(Vinnytsia, July 13, 1952)
The Pavlova family moved to Moscow in 1961, and Alla studied music at the Moscow Gnessin Academy of Music. She studied with Armen Shakhbagyan, a composer of solid reputation in the 1970s, paying particular attention to the works of Anna Akhmatova, who influenced much of her musical output until 1990.
After graduating in 1983, Pavlova moved to the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, where she worked at the Union of Bulgarian Composers and the Bulgarian National Opera. She returned to Moscow three years later.
From 1986, Pavlova served on the board of the Russian Musical Society in Moscow, before moving to New York in 1990.
After arriving in New York, Pavlova wrote a collection of simple piano pieces inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales for her daughter Irene. During the first half of the 1990s, her compositions alternated between lieder and smaller piano pieces. In 1994, Pavlova composed her first significant work, Symphony No. 1 "Farewell Russia", which aims to express the melancholy and sorrowful feelings the composer felt when leaving her home country. The work is a single movement and consists of an ensemble of two violins, a cello, a piano, a flute, and a piccolo, performed in Russia by soloists of the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra just two days after its opening.
Pavlova waited four years to compose her first symphonic work, a mere four minutes for piano and strings, inspired by Shakhbagyan's death. She then returned to lieder, composing pieces such as "Mi manchi... ma lasciami andare" in early September 2001. Like Cristóbal Halffter, he had modified his composition Adagio into a Rondo following the terrorist attacks of September 11; Pavlova was shocked by these attacks, mainly because she lived so close to ground zero, so she decided to rededicate the piece to the memory of the victims.
Her first symphonic work following the Elegy, Symphony No. 2 "for the new millennium" (1998), was probably her most ambitious work. After being revised over the next four years, it was released on CD by Vladimir Fedoseev, who would later become one of Pavlova's most representative interpreters in Russia by performing and recording her fourth symphony and helping to strengthen Pavlova's reputation in her native country. In addition to consolidating her prestige, the Second Symphony represents a significant turning point in Pavlova's career, as in her subsequent works she abandoned chamber music in favor of compositions for large orchestras. In 2000, she sealed this change of direction with the monumental Symphony No. 3; this work, inspired by a monument to Joan of Arc in New York, is characterized by its intense expressive scope and is considered her masterpiece. True to her revision policy, Pavlova continued to modify this composition, adding a guitar as a decorative element.
The fine-tuning of this symphony continued in 2002 when Pavlova composed a second concerto, a monologue with solo violin in which she again employed a string orchestra. In the following two years, Pavlova elaborated her first incidental realization, that of the dance Sulamith, which brings to the stage a story by Alexander Kuprin of biblical inspiration, resulting in a symphonic suite lasting three-quarters of an hour.
Pavlova's most recent compositions include a Fifth Symphony (2006), a Sixth Symphony (2008), and a Thumbelina Ballet Suite (2008/2009), which Naxos published.
Her music is inspired by the great Russian masters of the twentieth century (Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Rachmaninov, etc.), and each of her works seems crossed by the theme of uprooting and exile.
