Pacific Symphony Picks A New Music Director

The British conductor brings a distinguished background and a wealth of interdisciplinary experience to his new role.

Alexander Shelley will be introduced to Orange County today as Pacific Symphony’s next music director after a lengthy search that included several auditioning finalists. Shelley’s appointment will end the tenure of present music director Carl St.Clair – the longest for an American-born music director of a major U.S. orchestra. St.Clair became the orchestra’s music director in 1990.

“Alexander had a remarkable interpretive vision,” said Pacific Symphony president John Forsyte. “He did a work (Dvorak’s New World Symphony) that the orchestra had played many times, but they were surprised at how vital and interesting his approach to standard repertoire was. And it really was a clincher when a group of us flew to Ottawa and (saw) what he was actually accomplishing as a music director there.”

Read Timothy Mangan’s review of Alexander Shelley’s tryout performance:

Shelley neatly fits the mold of the successful 21st-century orchestral conductor. 

The 45-year-old Englishman enjoys a substantial social media following; he’s a fan of multidisciplinary performances combining music with other art forms; he’s passionately devoted to developing new audiences through music education, outdoor concerts and community initiatives. And he loves to push boundaries and expand preconceived notions of classical music and its place in modern life. “The concert hall, which can be the most exquisite museum piece in the world, shouldn’t be just a museum piece,” Shelley said during a recent interview with Culture OC. 

Shelley grew up in an extremely musical London family as the son of well-known pianists Howard Shelley and Hilary Macnamara. A career in music was seemingly preordained, but Shelley says his parents let him make up his own mind.

“You know, when parents are in an industry, they don’t necessarily push their kids to do it unless they see their kids want to, whether you’re a plumber or you’re a banker, or whatever,” Shelley said. “My parents were quite wary of it. It’s only in retrospect I realize what a wonderfully sort of unusual upbringing I had. I was hearing my parents converse via instruments as much as I was hearing them talking.”

Along with that early exposure to classical music performed at the highest caliber, Shelley developed an interest in other arts. As a young man he used to visit the Tate Modern, an art gallery in London with the United Kingdom’s largest collection of modern and contemporary art.

“I’d just walk past (a work of art) and say, ‘Do I like it or do I not like it?’ And then I went in with a friend who was an art historian, and instead of walking around every single thing, we would spend half an hour in front of one work of art. And he talked to me about it. He’d contextualize it, he’d point out connections, other things. And suddenly my own vocabulary expanded from simply ‘like or dislike.’”

Shelley brought his passion for other art forms and his desire to dive more deeply into a work to his current position as music director of Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, where he’s in his 10th season. 

“One of the first things I proposed for us was to get away from the idea of ‘I like or dislike a piece,’ but rather to allow it to have deeper ramifications than that, then set the scene for an audience (for) where this story might take them and (leave) room for people to use their imagination. At the NAC, my love of commissioning and creating new work that was often interdisciplinary and involved storytelling was really cemented.” 

Shelley believes that classical music should never be presented in a vacuum. “So often, biographical, political, historical context illuminates something about the music or elicits a sense of place and time from the players that can change a thousand different technical aspects that you don’t need to talk about with them. Rooting the ‘when’ and ‘why’ for audiences also can help bring a piece to life. For me, the music of now and the music of then is inextricably linked (if) you can conjure the sense of a kind of visceral relationship to the time it’s written. You start to … recognize the undercurrents of that, which is kind of immutable and timeless: fear, hope, melancholy, aspiration, all of these things that cross time and cultures.”

With the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Shelley’s expansive vision has led to major creative projects at a performing arts center that presents English-language, French-language and indigenous theater as well as music and dance. They include “Life Reflected,” a multimedia exploration of the lives of four famous Canadian women, and ENCOUNT3RS, a set of three new ballets in collaboration with the National Ballet of Canada, Ballet BC and Alberta Ballet Company.

“(Artistic collaboration) has always been a sort of sandpit that I’ve enjoyed working in,” Shelley said. “I did similar things when I was a student in Germany. I brought different genres together.”

Shelley doesn’t think of such collaboration as a new approach for classical music but rather a continuation of a centuries-old tradition.

“I don’t think of it as anything particularly modern as a concept. Some of the greatest music that we can think of from the late 18th, early 19th centuries was conceived as interdisciplinary. Mozart gave his best when he was working with (librettist Lorenzo) da Ponte, when he was working with singers in a theater and stories and all these other disciplines were in his mind; you could see that it brought him to life. And a lot of the great music that we perform in concert halls nowadays was conceived as ballet in the early 20th century. So it’s not a new idea to bring genres together and disciplines together.”

Shelley thinks he has the ideal orchestra to explore fresh challenges with Pacific Symphony. 

“One of the things that struck me within just a few moments of the first rehearsal was how responsive and malleable the orchestra is. Now, for my work going forward, that is the most exciting thing. We were working on Dvorak’s New World Symphony, and I wanted a certain specific kind of sound (for many passages). And their ability to respond and find the right color that I was looking for was very immediate.”

Shelley is also a strong believer in the power of music education as a way to bring out the best in people – an area that Pacific Symphony has embraced with conviction, due largely to the work of its present music director, Carl St.Clair. 

“The sheer amount of individual willpower that goes into getting anywhere on an instrument, for somebody who’s young, is amazing. But the beauty of this is that it matters for naught unless they get into an ensemble. They put all of it at the service of someone else. I believe the building blocks of society are encompassed (in music education). We want people to be individuals. We want people to be free, but we also want anything they achieve to be placed at the service of others so that we can celebrate one another and form something more than the sum of its parts.” 

To Shelley, the fundamental purpose of great music, and indeed all forms of artistic expression, is to connect us with life in vital ways that we’re often not even aware of. “The world that is really the realm of humanity, which is trepidation and hope and joy and anger and fear and love, all of these things that aren’t quantifiable but are literally the vocabulary of living – that’s the realm of the arts.”

John Forsyte, quoted in this story, is a member of the advisory board for Culture OC.