ALEX: A PASSION FOR LIFE

Alex: A Passion for Life is due to be screened on MNet on December 27 at 17h00.

Alex Stobbs, the amazingly talented Eton music scholar who, as the subject of the much-loved Cutting Edge film A Boy Called Alex inspired rave reviews and won the nation's heart, is now 18. He has severe cystic fibrosis, an incurable lung disease which is steadily getting worse. And yet, against incredible odds, he has achieved his ambition to study music at King's College in Cambridge University, where he also sings as a choral scholar in one of the most celebrated choirs in the world.

Despite requiring huge amounts of medication and daily oxygen, being deaf to high notes and suffering from osteoporosis in his fingers, Alex still has a beautiful voice and continues to astonish everybody with his extraordinary talents as pianist, organist and conductor.

And now he has fulfilled his greatest dream: to conduct one of the world’s most famous choral works, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. In April 2009, he was invited to conduct the Passion with a major professional orchestra and some of Britain’s best singers in one of London’s top concert halls. An audience of a thousand was there to watch him as he took on the three-hour epic in the climax of this film. It was as much an endurance test as the biggest musical challenge of his life. But nothing would stop Alex from getting there.