37 stories by "Alex Ross"
The composer’s work, featured at a recent festival in Germany, includes a howling denunciation of war crimes against children.
At the Met, Michael Spyres uses his broad vocal range to stunning effect, but Lise Davidsen loses power when she leaves her brilliant upper register.
A Washington, D.C., native says goodbye to the arts complex before Trump's wrecking crew goes to work on it.
The event's theme: Fugitives.
In his centenary year, the increasingly revered composer offers an uneasy refuge from the algorithmic din.
Early on, movies had no sound, but musicians provided live accompaniment. The tradition continues.
Whatever became of Don Sample?
Francisco Coll gives Ibsen's drama a stem-winder of a score.
Both composers remain intriguing outliers, notable for the stubbornness with which they have held to their youthful convictions.
The late German conductor, who came from a heroic anti-Nazi family, made one believe in the inherent virtue of the core repertory.
Gustavo Dudamel conducts John Corigliano's blistering First Symphony; Chuck Schumer faces a hostile crowd at the opening night of "Kavalier & Clay."
The Czech composer energetically explored form after form.
The Bru Zane label is recording dozens of forgotten works that testify to a Romantic golden age.
Pygmalion's visceral rendition of the B-Minor Mass.
Edmond Dédé's "Morgiane" shows how diversity initiatives can promote works of real cultural value.
Alex Ross on the company's tacky "Semiramide" and glorious "Parsifal."
Alex Ross on "The Last Jedi" and the Wagnerian leitmotifs created by John Williams for the "Star Wars" universe.
The critic's profession may be destined to fade away, but others will have to take up this simple, irritating, somehow necessary job.
The Metropolitan Opera last named a new music director in May of 1975. Gerald Ford had been President for less than a year; Saigon had fallen a few weeks earlier; Barack Obama was thirteen. …
No one who follows classical music can have been remotely surprised by the announcement that came in from the Metropolitan Opera earlier today: James Levine, who has been the dominant artist…
Last year, the British critic Philip Clark had a provocative response to the perennial question of how to save classical music from its so-called image problem"the perception that it is stuf…
Jonah Levy, a thirty-year-old trumpet player based in Los Angeles, has lately developed a curious weekend routine. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, he puts on a white shirt, a black tie, bla…
In the prologue to "Pagliacci," Ruggiero Leoncavallo's nimble shocker of 1892, the singer who is about to play the hunchbacked clown Tonio delivers a sly apologia for the mayhem to come. The…
Andrew Porter, who wrote the Musical Events column for The New Yorker from 1972 to 1992, was not one to throw around superlatives carelessly, but on the occasion of his death"he passed away …
A few years ago, I heard a film composer tell of a director's reaction to his labors: "O.K., now make it twenty per cent more Cuban." Such is the humble lot of composers in Hollywood: they e…
