Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century,
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 2007, 624pp.

Alex Ross could be described as the Kenneth Tynan of classical music critics. Like the late drama critic – who also wrote some of his finest work for the New Yorker, where Ross is resident music writer – Ross manages to be both polemical towards and passionate about his subject, without ever seeming partisan. Mind you, Pierre Boulez does manage to raise his hackles, although that clearly has much to do with Boulez and little to do with Ross.

Aside from his weekly gig at the New Yorker, and before that at the New York...