To celebrate his 70th birthday, Sony Classical have released a new all-Hillborg album from his collaborators and champions Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. The disc features new recordings of Liquid Marble, the Violin Concerto No.2 with soloist Eldbjørg Hemsing, and Kväll for voice and violin, with Hemsing joined by soprano Hannah Holgersson. Listen here.
Liquid Marble, now thirty years old itself, received its UK premiere at the BBC Proms in 1997 from Salonen and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, who recorded the work previously together in 2003. Hillborg discusses the background to the molten 10-minute piece, which was influenced by Iannis Xenakis’ use of string glissandi and a clarinettist Hillborg heard on the Stockholm metro, here.
The Violin Concerto No.2 is a 24-minute work cast in one unbroken span that is eerie and transcendent by turns. It opens with raptor-like cries from the strings, before settling on a chord that provides the shimmering backdrop for the violin’s entrance, which alludes to the Sarabande from Bach’s D minor partita. A fiery cadenza ensues, and the work’s lyrical journey begins. Hyperactive passagework follows, with the strings violently hammering their strings with bows and bamboo sticks, which then melt into more sustained and meditative sequences, the violin soaring over slow-moving chords. A bravura ending sees the violent and brilliant hammering and passagework of earlier return.
It was written for Lisa Batiashvili and premiered in October 2016 by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra under Sakari Oramo and received its German premiere from the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and Alan Gilbert one week later. It made its US debut with James Ehnes and the Minnesota Orchestra conducted by Osmo Vänskä, and its UK premiere with Batiashvili, Oramo, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2017 as part of the BBC’s Total Immersion Hillborg focus at the Barbican. Hemsing first performed the work as part of Hillborg’s tenure as composer-in-residence with the Stavanger Symphony in 2021.
All the works recorded feature in the sumptuous January 2024 Hillborg Jubilee celebration concert from the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Salonen, opening the birthday celebrations this year. These works were succeeded in the spring by performances of Hillborg’s Méditations sur Pétrarque with Marie Jacquot and Eleven Gates, conducted by Roberto González-Monjas.
On 28 November the Göteborgs Symfoniker offer their own celebration of Hillborg’s 70th birthday, honouring the composer with an all-Hillborg programme conducted by Pekka Kuusisto, in which the violinist also appears as soloist. They perform Hillborg’s King Tide, Through Lost Landscapes, Eleven Gates, Bach Materia, Kväll and The Strand Settings, with Ida Falk Winland as soprano soloist.