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Victoria Borisova-Ollas’ The Kingdom of Silence in American Premiere at San Francisco Symphony

Dec. 01, 2006

Victoria Borisova-Ollas’ music continues to proliferate throughout the musical world and now arrives on our shores with the American premiere of The Kingdom of Silence by the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy. The Russian-born composer—who resides in Sweden—first came to international attention as the Second Prize winner of the British-based Masterprize competition with her orchestral work Wings of the Wind and she has since continued to gain the attention of orchestras and ensembles worldwide. The BBC Music Magazine hailed her as “a composer with a sparkling individual voice,” and The Times (London) called her an “orchestrator of the greatest virtuosity.”

About her piece, Borisova-Ollas notes that it begins as a type of “lullaby…wrapped in the ‘echo’ of string instruments, gradually moving into a dream-like state of successive scenes and events of various moods and tempi.  With the return of the lullaby, a long chain of events has passed, but the dream itself - does it ever end?”

San Francisco Symphony’s performances of The Kingdom of Silence take place each successive night from November 29 through December 2.  The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Peter Eötvös, presented the world premiere of the piece in 2003. 

The composer’s next project is The Ground Beneath Her Feet(after the novel by Salman Rushdie) for the Manchester International Festival. This new work will be a narrative orchestral piece, a type of Songspiel for two singers, speaker and orchestra with a video component by British film director Mike Figgis. The world premiere takes place on June 29, 2007 in Manchester and the US premiere is still available.

To learn more about Victoria Borisova-Ollas' life and works, please visit www.universaledition.com.

For more about the San Francisco Symphony, please visit www.sfsymphony.org

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