Anders Hillborg’s Sound Atlas, a work fringed with the unearthly gleam of the glass harmonica, received its Finnish premiere on 27 November from Ryan Bancroft and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Watch Hillborg discuss Sound Atlas here.
Sound Atlas is divided into 5 sections: Crystalline, River of Glass, Vaporised Toy Pianos, Vortex and Hymn. The first two parts establish the work’s pellucid, glittering sound world, before the Toy Pianos are ’vaporised’. The music then plunges into ‘Vortex’ – a violent, whirling, convulsive soundscape. We then rise from this maelstrom to another crystalline interlude, which shatters and plunges again into another abyss. These outbursts are resolved in a solemn hymn in the strings that conclude the work.
The Financial Times (Richard Fairman) called it “music of the far expanses of the universe”. Commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, together with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra and the Göteborgs Symfoniker, the 20-minute work was premiered in London in January 2019, conducted by Marin Alsop.
Bancroft conducted Sound Atlas in September 2024 with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra; he will conduct the US debut of the piece with the Los Angeles Philharmonic at Walt Disney Hall in April 2025. In January 2024 he gave the Swedish premiere of Hillborg’s Piano Concerto No.2 with Emanuel Ax in Stockholm, the first of several concerts celebrating the composer in his 70th birthday year in Sweden headed by Esa-Pekka Salonen and Pekka Kuusisto.