Category Archives: Music

Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “seemingly boundless textural imagination” (NY Times) and “striking” (Guardian) sound world has made her “one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music” (NPR).

Her works were performed with great success in the western world beginning in 1979. During the same year, she and her husband, the composer Dmitri Smirnov, were attacked by the Composers’ Union as “not worthy of the Soviet Union.” During the course of perestroika, Elena Firssova first received permission to travel abroad. There was no lasting change in Russian musical life, however, since the influence of the functionaries of the Composers’ Union remained strong. She founded the association ASM together with Edison Denissov and Dmitri Smirnov, which performed contemporary music with its own ensemble at home and abroad. In 1990 Elena Firssova moved to England with her family.
Elena Firsova has so far composed well over 100 works, including operas, cantatas, concertos, orchestral works but also much chamber music. She received a commission for a composition for Expo 2000. Her “Achmatova Requiem” received its world premiere at the Berlin Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt in September 2003.

In parallel with her studies in music theory and accompaniment at the Paris Conservatory, she composed for the cinema, the theatre, and the television. An accompanist, a choral director and subsequently teacher of young singers at the Paris Conservatory, she focussed her creative activity from 1981 on the voice and opera. Attentive to prosody, demanding in the choice of libretti, she considers herself an heir to the French tradition of Debussy, Ravel and Poulenc. The excellent welcome accorded to the premiere of her first stage work Les Surprises de l’Enfer (1981) revealed her orientation: Leçons de français aux étudiants américains (1983), Trois folies d’opéra pour trois femmes compositeurs (1986), Cinq Nô Modernes (1992), La Lacune (1993), Monsieur Balzac fait son theatre (1999), Le Renard à l’opéra (2004).

A producer at Radio France from 1978 to 1992, in residence at the Casa Velázquez in Madrid between 1979 and 1981, composer in residence at the Strasburg Conservatory and guest of the Festival Musica in that city in 1993, she has been teaching analysis and orchestration at the Paris Conservatory since 1983. In 1995 she won the Grand Prix for symphonic music of the SACEM for her work as a whole. Michèle Reverdy has written many pieces for various chamber formations, vocal and choral music, works for chamber orchestra and symphony orchestra, as well as four operas.

Her compositions gain their dramatic structure by combining elements of theatre with musical forms which use voice as well as instruments. A series of songs for voice and piano reveal her strong interest in lieder, arguably the form of composition which she finds most satisfying.