Hillborg - The Strand Settings, etc

The Guardian 80

Fleming/Royal Stockholm PO/Oramo
(Decca)

Renée Fleming gave the first performance of the song cycle that Anders Hillborg wrote for her in New York in 2013, and brought it to London as part of her Barbican residency last year. The “Strand” of these Strand Settings is Canadian-US poet Mark Strand, and the cycle uses five of his texts, with the 2006 poem Black Sea serving as a prelude to three sections of his book-length Dark Harbor, published in 1993.

The poems generally inhabit nocturnal worlds, and concern themselves with loss and dreams and unfulfilled expectations. Hillborg often presents them in a recitative-like way, so that Fleming’s voice floats over subtly tinted cushions of more or less static orchestral chords. It’s only really in the third of the four songs that he allows himself more freedom in his orchestral writing, and the wilder textures that are more typical of his orchestral music assert themselves. But as a vehicle for the soaring purity of Fleming’s voice, and as an evocation of Strand’s very finely etched sensibility, Hillborg’s settings are genuinely beautiful and their cumulative effect is powerful. The four songs never stray far from tonality, but only really settle unambiguously into a key at the end of the final one, when an E flat major triad seems to symbolise the safe harbour for which Strand’s poems apparently yearn.