Cassandra is a large single-movement work for orchestra. Not quite a tone poem (since there is no specific program), this work in a contemplative, mysterious modern chromatic style has a dramatic quality and a mysterious mood that readily communicates to an audience. Cassandra represents a major element in Firsova's work, which follows the Romantic idea that art expresses its artist's life and feelings.

Born in 1950 in Leningrad, Elena Firsova is the daughter of physicists. She began to try to compose at the age of 12, and started compositional studies in earnest when she was 16.

Her bravery and independence became manifest while she was still a student at the Leningrad Conservatory and wrote a song cycle on poems of Ossip Mandelshtam, who died in Stalin's prison camps in 1938. In 1975 she met composer Edison Denisov, who helped her become known for her music expressing the oppression and drabness of Soviet life.

Firsova became one of a group of younger composers known as "unofficial" composers. In 1979, the Communist Party tried to bring these rebels to heel. The egregious hack Tikhon Khrennikov, head of the Soviet Composers' Union, attacked seven of them by name in terms that were an unintended compliment: He called their music "not representative of the work Soviet composers." Also among the Seven was Firsova's husband, Dmitri Smirnov.

Khrennikov's castigation made Firsova's name known in the West. Then the Gorbachev policy of "Openness" (Glasnost) reduced the danger of writing unapproved music and allowed its publication abroad, benefiting both Firsova and Smirnov. The collapse of the Soviet state in 1991 allowed them to emigrate to England with their children.

With the fall of the Soviets, Firsova began a remarkable burst of creativity, writing 29 compositions from 1991 to 1993. These included most of a group of four orchestral compositions including Cassandra that, together, make a loose cycle.

The first, Augury (1988) includes a choral setting of Blake's poetic lines beginning with "...to see the world in a grain of sand." It seems to yearn to see clearly what Firsova felt was apt to happen. The second, Nostalgia (1991), expresses her feelings when she and her husband were deciding on their move to England.

After moving, she took a large chance by beginning, without a commission for it, Secret Way, an orchestral song cycle on poems of Mandelshtam. It seems to summarize the bleak world of Soviet life, and received its premiere in Russian in 1996.

By autumn of 1992 Firsova was already planning out a fourth orchestral work when the BBC National Symphony Orchestra of Wales offered her a commission for an orchestral work. This spurred her into rapid action, and by the time the year was out she produced the full sketch of Cassandra. In this work the tragic prophetess of Troy, represented by the cello solo, is a metaphor for apprehension about the future of Russia, and that future's possible tragic consequences for the world. A bass drum part of remarkable sensitivity represents inevitable Fate.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide