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Assistant Classical Editor, All Music Guide
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Contemporary Russian composer Elena Firsova considers her cycle of three
solo cantatas here gathered together on the Megadisc
release Elena
Firsova: The
Mandelstam Cantatas as her most important body of work. A talented,
imaginative and technically pioneering poet, Osip Mandelstam is also regarded
as a symbol of an entire generation of Russians eliminated by Stalin in
the "great purge" of the 1930s, alleged as the worst mass
liquidation of people in human history. Firsova expresses a preference
for Mandelstamá¹s early period, and the first two cantatas,
Forest Walks Op. 36 (1987) and Earthly Life, Op. 31 (1984) are taken from
Mandelstam texts dating from 1908-1920. However, the third cycle Before
the
Thunderstorm, Op. 70 is derived from Mandelstamá¹s late
period, utilizing texts dating from 1930-1935.
In her student days at the Moscow Conservatory, Firsova studied with
Philip Herschkowitz, one of only a handful of musicians to undertake a
course of study in the twelve-tone system with Anton Webern and the
editor of Alban Bergá¹s final works. Firsova has retained the
best
lessons from this knowledge, and the cantatas essentially remain true
to the style of Webern, but with an important difference. Rather than trying
to
cram the whole setting into a movement lasting only a minute or two,
Firsova stretches out the music, allowing it to float, achieving satisfying
and complete results lasting two to ten minutes per poem. Firsovaá¹s
music is largely gentle, mysterious sounding in texture and calm in mood,
seldom breaking into anything suggesting disturbance or conflict, except
for when the text calls for it, such as in the passage "The tense and hollow
sound of fruit falling from a tree." The overall impression left is of
intense sadness, in keeping with the tone of Mandelstamá¹s
poetry. The
soprano parts are fairly high lying, and are sung very well in Russian
by Ekaterina Kichigina; English-language texts are included in the booklet.
This is uncompromising, yet beautiful music.
The Megadisc recording is stunning, and strikes a perfect balance between soloist and ensemble. Elena Firsovaá¹s work represents some of the most relevant and deeply felt contemporary music coming out of Europe.
~ David N Lewis
copyright 2004 All Music Guide
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See also:
http://www.musicalpointers.co.uk/reviews/liveevents/plg04.htm
http://www.musicalpointers.co.uk/reviews/liveevents/russian_music_discovery.html
Royal Academy of Music: Elena Firsova's 50th Birthday Concert
I think it was in 1987 Á€“ with the confidence of (relative!)
youth, and a regular critical platform to present my case Á€“
that I proclaimed Elena Firsova the finest Russian composer to have emerged
since Shostakovich. Over the next few years, London's musical scene did
at least seem to be considering this strangely unfashionable idea for itself.
High-profile commissions materialised, to which Firsova responded with
creations as memorable as her Autumn Music for chamber orchestra
(1988) and Odyssey for seven players (1990) Á€“ two
works among others that received glowing reviews (not just from myself)
at their London premiö¨res. Firsova's decision to move, with her
husband and fellow-composer Dmitri Smirnov and
two (then) very young children, from Russia to England seemed to have been
vindicated, not only in terms of the better life they wanted for their
family, but in growing musical success also.
A decade later? Things have turned out, on one level at
least, not to be quite like that. Elena Firsova must have found it hard
to come to terms with one of the cultural specialities of the over-sophisticated
West: that of "discovering" a composer, enthusing over his or her works
for a while, and then dropping it with the same abandon in order to chase
after the next vogue. She is still not the world-famous figure that her
music insists she should be. Does this concern her? Perhaps not overmuch,
to judge from the unpretentious personality who warmly thanked both the
audience and the performers after a concert given for her 50th birthday,
at the Royal Academy of Music's Duke Hall.
Before the Thunderstorm, the culminating work on the
programme. Showed how surely Firsova's talent has developed since her chamber
cantate Earthly Life astonished us here in the West in 1986. Composed eight
years later, Before the Thunderstorm, too. Sets poems by Osip Mandelstam,
in an idiom that reaps the full harvest of supple chromaticism and triadic
consonance, moving between them with wonderful fluency and sureness of
touch. The opening prelude, scored for a solo clarinet murmuring quietly
beneath high solo strings, has the haunting poise that is a Firsova trademark.
So is the sense of darkly powerful statement pushing outwards from within
the music itself, as from within Mandelstam's words. What do we in the
post-war West know (you caught yourself wondering) compared to what Russia
and Russians have lived through, and continue to live through?
Other works demonstrated how freely Firsova's talent can range
within its own territory. Two Akhmatova settings,
written in 1967, offered evidence of how early their composer had found
her own creative voice.
Hymn to Spring (1993) for solo piano showed
her instinct for extending it. While the bird singing in the opening section
recalls Messiaen, the development of its song
towards the coda, with its sequence of triads ascending into the piano's
upper register, could have been penned by one composer only.
The Scent
of Absence sets two poems by Oleg Prokofiev
(son of Sergei) for the unlikely combination of bass voice? Flute and harp:
the result has a bizarre, Mussorgsky-grotesque
inventiveness. Vernal Equinox for violin and piano, the concert's
world premiö¨re, conjured sonorities of the frosted-glass radiance
that is another Firsova's trademark.
It says much for Firsova's standing among fellow-musicians that
artists with world careers Á€“ Karine Georgian,
Patricia Rozario, Yuko Inoue, Alexander Ivashkin,
the Brodsky Quartet Á€“ were here
performing alongside their younger colleagues at the Royal Academy, who
also distinguished themselves under Lionel Friend's direction in Before
the Thunderstorm. Patricia Rozario's contributions
here and elsewhere were a highlight, as were Richard Shaw's
exemplary piano accompaniments, Ian Pace's impressive delivery of Hymn
to Spring, and the singing of Tim Mirfin
(remember this name) in The Scent of Absence. Alissa
Firsova, the composer's daughter, took the piano part of Frozen Time
for piano quartet; Barrie Gavin introduced the
concert with supportive warmth. Me, I stand by my original statement. The
finest Russian composer to have emerged since Shostakovich?
Yes.
CD REVIEW (Seen&Heard)
www.musicweb.uk.net/SandH/
Reviewer Rob Barnett: ****(*)
| Elena FIRSOVA
Akhmatova Songs; Mandelstam
Poems; Hymn to Spring; Frozen Time; La Malinconia; The Night Demons; Vernal
Equinox; Scent of Absence; Crucifixion; Meditation in the Japanese
Garden; Before the Thunderstorm.
|
 |
This is an extraordinarily successful live recording of Elena Firsova's
celebratory 50th birthday concert, reviewed in detail by S&H, March
2000, when I expressed the hope that some of the music might appear on
CD. Firsova and her husband Dmitri Smirnov are important representatives
of the ex-Soviet emigrö©s now in the West, and the enrichment
of British musical life thereby is reflected by the participants in this
double-CD and in the recent Russian Easter Weekend in London, 28-30 April,
also reviewed by S&H.
Patricia Rosario's accounts of two groups of songs, and as soloist
in a major Cantata to poignant poems by Mandelstam, are perhaps the high
points; she is in perfect voice, captured by expert engineering at the
Royal Academy of Music. Tim Mirfin (bass) impresses in two striking settings
of poems by Oleg Prokofiev. Michael Vaiman, a distinguished Russian violinist,
is partnered by his pianist son, Daniel, in the world premiere of Vernal
Equinox Op. 94, commissioned for the occasion. Two great Russian cellists
participate - Alexander Ivashkin and Karine Georgian. Richard Shaw accompanies
Ivashkin in The Night Demons and Owen Murray (accordion) partners Karine
Georgian in Crucifixion.. Ian Pace plays the Hymn to Spring for solo piano.
The Brodsky Quartet gave Firsova's 10th String Quartet, which is also featured
on the CD mentioned below.
Unusually for CDs, although individual tracks can be selected in the
normal way, the items run continuously without pauses; this appears to
have been a deliberate artistic decision. For full enjoyment of the music,
a copy of the RAM concert programme, with programme notes and all texts,
is desirable.
Reviewer
New string quartets by both composers are featured in a Brodsky Quartet recent release, reviewed in Music on the Web May 2000. PGW
Music Webmaster: Len Mullenger: Len@musicweb.uk.net
Concert Review: May 2000, Music on Web
String Quartets in London from home and abroad: The Schidlof,
Wihan, Petersburg and Brodsky String Quartets, March 2000.
<...>Before that, there had been two opportunities to hear another
ever popular Brodsky String Quartet, who go in for not too flamboyant designer
costume, and play standing up, which improves visibility and enhances audience
rapport. On 5 March, they had introduced Elena Firsova's most recent quartet
at the Royal Academy of Music in a marathon three-hour afternoon concert
- S&H, having its own marathon that day, was there to hear it. Firsova's
10th Quartet La Malinconia took Op 18/6 (inscribed by Beethoven La Malinconia)
as a starting point, its basic material generated by three grace notes
in the latter, with a short quotation from the original in her coda. It
is intense, very beautiful and shares the melancholy of Beethoven's second
adagio.
This quartet was scheduled to be repeated in the third of the Brodsky
Quartet's ambitious millennial series at Cabot Hall, Canary Wharf, with
six new commissioned quartets planned to reflect upon Beethoven's pivotal
Op 18, 200 years on. I heard two of these on 8 March, a light, American-tinged
Opus California by Sally Beamish, who had responded to the warmth of Californian
audiences, and a surprising quartet by Karen Tanaka, At the grave of Beethoven,
based upon the beginning of Beethoven's Op 18/3. Its idiom was close to
that of later Beethoven and the second movement, a chain of tonal modulations,
was deeply moving despite horrendous intrusive noise which wrecked the
quiet, contemplative music and its pianissimo ending.
There was the rub, in consequence of which Seen&Heard did not cover
the remaining concerts of the enterprising Brodsky project, which included
new quartets by Tunde Jegede, Javier Alvarez and Elena Firsova's composer
husband, Dimitri Smirnov, and had attracted large audiences to the Isle
of Dogs, London's wealthy business centre, which however is still poorly
supplied for cultural nourishment.
The impressive, lofty Cabot Hall can be fine acoustically for chamber
music, especially near the front, but can be spoilt by intrusive noise
and, at other times, by insensitive and gratuitous amplification. I was
assured that on this occasion the air conditioning had been switched off
(I had regularly had to plead for this to be done in the past). I complained;
so did others in the audience. The leader of the quartet did so from the
platform, all to no avail. I think this frustration made the performances
of Op 18/1 & 18/4 a little lack-lustre, and because the staff were
unable to trace and stop the noise (possibly from Tesco's above, they thought,
alternatively from the car park below) I did not return for the other days.
I will however, in the near future, endeavour to review for MotW (with
a link to S&H) the Brodsky Quartet's new Channel Classics CDs of the
Op 18 quartets, and another of Dmitri Smirnov's 6th and Elena Firsova's
10th.
Return to: Seen&Heard Index Return to: Music on the Web
Concert Review: June 2000, Music on Web
Elena Firsova 50th birthday concert. Royal Academy of
Music, 5 March 2000
www.musicweb.uk.net/SandH/
|
This was an extraordinary musical party. The Duke's Hall was packed for a concert introduced by Barry Gavin, who had made memorable TV films during 1990 about composers in Soviet Russia. The images of a large number of them eating, drinking and talking, crammed in the tiny kitchen of Elena Firsova and Dmitri Smirnov's small Moscow flat, are unforgettable, and a significant contribution to recent history. They emigrated to England with two small children, Alissa & Philip, and both composers were featured in London's Almeida Festival, where I first heard their music. Barry Gavin described Firsova as laconic and pertinent in her talk, no 'miniaturist' given her intensity of expression, and 'happily congruent' with Mandelstam. He celebrated how the couple had battled through, to become welcomed as fellow citizens and friends of their new country. |
 |
Michael Vaiman (violin) with his brilliant pianist son, Daniel, gave the first performance of Vernal Equinox Op. 94, commissioned for this birthday concert. Sharing her birthday (March 21) with those of Mussorgsky and Bach, Elena Firsova incorporated the notes of her own name and her husband's, together with the famous BACH motto.
Two great Russian cellists, now resident in London, contributed - Alexander Ivashkin and Karine Georgian. Richard Shaw mounted the concert with 'an endless list' of helpers, and played piano and celeste. He accompanied Ivashkin in The Night Demons (1993) - more dramatic than most of Firsova's music - and Owen Murray (accordion) partnered Karine Georgian in Crucifixion (also 1993), evoking 'the feelings of a human being entering a hard period in life'. (Both those pieces have alternative accompaniments for organ.) Ian Pace played the Hymn to Spring (1993) for solo piano, premiered by Yvar Mikhashoff in the 1993 Almeida Festival, a deliberately lighter piece after Crucifixion, based on bird song and a sequence of major triads.
Tim Mirfin (bass), with flute and harp, impressed in two striking settings of poems by Oleg Prokofiev (whom I knew in Blackheath), the recently deceased sculptor son of the great composer, and friend of the Smirnov/Firsova family. Patricia Rozario, in superlative voice, sang settings of Akhmatova and Mandelstam, the latter an enduring influence upon Elena Firsova. The concert ended with Before the Thunderstorm, a substantial cantata to Mandelstam's Moscow Poems, in which she was accompanied by an ensemble of nine musicians conducted by Lionel Friend.
Firsova's music has a clear, individual voice. Usually it is lyrical and beautiful, with a liking for decorative melismas, but with clear, spare textures, so that it manages to avoid becoming cloying. One or two of her works would go well as quieter, focused and centred contrasts to the noisiness and busyness of much contemporary music. She respects the essential qualities of voice and instruments so that they sound well, and her music must be grateful to perform. It was a pleasure to share this birthday celebration and I hope that a CD will follow, featuring especially Patricia Rosario in Elena Firsova's settings of Mandelstam. Seen&Heard is part of Music on the Web(UK) Webmaster: Len Mullenger Len@musicweb.force9.co.uk
Return to: Seen&Heard Index
The Free-Reed
Review
Critiques of Compact Discs,
Books and Music Scores
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CD Review:
Elena Firsova
Celebration
Concert Ram 2000
Various
performers, including
Karine Georgian,
cello
Owen Murray,
accordion
Program:
Hymn to Spring
Frozen Time
La malinconia
The Night
Demons
Vernal Equinox
Scent of
Absence
Crucifixion
Meditation
in Japanese Garden
Before the
Thunderstorm
total time:
79:18
released:
2000
review date:
March 2002
label: Meladina
Record
MRCD00012a/00013a
email: dmitri@smirnov.fsworld.co.uk
Review by Henry Doktorski:
Celebration Concert Ram 2000 is a live recording of portions of a concert at the Royal Academy of Music's Duke Hall (London) for Elena Firsova's 50th birthday. Naturally, the music performed (some three hours worth) was her own.
Firsova and her husband Dmitri Smirnov are important representatives of the ex-Soviet ö©migrö©s now living in the West. Both are now well-established composers in England. Elena Firsova was born in Leningrad on 21 March 1950 into a family of scientists. Her father was a distinguished atomic physicist. The family moved to Moscow in 1956.
Firsova made her first attempt at composition at the age of eleven. She studied at Music School 1963-66, Music College 1966-70, Moscow Conservatory 1970-75 where her teachers were Alexander Purimov (composition), Yuri Kholopov (analysis) and Nikolai Rakov (orchestration). She established contact of a crucial musical importance with a composer Edison Denisov and Philip Herschkowitz, the pupil of Anton von Webern. In August 1972 she married the composer Dmitri Smirnov and now they have two children, Philip and Alissa.
She has written about a hundred compositions in many different genres including operas, oratory, cantatas, orchestral works, concertos, chamber ensembles, solo works and so on. Naturally, readers of The Free-Reed Review are interested especially in the free-reed instruments, so I will concentrate on the one piece on the program which features accordion: Crucifixion.
Firsova wrote, "CRUCIFIXION Op.63 for Cello and Accordion (or Organ) was written in Spring 1993 for two remarkable performers, Karine Georgian and Elsbeth Moser. The outlines of sonata form can be seen in the structure of this one-movement concert work. The title has no direct religious meaning, but rather is connected with the feelings of the human being entering a hard period in his life."
When I first heard Crucifixion, I was reminded of another famous "crucifixion" piece by another famous Russian woman composer: In Croce for bayan and cello by Sofia Gubaidulina. Both are atonal works and both convey, by their dissonances, intense suffering of the human soul.
Firsova's Crucifixion features the cello as the lyrical solo instrument and, with few exceptions, relegates the accordion to an accompanying role. Nonetheless, it is an important work for accordionists, as the two instruments function together as a team, just as the voice and piano work together as a team in Schubert's Lieder. Naturally the cello takes the principle role in this piece as that instrument has a more dynamically expressive "voice" than the accordion, which admirably functions here as the sonic support for the plaintive cries of Karine Georgian's instrument.
Owen Murray, accordion professor at the Royal Academy of Music, plays his part in this duo expertly and deserves high commendation. I am pleased to recommend this CD for all lovers of contemporary classical music. In addition, free-reed lovers will be pleasantly surprised by Firsova's other works on the CD: for piano, string quartet, voice, flute, harp, etc. Most are less somber and some are even a bit jovial! (I found her string quartet La malinconia especially wonderful.)
Ernste Spiele
Das Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester auf der Spur von Anna Achmatowa
"Nein, nicht
unter fremden Himmeln schleichen / noch suchen unter
fremdem
Flügel Schlaf. / Damals blieb ich unter meinesgleichen, / dort, wo
mein Volk
sein Unglück traf." Anna Achmatowa wird vom Stalinregime gequält,
ihre Männer
und ihr Sohn verschleppt, die Dichterin selbst verbringt lange
Monate in
den Zuchthäusern von Leningrad. Dort liest sie die Trauer von
blauen Lippen,
sammelt das allgegenwärtige Flüstern, um den Geschundenen in
der Dichtung
ihr Gesicht zurückzugeben. Jahrzehnte arbeitet Achmatowa an
ihrem Gedichtzyklus
"Requiem", der tausendfache Schreie in klare Verse
taucht.
Die Komponistin Elena Firssowa, 1950 in Leningrad geboren, hat sie
für
Orchester, Chor und Sopran neu zusammengestellt - und das Rundfunk
Sinfonieorchester
Berlin besorgte unter Wassili Sinaiski im Konzerthaus die
Uraufführung.
Firssowas
"Requiem" ist durchdrungen vom Respekt gegenüber ihrer
literarischen
Vorlage, die weit mehr ist als das: der Versuch, den Atem
derer zu
bewahren, die ausgelöscht wurden. Da verbieten sich kühne
musikalische
Konstruktionen fast von selbst. Die Stimme der Opfer gilt es zu
hüten,
und Firssowa gelingen betörend eingängige Vokalpartien, besonders
für
die schwerelos
intonierende Claudia Barainsky. Die orchestralen Effekte sind
einprägsam
gesetzt, der Chor rauscht wie Herbstlaub (klangsatt: der
Rundfunkchor
Berlin). Doch letztlich weist nichts über Achmatowas Gedichte
hinaus,
drohen Ernst und Respekt in künstlerische Befangenheit umzuschlagen.
So steht
das "Requiem" etwas verloren da, wie zu früh geboren, zwei Wochen
vorm Beginn
der Festwochen mit ihrem Russland-Brennpunkt.
Davon völlig
unberührt tobt sich Prokofjews brillante "Sinfonia
concertante"
für Cello und Orchester aus, ein überbordend bis abgründiger
Schlussgesang
des Komponisten mit aberwitzigen Anforderungen an den
Solisten.
Wolfgang Emanuel Schmidt begegnet ihnen eher sophisticated denn
brachial.
Und das RSB vermittelt einen animierenden Eindruck davon, wie
aufregend
ernste Spiele sein können. Ulrich Amling
© Verlag Der Tagesspiegel GmbH
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/feuilleton/275301.html
Wolken in As-Dur
Nicht Marek
Janowski, der Chefdirigent, leitete am Sonnabend das
erste Konzert
des Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchesters Berlin in dieser Spielzeit,
sondern
Wassili Sinaiski. Die Gründe dafür sind programmatischer Natur.
Nach
der wunderbar
verhalten gespielten Sinfonia concertante für Violoncello und
Orchester
von Sergej Prokofjew (mit Wolfgang E. Schmidt als Solist) stand
eine Uraufführung
auf dem Programm: das Requiem von Jelena Firssowa. Texte
von Anna
Achmatowa liegen diesem Werk zu Grunde, Texte, die von der Angst
erzählen,
durch den sowjetischen Geheimdienst verschleppt zu werden, von der
Trauer um
ermordete Menschen und von der Scham, selbst kein Held gewesen zu
sein. Anna
Achmatowa hat dies alles in der Stalinzeit durchgemacht; Jelena
Firssowa,
1950 geboren, kennt den Terror in seiner milderen Form aus der
Breschnew-Ära;
Wassili Sinaiski ist im Gulag zur Welt gekommen. So war diese
Uraufführung
vor allem ein Zeugnis erlittener Geschichte.
Firssowas
Musik lebt in großen Zusammenhängen: Die mittelalterliche
Dies-Irae-Sequenz
aus der katholischen Totenmesse taucht im Requiem ebenso
auf wie
viele Anklänge an die Sinfonien von Schostakowitsch. Die kollektive
historische
Erfahrung legitimiert wohl den Rückgriff auf ein historisch
bereits
erschlossenes Repertoire musikalischen Ausdrucks. Firssowas Requiem
wirft damit
die grundsätzliche Frage auf, ob das Neue in der "Neuen Musik"
nicht seine
Legitimität gegenüber dem Alten in dem Moment verloren hat, wo
die Geschichtsphilosophie,
die dieser Idee zu Grunde liegt, in politischen
Terror umgeschlagen
ist.
Still, zärtlich,
fast elegant klang Firssowas Requiem, und wo die
Wolken (im
8. Satz) in As-Dur vorüberzogen, schien Gabriel Fauré aus ihnen
herabzublicken.
Die Sopranistin Claudia Barainsky und der Rundfunkchor
Berlin sangen
mit silbrig timbrierter Schönheit, wenngleich ihr Russisch
recht zahm
artikuliert blieb.
Jan Brachmann
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