Anders Hillborg’s Hell Mountain – a Mahler homage for orchestra – premiered on 9 May with Klaus Mäkelä and the Concertgebouw Orchestra at the Mahler Festival 2025. It was commissioned by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Oslo Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
The 23-minute work was presented alongside Mahler’s First Symphony. Its title 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. On 28 August Hell Mountain opens the Oslo Philharmonic’s season with Mäkelä alongside Mahler’s Seventh Symphony; the conductor takes it to the Orchestre de Paris for its French debut on 3 December. In February 2025 Mäkelä conducted the Norwegian premiere of Hillborg’s Piano Concerto No.2 – the MAX Concerto with Emanuel Ax in Oslo. In 2022 he conducted Hillborg’s set of orchestral panoramas Eleven Gates with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.