From catastrophic fires to mudslides, plane crashes, political upheaval — let’s just say that calamity seemed to be the opening act of 2025.
Seeking an antidote to the venom of relentless headlines, I’ve found myself listening to music more than ever. Which made me wonder: How and why does music act as more than mere entertainment, but perhaps offer deeper wisdom and perspective?
For answers, I turned to London-based conductor Alexander Shelley, who is the incoming artistic and musical director of Orange County’s Pacific Symphony. He’s one of the most generous and accessible arts educators I have ever come across, always willing to take time for a conversation about the arts. This despite a demanding roster of artistic appointments in addition to Orange County: He serves as both music director of the National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACO) in Ottawa, Canada, and as London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra principal associate conductor. He also is music and artistic director at Artis in Florida, leading the Naples Philharmonic. Shelley’s latest album, “Poema: Ad Astra,” was recorded with Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra.
He returns to the Pacific Symphony May 1-3 for his first performances with the orchestra since being announced as the next music director.
“I want to extend heartfelt prayers and thoughts to everyone in Southern California,” Shelley told me via Zoom. I was speaking to him in the wake of the fire catastrophes in Los Angeles County. “I’ve been, as everybody around the world has been, watching and thinking and trying to send some solace and positivity over there. I would be remiss if I didn’t start any comments by just sending, you know, an embrace.”
The rest of our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Samantha Dunn: Thank you. The impulse toward wanting to hear music seems almost frivolous to me at this point, but I was wondering if we could talk about why the arts might be exactly the place we need to turn when we’re feeling the way so many of us are feeling right now.
Alexander Shelley: When we think about the ways that we interact with the world, we have interaction with the things that manifest — like streets and cars and homes and chairs — things that we can measure, things that we can put a sort of material value on. You know, the things that we can just identify, name and quantify.
But the actual essence of music deals with all of those things that aren’t manifest, cannot be measured, but represent the essence of the human experience. The ideas of hope, of aspiration, of loss, of melancholy, of love — all those words that we experience as being as real as anything. We wake up in the morning and we feel something, and that is the realm in which music operates.
The music of Bach, for example, which was written hundreds of years ago, can speak as profoundly to the experience of love or loss as something that was written today, because the human experience hasn’t changed over millennia and the things that art seeks to describe and to capture hasn’t changed in millennia. And that’s true of music, visual arts, literature. You go back to the Greeks and beyond, across cultures and across languages. You can read things where you think, “You know, if my best friend had written that now that would make sense.”
So there is a constant there, which is the human experience. All through human experience we have had to deal with loss and devastation. Artists have tried to find ways to conjure a description of it, but also through that description a catharsis, a way of saying, “We’re a community. We’re a group. We’ve all been through this. Let’s hold each other across time and across cultures.”
SD: Permit me a small digression: The day my mother died I found myself that morning going to a church, even though I hadn’t been to mass in I don’t know how long. I went to the church because it felt like a place that was big enough and old enough to hold that kind of grief. It makes me think about the kind of music that you’re engaged in as a conductor, the kind that has been around for centuries.
AS: I think the act of being in a room together for a collective experience that the group can’t necessarily define, but it is unequivocally real, that is a kind of religious act.
You know, when we’re in a stadium, you can even not really care if one of the teams wins. Sometimes just the human experience of the collective fills you with something that is deeply enriching. And I believe that’s what we do in a concert hall, too.
Part of the beautiful challenge of communicating what a symphony orchestra does is that we run the full gamut of human experiences. There’ll be experiences you go into that are tragic and devastating when you hear them in the concert hall — music that just hits you in the heart. You’re supposed to leave feeling like you’ve experienced a trauma, because a composer needed to share that. Think of [Russian composer] Shostakovich, a piece that was written under the thumb of totalitarianism. The composer had to express it as a gift to later generations, to say, ‘I know you think you know that totalitarianism is bad. But this is what it felt like.’ So you’re supposed to leave feeling terrified. And then there’ll be another where it’s just about love, and you should have the hair on your arms stand up because you feel so full of that sense of joy and everything in between.
To your earlier comment, it’s the opposite of frivolous at a time of loss to seek the company of others in endeavors that deal with the feeling of being human. We quite often haven’t yet got words for the things that we’re feeling when we go through trauma and tragedy. And yet composers and writers and visual artists and filmmakers and poets, they have found the words.
What fascinates me is that idea of art as frivolity; it is a tragic symptom of the way that education has worked for a long time. That it’s like, well, you do your core subjects, and then you have the arts. And again, it belies the import of what art can do on the deepest level.
SD: Maybe that’s an American impulse? Unique to our culture…?
AS: No, no, I don’t think it is. I mean, I always have to laugh in the UK, you know, trying to get a politician to turn up at an art event. It’s like, forget about it. In Germany it’s different. The chancellor, particularly Angela Merkel, she was at symphony performances and opera and theater all the time. But again, there’s that misalignment. UK politicians think if they’re seen at a symphony, it means they’re screaming from the rooftops that they’re elitist. It’s actually the least elitist thing ever. If you knew anything about it, you’d know that the only thing that’s made it elite is the lack of investment in teaching it in schools. But that’s not the fault of the discipline itself. Anyway … yeah, it’s a long story, and a big topic.
SD: In times of trouble, what are the pieces of music you find yourself going toward, for solace?
AS: One of my absolute personal favorites is a piece by a great romantic German composer Richard Strauss, and he wrote it when he was very young. He was 22, 23 years old.
SD: Is that on your new album?
AS: Yes, it is! “Death and Transfiguration” it’s called. And it’s the most extraordinary piece of music. In the first half, you meet someone on their deathbed. You can hear the heavy breathing and the heart giving up, and then he has an attack of fever, and he has memories of childhood. Then another attack of fever, and he has memories of the greatest moments of his life — until there’s a final attack of fever and with a hit of a gong you hear his life end. The second half is the soul rising up to whatever’s next. In this case, it is a kind of Christian vision of heaven. But whatever anyone believes comes after, or take it in a metaphorical sense.
Then the themes from his life are transfigured and changed. And then this moment of a single note being held where he looks back at what was, and you feel in the music so deeply, that sense of “It was so beautiful, life, and I don’t want to let go. But I have to let go. And I know that what’s coming next is going to be greater still.”
And then he goes through those gates, and then there’s the most extraordinary kind of fulfilling climax in the music, of arrival and of oneness. As a listener, you feel oneness. And what’s happened is that the composer has actually unified two harmonic ideas that are diametrically opposed. You wouldn’t be able to analyze it listening to it unless you’re a musician, but you feel it. This is the amazing thing about music.
SD: Do you ever listen to contemporary music? Trying to imagine you bopping along in the car to Beyoncé, and I’m having a hard time…
AS: Oh, no, no, absolutely I do. It’s one of my favorite things, particularly if I’m juggling a lot of repertoire for work. But then there are these moments where I’ll go home, and I know I have some time off. You know I’ve played jazz piano since I was a kid and I was in a cover band as a keyboarder. We started off with parties and weddings, but then we played some relatively big gigs. I love pop music, I mean, I honestly love all music — all stuff like in the right context, it’s amazing.
I think that it would be hypocritical or disingenuous to say that there’s better music and worse music. Within all styles and genres, including classic music, there are duds, you know, pieces that aren’t very good. But in pop and in Latin, in world and in electronic and in classical, you know, I can think of loads of pieces that are really brilliant and serve a particular purpose as well. Music is not all supposed to do the same thing.
SD: Just a word on the May program. Anything to say about that music speaking to the moment in particular?
AS: Yeah, a few things. Firstly, the second half of the symphony features what is arguably the most famous piece of classical music ever written: Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. I would just point out one particular thing about why it’s so famous. This was the first time in music history in a symphony that a composer said you know, this isn’t going to end where it starts.
Normally, a composer would say, if it starts in a minor key it’s going to end in a minor key, and if it starts in a major key, it’s going to end in a major key. So this symphony is kind of a sad symphony or a tragic symphony, and this symphony is a joyful or a happy symphony.
But what Beethoven did was he started the 5th Symphony in C minor, the first time anyone had done that, and he ends in C major. He created the idea of a redemptive or emancipating piece of work, where you could start in darkness and a tragedy, the hammer of fate above you. And then he, Beethoven, can show you a route out, a route towards optimism and brightness. So it’s the first great dark-to-light symphony, one that shows us that the world is going to be okay.
We got Beethoven’s Emperor concerto in the first half of the program, one of the great piano concertos. There are two really fun pieces that I’ve paired with Beethoven. Every Tree Speaks was written as a companion to Beethoven’s 5th Symphony by the Iranian-Canadian composer Iman Habibi, and it picks up on some of the motifs and elements in Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, and just gives it a contemporary perspective. It’s only a five-minute piece that segues straight into it.
At the top of the concert, we have a great piece by Tanun. Again, it was written to accompany — well, notionally — Beethoven’s 9th symphony, and it has a children’s choir. It is an absolute kind of firecracker of a piece of music that will then lead into the Beethoven.
So, one of the things that people will experience in the program is interconnectedness across time. These composers are picking up on Beethoven’s motifs; there’s the idea that the composers of now and the composer of then, in this case, Beethoven, are in dialogue across the centuries. It’s that sort of reaching across time in a kind of human embrace that speaks so much to who Beethoven was, but also to the beauty of contemporary creation. Hopefully it’ll be just a really fun concert as well.
I can’t wait to get in front of the orchestra. I can’t wait to perform for our patrons and start to build friendships and relationships with everybody.
