Stereophile (US)
Performance: ****½ Sonics: *****
OUR Recordings, a musician-centric Danish label founded in 2006 by recorder player Michela Petri and guitarist/lutist Lars Hannibal, has garnered award after award for musical content. It deserves an award for sound quality. Few labels record in DXD, let alone with the liquid clarity that engineer Mette Due achieves here.
The four chamber works on Love and Loss were composed between 1991 and 2023 by Russian composers Elena Firsova and Dmitri Smirnov, Firsova's late husband. All are uncompromising in their truth-telling originality. The most arresting piece is Firsova's Piano Quartet No.2 Four Seasons (2019). First heard (along with Smirnov's to be or not to be...) at the Rudersdal Sommerkoncerter Festival in 2019, Four Seasons is a mesmerizing and disquieting personal take on the seasons in the couple's adopted home in England. The work is so ruminative that it feels as though Firsova is probing life's deepest mysteries with each note. "Summer" is by far the shortest movement; the dying expanse of "Autumn" the longest. If you need help finding your way in, consider that Firsova and Smirnov's harmonic language reflects the chilling repression and censorship rampant in Russia during the time they met at the Moscow Conservatory in the 1970s.
Smirnov's to be or not to be..., composed the year before he died, of COVID, and Abel from 1991, reflect the composer's fascination with Shakespeare's Hamlet and William Blake's ink drawing The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve. Brooding, agitation, horror, confusion, and primordial groans surface in a piece in which a clarinet sings Adam and a violin sings Eve.
The newest work, Firsova's poignant Quartet for the Time of Grief, was written on Smirnov's death. Urgently recommended.—Jason Victor Serinus, January 14th, 2026
https://www.stereophile.com/content/january-2026-classical-record-reviews