May 2026 saw the release of an all-Anders Hillborg album from Christian Karlsen and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra on BIS. This first volume of orchestral and concertante works – a second is forthcoming in autumn 2026 – includes the world premiere recordings of the 2020 Cello Concerto – with Nicolas Altstaedt – and Piano Concerto No.1 (2005) – with Tamara Stefanovich. Also featured are the Kongsgaard Variations – in its version for string orchestra – and Vaporised Tivoli , a frenzied 10-minute work for ensemble. Listen here.
Hillborg has always been an entertaining titler of his works…the music is wickedly inventive…Karlsen and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra certainly sound as if they relished it…Hillborg’s whimsical sense of the absurd abounds, not least in the manic first movement [of the Piano Concerto]…Kongsgaard Variations makes a gentle interlude…[The Cello Concerto is] luminous and delicately scored, predominantly lyrical…A winner.
Gramophone (Guy Rickards) July 2026
…a singular compositional language, capable of combining remarkable technical and conceptual complexity with an expressive immediacy…writing of an overflowing vitality, full of nervous figures and changing textures that advance with almost continuous tension… Kongsgaard Variations develops a more reflective and contemplative space, while Vaporised Tivoli bursts forth with an almost delirious energy and exuberant sonic imagination.
Sonograma (Marçal Borotau) 29 May 2026
Hillborg’s Cello Concerto was written for Nicolas Altstaedt and premiered in October 2020 with the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Fabien Gabel. The 27-minute work is cast in one unbroken movement. It is characterised by the intimacy of its scoring - much of the piece is written for strings alone, with dazzling virtuosity eschewed in favour of long, yearning cantabile lines, giving the work a soulful and reflective quality. It makes its UK debut with the cellist and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (conducted by Andrew Manze) in November 2026. In 2025 the Concerto was Hillborg’s debut on the dance stage when it was choreographed to acclaim by Mats Ek for A Cup of Coffee at the Royal Swedish Ballet.
Hillborg’s Piano Concerto No.1 (2001/5) is cast in three movements. In contrast to the reflective and melodic character of the Cello Concerto, the work is flamboyant, pointillist, and virtuosic, with its filigree details and micro-polyphony informed by Hillborg’s fondness for Ligeti. Its hyperactive flourishes recede for the long slow movement – “a state of blissful equilibrium, like a hanging mobile”, as Andrew Mellor writes. A frantic finale closes the piece, gradually unwinding itself until it returns to a diffused, less rigid version of the very chord that launched the 27-minute piece.
Vaporised Tivoli is a surreal, hallucinatory 10-minute invocation of the Copenhagen funfair. It premiered in 2010 with Ensemble Modern and Franck Ollu at the Sacrum Profanum Festival in Poland. Its unsettled and sinister mood is partly inspired by the ghoulish vision of a travelling carnival depicted in Ray Bradbury’s 1962 horror novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, which Hillborg read as a teenager.
In his Kongsgaard Variations (2006), Hillborg takes the Arietta theme from Beethoven’s last piano sonata as the basis for an evocative 16-minute work. Beethoven’s sublime music drifts strangely through the centuries and is warped, vaporised, and refashioned as if, in the words of Hillborg, the Arietta “is dreaming yet another variation on itself”. Composed initially for the Pražák Quartet, in 2021 Hillborg created a string orchestra version of the for the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and has been championed by Esa-Pekka Salonen with the San Francisco and Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestras.