Across the 24/25 season Ryan Bancroft takes up Anders Hillborg’s Sound Atlas (2018), giving performances with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Los Angeles Philharmonic that include its Finnish and US premieres. He presents the 20-minute work in Stockholm on 25 and 26 September, on 27 November in Helsinki, and in April 2025 at Walt Disney Hall.
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 the abyss. These outbursts are resolved in a solemn hymn in the strings that conclude the work. At its premiere The Financial Times (Richard Fairman) called it “music of the far expanses of the universe”. One of its most distinctive features is Hillborg’s use of the Glass Harmonica, which, along with string microtones, gives the work an unearthly gleam.
In 2022 it received its Swedish premiere from the Göteborgs Symfoniker with Anja Bihlmaier, and its Sinfonieorchester Basel and Aziz Shokhakimov, as part of an extensive focus on Hillborg. It was 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.
In January 2024 Bancroft gave the Swedish premiere of Hillborg’s Piano Concerto No.2 – the MAX concerto – with Emanuel Ax and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic; in 2021 he conducted Hillborg’s Bach Materia with the Tapiola Sinfonietta with Jonian Ilias Kadesha as soloist in the freewheeling, improvisatory work, written for Pekka Kuusisto as a companion to Brandenburg Concerto No.3.
On 28 November the Göteborgs Symfoniker join other Swedish ensembles in honouring Hillborg’s 70th birthday this year, in a celebratory all-Hillborg concert conducted by Pekka Kuusisto, with the violinist also featuring as soloist. The programme features Hillborg’s King Tide, Through Lost Landscapes, Eleven Gates, Bach Materia, Kväll and The Strand Settings, with Ida Falk Winland as soprano soloist. In January 2024 the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen opened the birthday celebrations with a sumptuous Jubilee concert, followed in the spring by performances of Hillborg’s Méditations sur Pétrarque with Marie Jacquot and Eleven Gates, conducted by Roberto González-Monjas.