We then rise from this maelstrom to another crystalline interlude, which shatters and plunges again into the abyss. These outbursts are resolved in a solemn hymn in the strings that conclude the work. At its premiere, The Financial Times (Richard Fairman) called it, “music of the far expanses of the universe”. One of its most distinctive features is Hillborg’s use of the glass harmonica, which, along with string microtones, gives the work an unearthly gleam.

In 2022, Sound Atlas received its Swedish premiere from the Göteborgs Symfoniker with Anja Bihlmaier, and its Sinfonieorchester Basel and Aziz Shokhakimov, as part of an extensive focus on Hillborg. It was commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, together with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and the Göteborgs Symfoniker, the 20-minute work was premiered in London in January 2019, conducted by Marin Alsop.  

In January 2024, Bancroft gave the Swedish premiere of Hillborg’s Piano Concerto No.2 – the MAX concerto – with Emanuel Ax and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic; in 2021 he conducted Hillborg’s Bach Materia with the Tapiola Sinfonietta with Jonian Ilias Kadesha as soloist in the freewheeling, improvisatory work, written for Pekka Kuusisto as a companion to Brandenburg Concerto No.3.

On November 28, the Göteborgs Symfoniker join other Swedish ensembles in honoring Hillborg’s 70th birthday this year, in a celebratory all-Hillborg concert conducted by Pekka Kuusisto, with the violinist also featuring as soloist. The program features Hillborg’s King Tide, Through Lost Landscapes, Eleven Gates, Bach Materia, Kväll and The Strand Settings, with Ida Falk Winland as soprano soloist. In January 2024, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen opened the birthday celebrations with a sumptuous Jubilee concert, followed in the spring by performances of Hillborg’s Méditations sur Pétrarque with Marie Jacquot and Eleven Gates, conducted by Roberto González-Monjas.

Listen to the Frankfurt Radio Symphony and Lawrence Power perform Hillborg's Viola Concerto (2021) under the baton of Jukka-Pekka Saraste:


To learn more about Anders Hillborg, visit fabermusic.com.

Anders Hillborg
Sound Atlas (2018)
for full orchestra
3(all.pic).3.3(3.bcl)2.cbn-4.3.3.1-3perc: glsp/crot/t.bells/timp/metal tin (paint tin or similar)/2 vibraslaps/guiro/2 congas/chinese opera gong/tam-t/kick drum/BD-glass harmonica-pno-str (16.14.12.10.8)
20'

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