Elena Firsova - Associate Composer

Elena Firsova's music has been performed throughout Europe and the USA. Her many commissions include works for the BBC, BBC Proms, Brodsky Quartet, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Manchester Wind Orchestra, Schubert Ensemble, EXPO 2000 (Hanover) and Ensemble Pyramide.

Since 1991 Elena Firsova has lived and worked in Britain. She and her family (she is married to composer Dmitri Smirnov) settled in St Albans in 1998. She held the post of composer in residence at Bard College (USA), St John's College (Cambridge) and at Dartington (Devon) and has taught at Keele University and the Royal Northern College of Music (Manchester).

Elena Firsova studied at the Moscow Conservatory where her teachers were Alexander Purimov (composition), Yuri Kholopov (analysis) and Nikolai Rakov (orchestration). Whilst in Moscow she also established contact with Edison Denisov and Philip Herschkowitz, a pupil of Anton Webern. In 1979 she, like her husband composer Dmitri Smirnov, was blacklisted as one of 'Krennikov's Seven' at the 6th Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers.

She has written well over a hundred compositions in many different genres, including the orchestral work Augury (premiered at the 1992 BBC Proms), chamber opera The Nightingale and the Rose, after Oscar Wilde and Christina Rossetti, (premiered at the 1994 Almeida Opera Festival), various concertos, and her masterwork, Requiem, a setting of Akhmatova's poem for soprano, chorus and orchestra (premiered at the Berlin Konzerthouse in 2003). She has also written many chamber works, including songs (voice and piano), ten string quartets, and a series of chamber cantatas for voice and small ensemble setting poems by pushkin, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, Oleg Prokofiev (son of the composer) and, her favourite, Mandelstam.

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

"Firsova's [music] is a subtler art, with ten string quartets at its core, her music often hints at private thoughts, never fully articulated but peeping through the foliage of her score like a cat in bushes." Norman Lebrecht (Daily Telegraph)

"One of the things I most admire about Lena Firsova's music is its single minded character. There is not a bar in what she writes that does not ring immediately with her personal tone of voice...tender and sweetly lyrical." Gerard McBurney

Publishers of her music include Boosey & Hawkes, G. Schirmer, Schott, Sovetsky Kompozitor, and Meladina Press.