... Needless to say, I was hooked before a single note was played. Once the music did start, Eleven Gates quickly proved itself to be a masterful deployment of orchestral colors and timbres.

www.ansatz-blog.com, July 12, 2008 - lawson

... Hillborgs verk är blixtrande uppfinningsrikt, emotionellt gripande och fyllt av inslag som pendlar mellan det skälmska och det djupt berörande. Något för fler konserthus att ta sig an! Och för publiken att upptäcka: nyskriven musik kan vara äventyr stora som livet.

Kulturen (www.tidningenkulturen.se), 15/9 2006 - Björn Gustavsson

...Men konsertens mest emotsedda programpunkt måste vara Europapremiären av Anders Hillborgs senaste verk, Eleven gates - uruppfört till publikens och kritikernas jubel i Los Angeles under våren, och ännu en produkt av den kreativa vänskapen med Salonen. Och det är inte svårt att förstå entusiasmen inför Hillborgs surrealistiska undervattensdrömmar, som också delades av den månghövdade publiken i Berwaldhallen.

Med en hommage till Wagners Rhenguldet, ett ackord som får valthornen att glöda, öppnar Hillborg spjuveraktigt den första porten till sin fantasi. Träblocken klapprar som klockans visare, men snabbt visar sig tiden vara ur led i ett landskap av tyngdlöst flytande harmonier.

Som en musikalisk bilderbok öppnar sig rum efter rum med vraken efter skeppsbrutna fioler och gnälligt måstutande oboer, tills en alltför hastigt bortklingande trumrytm väcker lyssnaren ur drömmen, ögonblicket innan den riskerar att bli bombastisk - och, för all del, romantisk. En perfekt inbjudan till Hillborgs konstnärskap, som fortsätter att veckla ut sig i Berwaldhallen under säsongen.

(Svenska Dagbladet, 26/8, 2006 -- Sofia Nyblom)

...Gårdagens pärla var Anders Hillborgs verk. Med Europapremiären av Eleven Gates fick han Berwaldpublikens ögon att öppna sig större och titta åt rätt håll i 17 minuter eftersom alla ville veta varifrån bilderna kom.

Med full symfoniorkester förstärkt med bongos, gongar, vibrafon och kristallglas öppnar Hillborg elva portar mot psykedeliska havslandskap framväxta ur de oändliga möjligheternas partitur. Man förflyttas från flytande vrakspillror i flageolett-stiltje till ledsna melodiers oboe-hage. Det är mycket poetiskt. Och kul.

Om Disney inte var fegt så skulle den spirituella Pixarstudion göra en modern kortversion av Fantasia, byggd på Hillborgs elastiska sjöfåglar, sjunkna leksakspianon, flytande speglar och rinnande stråkkvartetter...

(Expressen, 25/8, 2006 -- Gunilla Brodrej)

...Similar was Salonen's highly fluid take on a phenomenal exercise in tone color, Hillborg's Eleven Gates, premiered only 11 days earlier in L.A. After decades of close listening to contemporary music, I consider myself lucky if, when listening to a new piece, I can experience two or three new sounds that have never before graced my ears. Eleven Gates had dozens. The title refers to the often drastic transitions between its 11 movements. Certain recurring references provide cohesion among thoroughly disparate elements, but structure is not the raison d'être for this truly visionary composition, which should be listened to in a neoimpressionist go-with-the-flow manner, with one's own thoughts springing forth from the imaginative movement titles (e.g., "Suddenly in the Room With Floating Mirrors," or "String Quartet Spiraling to the Sea Floor").

Hillborg is not a stranger here; his Exquisite Corpse received complimentary notices when the S.F. Symphony performed it in 2003. Like his magnificent clarinet concerto, Eleven Gates capitalizes on a postmodern approach to triadic tonality. In the concerto, amid a cacophony of dissonance, a blink of a pause ushers in a glorious G-major chord out of nowhere. In Eleven Gates, over a more graduated interval, a dozen or more separate lines in the string section convolve through a blur into a sublime D-major chord. Other composers should take note: Judicious use of triads outside the context of tonal centers may result in a liberating compromise between the increasingly played-out modernist and minimalist schools of composition.

Like the Beethoven, both the Lutoslawski and the Hillborg were hits with the audience. Hillborg himself, sporting a bright green tie, was present to receive accolades. Outgoing S.F Opera Director Pamela Rosenberg, in her easily spotted red jacket, had two words to say about the Gates: "Loved it!" A member of the general public likened the Lutoslawski positively to a summer night with bugs and frogs.

Whether through formula or flexibility, Salonen and his orchestra delivered the goods to the audience - and I don't care what formulas he brings along next time, as long as there's another Hillborg along with it.

(San Francisco Classical Voice, May 23, 2006 -- Jeff Dunn)

...Still, last week, Salonen's approach worked best with the newer pieces. The Lutoslawski offered a lexicon of flawless effects: furry strings, collective groans, blazing surfaces, shivering walls of sound.

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, May 21, 2006 -- Richard Scheinin)

...The inclusion of familiar reportoire on Monday's program probably helped to pack the hall (a second program, including Beethoven's "Leonore" Overture and Symphony No. 7 in A major, and Lutoslawski's Symphony No. 4, was performed last night.)

Yet it was Hillborg's score, performed as Monday's centerpiece, that yielded the greatest rewards. With the Bay Area premiere of "Eleven Gates," Salonen and the orchestra made a persuasive case for the composer.

Dedicated to Salonen, who gave the work its world premiere in Los Angeles earlier this month, "Eleven Gates" creates a surreal sonic landscape, and an ever-changing one; throughout the 20-minute score, the listener hears bits of Beethoven, the Beatles and Donald Duck ("Kalle Anka" in Swedish).

The music is divided into 11 sections, connected by transitional "gates" with names such as "Confused Dialogues with Woodpeckers" and "Toy Pianos on the Surface of the Sea." Yet "Eleven Gates" doesn't feel episodic; Hillborg has given the score a musical through line with the strength of tempered steel.

The piece begins quietly, with the orchestra's divided strings creating a layered harmonic base. From this, voices of strings and woodwinds begin to rise up, expanding in speed and volume into an agitated mass. Eventually, an eerie calm descends -- and Hillborg starts the activity all over again, building to another huge sound wave. The finale, titled "Waves, Pulse and Elastic Seabirds," comes with a considerable jolt.

Salonen, presiding over a large orchestra augmented by exotic percussion (bongos, glass harmonica, Chinese gongs and vibraphone), conducted an astonishing performance, and Hillborg came onstage to one of the most enthusiastic ovations Davies Hall has heard in recent memory...

(ContraCostaTimes.com, May 17, 2006 -- Georgia Rowe)

...The 11 subtitles he's given the work's various sections - Suddenly in the Room with Chattering Mirrors, Confused Dialogues with Woodpecker and Toy Pianos on the Surface of the Sea among them - are certainly freewheeling and at least partly tongue-in-cheek.

The music itself is scored for a substantial ensemble, with an especially varied assortment of percussion instruments, including car horns, glass harmonica and Peking opera gong.

"Eleven Gates," which runs about 20 minutes, is rife with episode. Listen closely and you'll hear whispers of Richard Strauss, Stravinsky and even Gershwin. Yet 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, May 06, 2006 -- David Mermelstein)

...In this new piece, each "gate" opens onto a strange vista. Near the end of the 20-minute score, Hillborg describes one of these as "Whispering Mirrors at the Seafloor." As he would have it, those mirrors got there only after first "chattering," then "floating" in a room. On the way to the ocean's bottom, they passed toy pianos at the surface and a string quartet spiraling underwater. Somewhere else, woodpeckers had "confused dialogues."

Hardly noble, prophetic Beethovenian stuff this, but rather 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.

Probably no orchestra anywhere plays new work as convincingly as the Philharmonic under Salonen. Its interpretation of "Eleven Gates" will undoubtedly grow - the orchestra has admirably programmed the work seven times this month. A lot, moreover, was on the line Thursday, because the concert was being taped for release on iTunes. I can't say, after a single hearing, that everything was as right and secure as it sounded, but there was little question that the floodgates had been spectacularly opened.

(LA Times, May 06, 2006 -- Mark Swed)