Alex Ross

Las Vegas, United States

Classical Music Critic at The New Yorker

Music critic of The New Yorker, author of The Rest Is Noise, Listen to This, and Wagnerism. Blog: https://t.co/53IGcSxP49

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Articles

Kurt Weill Kept Reinventing Himself

1 week ago | newyorker.com | Alex Ross

“Music is no longer a matter for the few,” Kurt Weill declared in 1928, the year he wrote “The Threepenny Opera.” In Weill’s opinion, composers educated in the classical tradition had lost touch with the broader public and sunk into obscurantism. They should make their music “simpler, clearer, more transparent,” and they should address contemporary concerns. Seldom has an artist followed his own credo so faithfully.
Two Young Pianists Test Their Limits

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Alex Ross

When, last month, the preposterously gifted twenty-year-old pianist Yunchan Lim played Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts, in Costa Mesa, California, the crowd responded with one of the loudest noises I’ve lately heard in a classical venue. The previous week, Lim’s thirty-year-old colleague Seong-Jin Cho gave an all-Ravel recital at Disney Hall, and concertgoers emitted a similarly full-throated roar.
An 1887 Opera by a Black Composer Finally Surfaces

1 month ago | newyorker.com | Alex Ross

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, in 2020, and the cultural upheavals that ensued, classical-music organizations began including more composers of color in their programs. The Philadelphia Orchestra recorded the symphonies of the early-twentieth-century Black composer Florence Price. The National Symphony did the same for the modernist George Walker. The Metropolitan Opera presented two works by Terence Blanchard.
The Aesthetic Empire of Alma Mahler-Werfel

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Alex Ross

The first challenge is deciding what to call her. She is encircled by famous surnames—men jousting over her identity. A lustrous scion of fin-de-siècle Vienna, she was born Alma Maria Schindler, the daughter of the operetta singer Anna Bergen and the landscape painter Emil Schindler. She hoped to make her way as a composer, but that dream ended when, in 1902, at the age of twenty-two, she married the musical titan Gustav Mahler.
The Hidden Histories Lost in the Los Angeles Fires

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Alex Ross

At her house, Kohner-Zuckerman showed me souvenirs of her parents’ world, which were nestled amid memorabilia of her beach days. One was a bound copy of her father’s University of Vienna dissertation, “Der Deutsche Film: Tatbestand und Kritik einer neuen Dichtkunst” (“German Film: Status and Critique of a New Poetic Art”), written in 1929, at the end of the silent-film era.
L.A.’s New-Music Bastion

2 months ago | newyorker.com | Alex Ross

The first edition of Monday Evening Concerts, the world’s longest-running new-music series, took place on April 23, 1939, in a house on Micheltorena Street, in Silver Lake, Los Angeles. The hosts were Peter Yates, a functionary at the California Department of Employment, and his wife, the pianist Frances Mullen. The couple had commissioned the modernist architect R. M. Schindler to build an enclosed, cantilevered performance space atop their bungalow home.
UK’s economy grows for first time in three months

Jan 16, 2025 | the-independent.com | Simon Calder |Alex Ross

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground.
The Year the Metropolitan Opera Declared War on the Critics

Dec 22, 2024 | newyorker.com | Alex Ross

For those who think of opera as an antique genre preoccupied with musty subject matter, the above-named works might prompt a reconsideration. They address, variously, the birth of Christ, the suicide of Virginia Woolf, drone warfare, the murder of Federico García Lorca, the apocalyptic recent history of Ukraine, a Kurt Cobain-like rock star, the homoerotic art of John Singer Sargent, and a cult society built around ambient sound. Their musical languages are no less diverse.
The Berlin Philharmonic Doesn’t Need a Star Conductor

Dec 8, 2024 | newyorker.com | Alex Ross

When, in 2009, the Berlin Philharmonic launched the Digital Concert Hall, a streaming-video platform for its concerts, the orchestra had no particular need to bolster its reputation. For decades, the Philharmonic had reigned as the world-champion musical heavyweight. Established in 1882, it had been led by a procession of luminaries: Hans von Bülow, Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Herbert von Karajan, Claudio Abbado, Simon Rattle.
The Meditative Organ Soundscapes of Kali Malone

Dec 1, 2024 | newyorker.com | Alex Ross

“All Life Long,” the title of the most recent album by the composer and organist Kali Malone, is taken from a poem by the British Symbolist author Arthur Symons: “The heart shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, / All life long crying without avail, / As the water all night long is crying to me.” The poem appears as an epigraph in W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Souls of Black Folk,” which is where Malone found it.

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