Anders Hillborg’s Hell Mountain – a Mahler homage for orchestra – receives its French premiere on 3 December from Klaus Mäkelä and the Orchestre de Paris at the Philharmonie de Paris. It was commissioned by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Oslo Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and premiered on 9 May with Mäkelä and the Concertgebouw Orchestra at the Mahler Festival 2025. It received its Norwegian premiere with the conductor and the Oslo Philharmonic on 28 August, opening the orchestra’s season.
The title of the 23-minute work refers to the Höllengebirge that sit southeast of Mahler’s composing hut on the shores of the Attersee in Steinbach, where Mahler would write his Second and Third Symphonies as well as numerous songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The cliffs of the karst range loom dramatically over the water; Mahler remarked of the view to Bruno Walter that he had “composed all this already!”
Hillborg writes of the piece:
The music of Mahler has always been a part of my composing life – when I was younger, I always had the score of the Fifth Symphony with me when travelling. When Klaus Mäkelä invited me to write this tribute, my thoughts turned towards something I’ve always admired in Mahler: his ability to conjure feelings of awe-inspiring space by means of acoustic resonance. I also became preoccupied with two musical objects that bookend his symphonic output: the shattering dissonance from his Tenth and the falling fourths which open his First. These objects came to permeate my score and, to my ears, have given this piece a very particular character.
Read about Hell Mountain in the Concertgebouw magazine Preludium here. October and early November see Hillborg in focus at the GAIDA Festival in Lithuania, with performances of his music from Carolin Widmann, Nicolas Altstaedt, Lawrence Power, choir Polifonija, and the Lithuanian National and State Symphony Orchestras – full details here.
On 13 and 14 November Eldbjørg Hemsing returns to Hillborg’s Violin Concerto No.2 with the Göteborgs Symfoniker and Dinis Sousa (her recording of the work was released in 2024 on Sony Classical); Amalie Stalheim gives the Latvian premiere of Hillborg’s Cello Concerto with Sinfonietta Riga on 7 November, and returns to it on 20 November in Sweden with Emilia Hoving and the Norrköpings Symfoniorkester.