Anders Hillborg’s Violin Concerto No.2 appears with Eldbjørg Hemsing, Tabita Berglund, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on 18 and 19 April 2026 – the work’s second appearance in North America since its premiere with James Ehnes and the Minnesota Orchestra in 2017.
The concerto, eerie and transcendent by turns, lasts 24 minutes and is cast in one unbroken span. It opens with raptor-like cries from the strings, before settling on a chord that provides the shimmering backdrop for the violin’s entrance, alluding 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.
Hemsing first performed the work as part of Hillborg’s tenure as composer-in-residence with the Stavanger Symphony in 2021, and recorded it for Sony Classical’s Hillborg portrait disc with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, released in 2024. She presented the work at the all-Hillborg 70th birthday gala concert with Salonen in January 2024; in March 2026 she performed the concerto with the Arctic Philharmonic and Emilia Hoving in Tromsø and Bodø.
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 UK debut with Batiashvili, Oramo, and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2017 as part of the BBC’s Total Immersion Hillborg focus at the Barbican; in October 2025 it received its Lithuanian premiere from Carolin Widmann at the GAIDA Festival in Vilnius, as part of a focus on the composer.
In May 2026 Alexandre Kantorow gives the US and UK premieres of Hillborg’s The Kalamazoo Flow, at the Gilmore International Keyboard Festival (2 May) and Wigmore Hall (28 May). The 11-minute work was commissioned by Kantorow with assistance from the Gilmore International Piano Festival, following his celebrated success as the youngest and first French winner of the Gilmore Artist Award in 2023.
Kantorow gave the French premiere of the piece at the Philharmonie de Paris on 23 January, following its world premiere at KKL Luzern – part of the Piano Festival “Le Piano Symphonique” – on 15 January. Watch the performance on Medici.tv here.
Its title is borrowed from the Michigan home of the Gilmore Festival; its music suggests ever-changing forms of water. From almost naïve two-part writing, grand and more dazzling textures emerge: gleaming, rippling passagework that gives way to driving toccatas, as well as resonant chorales like vast, submerged bells.