In March 2026 Ryan Bancroft tours Anders Hillborg’s Beast Sampler with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, performing the piece at the Stockholm Konserthus (12 March), Göteborgs Konserthus (13 March), and then in Germany on 27 March at the Heidelberg Stadthalle.
The orchestra itself is the titular “beast” of the 10-minute work. Hillborg’s called the ensemble a “sound animal”, treating it as a living breathing organism in which individual voices are subdivided and absorbed into an ecosystem of orchestral, teeming with energy and wildness. It opens with chattering, breathing sounds in the woodwinds, that gather up the work’s energies like a steam engine; blazing brass chorales and sinister silences follow in a highly sculptural musical landscape. Eventually, its energies dissipate, with the work smouldering to an enigmatic conclusion.
Beast Sampler premiered with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and Sakari Oramo in 2014; it received its UK premiere from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Oramo at the Proms in 2015, and also featured at the BBC’s Total Immersion focus on the composer at the Barbican in 2020.
In June 2026 Bancroft will tour Hillborg’s Sound Atlas with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, playing at the Elbphilharmonie, in Lubeck, and Wismar. He previously conducted the US premiere of the 20-minute piece, fringed with the unearthly gleam of the glass harmonic, with the LA Philharmonic in April 2025 at Walt Disney Hall; in December 2024 he gave its Finnish debut with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
In January 2024 Bancroft gave the Swedish premiere of Hillborg’s Piano Concerto No.2 – the MAX concerto – with Emanuel Ax and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic; in 2021 he conducted Hillborg’s Bach Materia with the Tapiola Sinfonietta with Jonian Ilias Kadesha as soloist in the freewheeling, improvisatory work, written for Pekka Kuusisto as a companion to Brandenburg Concerto No.3.
On 19 April Amalie Stalheim returns to Hillborg’s Cello Concerto with the Oslo Philharmonic and Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider. A 27-minute work cast in one unbroken movement, it is characterised by the intimacy of its scoring - much of the piece is written for strings alone, with dazzling virtuosity eschewed in favour of long, yearning cantabile lines, giving the work a soulful and reflective quality. Stalheim has previously given performances of the work with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and Eva Ollikainen, James Gaffigan and the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, and with Emilia Hoving with Turku Philharmonic Orchestra and Norrköpings Symfoniorkester.