Cold Heat

Composed in 2010, Cold Heat is the twelfth, and most recent, in the increasingly impressive series of orchestral works to come from the pen of Anders Hillborg, beginning with Worlds of 1978–79. Their titles often suggest a paradox or a poetic idea – for example, Dreaming River (1998), King Tide (1999), Liquid Marble (1994) – which stimulates Hillborg’s imagination. Though their ambitions vary – Four Transitory Worlds (2008–9) is a mere six minutes long, but Clang & Fury (1985–89) all of 27 – most of them require about a quarter of an hour to meet the demands of their inner logic. Hillborg is, in effect, fusing two genres: his music usually creates a Sibelian sense of scale, and thus can reasonably be described as symphonic, but he does so within the span of the nineteenth-century symphonic poem. At thirteen minutes in length, Cold Heat once again offers the best of both worlds.

A joint commission of the Stiftung Berliner Philharmoniker, the Tonhalle-Gesellschaft Zürich and The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Cold Heat was first performed in the Philharmonie in Berlin in 12 January this year, with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by David Zinman, to whom the score is dedicated. It was the first work Hillborg has written for the Berlin Philharmonic – and he is the first Swedish composer to receive a commission from the Orchestra in its 124-year existence. When Hillborg asked Zinman what kind of piece he wanted, he received a response by e- mail: "It would be great if it could be a really rock ’n roll-ish super, toe-tapping, rhythmic sort of piece, with NO slow music  whatsoever!" "I guess I met him halfway", the composer comments: much of the work heaves with energy, but he has not denied himself the contrast of slow music.

Hillborg often begins a new piece by taking material from an earlier one as his starting point, in this case Exquisite Corpse (2002), heard at the Proms in 2004. Right from the start of Cold Heat, the swirling figuration in the woodwinds over long-held string chord explains why the label "post- minimalist" is sometimes applied to his music; the effect, though, is far from minimalist; instead, it suggests the nature-imagery of so much music by composers based around the Baltic – in this instances, flocks of birds wheeling over the sea. The woodwinds eventually calm, and activity slows to a stop; three oboes briefly recall a more conventional harmonic world before the swirling woodwinds resume. Huge brass chords loom through layers of strings, bowed freely, and a minatory crash from the percussion gives an indication of what is to come. Soon a leaping dance kicks off in the strings, hugely energetic but wrong-footed, and with a slightly American quality, like manic Copland. The percussion pick up the dance and shove the strings aside in a furious tattoo (here Zinman must have rubbed his hands when he first read the score). It stops even more swiftly than it began, the momentum carrying on into the flutes and clarinets, in echoes of the bird-calls of the beginning. As they calm down, a deep chord in the double-basses again brings in the layers of ecstatic upper strings, with the brass suggesting huge shapes in the offing. The strings, marked molto espressivo, now take on an elegiac character, with the basses dropping out to reduce the sense of scale, and a solo cello suddenly introducing a chamber-musical intimacy. A solo violin emerges from the divisi strings to join its lament – and the piece swiftly fades from view.

Martin Anderson, 2011