Anders Hillborg’s Hell Mountain – a Mahler homage for orchestra – makes its Swedish debut at the Berwaldhallen on 21 August with Andrés Orozco-Estrada and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Baltic Sea Festival.
The title of the 23-minute work 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.
The Swedish Radio Symphony have championed Hillborg’s works for a quarter of a century. In January 2024 they were joined by Esa-Pekka Salonen for a sumptuous Hillborg Jubilee, opening his 70th birthday celebrations; it was succeeded in the spring by performances of Hillborg’s Méditations sur Pétrarque with Marie Jacquot and Eleven Gates, conducted by Roberto González-Monjas.
Hell Mountain was commissioned by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Oslo Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and premiered on in May 2025 with Mäkelä and the Concertgebouw Orchestra at the Mahler Festival 2025.
14 August sees the release of world premiere recordings of Hillborg’s other recent orchestral works Through Lost Landscapes and Sound Atlas on Alpha, with the Gothenburg Symphony conducted by Pekka Kuusisto and Brad Lubman. The album, which includes a new recording of The Strand Settings with soprano Ida Falk Winland, captures another of 70th birthday celebration from 2024. Listen to a single from the album here.
On 3 September, the orchestra, Kuusisto and Hillborg's son Theo open their season with the premiere of The Sax Concerto - detail here.