Alex Ho

Winner of the Critics’ Circle Young Artist Award 2021, Alex Ho, born 1993, is a British–Chinese composer based in London whose music and stageworks have been described as ‘menacing and poetic’ (the Guardian) and a ‘remarkable experience’ (Schmopera). Alex is Artist-in-Residence at Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier and Associate Composer at the Oxford Lieder Festival. His first opera Untold won the 2020 George Butterworth Award for ‘an outstanding new work’, and his music theatre piece Breathe and Draw was shortlisted for a 2021 Scottish New Music Award, and was lauded as ‘a fresh, different idea that captured the imagination’. He is the recipient of the PRS Composer Fund 2022 and in the same year was featured as a Rising Star by the BBC Music Magazine.

Alex has had pieces performed/commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra, Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Manchester Camerata, BBC Radio 3, Royal Opera House, Het Concertgebouw, National Opera Studio, Music Theatre Wales, London Sinfonietta, Riot Ensemble, Roderick Williams, VOCES8, and National Youth Choirs of Great Britain. His works have featured in venues across the UK, Austria, France, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, USA and China, on platforms including SoundState Festival (Southbank Centre, London), Sound Unbound (Barbican Centre, London), Hearing China (Shanghai Symphony Hall, Shanghai), O. Festival Rotterdam, Crossroads Festival Salzburg, nonclassical (London), Cheltenham Music Festival, and BBC Late Junction. Alex is co-director of Tangram, a collective of composers and performers of Chinese and Western instruments who are recipients of Jerwood Arts’ Live Work Fund 2021 and Genesis Foundation’s Kickstarter Fund 2021. Alex graduated from Oxford and Cambridge Universities and is completing a doctorate at the Royal College of Music with a full AHRC scholarship.