The phrase ‘unashamed Romantic’ might not have been coined for the French composer Corentin Boissier, born in the Paris suburbs in 1995, but it certainly...

The phrase ‘unashamed Romantic’ might not have been coined for the French composer Corentin Boissier, born in the Paris suburbs in 1995, but it certainly fits him well. As the titles of his Glamour Concerto and Philip Marlowe Concerto suggest, he revels in the full-textured sound of 1940s and ’50s Hollywood, the golden age of Addinsell’s Warsaw Concerto, Rota’s Legend of the Glass Mountain and other such high-calorie classics. The Second Piano Sonata, the Sonata Appassionata, is no less Neo-Romantic, but has flecks of Russian color, locating it downstream from Rachmaninov.