Anders Hillborg
© Mats Lundqvist
“Inspiration, that’s for amateurs.” Swedish composer Anders Hillborg’s vast, almost panoramic body of work is performed all over the world. The result of decades of craftmanship, his work ranges from piano solos – such as the recent Kamalazoo Flow, written for Alexandre Kantorow – to chamber music, including Duo for Yo-Yo Ma and Emmanuel Ax, choral works such as Mouyayoum, his most frequently performed piece, and large-scale orchestral scores including Eleven Gates, Cold Heat and Liquid Marble.
A composer of grand orchestral and choral textures, Hillborg is drawn to the vivid motion of atmospheres: sometimes suspended and weightless, sometimes charged with an irresistible energy. His symphonic music pulses with undercurrents, electricity and vibration. It is performed by leading orchestras across the globe (among them the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Oslo Philharmonic) and under the baton of renowned conductors such as Esa-Pekka Salonen, Alan Gilbert, Gustavo Dudamel, David Zinman, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Susanna Mälkki and Daniel Harding. His works have also been written for some of today’s most celebrated soloists, including Martin Fröst, Anne Sofie von Otter, Renée Fleming, Lisa Batiashvili and Pekka Kuusisto.
Hillborg’s music embraces a distinctly Nordic sensibility. A Sibelius symphony, for instance, may seem static to an untrained ear; to a Northern ear, however, it is animated by a powerful inner force, one deeply characteristic of Scandinavia.
Yet Hillborg is not only a composer of symphonic tableaux, in which shimmering orchestral colours often seem to glow with an almost electronic sheen. He is also an artist of crossovers, unafraid of encounters with other musical genres. As a student at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, he resented the fact that a love for West Side Story could be mocked in certain contemporary music circles. That openness has since found its way into projects that draw on rock (Bach Materia), jazz (The Strand Settings) and hip-hop (Rap Notes).
Always searching for the “ideally ideal” balance between instinct and control, Hillborg believes that not knowing exactly what composition is remains essential to composing. He refuses to confine himself, creating music that is vivid and vibrant. His work is permeated by an eccentric virtuosity that pushes soloists to their limits, as well as by a metaphysical dimension born from a deep attentiveness to his inner ear. In his music, light and shadow coexist in an ambiguous balance that only music can sustain.
One clear night while the others slept, I climbed
The stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky
Strewn with stars I gazed at the sea (…) I stood in the long
Whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach
Of a distant light (…)
The Strand Settings – I. Black Sea