Marking the composer’s 70th birthday this year, the Göteborgs Symfoniker and Pekka Kuusisto present an all-Hillborg programme on 28 November celebrating his contribution to Swedish musical life. Kuusisto appears as both conductor and violin soloist in the concert alongside soprano Ida Falk Winland.
King Tide, written for the Göteborgs Symfoniker and Neeme Järvi in 1999, begins the concert. The 13-minute work is a meditation on water and time, opening with the complex, quietly animated layers of divided strings that are a hallmark of Hillborg’s style. It is succeeded by Through Lost Landscapes (2019), which imagines a natural world increasingly under threat from climate change. The 13-minute piece charts an epic, mythical path that takes in thick canopies of vegetation and vast tree trunks, teeming with life, as well as haunting, exotic bird calls.
Ida Falk Winland joins the orchestra in The Strand Settings – a 24-minute exploration of four poems by Mark Strand, whose elegiac work suggests loneliness, absence, and the search for identity. Hillborg’s setting is dark, dramatic, and impassioned, drawing on substantial orchestral forces; the opening song ‘Black Sea’ sees strings evoke a vast, empty landscape as the vocalist contemplates the enormity of sky and sea. The 2013 piece was premiered by Renée Fleming and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Alan Gilbert. At quite a different scale, Kuusisto joins the soprano in Kväll, an intimate 3-minute duet for violin and soprano.
Kuusisto appears as soloist in Bach Materia for violin and strings (2017), a 16-20 minute piece written as a companion to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.3. This freewheeling work is highly improvisatory in character, with extensive cadenzas that can draw in the other members of the ensemble as the soloist sees fit, especially the double bass, alongside more rhythmically taut, muscular tutti passages that recall Bach’s original.
The programme concludes with Eleven Gates, premiered in 2006 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Hillborg champion Esa-Pekka Salonen. The 19-minute piece passes through eleven thresholds of musical perception, evocatively named: ‘Suddenly in the Room with Floating Mirrors’; ‘D-major Still Life’; ‘Confused Dialogues with Woodpecker’; ‘Waves, Pulse, and Elastic Seabirds’. Its orchestral effects are just as startling and imaginative as these titles suggest – percussion and harp sparkle in the dreamy ‘Toypianos on the Surface of the Sea’; a tender oboe solo unfurls over shimmering blocks of strings in ‘Meadow of Sadsongs’.
Kuusisto has been performing Hillborg’s music since 2016, when he took up the Violin Concerto No.1 with Hannu Lintu and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Since premiering Bach Materia in 2017 with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, he has performed the work 28 times internationally with ensembles including the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. Ida Falk Winland previously performed in Hillborg’s choral orchestral epic Sirens at 2014’s Hillborg festival in Stockholm and at its UK premiere at the 2017 BBC Proms.