The composer Nimrod Borenstein, Israeli by birth, French by upbringing, and mostly English by training, has a style that, paradoxically enough, tends toward Russian and American thinking. He claims to have been unaware of the musical resonance of his first name until he enrolled at the Royal College of Music. Be that as it may, it is easy to understand why the lion of the podium, Vladimir Ashkenazy, has championed this composer. He has a hypermelodic style (he has used the coinage "multimelodic") of strongly Russian ...
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The composer Nimrod Borenstein, Israeli by birth, French by upbringing, and mostly English by training, has a style that, paradoxically enough, tends toward Russian and American thinking. He claims to have been unaware of the musical resonance of his first name until he enrolled at the Royal College of Music. Be that as it may, it is easy to understand why the lion of the podium, Vladimir Ashkenazy, has championed this composer. He has a hypermelodic style (he has used the coinage "multimelodic") of strongly Russian inflection, with a bit of Prokofiev and a bit of Stravinsky, leavened with inventive orchestration -- check the vibraphone -- that brings American film scoring to mind and keeps sentimentality at bay. (Indeed, Borenstein's music is finding American advocates as well.) Sample the considerable lyricism of the slow movement of 2013's Violin Concerto, Op. 60 (yes, Borenstein is one of the few composers left using the opus number convention). The concerto, with a clean four-movement form...
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