"A composer with a sparkling individual voice"
"A composer with a sparkling individual voice"
Michael Church/BBC Music Magasine
"The orchestrator of the greatest virtuosity"
John Allison/The Times
"Her Wings of the Wind is a highly effective, episodic and atmospheric response
to the text of Psalm 104 ..."
Stephen Pettitt/The Sunday Times
"With her expressive and methaphysical attitude, Victoria Borisova - Ollas is
absolutely unique in Sweden. In her Symphony, there is the same nervous touch, the
same high tension and hot-temperedness, the same passion for an almost erotic game,
with colliding harmonies and extended climaxes, as in Skriabin`s "Le divine poème".
The excitement lasts through the whole piece. Borisova - Ollas is able to create a
charged atmosphere and she knows perfectly well how to use her weapons."
Thomas Anderberg/Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm
"Borisova-Ollas exploits the timbral possibilities of the symphony orchestra
with astonishing imagination and superb technical perfection. She is in the process of developing
a completely original music language of enormous emotional intensity - if indeed she hasn´t already
done so long ago."
Mats Liljeroos/Hufvudstadsbladet, Helsinki
"Her fantasy for the orchestral sound and it`s colossal dynamic power is
impressing... She has a good command of the orchestra and shows both well controlled
eruptive energy and glimmering harmonies. The last minutes of her Symphony might feel
a little bit eclectic but I found them very gripping. Not only interesting or skilfully
written but really gripping."
Carlhåkan Larsen/Sydsvenska Dagbladet, Malmö
"[The premiere of The Ground Beneath Her Feet] was no ordinary Hallé concert, but
the latest genre-busting premiere in the Manchester International Festival. And an epic multinational
effort it was, too: a Russian composer's concert adaptation of Salman Rushdie's sprawling novel about
a tragic love-triangle involving two Bombay rock stars and a voyeuristic photographer. It included a
silent film, quirkily shadowing the action, by the British director Mike Figgis, while on the platform
Alan Rickman narrated the story and two singers took the parts of the main protagonists.
Complicated? Perhaps. But Rushdie's novel is itself a many-layered thing: a magic-realist fable, echoing
the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, that evokes the glad 1950s dawn of rock music, its hedonistic heyday, and
then its slow crumble into cynicism and sterility. To condense all that into 90 action-packed minutes,
yet tell the story so lucidly and movingly, was a considerable achievement on the part of the composer,
Victoria Borisova-Ollas, and her librettist, Edward Kemp.
Borisova-Ollas's lushly cinematic score has its estimable features. It is
orchestrated deftly ... And it is capable of portraying not only intimate moments of lovemaking but also
the earthquake that swallows up Vina, the wayward rock-chick who is the story's "Eurydice" figure."
Richard Morrison/The Times, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
"Russian-Swedish Victoria Borisova-Ollas' fabulous Orpheo-rhapsody, with the title
Open Ground, commissioned by The Baltic Sea Festival, is inspired by Salman Rushdie's novel. It starts as a
whisper from an underground world and gradually develops into a musical thriller in which the orchestral
"monster" is awakening in pulsing cascades, only to be buried, late on in a sad idyll of oriental colours."
Sofia Nyblom/Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm
"[Open Ground] is an effectively mastered composition. It is certainly going to be
performed around the world as often as some of her earlier works. Very few [composers] have the same feeling
for sonic colours and energetic motion in the orchestra as Borisova-Ollas."
Thomas Anderberg/Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm
"[Open Ground] is a dazzling, inspired composition... Borisova-Ollas is
obviously fond of percussion and employs the full spectrum of the section to great success throughout"
Patricia Wetzel/El Paso Times, El Paso
"... a sparkling poetry of sound"
Martin Nyström/Dagens Nyheter, Stockholm
"... Adoration of the Magi in the snow is a very exciting and solid composition"
Mats Åberg/Tidig Musik, Stockholm