KAROLA OBERMÜLLER - GERMANY
BORN 21 MARCH
Karola Obermüller’s composing, described by the New York Times as "hyperkinetic music”, is constantly in search of the unknown, often with layers and layers of obscured material buried deep underneath a surface which is at times sumptuous and at times crackling with rhythmic energy.
Obermueller has received commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fromm Music Foundation, New Music USA,the Bayerischer Rundfunk, Saarländischer Rundfunk, the IPPNW Congress Nürnberg, and from numerous ensembles including Ensemble Modern, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Elisenquartet, and Ensemble Phorminx. She has written operas for Staatstheater Nürnberg, Theater Bielefeld, the Musik der Jahrhunderte festival in Stuttgart and a collaborative opera for Theater Bonn funded by an Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation Grant. A portrait CD of hers with the WERGO Contemporary Music Edition with recordings by Ensemble Modern, MusikFabrik, ICE, and Neue Vocalsolisten, among others, is set to be released in 2018, another one will follow shortly thereafter with New Focus Recordings.
She holds a PhD from Harvard University as well as degrees from the Hochschule für Musik Saar, the University Mozarteum Salzburg, and the Meistersinger-Konservatorium Nürnberg. After teaching at Wellesley College, Obermueller joined the composition faculty at the University of New Mexico in 2010 where she helps direct the composition area and is a co-director of the John Donald Robb Composers' Symposium.
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ELENA FIRSOVA - RUSSIA
BORN 21 MARCH
Elena Olegovna Firsova is a Russian composer. Firsova was born in Leningrad into the family of physicists Oleg Firsov and Viktoria Lichko. She studied music in Moscow with Alexander Pirumov, Yuri Kholopov, Edison Denisov and Philip Herschkowitz. In 1979 she 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. She is married to the composer Dmitri Smirnov and they currently live in the United Kingdom. Their children are Philip Firsov (an artist and sculptor), and Alissa Firsova (a composer, pianist and conductor).
She composed more than a 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).
Her 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 her favourite poet Osip Mandelstam that include Earthly Life, Tristia, The Stone, Forest Walks, Before the Thunderstorm, Stygian Song, Secret Way, Seashell, Whirlpool, Silentium, Winter Songs, and Petrarch's Sonnets (in Russian translation by Osip Mandelstam).
She received commissions from many music festivals, orchestras and ensembles including the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Brodsky Quartet, Manchester Wind Orchestra, Schubert Ensemble, Freden Festival, BBC Proms, Asiago Festival, and Expo 2000 (Hanover). Her music is available through publishers Boosey & Hawkes, London; Hans Sikorski, Hamburg; G. Schirmer, New York.
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Chamber Concerto No1 by Elena Firsova
Chamber Concerto No1 by Elena Firsova
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