As our lives become increasingly digital, it’s clear that those moments when we escape from screens and experience art and culture in real life become more and more essential to our sanity and our sense of what it is to be human. On 5th November I’m presenting my music at a festival whose whole focus is that intimate experience. It’s called Up Close and Musical, and happens every November in the cosy setting of the Fidelio Cafe in Clerkenwell. Festival Director Shiry Rashkovsky carefully curates a selection of forward-thinking musicians to present diverse programmes, and also talk about their work, inviting the audience right inside their creative world.
This year I’ll be performing with the brilliant Argentinian Violinist & conductor Herman Ringer, and special guest, Bulgarian pianist Dimitar Bodurov. And I’ll be performing live electronics, connecting the digital world with the classical acoustic world, the machine with the very delicate sound of fingers & bow on strings. We’ll perform tracks from my new album,Dark Lights, which explores that dilemma of the electronic takeover of modern life, and also works from the sound-track I composed for the TV series ‘Litvinenko’.
The Litvinenko score has a particularly personal resonance for me, as my own family were targeted by the KGB under Stalin. My grandmother, Lina, was imprisoned for eight years in a gulag between 1948 and 1956. So when Litvinenko’s death was first reported in 2006, I felt a strong emotional connection to his story;. I also felt a chill, a fear that Russia (and neighbouring territories) were still not yet free from those dark times. I was especially moved by the tribulations of Marina Litvinenko, Alexander’s widow. Even before director Jim Field Smith approached me, I’d already been thinking about writing something inspired by her story — her strength, her refusal to let the truth about her husband’s assassination be buried. Alexander himself had spent his life trying to expose the connections between Putin’s regime and terrorism, and Marina’s determination to continue that fight really struck me.
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In writing the soundtrack, I wanted to capture both the intimacy and the enormity of their story. There’s definitely a Russian — and at times Soviet — atmosphere running through the music. I tried to build a sound world that feels emotional and human, without ever becoming sentimental. It moves between London and Moscow — geographically and emotionally — with a kind of quiet determination.
The string melodies pay subtle tribute to Shostakovich and other Russian composers I grew up with, but I also wanted to bring in a more experimental, textural edge. I became fascinated by the ANS synthesiser — that extraordinary Soviet-era instrument from the 1940s. I’d seen the original model at the Glinka Museum in Moscow, and later discovered that a Russian synth enthusiast had built a computer emulator of it. When I started experimenting it generated this sweeping, glassy, menacing sound that perfectly captured the paranoia, suspicion, and fear surrounding Litvinenko’s story. To deepen that atmosphere, I also used the Moffenzeef Modular Stargazer drone machine, which adds a kind of dark, radioactive pulse. It’s unsettling — intentionally so — but it also adds a strange beauty to the unease.
By dark coincidence, we were working the final sound-mix of the soundtrack for the ITV Series on 24th February 2022 – the same day that Russian tanks entered Ukraine, (adding poignancy to Sasha’s warnings to the world of the regime’s ruthlessness).
Gabriel Prokofiev performs live with Herman Ringer & Dimitar Bodurov at Fidelio Cafe on November 5th. For more information, visit https://upcloseandmusical.com/
His new album ‘Dark Lights’ is out now on Nonclassical, available on all streaming platforms, with physical CD release on 23 Jan 2026.