BIO

Alexander Mansour is a composer, cellist, and pianist from Los Angeles California.

 

As a composer, Alex is passionate about writing for both the concert hall and the screen. A recent orchestral work, Zephyr, was premiered by the American Youth Symphony in April of 2022, coming off the heels of another orchestral commission, Spark, which was premiered by the Alabama Symphony Orchestra in spring of 2021. His string quartet Memory Lane was read and recorded by the Aizuri Quartet.  Mansour’s Fantasy Noir was awarded third place in the American Prize. His chamber music has been performed at the Bowdoin and Atlantic Music Festivals. Alex was invited to the Yale School of Music (2020) as a composing fellow in the Norfolk New Music Festival. He is currently writing a large form operetta for the Notre Dame Children’s Choir. In film, he most recently scored Radical Wolfe (dir. Richard Dewey, now on Netflix) as well as geopolitical thriller/documentary SOMM: Cup of Salvation (dir. Jason Wise, distribution TBA). Alex has attended the Tribeca Film Festival, where he had scored Hoop Dreams (dir. Kasey Elise Walker, 2022). 

 

As a cellist, Alex is an active session musician in Los Angeles (recently played on Warner Brother’s Black Adam, Dungeons and Dragons, HBO’s The Gilded Age, Netflix’s Green Eggs and Ham…). He served as principal of American Youth Symphony (2019-2023), and has joined the New York String Orchestra Seminar for their Christmas concerts at Carnegie Hall. He has also appeared on NPR’s “From the Top”. He has studied with Katinka Kleijn (Chicago Symphony Orchestra) and during an exchange in London, Richard Lester (Royal College of Music). He was featured in Joel Stein’s Vanity Fair article for a series of rooftop solo string concerts (where he performed for Kris Bowers), distanced during the pandemic. 

 

As a jazz pianist, Alex arranged and played for Arturo Sandoval’s Christmas album, performing with him at Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2018. He attended the 2019 BANFF International Workshop for Jazz and Creative Music, a program helmed by Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey, and was the pianist of the USC Jazz Honors Combo 2019-2020. He has studied piano with Russell Ferrante and Jim Trompeter.