Piano Trio No. 1

Dmitri Smirnov wrote his Trio No. 1 for violin, cello and piano in 1977, five years after his graduating from the Moscow Conservatoire. It is dedicated to his teacher Edison Denisov. The three movements of the work correspond with three different states of musical sound, which symbolically represent the life of a human spirit: 1. Adagio molto-the birth of the sound; 2. Allegro-the active and expressive life of the sound; 3. Lento ("Dies Irae" theme with variations)-the ageing of the sound and its dying away. The Trio was recorded for Megadisc MDC 7818, "An Introduction to Dmitri Smirnov," by Patricia Kopatchinskaja, violin, Alexander Ivashkin, cello, and Ivan Sokolov, piano. Dmitri Nikolaevich Smirnov (pen names Dmitri N. Smirnov and D. Smirnov-Sadovsky) is a Russian and British composer. He was born in 1948 in Minsk into a family of opera singers Nikolay Senkin-Sadovsky and Eugenia Smirnova. He studied at the Moscow Conservatory 1967-1972 under Nikolai Sidelnikov, Yuri Kholopov and Edison Denisov. He also studied privately with Philip Herschkowitz, a pupil of both Berg and Webern. Since 1991 Smirnov has been resident of England. He was a Fellow at University of Cambridge, St John's College, a Composer-in-Residence in Dartington, and Visiting Professor at Keele University (1993-8). In 1998 Smirnov and his family settled in St Albans. From 2003 he has taught at the Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is married to the composer Elena Firsova. Their children are Philip Firsov (an artist and sculptor), and Alissa Firsova (a composer, pianist and conductor).