Winner of the UK Critics' Circle Young Artist Award 2021 for his "compelling and individual" music, Alex Ho (b.1993) is a British-Chinese composer based in London whose compositions 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 Oxford Lieder Festival. He won the George Butterworth Award 2020 for "an outstanding new work", and was shortlisted for a Scottish New Music Award 2021 for “a fresh, different idea, that captured the imagination”. He is the recipient of the PRS Composer Fund 2022 and a BBC Music Magazine Rising Star 2022.

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, nonclassical (London), Oxford Lieder Festival, 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 scholarship from the Arts & Humanities Research Council.

Photo: Ben Tomlin

Production

Function

Concept | Composition | Musical direction | Piano