Dmitri Smirnov
Dmitri Smirnov, also known by the literary pseudonym Dmitri Smirnov-Sadovsky, was a Soviet and British composer, poet-translator, and author of books. Born into a family of opera singers, he was the son of Nikolai Senkin, who used the stage name Sadovsky, and Yevgenia Smirnova.
Smirnov graduated from the music college in Frunze in 1967 and from the Moscow Conservatory in 1972. His teachers included Edison Denisov, Nikolai Sidelnikov, Yuri Kholopov, and Philip Herschkowitz. From 1973 to 1980 he worked as an editor at the Soviet Composer publishing house, and he joined the Union of Soviet Composers in 1974. His Solo for Harp won first prize at the International Harp Week in Maastricht in 1976.
His output included concertos, symphonies, operas, oratorios, cantatas, chamber music, and piano works. Major compositions include the First Piano Concerto (1971), Triple Concerto No. 1 for saxophone, piano, double bass, strings, and percussion (1977), the First Symphony, The Seasons (1980), and the Second Symphony, Fate (1982), for four soloists, chorus, and orchestra on poems by Friedrich Hölderlin. His operas based on William Blake, Tiriel and Thel, were staged in Freiburg and London respectively in 1989, while the First Symphony was performed at the Tanglewood Festival that year.
Smirnov was among the initiators and organizers of the second Association for Contemporary Music, founded in Moscow in 1990. He emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1991. He taught at St John's College, Cambridge, and at Dartington in Devon in 1992; from 1993 to 1997 he was Professor of Composition at Keele University in Staffordshire, and he also taught at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2002. He was married to the composer Elena Firsova.
William Blake was a recurring source for Smirnov's music, including The Seasons for voice, flute, viola, and harp (1979), the oratorio Song of Liberty (1991), The Seven Angels of William Blake for piano (1988), and the Sixth Piano Sonata, Blake Sonata (2008). Later works included the Cello Concerto (1992), the oratorio Song of Songs (1997), Triple Concerto No. 2 for violin, harp, double bass, and orchestra (2003), a Requiem for four soloists, chorus, and orchestra (2006), and Zodiac for large orchestra (2010–2012).
He also wrote literary and music-theoretical studies and articles on Anton Webern, Pierre Boulez, György Ligeti, Harrison Birtwistle, Brian Ferneyhough, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, Edison Denisov, Alfred Schnittke, and Sofia Gubaidulina. His English-language books included A Geometer of Sound Crystals: A Book on Herschkowitz, published in Berlin in 2003, and The Anatomy of Theme in Beethoven's Piano Sonatas, published there in 2008. Smirnov died of coronavirus in a Watford hospital on 9 April 2020.