The loss of Ross
The greatest music critic of our time hangs up his cleats
One day in the early 1990s, I picked up the latest issue of The New Republic to find a long, beautifully written, and terrifically erudite article about the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke. The author, a certain Alex Ross, was unknown to me even by reputation. I was both thunderstruck and weirdly perplexed: How was it possible that such a brilliant critical voice — so eloquent, so deeply informed — could have burst into view with no advance notice?
Ross dutifully went on to serve some time in the pool of freelance reviewers for the New York Times, but that too felt like a strange inversion of the natural order of things. It was evident from the get-go that he had a preternatural ability that sat poorly on a stringer. I waited, patiently but with keen interest, for him to find his rightful place in the music-critical ecosphere, which in those days was a thing that actually existed. The New Yorker’s decision in 1996 to hire him as its classical music critic was one of those all-too-rare occasions when someone in power makes the exactly correct decision, and everyone benefits.
Earlier this week, with a characteristic blend of confidence and self-effacement, Ross quietly revealed on his blog that he has given up that post. He’ll remain at the magazine as a staff writer, which is good news; he’s a stunningly fine essayist on matters as diverse as German philosophy, ecology, and Willa Cather. But it does leave the musical world bereft. Where can we turn now for guidance through the thickets of contemporary music, for help in understanding the historical position of the standard repertoire, or for the panoptic journalistic viewpoint that only a perch like that of The New Yorker can provide?
It’s no exaggeration to say that Ross’s writing has been our lodestar, in these and other aspects, throughout these past thirty years. His regular bulletins on musical events had a timely vividness unmatched since George Bernard Shaw prowled the opera houses and concert halls of London a century earlier. He wrote with such passionate enthusiasm about the music closest to his heart — the work of Richard Strauss, Chaya Czernowin, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and more — that not even a skeptic could resist. He canvassed the world of new music tirelessly and spread the good news as he found it; it was from him that I first learned of Thomas Adès, Kate Soper, Tyshawn Sorey, and Agata Zubel.
One thing I’ve always loved about Ross’s criticism is its utter lack of venom. Dissent is part of the critic’s job description, of course, but many practitioners embrace meanness with a little too much relish; it took me years to stop conflating honesty with cruelty. Yet Ross has always managed to express his opinions — both favorable and unfavorable, by definition — without imparting a sting. After decades of reading his work faithfully, I can call to mind exactly three exceptions: his famous and often-quoted excoriation of Robert Lepage’s production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Met (“pound for pound, ton for ton, it is the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history”); a deftly witty and almost invisible poisoned zinger directed at the composer John Corigliano; and a bizarre and uncharacteristically cruel ad hominem remark from his New York Times days. These stand out in memory because they’re so unlike the principled benignity that marks the rest.
Another aspect of Ross’s greatness is his ability to get a wide reading public to engage with classical music. His New Yorker columns persuaded a swath of broadly educated, intellectual readers that this music was just as worthy of their attention as literature, pop music, film, modern dance, and the rest. His first book, The Rest is Noise, was a history of classical music in the 20th century that became a best-seller. Not even Andrew Porter, considered by many (though not me) to be Ross’s relevant predecessor, ever achieved that kind of breadth.
The writer and academic Will Robin — who in certain ways is Ross’s intellectual heir, rather as Ross is that of the late Richard Taruskin — penned a beautiful burst of adulation and grief this week that expressed much of this more eloquently than I can. But Robin is a young man, who grew up reading Ross’s work in the normal way one reads that of senior figures.
I, on the other hand, was already a professional music critic when Ross came on the scene, and his arrival was all the more unnerving. Until he showed up, I’d had no inkling that music criticism could be practiced at that high a level. Such a thing had never been done before, perhaps never even attempted. My role model, for better or worse, had been Alan Rich, whose work I loved for its passion, its vigor, and its conversational directness (all the qualities Porter’s writing lacked). He was a good role model to have, because following in his footsteps felt like an achievable goal.
Ross was, and remains, something else again. His work exists on an exalted plane that is apparently out of reach to anyone else, and I’ve never been able to spot how he pulls it off. It’s a trite analogy, but it’s true: I felt like Antonio Salieri — the pop-culture, Amadeus version — when I first began to read Ross’s criticism. There was something about it that seemed unattainable, and woundingly so. But that initial burst of jealousy quickly faded — it was silly, after all — leaving me with unadulterated awe and admiration and gratitude. I’m going to feel his absence sharply. I think we all will.
Elsewhere:
Will Robin, Industry: “Who else could have written this, besides Alex Ross? I think the answer, emphatically, is no one. There is no comparable writer about classical music alive today; I’d argue that there’s not any comparable writer about music, period. For decades, Ross has been in a class of his own.”
Lisa Hirsch, Iron Tongue of Midnight: “There is simply no one writing the kind and quality of criticism he’s been writing. To some extent, it’s because of the freedom and space that The New Yorker has been able to offer; I can’t think of anyone else who has had that kind of space and time. There are always more concerts to review, and Ross has been lucky enough to be able step outside the pressures of daily reviewing to have a magisterial, considered perspective on everything he writes about.”
Les adieux
The San Francisco Symphony’s 2025-26 season drew to a close this weekend without much fanfare. I’m old enough to remember when a season-ending program was the occasion for something big and ambitious. Esa-Pekka Salonen closed his final season as music director with Mahler’s Second. Michael Tilson Thomas’ grand finale, which was KO’d by the 2020 Covid shutdown, had been planned to feature the composer’s even bigger Eighth Symphony, and the previous season concluded with semistaged performances of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges. But of course the now-departed season was assembled piecemeal, without benefit of a music director or even an artistic administrator. So this was a subscription program indistinguishable from any other, aside from the fact that nothing came after it.
It was still a fine way to go out, though. Guest conductor Stéphane Denève arrived with a canny thematic program: French music that pays homage to German models. The two main parts of the program featured the renowned French organist Olivier Latry, who was a thoughtful and eloquent soloist in Poulenc’s 1938 Organ Concerto, and returned after intermission to take part in Saint-Saëns’ Organ Symphony.
But the evening’s biggest payoff for me was the first Symphony performance of Flammenschrift, a breathlessly exciting orchestral romp from 2012 by the French composer Guillaume Connesson. Denève is an ardent champion of Connesson’s music, for reasons I’ve never quite understood; the last two of the composer’s offerings here have struck me as weak-kneed and sentimental. Flammenschrift continued my streak of not understanding what Connesson was up to, but compensated with music of thrilling athleticism. For 10 minutes, the orchestra goes pedal to the metal with full-throated abandon, racing ferociously around bend after bend before arriving, sweaty and gasping for breath, at the final double bar.
The composer claims the piece is an homage to Beethoven, and there’s some evidence for this; the main theme uses the first three notes of Beethoven’s Fifth followed by a different fourth note, veering off as if that were a plot twist. But if you’d asked me whose spirit presided over the piece, I would have answered Shostakovich with a fair degree of certainty. The chugging rhythms, the maximalist orchestration, the constant ironic flirting with tastelessness — it’s all reminiscent of the fiercer type of scherzo that shows up in Shostakovich’s symphonies. It was gaudy and galumphing, and I loved every second of it.
Poulenc’s concerto, with its initial bursts of Bach and ensuing stylistic eclecticism, is honestly a little too subtle for me; I never know quite what the piece is striving for, or whether the performers have achieved it. But the Saint-Saëns filled the second half of the program with music that was by turns grandiose and intimate, and suffused with instrumental color from orchestra and organ alike. It was a wonderful note on which to draw the curtain.
Elsewhere:
Collin Ziegler, San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV: “In a concert of repertory standards, at least as organ works go, Denève, Latry and the Symphony made a genuinely thrilling case for the organ as versatile, multicolored and profound.”
Michael Strickland, Civic Center: “Though not marketed as having anything to do with SF’s Gay Pride Weekend, the concert certainly could have been, since its two main composers, Poulenc and Saint-Saëns, were Gallic Friends of Dorothy.”
Pride and ‘prentices
The final offering of the San Francisco Opera’s 2025-26 season, by contrast, had nothing if not swagger. For the return of the company’s Pride Concert last Friday night, which certainly seems to be shaping up as an annual ritual, Robert Mollicone led a program of queer-themed music from both the pop and classical realms, as emcee Sapphira Cristál introduced each section with salty repartee and magnificent, regular changes of outfit.
Standouts included soprano Melody Moore’s haunting account of “La mamma morta” from Giordano’s Andrea Chénier (a gay anthem because of its appearance in the Tom Hanks flick Philadelphia) and a beautiful aria from Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones delivered with tender eloquence by baritone Reginald Smith, Jr.
But just like last year, the spotlight was definitively commandeered by mezzo-soprano Nikola Printz, whose vocal artistry and sheer theatrical presence seem to blossom more and more powerfully with each passing month. They brought an almost unbearable dramatic intensity to an aria from Charles Gounod’s rarely done opera Sapho, teamed up with Moore for a lustrous rendition of the “Barcarolle” from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, and brought down the house with a lusty, hopped-up romp through Ryan Cassata’s anthemic Gender Binary (Fuck You), which is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin.
The night before that, the end of the mainstage season overlapped with the beginning of the summer’s offerings from the Merola Opera Program — in this case a beguiling program of Neapolitan songs. Curator Mario Antonio Marra, together with director Claire Choquette, presented these in three discrete packages — one depicting the bland but charming development of a romance, a second featuring a stormier affair, and a third centered on a love triangle.
An evening of 23 such songs, by composers like Donizetti, Paolo Tosti, and Ernesto De Curtis, didn’t offer much variety. But the narrative arcs were helpful, and I was especially taken with the second set, in which soprano Charlotte Kelso and tenor Logan Wagner combined their considerable talents for plenty of back-and-forth passion, jealousy, recriminations, and reconciliation.
Elsewhere:
Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV: “While that aria [from Sapho] reached one kind of peak, so in a completely different and improbable vein did soprano Melody Moore’s flat-out fantastic cover of Brandi Carlile’s ‘The Joke.’ Starting at a slow, slightly peevish simmer, Moore kept turning up the heat in this anthem of hard-won defiance. She leaned into the chorus, which concludes, ‘I have been to the movies. I know how it ends. The joke’s on them.’”
Cryptic clue of the week
From Out of Left Field #326 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:
Little piece from debut for solo organ (6)
Last week’s clue:
Idea you once got: replace oxygen with hydrogen (7)
Solution: THOUGHT
Idea: definition
you once: THOU
got: GOT, but…
replace oxygen with hydrogen: change O to H
Coming up
• Festival Napa Valley: The annual music-and-wine extravaganza gets underway with a series of free concerts of vocal and chamber music (the pricy stuff comes later). Performers are drawn from among the Manetti Shrem Opera Fellows and the faculty and students of the Frost School of Music’s Blackburn Music Academy. July 4-8, CIA at Copia, Napa. www.festivalnapavalley.org.
I will deeply miss Alex's music reviews . They were an important part of my life. Wagnerism was one of my greatest reading experiences. I have to mention that some of it is hilarious; rough sex, mental illness, and Wagner. A flawless combination. Take care Alex. I will continue to read your articles. Hugs.
A fitting tribute from one great critic to another.