Rudersdal Chamber Players is one of the Nordic region's leading ensembles for contemporary music,and this recording represents a special tribute to their friendship with the composers, which dates back to2019.London-based Elena Firsova and Dmitri Smirnov are internationally acclaimed composers. Their catalogueis extensive and includes commissions and performances by, among others, the BBC Symphony Orchestra,London Sinfonietta, RSNO - Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Gidon Kremer / Kremerata Baltica,Ensemble InterContemporain (Paris), Ensemble Modern (Germany), Birmingham Contemporary MusicGroup, The Halle Orchestra, and BBC Proms.Elena Firsova and Dmitri Smirnov formed an extraordinary composing couple who spent almost half a centuryof creative life together as wife and husband. They met and fell in love while studying at the MoscowConservatoire, and from the start, they shared a passion for the arts and the world around them.As young composers, Smirnov and Firsova's music was heard in "unofficial" concerts outside the USSR,away from the judgmental ears of the Union of Soviet Composers. Despite this, they still ran afoul of officialdomand were denounced as members of The Seven, a group of non-conforming composers that includedDenisov, Firsova, Smirnov, and Gubaidulina, at the 6th Congress of the Union of Soviet Composers.Ironically, this rebuke only served to generate more foreign interest in the composing husband-and-wifeteam. When Smirnov died in 2020, at the start of the COVID pandemic, he left behind not only a prolific musicallegacy (200 opus numbers), but also poetry, artworks in various media, and several books, includingSong from Underground, one of the most important chronicles of later Soviet music.For Elena Firsova, her first critical influence as an artist was her father, an internationally distinguished thinkerin the field of atomic theory. As if to balance her father's scientific perspective, Firsova found inspirationin the great Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and has composed numerous works based on his texts.