Elena Firsova

Specialism:

Composition

Location:

St Albans
United Kingdom AL4

Contact:

+44 785 989 55 96

Additional Info:

A am Elena Olegovna Firsova, born in Leningrad into the family of physicists Oleg Firsov and Viktoria Lichko. I studied music in Moscow with Alexander Pirumov, Yuri Kholopov, Edison Denisov and Philip Herschkowitz. In 1979 I was blacklisted as one of the "Khrennikov's Seven" at the Sixth Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers for unapproved participation in some festivals of Soviet music in the West. Iam married to the composer Dmitri Smirnov and we currently live in the United Kingdom. Our children are Philip Firsov (an artist and sculptor), and Alissa Firsova (a composer, pianist and conductor).

I composed about two hundred compositions in many different genres including chamber opera "The Nightingale and the Rose" after Oscar Wilde and Christina Rossetti (premiered at the 1994 Almeida Opera Festival, London), an orchestra work "Augury", (premiered at the 1992 BBC Proms) that includes a choral setting of William Blake's famous lines 'To see the world in a grain of sand...' and Requiem to Anna Akhmatova's poem for soprano, chorus and orchestra (premiered at the Berlin Konzerthouse in September 2003).

My favourite genre is a chamber cantata for solo voice and ensemble (or orchestra). Some of them are written to the poems by Alexander Pushkin, Marina Tsvetaeva, Boris Pasternak and Oleg Prokofiev. However, the most of them are setting the poems by my favourite poet Osip Mandelstam that include "From the Voronezh Notebooks""Earthly Life", "Tristia", "The Stone", "Forest Walks", "Before the Thunderstorm", "Stygian Song", "Secret Way", "Seashell", "Whirlpool", "Silentium", "Winter Songs", "Petrarch's Sonnets" (in Russian translation by Osip Mandelstam), and othes.

I received commissions from many music festivals, orchestras and ensembles including the Deutscher Symphony Orchestra, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Brodsky Quartet, Manchester Wind Orchestra, Schubert Ensemble, Freden Festival, BBC Proms, Asiago Festival, and Expo 2000 (Hanover). One of the last my commissions came from Concertgebouw Orchestra for a Piano Concerto.

My music is available through publishers Boosey & Hawkes, London; Hans Sikorski, Hamburg; G. Schirmer, New York and Meladina Press, Amazon.

Specialisms

Commissions, Contemporary Classical

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