Hillborg: The Strand Settings, etc CD review – Renée Fleming is ravishing

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 n