Fanfare 4 (US)
Five stars: Love and loss unite this group of substantial, probing chamber works.

SMIRNOV Abel1. To be or not to be… FIRSOVA Piano Quartet No. 2, “Four Seasons”. Quartet for the Time of Grief1  Rudersdal Chamber Players; 1Jonas Frølund (cl)  OUR 8.226932 (55:06)
This release is titled Love and Loss, and it has what Hollywood script writers call a back story. The two Russian composers, Dmitri Smirnov and Elena Firsova, met while studying at the Moscow Conservatoire and soon married. Both were interested in current contemporary music styles, but Soviet strictures were still in place so their music had to flourish in underground settings. Their mentor was Edison Denisov, one of the previous generation who also walked a fine line with the authorities. In 1979, Smirnov and Firsova were denounced by the powerful Tikhon Khrennikov for “formalism” (some three decades after he made life hell for Shostakovich, Prokofiev and others), and they subsequently decamped to England. Once in the West, their music was recognized for its quality, and both produced new works in many genres. Two of the pieces in this chamber recital appeared in 2019, commissioned by these players for the Rudersdal Summer Concert Festival. That is the love story. Tragically, Smirnov became an early victim of the Covid pandemic, dying the following year at the age of 71. This was the loss referred to in the title. The CD booklet features many pictures of the happy couple throughout their marriage, like a family album, but the sentimentality these shots might suggest has no place in the music itself. Smirnov and Firsova were serious composers. Their writing is tautly conceived, atonal—but not in a grating way—and often deeply melancholy.
My impressions are superficial, as I had only one day to absorb this disc, but overall I certainly hear echoes of late Shostakovich, late Schnittke, and Denisov (the little I know of the latter’s music.) Smirnov’s Abel (1991) is a sextet inspired by William Blake’s biblical illustrations; like them it is sparsely textured, sharp-edged and unsettling. The clarinet plays a jagged melodic line (possibly a tone-row; I can never tell). Quiet piano clusters in the bass establish the foggy world of Hamlet’s ghost and his troubled psyche, in to be or not to be… (2018–19). Probing, questing string lines eventually build to a turbulent point, but Hamlet-like, they fail to resolve. Both pieces have central sections that introduce some rhythmic activity, but end bleakly.
Firsova’s “Four Seasons” Piano Quartet No. 2 (2019) is more about the sense of the seasons than a human response to them. For example, Spring is about growth rather than suffused with Delian warmth. The brief Summer movement’s activity is akin to the flurry of a light breeze, and Autumn (perhaps typically for a Russian composer) is the longest movement in its forlorn fading away. Firsova uses the same musical vocabulary as her husband, but fewer contemporary avant-gardisms: her textures are absorbingly open and clear. This is my favorite of the four works. Her Quartet for the Time of Grief, for the same forces as Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, was written after Smirnov’s death. Obviously a work of personal significance, it is at times dreamy, troubled, and even desolate. Firsova has the knack of saying a lot, emotionally as well as musically, with relatively little; the final slowing down of a ‘heartbeat’ figure from the piano, with long flat lines from the cool clarinet, is deeply touching by virtue of its understatement.
The musicians of the Rudersdal Chamber Players (a group of flexible numbers and combinations of instruments) were all involved with the premieres of these works. They are Christine Pryn (violin, and founded of the ensemble in 2017); Marie Stockmarr Becker (viola); John Ehde (cello); Jonas Frølund (clarinet), and Manuel Esparilla (piano). They are completely in sync with the idiom, and do a beautiful job in serving the subtly expressive writing of these two composers. OUR Recordings’ sound quality maintains its usual high standard. Strongly recommended. Phillip Scott

Five stars: Love and loss unite this group of substantial, probing chamber works.