Colin Clarke

It is an exciting time for composer Alexey Shor. I personally first came across his music on a Delos release entitled Classical Music Stars in Malta in which four of his chamber pieces (Farewell Nocturne; Addio; King Matt the First; Coming of Age) shared disc space with music by Ilya Dimov, Khachaturian, Joseph Vella, and the fabulous Handel/Halvorsen Passacaglia. Then, the superstar violinist Maxim Vengerov, no less, performed Shor’s St. Elmo Barcarolle at the Barbican in January this year under the baton of a conductor who is a tireless champion of Shor’s music, Sergey Smbatyan (review); and Vengerov’s encore, after Bruch’s First Violin Concerto and Ravel’s Tzigane, was another work by Shor: his Elegy for violin and orchestra.

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