Score and parts for hire

‘Constructed with iron logic, [its] clear and distinct sound brings to mind the purity and austerity of the Northern landscape.’

Gazeta Wyborcza (Dorota Szwarcman) 21 October 1998

 

‘There is in this works the sharpness of the Northern air, as well as a welcome brightness to penetrate the Scandinavian twilight.’

Zycie, 18 October 1998

 

‘Woodwind howled like a Northern wind, rushing scales whistled through the orchestra and the score had soon blown away the pretensions of some of this season's other premieres. Hillborg is not ashamed to go out and seize the audience’s attention.’

Financial Times, 3 September 1997

‘The most beautiful piece of music yet heard at these Proms… [It] imitates in art the new sounds of a late 20th century world, just as Romantic music might copy nature or industrial-age compositions echo steam-driven factories. Hillborg's is the music of the nuclear age. Woodwinds gurgle cleanly up and down micro-scales like science-fiction robots becoming excited. A scruff of low. slow-moving strings rise in pitch, aspiring to the noise of an aircraft revving up for take-off. Three piccolos cut like lasers. Reeds screech across a wasteland while large, distorted clumps of sound move like speeded-up clouds through the score. A slow section balances the picture. The cor anglais sighs over strings as still as death.'

Evening Standard (Rick Jones), 2 September 1997

‘Microtones tease and torment the music's texture... Rising chords and fast scales alternate and interweave, the scales like veins in the static chill of the marble… A strange, anguished work.’

The Times (Hilary Finch) 2 September 1997

 

‘As always with Hillborg the musical architecture is clear but the character all the more elusive… If Ligeti had written Night on a Bare Mountain it might have sounded something like this… A thrilling piece.’

Dagens Nyheter (Thomas Anderberg), 12 May 1996

 

‘Hillborg’s fresh, undogmatic and personal musical language triumphed in an unprecedented way and he had said more in ten minutes than many less-skilled composers would need ten times as much time for...’

Hufvudstadsbladet (Mats Liljeros), 9 August 1995