In June 2026 Ryan Bancroft will tour Anders Hillborg’s Sound Atlas with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, playing at the Elbphilharmonie, in Lübeck, and Wismar. He previously conducted the US premiere of the 20-minute piece, which is fringed by the ghostly sound of the verrophone, with the LA Philharmonic in April 2025 at Walt Disney Hall; in December 2024 he conducted its Finnish debut with 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.
In March 2026 Bancroft toured Hillborg’s Beast Sampler with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, performing the piece at the Stockholm Konserthus (12 March), Göteborgs Konserthus (13 March), and then in Germany on 27 March at the Heidelberg Stadthalle. In January 2024 he gave the Swedish premiere of Hillborg’s Piano Concerto No.2 – the MAX concerto – with Emanuel Ax and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic.
May 2026 saw the release of an all-Hillborg album from Christian Karlsen and the Swedish Chamber Orchestra on BIS. The selection of orchestral and concertante works 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 – Hillborg’s 2006 quartet after Beethoven arranged for string orchestra – and Vaporised Tivoli for ensemble, a frenzied and hallucinatory 10-minute invocation of the funfairs from which the piece takes its name.