Alexey Shor (born Alexey Vladimirovich Kononenko, 20 May 1970, in the Ukrainian SSR) is a Ukrainian-born American composer who came to music after a career in mathematics and finance. The son of a physicist at the Kyiv Polytechnic Institute and a programmer, he attended specialised mathematics and physics schools in Kyiv and won the national mathematics olympiad as a teenager. He emigrated in 1991, pursued graduate studies at Pennsylvania State University, where he received a PhD in mathematics in 1996, and then held a post at the University of Pennsylvania. From 1999 to 2016 he worked in quantitative research and statistical modelling at the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies.

Largely self-taught as a composer, Shor began writing music as a hobby around 2012 and devoted himself to it full-time from 2016. His style is tonal and neo-romantic, built on melodic directness. His first violin concerto, Seascapes (2014), was followed by a large body of orchestral, concertante and chamber music, including more than twenty works written for the violist David Aaron Carpenter, who did much to bring his music to a wide audience, and the ballet Crystal Palace, whose overture was performed at the 40th Gramophone Classical Music Awards in London. His score for the film Blood on the Crown (2021) won Best Musical Score at the Malta Film Festival. His music has been recorded for labels including Warner Classics, Sony Classical, Decca, Naxos, Denon and Pentatone, notably in the Naxos series Composer's Notebook.

Shor has been composer-in-residence of the Armenian State Symphony Orchestra, associate composer at the Yehudi Menuhin School (2022-2023) and composer-in-residence of the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra (2024-2028). In 2018 the Komitas State Conservatory of Yerevan made him an honorary professor. He lives mainly in New York. Source: Rondo DB

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