EPITAPH was written in 2003 for The Asch Trio and dedicated to the memory of Oleg Nikolaevich Ivanov. This is a short one-movement piece that I wrote under impression of very tragic event happened in Moscow at the end of December 2002 with one of my distant relatives who was killed in the early evening at the entrance of his own house. The music reflects this event and therefore has almost cinematographic qualities. The Asch Trio gave the first performance on 21st March 2003 at the Wigmore Hall in London. FAREWELL is one movement string quartet, dark in its character, which corresponds to Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich's attitude to death. It has no direct quotation of his music, but I used the three-note dotted rhythmical pattern that is possible to trace in many of his compositions. The music of this quartet reflects also my personal grief for the death of my mother who died in September 2005. The first performance took place on 29th Septem- ber 2006 in Bristol at St. Georgies, played by Brodsky Quartet. A daughter of the distinguished atomic physicist, Elena Olegovna FIRSOVA was born in 1950 in Saint Petersburg. She began to compose her music at the age of eleven. She studied at the Moscow Conservatory between 1970 and 1975 with Alexander Pirumov and Yuri Kholopov. She established the contact of a crucial musical importance with Edison Denisov and Philip Herschkowitz. In 1972 she married a composer Dmitri N. Smirnov. They have two children, Philip and Alissa. Since 1991 Firsova and her family have been resident of England. She has written near two hundred works in many different genres of music and had many performances round the world. The premiere of one of her major works Augury for choir & large symphony orchestra, commissioned by BBC Proms, took place on BBC Proms festival in Albert hall in London in 1992. The premiere of another her major work Requem to Anna Akhmatova poem took place in Berlin in 2003. The recent premieres include the orchestral pieces The Garden of Dreams commissioned by Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam, and Beyond the Seven Seals commissioned by Toulouse Symphony Orchestra. One of her latest works is the Double Concerto for Violin and Cello com- missioned from DSO, Berlin. Her music is available from the Boosey & Hawkes, Hans Sikorski and Meladina Press.