Before the Thunderstorm

The chamber cantata Before the Thunderstorm to texts of Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) for solo soprano and ensemble of nine performers was completed in March of 1994 at Keele, Staffordshire, UK. The genre of solo cantata is probably the most important for me. I have written quite a few cantatas for solo voice and different combinations of instruments almost at the regular intervals of time and every time this gave me very strong creative impulses, which act even upon the next few compositions. Before the Thunderstorm is already my sixth cantata. Like the two previous cantatas Earthly Life (1984) and Forest Walks (1987) it was commissioned by The Nash Ensemble. The work consists of the six move- ments, where the first is an instrumental introduction. I've chosen the texts from so called Moscow Notebooks (1930-1934) by Mandelstam, written a short time before his first arrest. The poems are full of presentiments of his impending cata- strophe. The title comes from the second line of the third poem: "...I feel with no fear that thunderstorm is coming..." The "thunderstorm" can mean many different things. For Mandelstam it meant his future imprisonment, exile and death in the concentration camp of GULAG. The first performance of the cantata took place on 7th of March 1995, at the Purcell Room, London with Patricia Rozario, sopr. and The Nash Ensemble conducted by Lionel Friend. A daughter of the distinguished atomic physicist, Elena Olegovna Firsova was born in 1950 in Saint Petersburg. She began to compose her music at the age of eleven. She studied at the Moscow Conservatory between 1970 and 1975 with Alexander Pirumov and Yuri Kholopov. She established the contact of a crucial musical importance with Edison Denisov and Philip Herschkowitz. In 1972 she married a composer Dmitri N. Smirnov. They have two children, Philip and Alissa. Since 1991 Firsova and her family have been resident of England. She has written near two hundred works in many different genres of music and had many performances round the world. The premiere of one of her major works Augury for choir & large symphony orchestra, commissioned by BBC Proms, took place on BBC Proms festival in Albert hall in London in 1992. The premiere of another her major work Requiem to texts of Anna Akhmatova took place in Berlin in 2003. The recent premieres include the orchestral pieces The Garden of Dreams commissioned by Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam, and Beyond the Seven Seals commissioned by Toulouse Symphony Orchestra. One of her latest works is the Double Concerto for Violin and Cello com- missioned from DSO, Berlin. Her music is available from the Boosey & Hawkes, Hans Sikorski and Meladina Press.