composers

Elena Firsova

• Frozen Time

Elena Firsova was born in Leningrad on 21 March 1950 into a family of scientists. The father was a distinguished atomic physicist. The family moved to Moscow in 1956. She made her first attempt at composition at the age of twelve. She studied at Music School 1963-66, Music College 1966-70, Moscow Conservatory 1970-75 where her teachers were Alexander Pirumov (composition), Yuri Kholopov (analysis) and Nikolai Rakov (orchestration). She established contact of a crucial musical importance with a composer Edison Denisov and Philip Hershkovitz, the pupil of Anton von Webern. In August 1972 she married the composer Dmitri Smirnov. Now they have two children, Philip and Alissa.

Since 1979 she had a lot of performances in Europe and the USA and received many commissions including BBC, PROMS, WRD. Boosey & Hawkes, Sikorski, Schirmer, Schott and Sovetsky Kompozitor printed dozens of her scores. She has been composer in residence in Bard College, USA (1990), in St John's College, Cambridge, UK (1992), and later in the same year at Dartington Hall, Devon. From 1993 to 1997 she has been appointed as visiting professor and composer in residence at Keele University. Since 1998 settled in St Albans. From 1999 she teaches composition at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester.

She has written about a hundred compositions in many different genres including operas, oratorio, cantatas, orchestral works, concertos, chamber ensembles, solo works and so on. Recent commissions are from Brodsky Quartet, Manchester Wind Orchestra, Schubert Ensemble and the Freden Festival Her oratorio “Das erste ist vergangen” Christushymnus 2000 was premiered at EXPO Hannover 2000. The premiere of her major work Requiem to Akhmatova poem took place at the Berlin Konzerthaus, 2003.