Instrumentation
3(all=picc).3.3(III=bcl).cbcl.3.cbsn – 4.3.2.btrbn.cbtrbn.1 – timp – perc(4): vib/glsp/crot/mar/t.bells/Peking opera gong/2 car horns/2 wdbl/3 congas/bongo/mini congas/3 roto toms/log drum/tam-t/BD/3 wine glasses – pno – harp – strings (large section preferred)
Availability
Score and parts for hire
Reviews
'Each "gate" opens onto a strange vista... Hugely entertaining, sonically enveloping music. Hillborg creates pools of liquid sound, beginning with a big, wet D-major string chord that moves to the winds as scales in the strings flutter through it... Hillborg's compositional rhetoric is to create a series of unfolding scenes, more like Sibelius than Beethoven. The sounds are strange and captivating but not strangely captivating. That is to say, his is a science fiction of our time - we recognize the strangeness.‘
LA Times (Mark Swed), 6 May 2006
'It all hangs together with consummate craftsmanship and elemental originality. Indeed, this piece is so engaging, I was sorry to hear it end - surely the ultimate compliment.‘
LA Daily News (David Mermelstein), 6 May 2006
'Blazingly inventive, emotionally gripping and full of elements that oscillate between the roguish and deeply touching. Something for more concert halls to take on! And for the audience to discover: new music can be as big and adventurous as life...‘
Tidningen Kulturen (Björn Gustavsson), 15 Septemeber 2006
'It is not difficult to understand the enthusiasm for Hillborg‘s surreal underwater dreams... Wood blocks clatter like clocks, but time quickly proves to be dislocated in a landscape of weightless floating harmonies... The musical picture book opens up room after room... A perfect introduction to Hillborg‘s oeuvre.‘
Svenska Dagbladet (Sofia Nyblom), 26 August 2006
'It's very poetic. And fun. One could make a modern version of Fantasia, built from Hillborg‘s elastic seabirds, sunken toy pianos, liquid mirrors and running string quartets ...‘
Expressen (Gunilla Brodrej), 25 August 2006
'Better yet was Hillborg's Eleven Gates. The performance had an icy luminosity: stasis, then high-frequency surges of rockets, maybe, blasting off a frozen landscape. This was the musical version of super-realism in the visual arts, densely detailed and panoramic. I first imagined a snowy world, expanding, and then melting; then a micro-world, a world inside crystal structures, full of whistling, eddying, stupefying sounds, outrageously clear and eerily beautiful.‘
Mercury News (Richard Scheinin), 21 May 2006